CITY HALL — On Tuesday, Council Member Moya co-chaired a joint hearing between the Committee on Land Use and the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises to discuss his two bills that would require the city to study the effects of a neighborhood-wide rezoning and the efficacy of the City Quality Environmental Review (CEQR) Technical Manual.

“Few things can fundamentally reshape an entire community as a neighborhood rezoning can,” said Council Member Francisco Moya, who chairs the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises. “These rezonings have real consequences for New Yorkers — some beneficial, others detrimental. When it comes to the adverse effects like residential displacement, the city cannot operate on a policy of willful ignorance. We owe it to everyone affected by neighborhood rezonings to reveal how many residents are being pushed out of their homes and whether or not these community transformations contribute to school overcrowding. Failure to look back and identify areas for improvement is arrogant, lazy and an abdication of our duty to the people we serve.”

City agencies use the CEQR technical manual to assess, disclose, and mitigate the significant environmental consequences of a project, such as a neighborhood rezoning. With respect to neighborhood rezonings, researchers use the CEQR manual as a guide to conduct a predictive analysis on a range of concerns such as business and residential displacement and school overcrowding.

The estimates for previous rezonings call into question the efficacy of these analyses. In Long Island City, which was rezoned in 2001, the city estimated the rezoning would create some 300 new residential units. In reality, over 10,000 units have been created since then. In Downtown Brooklyn, the city estimated that the rezoning would create 979 residential units by 2013. In reality, 3,000 residential units were built by then and another 5,000 units have been added since.

The significant discrepancy between estimate and reality in these two cases make clear how poorly these predictions may inform city planning. To remedy this, Council Member Moya has introduced two bills that would require the city to study the relationship between neighborhood rezonings and residential secondary displacement (INT. 1482) and school overcrowding (INT. 1531) and then report the findings to the City Council. This information could be used to update CEQR to more accurately account for the effects of a neighborhood-wide rezoning.

“This is simple. Where we can do better, we should,” Council Member Moya said. “It seems to me that right now we’re treating New Yorkers in primarily low-income minority communities as guinea pigs in a badly designed experiment. We need to compare the results of these rezonings to our original hypothesis in the CEQR study and see what we can glean.”

###