Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Department of City Planning

Rezoning to Encourage Street Life on Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue

By Noah Kazis | Jun 22, 2011 | 7 Comments

When the Department of City Planning put forward its rezoning of Park Slope in 2003, one of the earliest of the now 111 rezonings under Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, it was intended to help turn Fourth Avenue into “a grand boulevard of the 21st Century.” The sought-after residential development has started […]

DCP Official: Parking Minimums Buy Support for Upzonings

By Noah Kazis | May 11, 2011 | 4 Comments

We reported yesterday that Department of City Planning Sustainability Director Howard Slatkin recently announced that his agency “believe[s] there are opportunities to lower parking requirements” in a ring of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core. This would be an important step forward in overhauling decades-old policies that lead to more traffic and less affordable housing. Importantly, […]

DCP Likely to Propose Lower Parking Minimums for NYC’s “Inner Ring”

By Noah Kazis | May 10, 2011 | 19 Comments

In its recent update of PlaNYC, New York’s long-term sustainability plan, the city committed itself to the proposition that “requiring too much parking to be built in a dense city like New York can encourage driving, contribute to congestion, and unnecessarily raise the cost of new development.” That was a major breakthrough given the Department […]

DOT to Red Hook: No Streetcar For You

By Noah Kazis | Apr 20, 2011 | 43 Comments

Proposed Red Hook streetcars aren’t worth the cost, according to the city DOT. In a presentation to community groups last Thursday [PDF], DOT revealed the results of its streetcar feasibility study and recommended against the construction of a line that would run from the Smith/9th subway station into Red Hook and up the waterfront to […]

Senior Philly Planner, Unlike NYC Peers, Says Parking Minimums Matter

By Noah Kazis | Feb 22, 2011 | 11 Comments

We reported last week that Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. are each making policy shifts to curb the proliferation of off-street parking even as New York City continues to enable the construction of more and more traffic-inducing, land-devouring parking. Streetsblog followed up with Debbie Schaaf, a senior transportation planner at Philadelphia’s planning department, about her […]

Parking Minimums Make NYC Housing More Expensive, NYU Report Finds

By Noah Kazis | Feb 11, 2011 | 13 Comments

You don’t need Jimmy McMillan to tell you that housing in New York is expensive. But figuring out why the rent is so damn high, and what to do about it, is a knotty policy question. Thanks to new research from NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, one underlying reason for the […]

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