Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Headline is stupid. The headline should be "Is current NYC zoning code as transit-oriented as we think"? Transit orientation is typically defined as some measure of transit share, not whether or not potential buildings can rise to a particular height.
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It's a problematic comparison, but I think you miss a chunk of why that is. Modern code almost never allows the construction of what might be called "bed density" approaching anywhere near what was allowed 75+ years ago like a very large chunk of New York housing stock was. So, for example, an ADA-compliant 8-story building in California with average 2-bedroom unit sizes of, say, 900 square feet (still small by US standards overall) and wide halls elevators and more building space dedicated to modern amenities, will probably have fewer people actually living there, available to take transit, than a 120 year old New York 5-story walk-up building with narrow halls, no elevator, 600 square foot 2-bedrooms, and the extent of its "amenities" are free heat from the boiler in the basement.
So it's really not a valid comparison to compare un-built California modern buildings to long-time New York buildings. There are soooo many differences that make the comparison nearly useless. If they wanted to see the impact for a useful comparison to New York, they have the density data for New York at the Census block level, so they should be able to, relatively easily, generate projections for Census blocks fully built out based on California's new law and then populate those buildings using comparable data from Los Angeles or San Francisco to understand how actual Californians are likely to reside in such buildings.
My guess is that to get density levels comparable to those in Manhattan and Brooklyn and the south Bronx, a given city would likely need to construct buildings of double the height because the "bed density" would be about half on a per-square-foot basis.