For several decades proposals to rezone manufacturing districts to allow other uses have run aground of opposition from border communities that prefer the tranquility of the status quo and from industrial preservationists who believe the city must retain a diversified, blue-collar job base. The decline of the city’s industrial sector has thus far defied all efforts to arrest it, however, and there is an increasing consensus that the city’s economic evolution has made strict segregation of residential, commercial and manufacturing uses obsolete.
Click here (pdf) to read CHPC’s assessment of manufacturing in New York and how zoning for obsolete uses impacts the city.