Follow-Up Testimony to the New York City Charter Revision Commission

This follow-up testimony addresses two questions put to me by Commission member Carl Weisbrod when I testified at the February 24, 2025 public session:

1. Should there be a comprehensive planning requirement in the Charter?
2. Should the City Planning Commission's co-responsibility for the capital budget be restored?

Summary of Recommendations

I suggest that this Commission consider the changes to the City Charter outlined below. These changes would create a workable process to develop a comprehensive land use planning framework for New York City, updated periodically. The proposed changes would also give more structure and purpose to the City Planning Commission’s role in capital planning by relating that role to the oversight of capital improvements necessary to implement the comprehensive land use framework.

• Repeal § 192(f) (relating to preparation of a Zoning and Planning Report by the City Planning Commission).
• Amend § 197-a(a) (relating to plans for the development, growth, and improvement of the city) to require that by December 31, 2027, and not less than every eight years thereafter, the Department of City Planning propose for public review (pursuant to the provisions of this section) a comprehensive land use framework for the city.  Such framework should include forecasts of expected population and employment growth, quantification of expected citywide needs for additional housing units and nonresidential space, identification of areas where residential and non-residential land use changes are appropriate in response to those needs, and analysis of changes in public facilities and supporting infrastructure necessitated by such changes.
• Create new §197-e that specifies a special abbreviated process for reviewing zoning map changes (and any zoning text change limited in effect to the area proposed for rezoning) identified in an adopted comprehensive land use framework pursuant to §197-a.
  • Referral of a complete application (including any environmental review required by law) to Community Board, Borough Board (if relevant), Borough President, and City Council Land Use Committee.
  • These entities may solicit public comment through a public hearing (in which the community board, borough board and borough president may hold a combined hearing) or by soliciting public comments through an online portal for a period of not less than one week.
  • These entities each have 30 days to submit a recommendation to the City Planning Commission.
  • CPC has 60 days to hold a hearing and vote.
  • New body, Zoning Change Review Panel, consisting of mayor, council speaker and borough president, or their designees, may review the CPC’s decision. 
  • Create new §191(d) specifying that DCP will provide staff support to the Panel as needed.
  • Panel can call up a rezoning application approved by CPC upon request of one member.
  • Panel must consider the existing record, and may request additional testimony, in person or online, from DCP, the community board, borough board, borough president, city council members or land use committee staff, and from other persons who have testified for or against the application.
  • Panel must vote within 30 days, with a majority (two members) needed to approve, disapprove or modify.  If the panel modifies an application, clock is tolled for 15 days for the Planning Commission’s comment as per §197-d(d).
  • If no Panel vote within 30 days CPC vote stands.

• Amend § 215(b) (relating to the contents of the ten-year capital strategy) to include a narrative, drafted by the Department of City Planning, relating the proposed capital commitments by applicable city agency to the needs identified by the comprehensive land use framework approved by the City Planning Commission and City Council.
• Amend § 228 (Draft ten-year capital strategy) to change the date of submission to not later than January 16^th of each odd-numbered year, which reflects actual practice.
• Amend § 234 (relating to the City Planning Commission’s hearing and comment on the draft ten-year capital strategy) to move the date of the hearing to not later than February 15^th of each odd-numbered year, and submission of the comment to March 1;  and to explicitly relate the subject of the hearing and comment to the relationship of the draft ten-year capital strategy to the comprehensive land use framework approved by the CPC and Council.

My analysis leading to these recommendations is presented below.

Comprehensive Planning

There is a widespread view among elected officials and activists that New York City’s failure to undertake “comprehensive planning” results in “zoning without planning,” e.g., City Planning Commission actions that induce growth without adequate attention to the provision of supporting infrastructure and adequate local services. There is some truth to this, particularly in neighborhoods like Long Island City where the pace of growth has far outstripped planners’ original projections.

However, “comprehensive planning” is no panacea, for several reasons. First, New York City is very large, and budgets are always tight. There will never be the resources to plan on a granular basis across the city. Second, local politics are contentious, and consensus on desirable changes will always be elusive. Third, the city is always evolving faster than planners, elected officials and the public can readily comprehend. Plans that do achieve consensus may have a short shelf life.

