Inwood Zoning Proposal
Inwood NYC is a detailed plan that is designed to ensure that Inwood remains an attractive, affordable district for immigrant and working families. The project is expected to supply more than $200 million of public investments to the community. These investments will develop, reserve, and secure many affordable homes, reclaim parks, open roads to the Harlem River waterfront, and offer new STEM education prospects and support for small businesses.
As one of the Inwood Action Plan, the City recommended a series of land measures, comprising a rezoning, which was ratified on August 8, 2018, by the City Council. Through a mixture of land use measures, the Inwood Rezoning intends to improve core community priorities of developing permanently affordable housing, enhance the new retail, community, and the commercial facility uses to create more employment and grow business opportunities.
The purpose of zoning west of tenth Avenue is to reserve and reinforce the district’s popular character and secure rent-stabilized housing stock, an essential asset for cohorts of New Yorkers. To the east of the tenth Avenue, the zoning strives to enlarge this well-developed multi-purpose district eastward to the Harlem River (Rodriguez 16). The land exploitation measures also developed a Waterfront Action Plan to construct riverside. Moreover, the rezoning developed the Special Inwood District to design walkable, attractive streets and ensure that any new structure matches architecturally and visually into the surrounding districts.
The transformations coming to Inwood’s lakeside are part of a mega and continuing sets of rezoning and renovations that have taken effect all over the five regions over the last decade, as the New York’s irregular boundaries are smoothened out and replaced by modern glass turrets. The chop shops of Willet’s Points have been demolished, the Hunter’s Point South forests have been flattened, Columbia University’s removal of Manhattanville is nearly accomplished, the post-industrial fields along the shoreline of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have been ruined, and the last ruins of momentous business along the Gowanus are swiftly vanishing.
The plans for the tenth Avenue have not transformed. However, the EDC has recommended dividing regions west of tenth Avenue and north to Dyckman Street into two distinct zoning neighborhoods, the Upland Core, which stretches nearly eighty percent of the area and the Commercial U, which stretches from Dyckman Street through Broadway up to West 207th Street.
All neighborhoods which extend to the Upland Core will be rezoned from R7-2 blocks to R7A, a move which is pleasant to most of the more influential opponents of the rezoning plan. The R7A neighborhood, an extremely preferred among protesters during a July zoning factory, will cap construction heights of eight skyscrapers with a constructible floor area ratio of 4.0 for residential apartments and 6.5 for public facilities, in line with the EDC (Rodriguez 06). Moreover, the zoning would overlap business use for ground-floor marketing, where it presently exists.
At the northern end of Manhattan adjacent to the Broadway Bridge, many blocks of storerooms, parking areas, and auto body outlets have been rezoned to facilitate new business and industrial developments. This region of Inwood’s east coast encompasses the Broadway Bridge Wash and Lube, on the boundary of Broadway and 220Th Street. The rezoning will enable the new industrial and commercial developments to be structured in this region. The structures in this area are primarily low warehouses, such as Hans Auto Service on 28th Street, which has been in operation for more than forty years. The rezoning will as well enable for taller buildings to take their space.
In most of these districts, rezoning has been applied like a sledgehammer, dismantling the popular community into dust, and setting up the land for modern, distinct residential apartments. Opponents to the plan have described the City’s extensive exploitation of rezoning as a methodically racist exercise that has heightened exclusion in New York, and the population of Inwood has paralleled their zoning to an ethnic sanitizing. As the new waterfront increases, serving many of the modern society, one wonders what will happen to the already existing population in Inwood. One of the critics of the rezoning, district occupant Josh Karan has expressed his reservations regarding the plan by terming it shameful because it did not factor in setting up any community housing in the districts in regions that are being newly zones for housing. Another activist, by the name Anna Morales, has termed the whole plan as disrespectful. She stated that their opinions had not been considered irrespective of presenting a memorandum.
Ultimately, EDC is the primary determinant regarding this proposal. Its representative Meagher has recorded that the rezoning exercise will go through scoping and public participation to enable the City to make changes to the project as it attracts more recommendations from the community to develop a better plan in the end. She already alluded that they are prepared to discuss the program and factor in the community’s feedback. Moreover, EDC spokeswoman Stephanie Baez has assured the public that they will continue discussing the discussion with Community Board constituted of twelve members, elected representatives, populations and shareholders to inform a proposal that will preserve the district’s character while building affordable housing, employment, and waterfront roads to Inwood populations.
Works Cited
Rodriguez, Ydanis. “Inwood NYC Planning Initiative.” EDC, April 17. 2020.