[Sociotechnical field research] The Technocratic War of Brooklyn Development: Zoning Laws & Social Provisions

Research Papers
Written By Oscar Fossum

Research Introduction:

Neighborhoods across New York City are currently experiencing a wave of gentrification. Low-income and middle-class New York City residents are being displaced from their long-term communities due to a local influx of wealth and development. As new wealthy residents move into Manhattan, Brooklyn has become a popular destination for middle-class NYC residents seeking more affordable rent in the city. This paper looks at Bedford-Stuyvesant as a Brooklyn neighborhood of interest experiencing a disproportionately high influx in affluent residents. I first became aware of Brooklyn’s gentrification as a topical subject through reading articles such as this publication from The Atlantic, “Brooklyn Is Booming. So Why Is It Shrinking?” which details that the black middle-class in Bed-Stuy is shrinking, while the white and Asian populations are rising. My research details the primary actors and legal frameworks that influence development in New York City. It is important for us to understand why racial and socioeconomic demographics in specific areas are changing quickly so that we may design solutions to create favorable conditions for all residents. This paper claims that the NYC Department of Planning and private developers are given an advantage in exerting influence on shaping New York City’s built environment, and that the technical measurements which dictate development requirements in a neighborhood act as a technocratic barrier to entry for community board members to make successful challenges to local development proposals.

A report from the Office of the NY State Comptroller titled “An Economic Snapshot of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood” outlines that “many of the new [Bedford-Stuyvesant] residents are immigrants, white, or young, and are likely to have higher incomes than long-term residents”. Illustrating this trend, the report continues, saying “in 2015, new residents comprised one third of the households. The new residents had a median household income of $50,200, compared to $28,000 for long-term residents” (DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller). More affluent residents are allowed into affordable housing lotteries when New York City’s Area Median Income (AMI) rises, thus increasing the competition within the affordable housing pool for lower income applicants. Clearly, as wealthy new residents move to Bed-Stuy, the actual demographics are changed in a way that allow for official changes to zoning regulations and affordable housing pricing limits that displace the lowest income residents of the neighborhood. This process of adjusting the AMI exemplifies some of the official tools which enable the legal displacement of long-term NYC residents from their neighborhoods.

In this report, I focus on NYC zoning laws and the AMI as tools of measurement which are used to appeal to the local interests of a community, while continually pushing for renovation of property and the displacement of existing residents; specifically, of low-income and minority residents. Zoning laws establish seemingly rigid parameters for development projects in a given neighborhood. In this paper, I will show how zoning laws are designed to be permissive to developers, where developers are allowed to exceed zoning restrictions by claiming aspects of social provision in their residential and commercial building projects. Furthermore, I will show how a competence in zoning law jargon is part of the required vocabulary for community member challenges to be considered in a development proposal in New York City. Thus, in order for local community members to join the conversation to influence local development, they must exhibit a technical understanding of how zoning laws work. Alongside technical considerations of how AMI and zoning laws are put to practice, I will detail the numerous actors involved in the redevelopment of a neighborhood. These actors include property owners and developers, the NYC Department of City Planning, NYC community boards, new affluent residents and long-term community members. All of these actors have separate interests in the development of a neighborhood, and it is important to consider the varying degrees of influence that each possess.

I will draw on a range of data for this paper, including qualitative research methods of participant observation at Bed-Stuy community board meetings, as well as quantitative research from state resources such as the offices of the New York Housing Preservation and Development, and the NYC Department of City Planning. I frame current policies and development in Bed-Stuy alongside historical actions taken to reshape NYC’s socioeconomic geographies. Among these historical analyses are academic research in works such as “The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite” by Alessandro Busà, and “The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City” by Neil Smith. These academic reports combined with state information from the NYC Department of City Planning, as well as my own qualitative research engagement at Bed-Stuy community board meetings help me paint a picture of historical actions taken which have created the conditions that contribute to the current gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant. 

This report focuses on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a research site to examine the technical instruments and practices used to raise the local housing and rental prices. These instruments include the AMI and successful development proposals to exceed zoning limits on properties, leading to the eventual “rezoning” of a neighborhood. Important vocabulary for this discussion includes the concepts of AMI, development zones and the process of “rezoning”, and gentrification. Using existing research on development in other New York City neighborhoods as a backdrop, I hope to provide a detailed description of the current gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of NYC’s fastest changing neighborhoods. It is my goal to uncover bias built into the technical measures which dictate development in New York City. 

