"Community planning" is the sort of innocuous, agreeable phrase that rarely evokes more than a yawn, the province of over-credentialed technocrats. To Tom Angotti, it’s a rallying cry for those left dispossessed and disenfranchised by what passes for New York City’s municipal land use planning process – most residents, by his lights. Angotti has poured his life’s work as a planner, organizer, and professor into his new book, "New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate." Surveying the land-use landscape from the big business of buying and selling property, to the potential for non-profit public land trusts or “community land,” to particular neighborhood struggles for land-use self-determination, the book sprawls like the city itself.
A terse “Chronology of Major Planning Events in New York City” opens the book, both rooting Angotti’s exploration and suggesting what a youthful story community planning in the five boroughs must be, if it can be included among 26 points on a timeline from 1898 to 2003. The year 1961 emerges as critical. It was the year community activist Jane Jacobs published her classic treatise, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was the year the city passed its second zoning resolution, updating a 45-year-old document that left the outer boroughs “unrestricted,” allowing industry, commerce and people’s homes to exist side-by-side on the same block. (Angotti argues that the city’s elites had always preferred zoning over planning.)
It was also the year that a klatch of radical neighbors formed the Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmen’s Association to save their stretch of the Lower East Side from bulldozers. Two years prior, Robert Moses had marked 11 blocks of the neighborhood for “urban renewal.” The Cooper Square Committee parried with a study showing 93 percent of the people whose homes were slated for “renewal” wouldn’t be able to afford the new housing. Challenged by an assistant to the mayor to come up with its own proposal, the Committee produced New York City’s first community-based plan.
The plan’s introduction read: “A renewal effort has to be conceived as a process of building on the inherent social and economic values of a local community. Neglecting these values through programs of massive clearance and redevelopment can disrupt an entire community.” It’s a statement that could just as easily have been drafted by community activists staring down any of a number of mega-projects in the city today.
It took nine years, but an updated version of the Cooper Square plan was finally approved by the city. Not long after, the city’s charter was revised, initiating both community boards and the Urban Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). By 1989, the charter had been revised yet again, empowering the boards to design what are known as “197-a” plans to guide their communities’ development.
Angotti argues that 197-a plans should be “the building blocks for citywide planning policy.” Their process of communal creation, while vaguely defined, provides an opportunity for each and every one of us to have a say in the social decisions that determine the quality and direction of our neighborhoods, and our lives. But the regulations adopted by the Department of City Planning ensured the plans would have no teeth: “The existence of an adopted 197-a plan shall not preclude the sponsor or any other city agency from developing other plans or taking actions not contemplated by the 197-a plan that may affect the same geographic area or subject matter.”
