Planning via Zoom: Legal Scrutiny for Pandemic Realities in New York City
The question of whether a public review process conducted by Zoom is sufficient to approve a sweeping rezoning plan is a matter of no small legal concern in New York City. February 24, 2021, 5am PST | James Brasuell |
Rebecca Baird-Remba reports the details of a lawsuit that threatens to derail the Gowanus Neighborhood Planning Study, alleging that Zoom meetings don t allow for a sufficient public review process.
The stakes in the lawsuit are substantial. The new zoning would cover 80 blocks between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, and it would pave the way for 8,200 new apartments, 700,000 square feet of commercial space and 251,000 square feet of community facilities on land that is now largely zoned for industrial uses, according to Baird-Remba. The plan had been stuck in COVID limbo for the first half of 2020.
Kerre McIvor: The NIMBYs might have a point
13 Feb, 2021 04:00 PM
4 minutes to read
Intensive housing can and should be done well. Photo / Alex Burton Back in the days when I had a house, it was right next to Wellpark College, a place where students of all ages studied natural medicine and the like. They were good neighbours. People who are dedicated to studying massage and aromatherapy and naturopathy are gentle souls, in the main. There was one bats t crazy woman of a certain age who clearly needed someone in her class to realign her chakras when she started yelling and ranting that we shouldn t have two car parks, that it was just greedy and she was going bankrupt paying parking fees. But she was not the norm.
California is making liberals squirm
Ezra Klein, New York Times
Feb. 11, 2021
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FILE: An aerial view of San Francisco on a sunny day.Ivan/Getty Images
You may have heard that San Francisco’s Board of Education voted 6-1 to rename 44 schools, stripping ancient racists of their laurels, but also Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The history upon which these decisions were made was dodgy, and the results occasionally bizarre. Paul Revere, for instance, was canceled for participating in a raid on Indigenous Americans that was actually a raid on a British fort.
In normal times, bemusement would be the right response to a story like this. Cities should have idiosyncratic, out-there politics. You need to earn your “Keep X weird” bumper stickers. And for all the Fox News hosts who’ve collapsed onto their fainting couches, America isn’t suffering from a national shortage of schools named for Abraham Lincoln.
Co-Living Redefined by Denver City Council
Over the strong opposition from neighborhood groups, the Denver City Council has approved new regulations that allow up to five unrelated individuals to live in the same household. February 10, 2021, 9am PST | James Brasuell |
The vote raises the limit of unrelated people living in the same household from two to five. Denver Senior Planner Andrew Webb has argued in the past that the new law is unlikely to significantly increase the number of people in households in the city. Rather, this legalizes living situations for hundreds or thousands of households across the city, explains Swanson in the most recent article on the subject.
YIMBYs Go Mainstream in New York
YIMBY, pro-development, politics are gaining support and attention in New York City at an opportune moment in the city s planning history. January 14, 2021, 5am PST | James Brasuell |
According to an article by Orion Jones, the pro-development messages of New York City s only Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) group, Open New York, has begun to resonate.
Where public meetings used to respond to the YIMBY message with hostility, Open New York is professionalizing and winning support, according to Jones, even among the ranks of the city s politicians.
The growing influence of Open New York is timed for a watershed moment in New York City planning history, as the last of a series of rezoning processes spurred by the de Blasio administration targets the relatively wealthy neighborhoods of NoHo and SoHo in Manhattan and Gowanus in Brooklyn the types of neighborhoods that tend to oppose new development or density and the types of neighborhoods that are mo