Research Background: Outside Works on Zoning Laws and Gentrification: 

To guide my research engagement in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood with a theoretical basis, I draw primarily on works by Alessandro Busà and Neil Smith to provide an analysis of the interaction between the actors involved in the development of a New York City neighborhood. These actors, restated, include property owners and developers, the NYC Department of City Planning, NYC community boards, new affluent residents and long-term community members. Despite this rich field of possible input from diverse groups, I have found that the NYC Department of City Planning and private developers hold the most power in the process of updating and implementing new zoning plans in NYC. In this section, I will illustrate through Busà and Smith how zoning laws are created by the Department of City Planning, and how developers are encouraged to exceed zoning laws by including social provisions in their developments. All other actors are tertiary in this process. Namely, the concerns of community boards — which were set up to give neighborhood organizers some power to influence local development — are marginalized when they conflict with the goals of the Department of City Planning. Further, I will show how the social provisions that are said to cushion the negative effects of development, like including affordable housing units in new buildings, often do not benefit the low-income community members who need it most during times of neighborhood development.

Zoning laws are the set of building ordinances and restrictions mapped onto New York City neighborhoods. New York City’s current zoning resolution dates back to 1961, and has since been updated piecemeally. The zoning resolution outlines the regulations, guidelines and borders for development in NYC’s various zoning districts (NYC Department of City Planning). These zoning districts are routinely “rezoned,” a process which ideally involves updating local development laws to match current needs. However, rezoning may imply more than just meeting local demand, as Busà notes “because of their flexibility and their detachment from any rigid blueprint, rezoning plans have proven to be the device of choice for policymakers eager to facilitate development in areas where opportunities for profit arise” (Busà, 93). Because zoning laws dictate the legal limits of development in a neighborhood, all applications to rezone a neighborhood are subject to a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), where input is considered from instrumental community organizers, including the City Planning Commission, the mayor and the local community board. Once the ULURP is complete, the NYC Department of City Planning makes the final decision to approve or deny the rezoning application.

While community boards have been instrumental in advocating for community-based interests in local development projects throughout the city, the degree of power they hold to substantially influence local development projects is questionable. Through applying political pressure, community boards have pushed for the NYC Department of City Planning to “assess the environmental impact of zoning changes before approval …  including effects on air or water quality, traffic, historic resources, socioeconomic makeup, and character of a neighborhood” (Busà, 99). However, despite the work that has been done by NYC community boards to facilitate local development, the Department of City Planning has also taken steps to limit the power of the community boards when making final decisions on developments. Community boards submit a “recommendation” to the City Planning Commission for each development proposal that a community board reviews. Whether that recommendation is taken into consideration when approving or denying development proposals is entirely up to the City Planning Commission. 

These community board recommendations generally revolve around the social implications of a given development proposal. Specifically, community boards encourage developers to include social provisions in their buildings, like affordable housing, community amenities or other social services. However, it must be asked whether these social provisions actually benefit the existing community, or rather if social provisions are simply rhetorical tools to pacify community-based concerns through the restructuring of a neighborhood. These social provisions allow developers to improve the value of their properties, “while providing the city administration with an alibi for development that is virtually unassailable, as new waves of profit-driven development efforts can be mobilized in the name of a collectively shared goal” (Busà, 117). Thus, the question must be asked: what real tools do NYC community boards possess to substantially influence the development of their locale?

Here it is worth noting that developers are given bonuses for including social provisions in their developments which allow them to exceed zoning limitations such as building height requirements, building Floor to Area Ratio, and so on (Department of City Planning). Developers are thus incentivized to challenge local zoning restrictions by including social provisions in their projects. This also incentivizes community boards to react favorably to development proposals which exceed zoning restrictions, as these are developments claiming bonuses for including social provisions. However, these development bonuses are awarded all on a basis of community improvement, or in other words, to the extent that they retain value or bring in new value to the community. 

In practice, as development aims to increase the property values in a neighborhood, the very same buildings that claim to offer social provisions may be responsible for driving up local affordable housing prices. This is illustrated by the AMI measurement, which uses NYC’s comprehensive average income to determine affordable housing prices, such that “in many working-class neighborhoods where rezoning plans were implemented … the [local] AMI was much lower [than the city standard], so that a large part of the newly produced “affordable” units remained far out of the financial reach of local residents” (Busà, 121). Thus, the measures of social provision that are claimed by developers to mitigate the displacement of existing community residents do not ultimately serve the lowest-income residents of a neighborhood, and are in fact designed to increase the profitability of a development, as well as the property values in the surrounding area.

