What Can Caroline Teach Us About City of Yes?

A few years ago, delivering my son back to college, I drove through a small upstate town where residents clearly had strong feelings about zoning. Over the next few semesters of pickups and drop-offs, I watched the yard signs proliferate, and escalate. Opposition seemed vociferous (apparently “grandma hates zoning”) and from 200 miles away I became an unlikely follower of an ongoing land-use debate in Caroline, New York.

I’ve been thinking about Caroline lately as the City of Yes proposals wend their way through the review process here in New York City. In its 200-year history, Caroline had never had any zoning at all – property owners could do whatever they pleased with their land – but a new move was afoot to separate the town into zones, to specify what land was agricultural, residential, or commercial, and what area needed to be protected for environmental reasons. Down here in New York, our city has been zoned since 1916, with changes and updates over the past century that – depending on your point of view – have either improved things or crippled them.

In Caroline the debate fell along predictable lines, from the libertarians who believe in their absolute right to do whatever they wanted with their property, to those who would put some limits on those rights. In Caroline, that meant asking whether a landowner could open a gas station on residential property, hard up against a neighbor’s front lawn. Sure, it's your land, but it affects me, so don't I have a say in what you can build there? In New York, that question can best be phrased as, “who owns the block?”

Mayor Adams apparently has no doubts about the answer to that. To those of us who want a say in the character of our neighborhoods, he says “you are believing your block belongs to you. It belongs to the city.” That is a very dangerous position, and it is why some citizens and some communities are so staunchly opposed to the block-crushing approach of the City of Yes.

At its heart, zoning is the voluntary surrender of some individual property rights in return for maintaining a particular community character. You want to install a 12-foot fence around your property, stable a horse in your backyard, or open an auto repair business in your driveway? The purely libertarian approach is that you should be free to do that, and your neighbor would have no say in it at all. At the other end of the spectrum, the ultra-zoned approach would apply rules to every aspect of all properties in a given community, from the height of your fence to the color of your paint to what sign you can put on your lawn. Most of us live somewhere in between those extremes. But when buyers purchase property, they do so knowing what’s on their block – whether it’s a quiet refuge from crowds and noise or a great place for a busy new auto-repair business. They may not “own” the block, but they buy into it.

The City of Yes would change all that, would pull the rug out from under those of us who bought homes on blocks that matched our preferences. Whether it was a majestic brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a quaint carriage house on a crooked street in the West Village, or a century-old colonial on a modest lot in an outer borough, the homes we chose are on blocks that suit us. The block may be outside our property lines, but zoning protects it, and us. I can’t build a 12-foot stockade around my little oasis, and my neighbors can’t add stables or auto shops to theirs. It’s a fair trade-off, one of the basic community contracts, and it protects the character of my block.

The important thing is that my block is different from other blocks, and my community is different from others across the city.

On some things, however, the City of Yes makes no distinction between my tree-lined street in Queens and the densest block in Manhattan – if a developer wanted to add an apartment building without accounting for parking, in either place, that would be okay under this new plan. That’s ridiculous on its face – 100 new residents in midtown would be likely to have very few cars, and those who did would have plenty of commercial garages available to put them in. On my block, even 25 new residents would likely add a couple of dozen cars to the street (because all of those residents would need cars in this neighborhood, no matter how much city planners might wish away that fact) with no commercial garages available for them. The completely predictable result will be homeowners paving over their lawns to make space for cars.

Green space would start to vanish, worsening an already difficult water drainage problem and contributing to the combined sewage overflow that already pollutes the nearby waterways every time it rains.

Lot sizes would also be reduced under this plan, and allowable home sizes increased, making my block – and all surrounding blocks – more crowded, without any improvements to the infrastructure to support its new load.

Multifamily homes would be permitted in single-family neighborhoods, changing the rules of the game for those of us who worked our way up from shares and studios and small rentals to finally realize the dream of home ownership in the neighborhoods of our choosing. If we had wanted to live next to bodegas and apartment buildings, on blocks with no green space, there are plenty of places in New York where we could have chosen that. In my younger days, in fact, I relished living across from a bodega, or upstairs from a Met Food, or a block from a busy subway line. That's not what I chose when I bought my current home (and block).

City planners tell us City of Yes would not alter the character of any neighborhood. But it would, and they know it, and this blatant misrepresentation is part of the reason why the opposition is growing.

Worst of all, there has been no community input into this massive plan. Dog-and-pony shows at community board meetings and in 12-hour-long webinars have presented this fait accompli to individuals who had no say in its development. No matter how many community boards vote no, and how many citizens stand up to voice their objections, city planners continue to try to ram this plan through.

In Caroline, after four years of debate, the town actually did pass a basic zoning law earlier this year. If you want to open a gas station in Caroline now, you’ll have to do it in the commercial part of town, not in an agricultural or residential area. That will outrage some, please others. But for four years the residents were engaged, involved, and vocal – even if they weren’t always happy. Here in New York City, we have not had that opportunity.

We could learn a lesson from Caroline – we can work together to solve the housing shortage while keeping our residential zones, and without applying the broad strokes of City of Yes to every square inch of the city. Let’s throw out this massive, misguided plan and create workable solutions, zone by zone, appropriate to our blocks, with community input. If a town of 3,000 in upstate New York can do it, so can we.