Court Upholds Zoning Restriction On Peace Sign

Zoning resolution prohibited apartment dweller from placing illuminated “Peace” sign in 17th floor window. In 2010 Brigitte Vosse placed an illuminated “Peace” sign in the window of her seventeenth-floor condo in The Ansonia at 2109 Broadway in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  The Department of Buildings fined her $800 for violating a zoning ordinance restricting illuminated signs in her neighborhood at heights above forty feet.  Vosse argued that the City placed a content-based … <Read More>


Simeon Bankoff: Taking the Context out of Contextual Zoning

In March 2015, the City Planning Commission announced a proposal called Zoning for Affordability and Quality, which broadly calls for three principal changes in the current citywide zoning resolution. The plan proposes to change and enlarge definitions of senior housing to include more types of housing providers than currently permitted. It also proposes to increase buildable space for senior housing in some instances. The proposal also seeks to lessen or some instances no longer mandate … <Read More>


Rezoning Approved for Central Harlem Project

Rezoning approved for project that will restore historic church building and provide thirty percent affordable housing to Harlem residents. On June 17, 2014, the City Council Land Use Subcommittee for Zoning and Franchises heard an application submitted by 117th Street Equities, LLC (Artimus) for a zoning map amendment to facilitate a mixed-use development in Central Harlem, Manhattan. The map amendment would rezone an existing R7A to an R8A zoning district on a block … <Read More>


Queens Rezoning of Shopping Center Site Would Expand Types of Commercial Uses of Site [Council Land Use Committee Approves Plan]

See Below for Update

City Planning Commission approved a zoning map amendment to facilitate broader commercial uses of the property.On March 5, 2014, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved an application submitted by DERP Associates, LLC, for a zoning map amendment to rezone to a C4-1 district a portion of an R3-2 district and an R3-2/C2-2 district, located at 220-05 Hillside Avenue in Queens. Currently at the site is a shopping center occupied by … <Read More>


East Midtown Rezoning: Looking For Extra Zoning Rights? They’re For Sale

A disarmingly simple plan for rezoning Manhattan’s office district running from Grand Central Terminal north to about 58th Street has been approved by the Planning Commission and will come to a Council vote around the time of the November election.

It has three key components:  1) The City almost doubles the allowable floor area for new buildings on large sites along the major thoroughfares; 2) it sells to the landowner the right to build the … <Read More>


The East Midtown Rezoning and the Future of New York City

(Economic) Heart Trouble

More than 30 years after its last major zoning change, the economic heart of New York City merits a checkup. According to City planners, the prognosis for East Midtown is not good: an aging office stock, a congested pedestrian network, global competition, and the lack of new office development threaten to undermine the economic competitiveness of the City. The cure, proposed by the Bloomberg Administration, is a rezoning of 78 blocks of … <Read More>