Grassroots Foresight
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1990-2005 |
Grassroots Foresight
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1990-2005 |
A Tale of Two Policies: 1990-2005 |
If the 70s through the 80s were a foundational time for Chelsea infrastructure and for New York housing and development policy, the 90s into around 2005 were a foundational and increasingly important time for local policies which could override state and federal ineptitudes. On the state level, 421-a policy would not change during this time, despite ambitious city wide initiatives led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to continue to develop the city. Chelsea, it would turn out, would benefit from local policies proposed by a local community board and advanced by the City Council which would protect zoning and development requirements throughout the neighborhood, while ensuring affordable housing where city and state policies failed to. This would become a tale of primarily (and among many other factors) two policies: Community Board 4's contextual zoning resolution of 1996 and state 421-a tax abatement.
With policies affecting the neighborhood from the local, city, state and federal level, it would turn out to be the local policies that would be best informed and tailored to the neighborhood and thus more effective in achieving preservation while allowing for increased development and economic progress. |
Groundwork for a New Chelsea |
City Council Votes for "Vacancy Decontrol" Laws (1994)In a vote that would become more influential with increases in housing development, the City Council put into law "vacancy decontrol" regulations. There are different ways in which an affordable unit can be transferred from rent-stabilization to market rate. One way in which landlords can raise their affordable units to market rate is by increasing the rent on a given affordable unit above a maximum threshold. In New York today, that threshold is $2,700 a month. If an affordable unit increases above that, the next lease can be brought up to market rate. Rents can be increased through Major Capital Improvements, which allow landlords to permanently increase rents after developments undergo general improvements.
Vacancy decontrol means that when a rent stabilized unit is vacated, the following lease can be brought out of rent stabilization and into market rate. Today, this contributes to the fact that only around 8% of units in New York within developments benefitting from 421-a tax abatement remain affordable, rather than the 20% that hypothetically should be. Community Board 4 Chelsea Contextual Zoning Proposal (1996) |
The Community Board 4 is one of 59 such civilian committees in the city, made up of volunteers from the community appointed by the Borough President to represent the community in receiving complaints and conveying them to local officials as well as overseeing the implementation of city services, processing of permits, and more. In Chelsea, CB4 as it is known is a prominant force as it represents much of the neighborhood and thus is composed in large part by Chelsea residents. Because Community Board 4 has a lower boundary that covers most of Chelsea, anything it works with local government to accomplish effects Chelsea. To the right is a map of CB4, in which Chelsea neighborhood is highlighted in yellow:
In 1996, CB4 came up with a plan to create new opportunities for housing development in Chelsea while preserving historic and affordable sites through new zoning requirements. The plan, titled "A Contextual Zoning Proposal to Create Housing Opportunities" and adopted by the City Council in the same year, sought "to provide for orderly growth and change; to provide opportunities for new, economically-integrated housing; to preserve the existing low-income housing stock; to prevent significant displacement of residents and businesses; to preserve ethnic and economic diversity; to protect residential areas from commercial intrusion; to preserve the character and visual unity of Chelsea; to preserve the traditional urban form and scale of the community; and to protect the [Chelsea] Historic District and other areas of historic character..." It would do this by keeping "contextual" zoning -- which requires new building to stick to 'character' of existing neighborhood or to, in other words, limit the size and density of new housing -- and making the east side of Chelsea non-contextual, increasing density and building size allowances for the future. The plan also included a vital provision that would force any new developments on vacated or empty lots of land -- similar to the 421-a tax abatement program -- to be R10 density, a high level of building density and to include affordable housing. This, it would turn out, would give Chelsea thousands of promised affordable units in 2005 when the Hudson Yards Development was permited and accepted within the state 421-a tax abatement program; 421-a did not require it at the time to include on-site affordable housing, but because of its density and size, CB4's centextual zoning plan did in fact make this requirement. What would have been zero affordable units would hopefully become over 4,000. |
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace Plan of 2003 |
In his 2002 promise of affordable housing creation, Mayor Michael Bloomberg at first promised to "preserve 38,000 units of affordable housing, and build 27,000 others, with a total of $3 billion." By 2007, however, there were promises to have affordable housing for 500,000 New Yorkers by the end of his time in office.