Neil Smith criticizes the current approach to development as overly “neoclassical,” where “consumer sovereignty” is cited as the leading factor driving urban development; in this view, neighborhoods develop based on local consumer preferences for housing, and residents’ ability to pay for access to preferable amenities (Smith, 53). Missing from this conversation is an analysis of what might be called “producer sovereignty,” or a consideration of how developers vie to influence the conditions of the housing market. Smith argues that a “broader theory of gentrification must take the role of the producers as well as the consumers into account, and when this is done it appears that the needs of production—in particular the need to earn profit—are a more decisive initiative behind gentrification than consumer” (Smith, 55). 

A pessimistic, yet not inaccurate reading of development in New York City would pose that certain neighborhoods are intentionally left to disrepair and “devalorization” by property owners, only to be refurbished when the cost of redevelopment drops low enough. Smith’s work on the rent gap shows that this devalorization, however, is not an inevitable or objective fact of housing dynamics, but rather that these conditions are strategically created by developers and other powerful actors in the housing market in hopes of reaping higher profits. Smith argues that “gentrification occurs when the [rent] gap is sufficiently wide that developers can purchase structures cheaply, can pay the builder’s costs and profit for rehabilitation, can pay interest on mortgage and construction loans, and can then sell the end product for a sale price that leaves a satisfactory return to the developer.” (Smith, 65). In this reading of development, the developer’s interest to profit is always prioritized, and the low-income and marginalized residents always get the losing end of the deal. 

Brooklyn Community Board #3 Participant Observation:

In order to understand how development projects are actualized through proposals to community boards and New York’s Department of City Planning, I have attended Brooklyn Community Board #3 (Bed-Stuy’s community board) Housing and Land Use committee meetings. This has informed my knowledge of the on-the-ground process facilitating communication between local developers and community members representing local resident interests. Through attending these board meetings, I have made contact with Bed-Stuy based architects, NYC city planners, developers, homeowners, and renters, all of whom represent different community-based interests in the discussion of development in Bed-Stuy. 

On October 10, 2018, I attended my first Bed-Stuy Community Board meeting. Specifically, this board meeting was for the Housing and Land Use Committee to review two real-estate development projects currently underway in Bed-Stuy. I used this opportunity to consider the intricate link between real-estate development, and neighborhood gentrification. Most notable to me was the desire on the behalf of the developers to improve the value of their respective properties, and the response on behalf of the community board urging the developments to consider neighborhood repercussions, including the provision of affordable housing, as well as the potential effect of exceeding zoning requirements. 

Consider the following example as an illustration of how incentives of social provision work to leverage board member buy-in on development proposals. During one of the community board meetings I attended, two developers in the neighborhood presented their development plans, and proposed for exceptions to certain zoning laws. The first proposal was for the expansion of a local Hasidic K-8 school (referred to as the “Yeshiva”). This group proposed a waiver to existing zoning requirements in order to provide ample space for a “modest expansion” of the student population. Among the considerations were the requests to exceed the local zoning limits, including building height limits, “setback” (distance of building from street) limits, and a waiver to the requirement of a backyard. In total, the developers hoped to build to 98% lot coverage, where 77% lot coverage is permitted by zoning regulations. In their formal proposal, the Yeshiva argued that certain zoning restrictions should be waived, asking that “the Board apply the appropriate educational as well as religious deference when reviewing this application”. Through claiming social provisions, the developers simultaneously made a case for neighborhood improvement while also increasing the value of their property beyond what the zoning laws allow for on paper. This illustrated to me the strategy developers use to exceed zoning requirements, and create new precedents for the future neighborhood building developments and zoning restrictions. 

The second proposal, also from a Hasidic property owner and developer, was to develop his lot into a mixed-use residential and commercial “fresh market” building. In this case, the developer had originally obtained certification to build the residential building with a parking lot on the ground floor. One year after obtaining this certification, the developer came to the Board to change his parking lot certification to allow for a fresh market in its place. The developer was already 90% complete with the development of this property, and mentioned that they would face “serious issues” if they were ultimately not allowed this certification. Additionally, they made the argument that building a fresh market would allow for three extra affordable housing units than the original plans for the parking lot. Here, the Board asked how the developer was marketing these affordable units, to which the developer responded they are working with an agency based in Manhattan. The Board took issue with the fact that the developer was not using a community-based marketing organization to outreach existing low-income Bed-Stuy residents for the affordable housing lottery. 

