Sometimes you do want to see how the sausage gets made.
The City Council's ultimate approval of Mayor Adams’s "City of Yes" rezoning last year was political meat-grinding at its best – the simplest part of the plan, removing parking mandates citywide turned into a map of three zones and some egregious carve outs. But even with Council members playing local political games, the resulting sausage was not half bad.
Late last year the City Council narrowly voted in favor of the Mayor’s last installment of the administration’s three part “City of Yes” rezoning push, the . The citywide residential rezoning was the first of its kind since Robert Moses-helmed the planning department in 1961.
The final form of the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity did not rid the city entirely of parking mandates – which require developers to build off-street parking at all new residential projects. Instead it divided the city into four main zones: An existing Manhattan core zone; an “inner transit zone,” where parking mandates were entirely removed; the “outer transit zone,” where mandates were reduced and changed; and a “beyond the greater transit zone,” where parking mandates largely mirror the pre-City-of-Yes zoning code barring a few important exceptions for town center zoning and transit oriented development.
In June, Streetsblog outlined the history of how parking mandates had shaped the city and how in middle-density districts the existing mandates were making it so developers consistently “under-built.” The prevalence of four-story, nine-unit buildings in these parts of the city showed how developers would avoid building 10 units or above because they didn’t want to trigger the parking mandates.
Remember these buildings? A split lot at 486-488 Lefferts Ave. shows how parking mandates affected development in the Wingate section of Brooklyn. The development company did not want to trigger the parking minimums, so it "under-built."
“The old system was many layered and convoluted. There were reductions and waivers. If you were building in an R6 district, you could waive up to five parking spaces, which meant that oftentimes what you would get is eight or nine units, and you wouldn’t get the 10th so that you didn’t have the unit count that triggered the parking requirement,” said Howard Slatkin, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and a former top official at the Department of City Planning.
The city’s zoning code always had “waivers.” Before City of Yes, the waiver threshold for the Wingate block, an R6 district, was five parking spaces, meaning that if the mandated number of parking spaces was five or less, the parking could be scraped entirely.
City of Yes raised these waivers. Now, in the same district, not only has the amount of parking required has been reduced — previously it was 50-70 percent of units, now it's 24 percent of units — the waiver has been increased to 15. That means a developer can build a lot more units before triggering the new, lower, mandates. In practice, this means that parking is optional for developments that include 60 or fewer market-rate homes. And for affordable units, there are no parking requirements, so if a developer wants to take advantage of the new affordability benefits also passed under City of Yes, it won't increase the amount of required parking at all.
“The most damaging part of those parking requirements was that if you were two spaces short and that meant you needed to dig. There was no flexibility,” said Slatkin. “And [the new parking requirement] just gives flexibility that you didn’t have under the old system so that some number of projects that couldn’t happen then, can now happen. You’re expanding that circle bit by bit. It’s not perfect, it’s not allowing everyone to come up with a unique solution for every site but you’ve got a lot of possibilities and the chances of needing to excavate are just so much lower.”
And waivers have increased throughout the “beyond the greater transit zone” area as well, even as parking mandates stayed put. This means that even in those areas there will be less moments where required parking makes a development unfeasible.
You get a carve out! You get a carve out!
The agreed-upon zoning text creates a lot of new flexibility for developers, thanks to the increased waivers coupled with lower requirements, but the decision to keep mandates in most of the city goes back to political optics.
The “outer transit zone,” where parking mandates were reduced and changed, but not eliminated, typifies the political compromise. Parking was one of the most contentious parts of the plan from the community review process until minutes before the Council’s first vote.
But there are some parts of the map that don’t add up. Many of the Council members whose districts include the “outer transit zone” were publicly supportive of removing parking mandates citywide, and would’ve preferred their districts do just that. Some rallied in front of City Hall to remove the mandates and many signed onto a letter in 2022 calling for new developers to apply for parking mandate exemptions.
Yet the mandates remained.
Council Member Shahana Hanif (D–Kensington) was one of the progressives whose district includes some of the “outer transit zone.” Her spokesperson said the Council member "did not advocate for any carve outs."
Council Member Crystal Hudson (D–Fort Greene) told Streetsblog that she "requested all three community districts in my councilmanic district (2, 8, and 9) have parking mandates completely eliminated.” But lo and behold, even her transit-friendly district had some parking mandates remain. She blamed "the Council."
A spokesperson for Council Member Sandy Nurse (D–Brownsville) said her entire district is in the “outer transit zone” because the Council's "compromise [was] shaped by amendments from our district’s community boards."
"It wasn't something that was pushed for specifically by Council Member Nurse,” spokesperson Patricia Santana told Streetsblog.
But some have been quiet.
Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez (D-Bushwick) recently wrote an op-ed about the need to rid the city of mandatory parking minimums, yet somehow parts of her district retain the mandates.
“These requirements not only take up valuable space that could be used for housing units but also drive up construction costs significantly. In a city where every square foot counts, this outdated policy is a concession to cars that we don’t need and can’t afford,” the op-ed read.
She did not respond to Streetsblog’s request for comment.
Council Members Alexa Avilés (D-Sunset Park), Rita Joseph (D-Prospect Lefferts Gardens), and Farah Louis (D-Flatbush) also had signed onto the 2022 letter, yet mandates retained in all or part of their districts.
There are also clear carve outs in the map, which the Council has called the “Special 25-241 Parking Provisions,” small sections within the outer transit zone that will keep their mandates entirely. The special zone falls in parts of Council Member Francisco Moya (D-Corona), Zoning Committee Chair Kevin Riley (D-Bronxwood), and Selvena Brooks-Powers (D-Arverne) districts, who all ended voting in favor of the plan, as well as Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx) and Joann Ariola (R-Rockaway) who still voted no, even with the special treatment.
“This isn’t the first time anomalies like these have been embedded in zoning. There are fingerprints the legislative process leaves on policy,” said Slatkin.
Even with the fingerprints the planning commission sees this compromise as a win.
“Thanks to the passage of the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, parking and housing are no longer coming into conflict in the parts of New York City that are well-served by transit,” Dan Garodnick, the chairman of the Department of City Planning, said in a statement.
