The city recently enacted stricter zoning regulations to curb excessive mechanical spaces in residential buildings, the first in a series of steps geared toward eliminating zoning ambiguities exploited by developers.
[...]
Now, elected officials and preservationists are pushing the city to enact stern oversight on additional types of voids and other perceived zoning loopholes.
— Curbed NY
"Many neighborhood advocates felt the void amendment did not go far enough, and called for the change to recognize unenclosed voids—such as Rafael Viñoly Architects’ disputed 'condo on stilts' on the Upper East Side—as mechanical," writes Caroline Spivack for Curbed NY.
"They charge that such open-air voids should count toward a building’s floor area ratio. Meanwhile, elected officials urged the city to study how some developers 'gerrymander' zoning lots by slicing off slivers to avoid triggering certain regulations."
In May, the New York City Council passed a zoning amendment that will limit real estate developers' ability to inflate the overall height of new skyscrapers through targeted over-sizing of "mechanical void spaces" in order to drive up the price of units higher up in the building.
The Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York has also signaled its support of new legislation addressing this issue.
2 Comments
if the desire is reduced building heights why don't they just establish a height limit?
They should also adopt an official policy forbidding tax abatements and other giveaways to developers and industries, like the billions lavished on Hudson Yards and the massive bribe offered to Amazon to relocate here. This is at least if not more important as it would eliminate the public subsidizing this crap. Which ironically they have to go fight against despite paying for it.
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