Time to turn the city's building rules upside down

From Silicon Alley in Lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, New York City has made important strides in cultivating mixed-use, live/work communities aimed toward the creative workforce and growth industries. While things are off to a good start, our elected officials need to be more proactive if New York is to reach its potential for economic and middle-class job growth. In particular, we need to be more creative and open-minded when it comes to our most precious commodity: land. The city and its land-use policies are hamstrung by antiquated zoning regulations that force developers and policy makers to choose between building housing and protecting scarce land for commercial or manufacturing use. The rules also stifle creativity, make for inefficient use of land and preclude smart growth. article continues below advertisement The answer is dynamic zoning, an idea that has been around for years but needs the support and participation of government, community stakeholders and developers to succeed. Dynamic zoning is a process that incentivizes smart growth and is attuned to every New York City neighborhood's unique and evolving needs. Step one is adopting far more flexible zoning laws that encourage—rather than prohibit—different types of developments to exist side by side (and possibly even floor by floor). The next step is for the city to engage communities in a formal planning process to create a comprehensive list of short-term needs and long-term opportunities in such areas as housing, office space, schools, lab space and transportation. Ideally this would culminate in a detailed blueprint for sustainable growth. From there the city could package incentives for developers willing to incorporate these community priorities. In essence, this would be a more expansive version of Mayor Bill de Blasio's mandatory inclusionary housing policy, in which incentives would be tied not just to affordable housing but also to community facilities and job creation. With dynamic zoning, the city would be in the business of cultivating vibrant microneighborhoods where residents of all ages could easily coexist with an eclectic mix of small businesses and incubators. Imagine a scenario, for example, in which a recent graduate of Cornell Tech or Fordham University could rent an affordable apartment on the same block as his new job at a cutting-edge tech startup. Better yet, what if his apartment and his employer shared the same building? Dynamic zoning will allow the city to cultivate microcommunities where residents coexist with an eclectic mix of small businesses and incubators Such a scenario—virtually impossible now—could be the norm, as developers would gladly incorporate a modest amount of affordable office space in new projects in exchange for greater density or the opportunity to build housing in a former manufacturing district. It would be a boon to the burgeoning tech companies that want access to New York's highly educated workforce. It also would fit squarely with the mayor's five-borough plan to create 100,000 jobs and centers of innovation for such growth industries as technology, cybersecurity and life sciences. Such live/work microcommunities also would alleviate some of the burden on our overtaxed public-transportation system, as the new jobs and housing would be virtually side by side. Of course, none of this will be easy. Having operated under a fraught land-use process that too often pitted residents, developers and government against one another, we all will need to regain a sense of mutual trust and shared responsibility. If nothing else, the adoption of a dynamic zoning model will generate an honest and open conversation about how we move forward in the 21st century.