Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
53
professionals from other parts of Manhattan, who could profit from the relatively low prices
and the excellent transportation options of the area.
Rezoning 125
th
Street
In December 2003, the Department of City Planning (from now on, DCP) partnered with
several city organizations, including the New York City Economic Development Corporation
(NYCEDC) and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to create a
development framework to ‘sustain the ongoing revitalization of 125th Street as a unique
Manhattan Main Street, enhance its regional business district character and reinforce the
street’s premier arts, culture, and entertainment destination identity’ (DCP 2007a).
The plan was crafted in a moment where the city was recovering from 9/11, Wall
Street profits were rebounding, and the Manhattan property market was reaching record highs,
creating momentum to push development to other parts of the island and the outer Boroughs.
An advisory committee of local stakeholders was included in the planning process,
comprised of local businesses, civic groups, cultural institutions, and Community Boards
(CBs) 9, 10 and 11. Key roles in crafting the proposal were also played by several business-
oriented Harlem organizations, most of which would come to benefit directly from the
rezoning of the area (Feltz 2008).
The 125
th
Study was based on zoning amendments to accommodate increasing
pressures for commercial and residential development in the area by increasing allowable
densities and encouraging mixed-use development along the entire length of the street, from
the Harlem to the Hudson River. Like many other rezoning plans implemented by the DCP
across the city in the years of Bloomberg,
1
it was based on the physical restructuring of a low-
income but rapidly gentrifying community to encourage property investment and the influx of
new, more affluent residents (Angotti 2008; Busà 2012, 2013). By the time the rezoning was
on the drawing board, the neighbourhood around 125
th
Street was a predominantly low-
income, predominantly black community, whose area median income equalled to less than
one-third of the average median income of the city as a whole, and which was already under
pressure from escalating housing prices, large development schemes by neighbouring
Columbia University and extensive waves of foreclosures and bankruptcies of small
businesses.
The proposal envisioned the rezoning of all blocks between 124th Street and 126th
Street, from Second Avenue to Broadway. By increasing residential densities and fostering
mixed-use development, the plan would allow for approximately 3,900 new apartments and
600,000 square feet of new office and retail space. At the same time, the proposal introduced
height restrictions for all new developments at 290 feet in order to discourage out-of scale
development in the area.
1
Under Michael Bloomberg, the DCP has adopted123 rezoning plans covering more than 11,500
blocks, or almost one third of the total urban land, in the decade 2002-2013.
