Urban Planning

Former Staten Island Council Member Stephen Fiala defends the role of borough presidents in land use decision-making. Image: SI Advance. The city’s Charter Revision Commission held its fifth issue forum last night, discussing the city’s complex land use process. Based on the commentary of a panel of expert witnesses, a major revision of the city’s … Continued

Today, Manhattan's AIA Center for Architecture debuted an exhibition that envisions a new era of sustainable mobility. For "Our Cities Ourselves," the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy invited architects to take on the evolving transportation needs of the world's cities, which in two decades are expected to be home to 60 percent of the global population.

Last week, Jackson Heights residents won a summer-long car-free street, and it turns out that local activists have many more initiatives for a greener, more livable neighborhood in their sights.

The key to building better and more affordable housing in New York City is that oft-cited but elusive quality: urbanism. So said a panel of housing policy experts and real estate developers at Friday's RPA regional assembly.

The process of expanding the federal government's definition of "affordable housing," a stated goal of the Obama administration's sustainable communities effort, began in earnest yesterday with the introduction of a new index that integrates transportation prices into the cost of living for hundreds of metro areas.

Last week, Comptroller John Liu announced plans to convene a task force to study and issue recommendations about community benefits agreements in New York. While details on the task force are still forthcoming, the renewed public attention on these planning tools provides an opportunity to examine how CBAs have worked in New York and how they are increasingly being used to build livable streets.

In the last eight years, Amanda Burden's Department of City Planning has rezoned 20 percent of New York along relatively transit-oriented lines, while simultaneously promoting quasi-suburban projects at prominent sites and maintaining parking minimums that erode the pedestrian environment. In other words, the planning department is promoting growth in the right places, but enabling the wrong kind of development. So in the next four years, will New York's planners adopt more sustainable practices or continue the status quo?

This is the first installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets.

The $8,000 tax credit for new home buyers -- which was wracked by fraudulent claims after its creation as part of the nation's economic recovery effort -- is on the verge of a significant expansion by Congress.