These are some of the questions the former mayor of Bogotá and current celebrity speaker Enrique Peñalosa asked at a conference of city planners and community board members held at Columbia University one year ago. They sounded thrilling to an audience unused to hearing their own local politicians pose such questions. A community planning culture and political process in which New Yorkers are called upon to gather in small groups, discuss the economic, physical and geographic needs of their neighborhoods, and with the help of experts, put together a detailed plan in which these things are competently envisioned seemed farfetched.
Actually, the political framework for just such a process has existed since 1975 when a newly revised city charter called for the creation of 59 community districts, each with a board of residents who, when need be, could propose official plans for “the development, growth, and improvement of the city and [their district].” If reality has been slow to catch up, it’s not because the parts and potential aren’t there. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer certainly thinks the framework is sound.
Stringer, a Manhattan native, has spent much of his nearly two-year tenure implementing reforms in the way his borough's community boards work. He thinks the city helpline, 311, and district offices for members of City Council and the state legislature have largely shifted the role and responsibility of community boards. “I believe we’ve got to segue from fixing the street corner light, which 311 is doing, to becoming the planning vehicle for a local neighborhood," Stringer said in an interview. "We should be hiring a planner in every community board district office.”
This idea is a radical break, to say the least, from the time when the city charter required every land-use decision to derive from a comprehensive, citywide master plan which professionals oversaw in central offices. Community-based planning initiatives have existed as far back as the 1950s, but they were spurred by local planning corporations, dependent on their own funds, and couldn’t rely on an official city-sponsored process to be heard.
Things changed in a major way during the 1970s with the introduction of the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) and the advisory role granted to borough presidents and their appointees sitting on the community boards. Since then the problem has been less political or legal, says Municipal Art Society president Kent Barwick, and more “breaking down the culture.”
“On the one hand, planners being trained people think they know best,” Barwick said, “and tend to see the communities as reactive. On the other, community boards have sometimes acted as private clubs nobody can get into and haven’t really been taken seriously as a result. Stringer’s efforts have been on both sides to try to improve the culture.”
In particular, since Stringer took office in Jan. 2006, he has screened potential members for conflicts of interest; slowly transformed – with the help of good-government groups – the community board application process into one based more on merit than patronage; and filled widespread vacancies. When he took office there were 112 empty chairs among Manhattan's 12 community boards; today that number is down to six. In conjunction with the Municipal Art Society, which runs the annual Livable Neighborhoods training program, Stringer has also attempted to educate board members about the city’s public planning process and how its zoning ordinances work, and he’s created a fellowship program in which graduate students in city planning get stipends to help with planning projects. In an effort to open up the boards to the broader public, the Manhattan Neighborhood Network has even begun televising meetings.
