City Shelves Midtown East Rezoning Plan

NEW YORK CITY-Citing “a lack of City Council support,” the Bloomberg administration said Tuesday it was withdrawing its plan to rezone a 73-block area of Midtown East. The move to shelve the proposal in the face of a likely defeat when it came up for a Council vote later this week means that the ball is now in the court of the next mayor, Bill de Blasio, who told the New York Times he looked forward to working on a new rezoning plan.

While acknowledging that job creation in the district is “essential,” outgoing City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Council Member Daniel Garodnick say that “a good idea alone is not enough” to justify a thumbs-up vote. “We should rezone East Midtown, but only when we can do so properly. After extensive negotiations, we have been unable to reach agreement on a number of issues in the proposed plan.” Garodnick represents the district in which the Midtown East rezoning would take place, and has been touted as a possible successor to Quinn.

Among other concerns, Quinn and Garodnick cite “the price, methodology and timing of the air rights to be sold by the city for the District Improvement Bonus,” through which developers would help finance upgrades to the area's infrastructure. Accordingly, the two lawmakers express concern over the “certainty and funding level of the needed infrastructure improvements, which includes both above and below grade needs.”

On that score, says Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “We have a financing agreement in place to pre-fund $100 million in mass transit and public space improvements before any new development could begin, but that funding was predicated on future development, which now will not occur.”  He says the “inability to reach a consensus on the plan” will cost “hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed subway and street improvements and $1 billion in additional tax revenue—as well as tens of thousands of new jobs that would have been created.” The administration has repeatedly cited the need to modernize the office district, where the average age of office building stock is more than 50 years.

Similarly, Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, says the organization is “obviously disappointed” in the turn of events. “This plan would have created tens of thousands of good paying jobs for New Yorkers in every borough and resulted in tens of millions of dollars in private sector funding for public infrastructure,” he says. It's not known when a new proposal to rezone the area will be introduced, or how much it will differ from the one withdrawn by the Bloomberg administration.