In recent decades, low-density zoning has been ratcheted back repeatedly through a combination of citywide zoning text amendments and neighborhood rezonings.

CHPC’s Home Truths brief shed light on the housing-related financial stress faced by both renters and homeowners in low-density zoning districts. Our Twilight Zoning brief highlighted the paucity of housing production in these districts, which now create less housing than any other major city or part of the metro region. Now, Unplanned Shrinkage looks at the recent history of low-density residential zoning, to understand how we got to this point – and how we can move forward.

We assessed citywide zoning text amendments affecting low-density districts over the last half-century, along with area-wide zoning map changes, to examine the following questions:

  • What significant changes have been made to zoning in low-density districts over this time?
  • To what extent have these zoning changes constrained the housing options permitted in low-density districts?
  • Was greatly diminished housing production the goal of these changes, or an accidental by-product?

KEY FINDINGS

  • A series of citywide and local changes have reversed prior efforts to promote infill housing development and made low-density residential zoning increasingly restrictive.
  • A common thread in more than 80 downzonings covering over 40% of the city’s low-density land was the elimination of multifamily zoning.
  • The regulations imposed for use, lot size, yards, parking, and other criteria have effectively prohibited the addition or alteration of housing on many lots.

Keep scrolling to see highlights from our analysis, or read the full report.

A series of citywide zoning changes have made it more difficult to add housing in low-density areas.

How have citywide changes restricted housing?

When New York City adopted its current Zoning Resolution in 1961, this reduced the city’s zoned capacity for housing by an estimated 80 percent. Following a decade of declining production, in 1973 the City adopted zoning changes for low-density districts intended to promote new infill housing production. But ever since then, low-density zoning has moved in the opposite direction, consistently introducing changes that make it more difficult to add housing.

For instance, text amendments in 1987 and 1989 curtailed the range of conditions in which larger infill buildings were permitted, and focused on matching the physical configuration of new buildings more closely to what already existed in neighborhoods, rather than on sustaining the production of new housing. Concerns that these changes would depress housing production and drive up the prices of new homes went unheeded.

More changes followed in the early 2000s. In 2004, Lower-Density Growth Management regulations imposed higher parking requirements and minimum lot sizes as well as other restrictions across most of Staten Island, where new housing construction subsequently dropped by two thirds. 

The 2008 Yards and 2010 Residential Streetscape Preservation text amendments were ostensibly focused on qualitative changes to the configuration of buildings in low-density districts, such as planting requirements and curb cut restrictions. However, these amendments also contained provisions that hampered the addition of housing, such as impractical parking requirements for residential conversions and reduced flexibility to fit required parking. CHPC warned at the time that such requirements would “discourage the creation of housing units and encourage illegal conversions that pose health and safety hazards.”

Discussion of these citywide zoning changes focused on details of the bulk and streetscape regulations, rather than on their broader housing implications. While these changes contributed, directly or indirectly, to making multifamily housing or the addition of a unit to an existing home impossible, there was no meaningful evaluation of their impacts on housing supply.

 

Concerns about negative impacts the 1989 changes could have on housing production were broadly disregarded.

Excerpts shown from the New York Times, April 30, 1989

In 81 neighborhood downzonings, 88% of low-density multifamily zoning was eliminated.

How have neighborhood rezonings restricted housing?

Between 2002 and 2015, the City adopted more than 80 neighborhood-scale downzonings covering over 30,000 acres of low-density land.

CHPC took a novel approach to assessing the impact of these changes, focusing on changes to housing typologies allowed rather than on changes to floor area ratio (FAR), which has traditionally been used as a proxy for effective zoning capacity. As an indicator of the range of housing types allowed, we broke low-density zoning districts down by the types of housing their use regulations allow: single-family, two-family, and multifamily districts.

Our analysis found that these neighborhood downzonings imposed dramatic and wide-reaching restrictions on permitted housing types:

 

  • Nearly 20,000 acres of low-density land were rezoned to allow fewer housing types.
  • 88 percent of low-density multifamily-zoned land in these rezonings—an area the size of Manhattan—was rezoned to prohibit multifamily housing.
  • 43 percent of the city’s low-density residential land was rezoned, covering over 30,000 acres.
  • The total amount of land zoned for low-density multifamily housing in New York City decreased by 37 percent.