The inclusion of “master plan” requirements in the City Charter has its origins in the Standard City Planning Enabling Act, published in 1928 under the auspices of then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.[1] Many of the members of the drafting committee were New Yorkers, including Edward M. Bassett and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. The Standard City Planning Enabling Act reflects its drafters’ view that cities could be planned with scientific precision.[2]

Consistent with the Standard City Planning Enabling Act, both the 1936 and 1961 Charters required the City Planning Commission to adopt a “Master Plan.” The 1936 provision seemed to envision the form of an extraordinarily detailed map:

§ 197. a. The commission shall prepare and from time to time modify a master plan of the city which shall show desirable streets, roads, highways and the grades thereof, public places, bridges and tunnels and the approaches thereto, viaducts, parks, public reservations, parkways, squares, playgrounds, roadways in parks, sites for public buildings and structures, building zone districts, pierhead and bulkhead lines, docks and wharves, waterways, routes of railroads, omnibuses and ferries, locations of drainage systems, sewers, sewage treatment plants, incinerators, water conduits and other public utilities privately or publicly owned, and such other features, changes and additions as will provide for the improvement of the city and its future growth and development and afford adequate facilities for the housing, transportation, distribution, comfort, convenience, health and welfare of its population.

The 1961 provision seemed to envision, in contrast, a document, or series of documents, that would include descriptive matter and not simply a map.

§ 197. a. The city planning commission shall prepare and adopt, in one or more parts, and from time to time modify a master plan for the physical development of the city, which shall provide for the improvement of the city and its future growth and afford adequate and appropriate facilities for the housing, business, industry, transportation, distribution, recreation, comfort, convenience, health and welfare of its population.

The Lindsay administration, shortly thereafter, decided to produce such a plan. The Plan for New York City was published in draft form in 1969, in five volumes.[3] The plan was never adopted. In 1971 an additional report, Planning for Jobs, was published;[4] that ended the master planning effort. The Plan for New York City was largely descriptive and backward-looking; it failed to address both the factors leading to the city’s rapid decline in the 1970’s and the structural changes in the city’s population and economy that subsequently drove recovery. It was viewed as a costly failure, and that resulted in the removal of the master plan requirement in the 1975 Charter.

The 1975 Charter Revision Commission replaced the “master plan” requirement with a provision that allows the Planning Commission to adopt “plans for the development, growth and improvement of the city,”[5] which could be proposed by the mayor, borough boards and community boards as well as DCP and the CPC. Such a plan could be comprehensive, or local. That provision remains. The Department of City Planning lists 13 CPC reports since 1976 for “197-a” plans. Two are citywide updates to the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, and the rest are neighborhood plans.

The 1989 Charter added a requirement that the Planning Commission prepare, every four years, a “zoning and planning report.”[6] Only one such report was ever prepared, in 1993.[7] It had little impact. One major problem with this provision is that the report is authored by the CPC. The part-time commission is not well-suited to engage in authorship of a meaningful citywide plan, and no subsequent Chair has wanted to repeat this experience.

The Charter still contains language from the one-time “master plan” provision, stating that the “city planning commission shall be responsible for the conduct of planning relating to the orderly growth, improvement and future development of the city, including adequate and appropriate resources for the housing, business, industry, transportation, distribution, recreation, culture, comfort, convenience, health and welfare of its population.”[8]

Consistent with this language, and the ideals of rational planning that have persisted for 97 years—despite repeated failure to achieve them—my recommendation is that this Commission consider deleting § 192(f)’s zoning and planning report requirement and substituting a workable comprehensive planning requirement.

Some American cities have used comprehensive planning well to accommodate a growing population. As a scholar, I have been impressed by the example of Seattle.[9] Washington State’s comprehensive planning requirements are found at RCW 36.70A.070.[10] This specifies that a city’s comprehensive plan include various elements: land use, housing, capital facilities, and so forth. Some of the elements, such as sustainability, are covered by other NYC plans already mandated in the Charter.[11]

Another exemplary local comprehensive plan is Minneapolis 2040.[12] The requirements for Minnesota municipalities’ comprehensive plans are found in §473.859 of the state statutes.[13] Like Washington state, the statute specifies a land use plan and a public facilities plan.

Both Seattle and Minneapolis are much smaller than New York City, likely making achieving consensus on a comprehensive plan far easier. However, the need for at least a high-level comprehensive framework for New York City is compelling. The current mayor, for example, set a “moonshot” goal of producing 500,000 new housing units in ten years but has not asked city agencies to produce a plan to reach that goal. The city needs to debate, and ideally agree on, both the goal and the route to achieving it.

My proposal would require DCP to propose a “comprehensive land use framework” for public review through the “197-a” process. That would provide a high-level identification of citywide residential and nonresidential land use needs and of areas proposed for growth to meet those needs. There would also be a discussion – again, at a high level – of the public facilities and infrastructure needed to support that growth. Addressing these issues at a high level keeps the costs and time frames of the plan within reason. Having DCP prepare the plan avoids the impracticality of assigning the zoning and planning report to the CPC. The CPC would review the plan and propose modifications based on public testimony, which is its typical role.