Though the Board aimed to influence the developer’s continued marketing of the project’s affordable unit offerings, the Board in fact has no direct outlet to require this operational shift from the developer. To fight for this stipulation, the Board will submit their advice to the NYC Department of City Planning to be reviewed alongside the developer’s own proposal, which is also sent directly to the City Planning Office. Thus, one key issue is illuminated with development in New York City; despite their commitment to representing local concerns to neighborhood development projects, the efficacy of the “recommendations” made by community boards is questionable. Ultimately, the NYC Department of City Planning will make the final decisions to approve or deny development proposals; none of the community board recommendations are explicitly binding. 

The two developer groups left the Board conference room after they presented their cases. I stayed an extra hour to observe the following board discussion, where they deliberated on their official recommendations to the Department of City Planning. After the meeting, I volunteered to share my notes with the Secretary of the Board, and was able to introduce myself to the board Chairpeople, and other board members. They were gracious to answer some of my follow up questions, and encouraged me to keep attending these meetings. Most notably, attending the Bed Stuy Community Board Housing and Land Use committee meetings illustrated to me how, in order to contest development projects that are seen to carry social harms, board members must make technical challenges to development proposals. Board members seem to assess development proposals in part by whether the public services proposed by developers are genuinely needed in the area. For example, if board members determine that a neighborhood has enough fresh food grocery stores, they may challenge the developer to use their space to provide a less-common public amenity.

Behind board member technical challenges there lies a clear concern toward promoting equity and stability for existing Bed-Stuy residents. For instance, board members will request that developers use their bonuses to provide additional affordable housing units, and that they will use a Brooklyn-based marketing agency to advertise these new affordable units to local residents. Board members might argue that a development proposing to exceed height limits will dwarf neighboring buildings, yet behind this challenge might lie deeper social concerns of the future building’s effect on the neighborhood demographics; a concern for which there are no firm metrics of evaluation in development proposal considerations.

Conclusion: 

When communicating with developers, board members use zoning laws as an objective measure to challenge development proposals that they disfavor. I suggest that these technical challenges illustrate a barrier to entry for community board members to voice their concerns on more complex social issues. For instance, board members will question the legitimacy of development proposals requesting to exceed zoning specifications like setbacks and building height limits. Because the bonuses which allow developers to exceed zoning limits are awarded through social provisions, I propose that technical challenges from the board should be seen as a consideration of the value of permitting these zoning concessions against their proposed and implicit social repercussions, specifically with regard to the effect of increasing property values on low-income residents. This delicate relationship between zoning laws and development bonuses illustrates the importance of board members challenging the technical aspects of development. These technical challenges are some of the only tools that the community board wields to influence a development project. 

These board member challenges reflect a focus on creating and maintaining economic, housing and social stability for existing Bed-Stuy residents. The board members seem to be excited about the prospect of neighborhood improvement through the refurbishment of older buildings and the offering of more local services, while remaining conscientious to prioritize the needs of existing Bed-Stuy residents. My impression is that the board members as a collective want neighborhood developments to benefit long-term residents without displacing them. It seems to me that Bed-Stuy board members are aware that development can lead to gentrification. While aware that development improves the average quality of life in the neighborhood, community board members want this improvement to be experienced by long-term Bed-Stuy locals. 

Summarized below are the strongest points of interest for further research to develop favorable housing conditions for all New York City residents. First, AMI takes into account the average income of all New York City residents, and thus drives up “affordable housing” prices even in traditionally poorer neighborhoods. If requirements for low-income housing prioritized providing affordable housing for NYC residents whose annual income falls far below the city’s AMI, then displacement of long-time residents might be mitigated. Second, the social provisions offered in new developments to cushion the displacement of existing low-income community members do not help the long-time residents who could be said to need these provisions the most. Despite the fact that developers are encouraged to build social provisions into their developments, low-income residents are not assisted because they still cannot afford the “affordable housing” prices as determined by a continually rising AMI. This issue could be helped if developers seeking bonuses to exceed zoning restrictions were required to build their social provisions according to local needs of a neighborhood.

In this paper I have shown how the priorities of developers and the NYC Department of City Planning are given precedence in determining neighborhood development standards, and how an understanding of the technical measurements which dictate New York City neighborhood development act as a technocratic barrier to entry for community board members to make challenges to local development proposals. Returning to Smith’s analysis that the conditions of gentrification are created in part through the profit-earning interests of property owners, I propose continued research around the social provisions offered by developers to exceed zoning restrictions. Because many of these social provisions remain out of reach for the lowest-income residents through phases of neighborhood development, there remains further work to to be done to ensure that the benefits of development in New York City can be experienced by all city residents.

Works Cited: 

Thumbnail photo from: Oscar Fossum




Oscar Fossum
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