In 2004, Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace Plan for housing development and affordable housing creation officially went into effect. The plan emphasized sites for which housing preservation would be emphasized, and opposite those, sites/neighborhoods in which new construction would be emphasized. Poorer neighborhoods emphasized preservation and so safety from private deinvestment; whereas neighborhoods seen to be on the rise expected new housing construction. In Chelsea and the midtown-west side of Manhattan, the emphasis was primarily on private development. This map below is a map from the initial plan, on nyc.gov, from 2004: |
According to NYC's Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), "The City responded to the new market pressures by increasing the Plan’s emphasis on preservation, in order to avoid massive disinvestment threatened by the plummeting real estate market. In pivoting towards preservation, the Plan sought to: (1) strengthen neighborhoods through targeted Housing Maintenance Code enforcement and addressing physically and financially distressed properties; (2) expand the supply of affordable and sustainable housing through increased preservation and targeted new development; and (3) stabilize families by keeping them in their homes through increased foreclosure prevention activities." Just like Koch's plan of 1985, Bloomberg's plan sought to create funding for housing both affordable and private by creating partnerships with developers, nonprofits and the HPD.
But just like Koch's plan, it was also in many ways, according to the Terwillinger Center for Housing a "victim of its own success." By 2014 "the HDC [New York City Housing Development Corporation] has devoted more than $1.1 billion in direct subsidy from its corporate reserves and has raised more than $6.7 billion in financing for HPD developments; the NHMP has produced 143,469 units to date. " With huge success in housing development, housing prices and market rate increased dramatically, further exacerbating the problem of affordable housing the plan had set out to tackle, creating a new set of problems for the next generation of policy makers to deal with. This will be dealt with in the next section. |
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In 2005, cultural zoning changes created new opportunities for infrastructural development in Chelsea that would change its landscape forever. The Waterfront, the High Line, Chelsea Market were all transformed before and during this time, making Chelsea an extremely desirable destination by the early 2000s. Heeyuen Yoon and of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett of the University of California outline in their piece, Industrial gentrification in West Chelsea, New York: Who survived and who did not?, the importance of the West Chelsea rezoning toward the evolution of Chelsea through housing development:
“The West Chelsea rezoning of 2005 focused specifically on 13 blocks and two half-blocks of West Chelsea (Special West Chelsea district, roughly bounded by W16th Street to the south, W30th Street to the north, 10th and 11th Avenues to the east and west, respectively). The primary purpose of this rezoning was twofold: first, to encourage mixed-use development of the neighbourhood; second, to advance the development and use of the High Line as a public park.” “The High Line, former West Side Freight Line, was converted to a park. After 30 years of abandonment across West Chelsea and Meatpacking district, the city government announced to pursue the use of the High Line as a public amenity in 2004 (excluding the last section of the park), and completed the first and the second sections in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Between its conception and completion, the project attracted speculators’ attention and induced an unprecedented amount of property development in West Chelsea – US$2 billion of private investment as of 2011 (McGeehan, 2011).” The rezoning of West Chelsea did not only effect Chelsea through the creation of the High Line as a park and soon-to-be world-renowned architectural and tourist attraction; the rezoning allowed for the creation of the Special Hudson Yards District which would serve as a planning site for the city and Hudson Yards Group to come up with a development plan that would add much needed park space, albeit as well with commercial and extremely expensive business. The Hudson Yards development, given its permit for development in 2005 and negotiated as a part of the Special Hudson Yards District by the city and state as a part of the 421-a tax exemption policy would not have affordable units on site if it were not for savvy negotiating by the Community Board and local officials. There is also off-site affordable housing that the Hudson Yards Development will have to create, although plans for that have not yet been released, much to the dismay, further, of local watch groups. Below, take a look at demographics changes in Chelsea during this time, including a graphical recap of housing and rent changes in the neighborhood between 1990 and 2005. |
Chelsea Market and the Land Rush to Come |