To the extent that the goals of downzonings were articulated aloud, protection of “neighborhood character” and preventing “out-of-context buildings” were frequently cited. This could refer to architectural styles, housing types, or quantity of housing, or sometimes serve as a coded reference to the differing preferences of in-moving racial or ethnic groups.

In retrospect, low-density downzoning has dramatically curtailed the supply of new housing, but it has not stopped continued demographic changes in low-density districts. Since 2000, these areas have become markedly less white and more Asian and Latinx in composition, while the white population has declined sharply and the Black population somewhat less so. Downzoning has prevented housing from evolving to meet the changing needs of residents. Immigrant communities and other residents alike are saddled today with few housing options, higher costs, and greater insecurity.

In Ozone Park, the most common zoning change rendered many lots practically unbuildable.

A closer look: Ozone Park

As striking as it is, the analysis of districts as multifamily, two-family, or single-family still understates the effects of downzoning on the quantity and type of housing allowed in low-density districts. This is because housing types nominally allowed in a district may be prohibited or rendered impractical by minimum lot sizes, yards, or other zoning parameters.

To provide a window on how these zoning details can dramatically curtail housing supply, we looked at the most common lot sizes and zoning changes in the 2013 Ozone Park Rezoning, one of the largest at 530 blocks.

The most common change was the rezoning of a 20-by-100-foot lot from R4, a multifamily district, to R4A, a district allowing two-family detached houses on lots at least 30 feet wide. This change occurred on over 700 lots, and on many more of similar size.

With side yard requirements, a new detached home on one of these lots can be only be seven to ten feet wide! On a 25-foot-wide lot, it’s little better, at 12 to 15 feet wide. Existing homes may be modified but must generally comply with the new zoning limitations. This not only prevents infill development, but also limits renovations or enlargements to existing homes. Only if several homes are assembled and demolished can new housing be built freely.

Effect of citywide and neighborhood zoning changes on a typical Ozone Park lot

Politics, procedure, and policy gaps were all factors.

How did this happen?

Perhaps the most obvious driver of downzoning activity was local political pressure. Downzonings were politically popular among Community Boards, whose members were whiter, wealthier, and more likely to be homeowners than the population in their districts. One possible accelerant of restrictive zoning was the 1989 Charter’s revision to the land use review process, which sowed the seeds of a tradition of “member deference” under which members of the Council informally control land use decisions in their districts.

Perverse procedural incentives in New York law make downzoning far easier and faster than up zoning. While rezonings that enable housing construction require extensive and costly analysis under environmental review statutes, actions that reduce future housing supply do not. Public review of the Ozone Park downzoning took just over three months from start to finish, including just eight days for City Council review and approval!

Land use policy at the time had an incomplete vision of growth, focusing on the sustainability virtues of higher-density, transit-oriented development (TOD) without attention to housing needs in low-density districts. Even with TOD, central locations cannot provide housing for everyone—more options are still needed in lower-scale areas.

If we don't explicitly aim to build more housing, we have no reason to expect that we'll get it.

What can be done to fix it?

Citywide zoning changes like those proposed in the Department of City Planning’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity text amendment offer an opportunity to repair much of what has been broken in low-density zoning. Cities around the country provide a wide palette of options—from accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to mixed-use development along commercial corridors to “missing middle” housing like two- and three-family homes and small apartment buildings. Many of these housing forms are familiar to New York City’s lower-density neighborhoods.

Similarly, where building codes or other regulations include unnecessarily prescriptive requirements that add cost and impede the creation of housing, these too should be reformed. In the East New York Basement Apartment Conversion Pilot Program, code requirements that do not contribute meaningfully to safety were found to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of legalizing a basement apartment.

The Fair Housing Framework advanced by Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is one vehicle for sustaining attention to housing supply and its equity implications. The creation (and elimination) of housing should be monitored through data now regularly published by the Department of City Planning at a range of geographic scales.

Looking ahead, it’s also possible to imagine reforms to environmental review and other regulatory and legislative processes that would make it at least as easy to allow new housing as to prevent it. At minimum, when laws or regulations make it more difficult to build housing, this should be disclosed to inform decisions.

Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has famously said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Similarly, we might observe: if we don’t explicitly aim to build more housing, we have no reason to expect that we’ll get it.

For more detailed findings, infographics, and CHPC’s methodology, read the full brief.

This policy brief is part of CHPCs One Size Housing Fits All initiative, which investigates how well the range of housing options available meet the diverse and dynamic needs of New Yorkers lives – and what we can do better to meet those needs.

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