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Sunday, June 20, 2004

Law - Two Interesting Real Estate Development Stories

Two interesting stories on real estate development were published in the NY Times last week.

"City Plans to Rezone Overdeveloped Neighborhoods in Queens" is the headline to this story, which appeared June 16th. Some quotes:

More than a dozen neighborhoods in Queens will be rezoned to curb overdevelopment in the most ambitious rezoning of the borough in more than 40 years, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday at Queens Borough Hall. By tinkering with these neighborhoods - a process that began for some of the areas in 2002 - developers will be prohibited from building multiple-family dwellings on lots that have traditionally served single-family homes.

"Overdevelopment changes the character, overdevelopment changes the traditional appearance of neighborhoods," said Mr. Bloomberg, who was joined by Borough President Helen Marshall and severalCity Council members from Queens.

Since the 1960's, neighborhoods that are far from mass transportation have tended to remain what is known as "low-density" residential neighborhoods, which were dotted with mostly one- and two-family homes. But over the last decade, multifamily homes and large tenement buildings began to crop up around Queens and Staten Island. * * *

"Developers are buying up fairly large lots that may have had one home on them and then building maybe three two-family homes," said Gary Giordano, the district manager of Queens Community Board 5, which covers two neighborhoods - Middle Village and Maspeth - where zoning laws will change.

"When you start compounding that on numerous different lots, your neighborhood is getting a lot more crowded," Mr. Giordano said.

The rezoning would force developers to have their projects fit in with the scale of surrounding structures. The revisions would be reviewed by the local community board, the borough president, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

Overdevelopment has been a hot political issue in Queens and Staten Island for years, but Mr. Bloomberg learned of the problem only when he was running for mayor in 2001, he has often said. He became fascinated with the idea that some neighborhoods in New York wanted less, rather than more, development.Since then, he has tried to work on rezoning areas of Queens and Staten Island, areas where he hopes to redevelop his political base as well.

A lengthy feature published in the Times on June 17th focuses on urban sprawl and a Yale professor "of architecture, urbanism and American studies, whose new book, 'A Field Guide to Sprawl,' will be published next month." Some quotes:
The idea for a field guide grew out of [Dolores] Hayden's own frustration as a scholar and a citizen. She moved to Guilford, 12 miles east of New Haven, in 1991 after 11 years teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. With its pristine New England village green and one of the largest collections of 18th-century houses in the country, Guilford, on the rural fringe about 100 miles from Manhattan, "is a very typical battleground for preserving the sense of place," she said.

Several years ago, Ms. Hayden ... wound up serving on a citizens advisory committee examining encroaching development. "The town's zoning code was so convoluted nobody could read it," she recalled. "After a while I got to see that a lot of it was designed to frustrate discussion rather than enable it." At the same time, she noticed that her graduate students at Yale, who came from different disciplines, including American studies, architecture, planning and anthropology, had difficulty describing the everyday American landscape without resorting to impersonal jargon. "I began to see that one of the most useful things to do might be to develop a common language," she said.

To probe the dark, semantic recesses of sprawl, Ms. Hayden combed planning glossaries, newspaper columns and Web sites for trade groups like the National Asphalt Pavement Association, and she went through slang dictionaries and real estate manuals. Along the way, she unearthed the origins of now ubiquitous terms like "gridlock," coined by two Manhattan engineers in 1980, as well as unwieldy euphemisms like "nonattainment area," plannerspeak for impermeable smog that fails to meet federal clean air guidelines.

Her personal favorite is boomburb, a word that "gives the feeling of a place that's growing double-digits when you say it," she said. (As a published poet, she is particularly attuned to nuances of language.)

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 20, 2004 10:15 AM
Posted to General Law Related