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Old Posted May 22, 2012, 11:42 PM
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NYC Planning Department Director Wants To Remake New York. She Has 19 Months Left.

Amanda Burden Wants to Remake New York. She Has 19 Months Left.


May 18, 2012

By JULIE SATOW

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/ny...pagewanted=all

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“Today, I am thrilled to vote on the department’s latest sustainability initiative,” said Ms. Burden, the director of the New York City Planning Department, her clipped diction and sophisticated dress contrasting with the worn-out rug and metal chairs of her surroundings. Ms. Burden was referring to Zone Green, “the most comprehensive effort of any city in the nation,” she said, to use zoning to spur environmentally efficient building.

- Since 2002, when she was appointed to head City Planning, she has overseen the wholesale rezoning of the city, with 115 rezoning plans covering more than 10,300 blocks; by the end of her administration, the department is expected to have rezoned about 40 percent of New York, an unprecedented number. Ms. Burden’s watch, the Brooklyn waterfront has been transformed from a landscape of derelict industrial structures to one of glossy condominiums and parkland, the abandoned elevated railroad track that runs through Chelsea has been converted into the popular High Line park, and the once-desolate Hudson Yards neighborhood is poised for a rebirth as a commercial and residential hub.

- “Creating fine-grained open spaces in combination with remaking the city’s land-use blueprint is what I’m most proud of,” Ms. Burden added, perched on a seat at the enormous round table that dominates her well-worn second-floor office at 22 Reade Street, zoning maps on the wall behind her, a photo of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn propped in the corner. Her fans say that Ms. Burden is a visionary who will leave behind a much-improved city. “There is no question that under Amanda’s leadership, New York has experienced a renaissance,” said Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, “with more development of parkland, waterfront and infrastructure over the last 10 years than in the 100 years before it.”

- But critics say that the sum total of Ms. Burden’s ambitions will be a gentrified city that no longer has a place for working-class New Yorkers. “The overall effect of the city’s rezonings has been incredibly dramatic in terms of the creation of expensive, market-rate housing and typically middling at best in terms of affordable housing,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Now, in Year 11 of Ms. Burden’s likely 12-year tenure, she is pushing through her final priorities, which could affect the way New Yorkers live, work and play well into the 21st century and long after she and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have left office.

- Among those current efforts are plans to rezone West Harlem in Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and a key stretch of Fordham Road in the Bronx. The most sweeping final act may be the redevelopment of millions of square feet of office space along Park Avenue and surrounding Grand Central Terminal that proponents say is antiquated.

- Ms. Burden’s belief in contextual zoning, for example, under which new developments in a neighborhood are required to be in the height and style of surrounding structures, leads to “profoundly conservative building,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association and director of its Center for Urban Innovation. “New York’s greatness as the dominant skyscraper city of the 20th century was the result of bold building, but the local zeitgeist has switched from big and bold to keeping everything small, nondescript and similar to everything else in the neighborhood.” It has also become common under Ms. Burden’s leadership for developers and their architects to have to negotiate their designs with City Planning. “Development has become a game of second-guessing,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said. “What will Amanda think of my project? What will I need to compromise on?

- Ms. Burden argues that gentrification is merely a pejorative term for necessary growth. “Improvement of neighborhoods — some people call it gentrification — provides more jobs, provides housing, much of it affordable, and private investment, which is tax revenue for the city,” she said. On her watch, the administration has undertaken financing 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2014, of which more than 130,000 have been built, and has created projects like Via Verde, the handsome, eco-friendly subsidized development in the South Bronx. “We are making so many more areas of the city livable,” she said. “Now, young people are moving to neighborhoods like Crown Heights that 10 years ago wouldn’t have been part of the lexicon.”

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