Street wall requirements and a tower-lot coverage minimum would create more floor area ratio in towers that are less tall.
One can see from the two examples above that with common-sense contextual regulations, mixed-income residential buildings of 18 FAR would have been considerably shorter than the 57th street towers that were built as-of-right under the current rules.
In addition, these buildings would have a mixed-income component instead of being all-market buildings for the extremely wealthy with oversized apartments. Take the Steinway building, which has 60 oversized luxury apartments in the as-of-right building. An 18 FAR building with MIH and standard apartment sizes would have had 95 affordable apartments alone, and 287 more market-rate units. It would be large, but not out of context for Midtown. In short, it would be the kind of apartment building common to Manhattan.
These types of buildings - not more supertalls - are examples of what we would get by repealing the 12 FAR cap. While this reform is just one of many needed to address our housing scarcity crisis, it would be a significant step to delivering more of the kind of housing New Yorkers need.