Once the City Council approves a comprehensive land use framework, an abbreviated process is appropriate for approval of future rezonings pursuant to the framework. The alternative of subjecting such rezonings to the normal ULURP process would give individual council members who object to a specific rezoning undue leverage to pick apart a plan approved by the entire council as being fair and equitable in its distribution of community impacts. The proposed Zoning Change Review Panel would preserve the oversight of elected officials while maintaining a focus on an individual rezoning's role within an overall land use framework.

As an aside, I would note that the Zoning Change Review Panel, once created, may have utility beyond the implementation of a comprehensive land use framework. Some recent commentaries on the Charter have suggested replacing the current mayoral veto of City Council land use decisions with a new override mechanism that might be more effective.[14] The Zoning Change Review Panel as outlined in this testimony may represent another potential avenue for revising final review of City Council zoning actions.

Capital Budget

The history of the City Planning Commission’s role in the capital budget is one of continuous failure to achieve meaningful input. One obvious issue is that once the city urbanized to its edges, stopped building new bridges, tunnels, and highways, and transferred responsibility for the subways to the MTA, there was little demand for planning input into the capital budget. Most of the capital budget is comprised of capital maintenance, such as bridge reconstruction, or scheduled replacements, such as purchasing fire trucks. The proportion which might interest the CPC – new or improved infrastructure to support growth – is small, relative to the overall program.

One can see how successive Charters pushed the CPC to the side as the domain of the Bureau of the Budget (later Office of Management and Budget) grew. The 1936 Charter had the CPC preparing the proposed capital budget with the assistance of the Bureau of the Budget.[15] The 1961 Charter had the CPC prepare a “draft” capital budget that would then be superseded by an “executive” capital budget submitted by the mayor, making the entire CPC exercise superfluous.[16] The 1975 Charter, recognizing the futility of this arrangement, replaced the draft capital budget with a CPC “statement of the city’s capital needs and priorities.”[17] With no dedicated staff, this became a pro forma document that had no meaningful impact.

The 1989 Charter eliminated the statement of capital needs and priorities but created a new document, the ten-year capital strategy, with the draft prepared jointly by DCP and OMB and the final by OMB only.[18] The CPC is required to hold a public hearing and issue a report on the draft strategy.[19] The ten-year capital strategy has no specific planning content and has evolved into part of the Mayor’s preliminary budget submission in early January of odd-numbered years. The CPC hearing and comment are, at best, pro forma and have no impact.

One advantage of the comprehensive land use framework, as I envision it, is that it provides land use planning content that the Ten-Year Capital Strategy can reference. This in turn potentially provides the public with a reference point for the CPC hearing and makes the Commission’s comments more meaningful.

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1. Scanned online at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-955faaa3558a7c44c6a9edbbc01f5cd5/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-955faaa3558a7c44c6a9edbbc01f5cd5.pdf.
2. See Section 6, General Powers and Duties, p. 13.
3. The five volumes are scanned online at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c42cb93f-8f3d-ca65-e040-e00a18064e5c/book?parent=8b252450-c603-012f-14f1-58d385a7bc34#page/1/mode/1up.
4. Scanned online at https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studies/nyc-industrial-plan/planning-for-jobs-1971.pdf.
5. N.Y.C. Charter § 197-a.
6. Ibid., § 192(f).
7. The report is scanned online at https://www.nyc.gov/html/rabrc/downloads/pdf/dcp_shaping_the_citys_futuresmall.pdf.
8. N.Y.C. Charter § 192(d).
9. The Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan can be found at https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/current-projects/seattle-2035-comprehensive-plan#whatwhy and the proposed 2025 update, Mayor Harrell’s One Seattle Plan, at https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/OPCD/SeattlePlan/OneSeattleComprehensivePlan.pdf.
10. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=36.70a.070.
11. See, e.g., N.Y.C. Charter § 20(e).
12. https://minneapolis2040.com/
13. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/473.859.
14. The mayoral veto is found in §197-d(f).  Alternative suggestions include the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, “Allow the City Planning Commission to override or modify Council votes on land use actions with a supermajority vote,” Key Charter Reforms for Housing and Land Use - CHPC New York; and the Citizens Budget Commission, “Allow applicants to appeal actions rejected by the City Council to a ULURP Appeals Board consisting of the City Planning Commission and Council Speaker,” https://cbcny.org/advocacy/cbc-makes-3-bold-proposals-improve-nycs-land-use-decision-making-process.
15. N.Y.C. Charter § 216 (1936).
16. N.Y.C. Charter §§ 216-19 (1961).
17. N.Y.C. Charter § 214(d) (1975).
18. N.Y.C. Charter §215 (1989).
19. Ibid., § 234.