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Originally Posted by Zapatan
So if they where to build the full amount of square feet, the Commission really couldn't give them that extra 39 feet? That's ridiculous. There is no reason in this city.
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Well, they're in charge. It's not that they don't like large buildings. Amanda Burden was at the CPC when the Hudson Yards zoning passed, and at that time it was the City Council that wanted the power to regulate the size of what got built there...here's a flashback for those that don't remember:
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
BLOCKS; The Sky Is No Longer the Limit on Far West Side Buildings
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
January 13, 2005
''No limit.''
These were perhaps the most striking words in the rezoning plan for the Far West Side of Manhattan, also known as Hudson Yards. They referred to the density limit that the City Planning Commission, until this week, intended to place on the commercial development of two blocks at the heart of Hudson Yards. None.
Developers would have been free to build towers on these blocks as large as they could. There would have been no specified maximum under the density control called the floor-area ratio, or F.A.R., which has regulated building sizes throughout the city since 1961. (In zoning districts with a ratio of 18, for instance, the owner of a 10,000-square-foot lot may build a structure with 18 times the floor area, or 180,000 square feet.)
Visions of office towers soaring 80 stories and higher were conjured by Community Board 4 last year in its critique of the plan, which described the overall density as ''unprecedented, undesirable and ultimately unnecessary for the city's future.''
When Melinda Katz, the chairwoman of the City Council's Land Use Committee, learned of the no-limit provision at a hearing last month, she told planning officials, ''I'm sure we'll be getting back to you on that.''
In a telephone interview yesterday, Ms. Katz, a Queens Democrat, explained: ''No. 1, I was concerned with precedent. No. 2, we were uncomfortable as a council with passing something that basically took the authority for creating a limit away from us.''
To the administration's credit, she said, a floor-area ratio of 33 was quickly imposed on the two blocks after objections to the no-limit proposal were raised. That was one of several compromises made in the Hudson Yards plan before the committee approved it on Monday, 15 to 0, with 1 abstention. It goes to the full Council for a vote next Wednesday.
The blocks in question are bounded by 10th and 11th Avenues and 33rd and 35th Streets. They are known as the Four Corners because they would be bisected by a new north-south midblock boulevard, which would effectively create four large building sites. The southwest site would be directly over the new terminus of a planned extension of the No. 7 subway line.
''You have to have density to get vibrancy,'' said Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the Planning Commission and director of the City Planning Department. ''We believe that deeply, deeply, deeply.'' At the same time, she said, planners do not expect construction of the office buildings to start until the expected completion of the No. 7 line in 2010.
The basic floor-area ratio on the Four Corners would be 10, but a developer could add 8 by making payments into a district improvement fund to help finance the boulevard, parkland and subway extension. The developer could add 15 more by purchasing development rights from the rail yard to the south. Because of a limit on the amount of transferable development rights from the rail yard, however, not all Four Corners sites could reach the maximum floor-area ratio, 33.
While that ratio far exceeds the current limit of 21.6 in the zoning rules, city planners note that other skyscrapers have been constructed at roughly that density or greater.
''It is not much different than the buildings that went up along Times Square,'' said Sandy Hornick, director of strategic planning at the planning department. Cautioning that density can be calculated in a variety of ways, Mr. Hornick put the floor-area ratio of 7 Times Square (Times Square Tower) at 42; 5 Times Square (Ernst & Young), 36; 4 Times Square (Condé Nast), 31; and 3 Times Square (Reuters), 25.
The point of removing density limits at the Four Corners, he said, was to allow developers flexibility in transferring development rights from the rail yard. ''We didn't really think that people would build infinitely tall buildings,'' he said.
There are practical limits, as Carol Willis, the founding director of the Skyscraper Museum, noted in ''Form Follows Finance'' (Princeton Architectural Press). ''At some point in the construction of every skyscraper,'' she wrote in 1995, ''the law of diminishing returns sets in, and rents for the additional stories do not cover costs'' -- including extra foundations, equipment and space for elevator shafts. These days, there is another inhibition: tenants might feel like targets on very high floors.
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