1. A shameless story of rent control in NYC. Glad to see that the city is forcing developers to subsidize wealthy Manhattanites’ Eat, Pray, Love-like dreams of moving to Paris.

2. The travails of getting a bus lane on a busy LA street where “[m]ore people already travel by bus than by car along the route during peak hours.”

3. Here is what appears to be another example of bad zoning creating blight, and the city using said blight to seize the property via eminent domain and hand it over to favored developers. NYC zoning maps are shockingly difficult to read – can anybody tell me what is allowed to be built, as of right, in the area bounded by 125th and 127th Sts. and 2nd and 3rd Ave. in Manhattan?

4. NYC’s new zoning lite handbook. No code should be so complicated that a 168-page handbook can’t even contain a zoning map.

Stephen Smith
Stephen Smith

I graduated Spring 2010 from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else.

I still do most of the tweeting for Market Urbanism

Stephen had previously written on urbanism at Forbes.com. Articles Profile; Reason Magazine, and Next City

Articles: 282

One comment

  1. It looks to me like the block between 125th and 126th is R7-2, but the block between 126th and 127th is C6-3″. It’s hard to tell exactly how high they can be because it’s expressed in terms of floor-area ratio, but it looks like R7-2 allows up to fourteen stories if you do that “tower in the park” bullshit, and C6-3 allows it without that. The parking requirements range from 40-50%, meaning that four or five spaces have to be built for every ten housing units.

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