Pratt Center Calls for Inclusive City Charter Process

City Charter Review Commission

Graduate Center, City University of New York

April 6, 2010

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Charter Revision Commission. For 45 years, the Pratt Center for Community Development has provided technical services in fields such as architecture, planning, preservation and energy efficiency to empower and improve the quality of life in the City’s low- and moderate-income communities. We recognize the role the Charter plays and the significance of your charge.

While we appreciate your eagerness to begin this work, the importance of what you are doing and its potential to impact virtually every aspect of neighborhood and civic life requires an inclusive, accessible and transparent process. The brief public notice for this set of hearings, given just before a holiday weekend, falls far from meeting that standard.

New York City is in a period of extraordinary change. That change is being driven by a wide array of forces, everything from increases in population and shifting demographics to rises in energy costs and the growing need to reduce carbon emissions.

One of the most important ways the City will meet these challenges is through its land use planning process, and this is why the charge of this Commission is so significant. The City needs space for housing – particularly affordable housing – for jobs, for parks and schools, and for a future infrastructure that will recycle materials and generate renewable energy, to name just a few. And it must do all these things while preserving the extraordinary diversity of our neighborhoods and ensuring an equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of urban life.

Virtually everyone agrees that the land use process has broken down. Fundamental concerns about jobs, schools and other impacts are inadequately addressed. Small business owners are inhibited from investing because they are uncertain about their neighborhood’s direction and their own tenure. And property owners feel unfairly burdened by an unpredictable process and the assumption of what should be the City’s responsibilities.

We are intimately familiar with the land use process and call on the Commission to carefully and in meaningful conversation with stakeholders work to address four major issue areas:

Comprehensive Planning: Zoning changes are only one of the tools that the City has to advance its competitiveness, quality of life and long term sustainability. The City needs to better integrate zoning with budget, services and the tools available to it. The City Planning Commission (CPC) must then assess how a zoning change impacts on the City’s long term goals, which must be more comprehensively articulated than the patchwork of efforts to date.

Meaningful Community Participation: Community involvement is essential to planning. Without it, the process and the result lack legitimacy and lead to litigation over zoning. Neither the Section 197(a) nor the advisory role that community boards now have in the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) have sufficient impact. Communities need more resources and their positions need weight in the deliberations of both the staff of Department of City Planning (DCP) and the Planning Commission.

Fair Share: The worthy goal of having an equitable distribution of public benefits and burdens has been end-run through privatization and other loopholes to the policy adopted in 1989. These should be closed.

Commitments to Communities: Side agreements that include additional provisions and benefits to communities have become a routine part of ULURP, aimed to fill in gaps in City policy and programs. We urge the Commission to develop standards for their scope, for the representative nature of their participants, their disclosure, their incorporation into the ULURP approval process and their enforcement.

We call on the Commission to ensure that its process and deliberations going forward reflect the level of import that potential changes to the Charter will mean for the City. Pratt Center looks forward to working with the members and staff of the Commission, and most importantly, with members of the public in communities that will be impacted by this process.