DCP Reps Visit CB 12 to Lift Zoning Headaches for Businesses

By Yehudit Garmaise

To discuss ways that the city’s zoning laws can better help NYC businesses to grow, Matt Waskiewicz, the senior planner for economic development and regional planning at NYC’s Department of City Planning (DCP) and Inna Guzenfeld, DCP’s senior borough planner, visited Community Board 12’s monthly meeting Tuesday night.

Zoning laws in New York City, for instance, have not been updated in more than 60 years, explained the DCP reps, whose mission is to gather community input on zoning reforms that allow entrepreneurs to create more businesses and for existing businesses to expand more easily.

“The outdated terms, such as references to shops that provide ‘typewriter repair,’ make it hard for newer businesses, such as cell phone shops, to know where they can locate,” said Guzenfeld, who said the DCP wants to simplify and update the terms used to define modern business types.

This proposal to simplify business classification does not change where businesses are allowed to locate but just clarifies which types of businesses can set up shop in which locations.

“We want to make it easier for businesses to use their spaces more efficiently and to grow,” Guzenfeld said about the DCP’s proposals for zoning reforms, which were informed by meetings with 100 groups of small business owners, chambers of commerce, and industrial service providers across the city.  

In addition, the DCP has conducted five information sessions and “heard from countless New Yorkers about the zoning challenges they face,” Guzenfeld said. “These proposals have been shaped by those constituents.”

Among the DCP’s ideas to reduce zoning headaches for business owners in New York City are to “reactivate” vacant storefronts, enable more business-friendly streetscapes, and create new opportunities for businesses.

“Today, storefronts that are deemed ‘non-conforming’ [to current zoning laws] face a two-year time clock for reactivation, or else they remain vacant,” said Guzenfeld. “We are proposing to remove that time-clock, when storefronts become vacant, they can be reoccupied anytime thereafter.”

A non-conforming property does not follow current zoning laws, although that property might have followed the zoning laws that were on the books at the time of construction.

The DCP’s also wants to simplify the city’s “district types.”

“We found that in many parts of the city, we have similar zoning districts that are located along the same corridors or on opposite sides of the street, and yet they allow or don’t allow different kinds of businesses,” said Guzenfeld, who said the DCP wants to help businesses “to find space and to grow by lifting zoning barriers so businesses can actually locate closer to their customers.”

While seeing many new businesses that include “small-scale clean production, such as pottery studios, bakeries, coffee roasters, jewelry makers, apparel designers, and 3D printer businesses across the city,” the DCP wants to see a change in the kinds of businesses allowed.

“We want to allow these businesses to locate in commercial districts for the first time.

In terms of helping businesses find space to set up shop, the DCP reps remarked that “onerous loading dock requirements can be hindrances to new businesses, so we are proposing the following change: if a business wants to locate in an existing building, we want to allow for older commercial districts to change over time.

“We will not be mandating unnecessary loading docks that in many cases, can’t even be physically accommodated.”

When Community Board 12 members were given time to ask questions, they were interested in how the DCP’s proposed new zoning rules would affect Ocean Parkway and the many auto-repair shops that can create conflicts with pedestrians on Coney Island Ave. 

Beri Spitzer, CB 12’s district manager, worried that the new zoning rules would allow more auto repair shops about which the board receives many complaints.

Before taking a vote on their responses to the DCP’s new proposals, CB12 board members decided to wait until January, by which time the DCP was asked to provide information to answer their questions.

To review the DCP’s new zoning proposals, readers can head to nyc.gov/yeseconomicopportunity.

In 2024, the DCP will also start thinking creatively about improving the city’s zoning rules for housing, a topic in which Community Board 12 has expressed interest.