The New York City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process requires authorized City agencies to evaluate, disclose, and mitigate to the greatest extent practicable the significant adverse environmental impacts of projects they fund, directly undertake, or approve. The environmental assessment leads up to the formal public review process for discretionary actions and land-use changes known as ULURP. Conclusions disclosed in environmental review documents are based on evaluations of nineteen technical areas and methodologies described in the CEQR Technical Manual, including zoning, socioeconomic, public health, solid waste, climate change, water and sewer systems, and infrastructure conditions, among others.
While New York City has a structured and detailed environmental review process, limited participation and off-target projections disclosed in CEQR documents confound a complex set of decisions that cut across land-use, mitigation efforts, and capital programs. Such lack of cohesion limits the full potential of the city’s assets and impairs long-term planning efforts. The city needs to recover from the pandemic coming out stronger, reversing the enduring legacies of discrimination, and confronting the imminent threats of an adverse climate reality. A successful recovery demands efficiency and coordination, yet CEQR as an evaluation and disclosure effort, fails to provide certainty and reliability.
The city’s environmental review process has to be part of a systemic solution. If done right, modifications to CEQR will improve public discourse and facilitate consensus on challenging planning issues. Three interrelated areas require changes to improve the reliability of the environmental review process and ensure its capacity to support citywide goals:
- Align the CEQR process and the Technical Manual guidelines with fair housing and comprehensive planning goals
- Promote stakeholder engagement earlier in the process by enabling more land-use scenario planning and early evaluation of alternative scenarios
- Update and provide consistent methodologies to improve the reliability of development projections and conclusions pertinent to environmental mitigation requirements
Align CEQR with fair housing and comprehensive planning goals
An alignment between the CEQR framework with fair housing and comprehensive planning goals is especially relevant today. Proper modifications to CEQR will facilitate the city’s recovery from the multiple yet disparate impacts caused by COVID-19. Reform will also enable adaptation efforts in the face of climate change and help reverse racial injustices and segregation caused by urban policy.
CEQR should play a crucial role in ensuring that the city’s fair housing goals are expedited and fully implemented. These goals have been articulated in the city’s Where We Live plan and further elaborated by the New York Housing Conference’s latest report. CEQR will influence the objectives that seek to facilitate equitable housing development in amenity-rich areas and preserve affordable housing to prevent displacement. In this alignment, it will be crucial to have CEQR methodologies based on fair share criteria instead of arbitrary thresholds. This will help ensure that new housing construction, including affordable housing, as well as challenging facilities, are all equitably distributed across city neighborhoods. Modifications to CEQR procedures and methodologies must ensure that discretionary actions and development proposals that are consistent with the city’s fair housing goals, and fair share initiatives in general, are streamlined, not obstructed.
Similarly, the Office of Environmental Coordination along with the Department of City Planning should proactively align CEQR in ways that support the implementation of a comprehensive planning process. A comprehensive plan will require the significant undertaking of developing citywide or boroughwide Generic Environmental Impact Statements (GEIS) that evaluate dozens of land-use scenarios across community districts. Changes to CEQR should also improve and expand the use of GEISs to allow for more meaningful consideration of impacts across a broader geographic scope and a streamlining of the review process for smaller-scale projects that are consistent with citywide objectives. Projects in the same geography with similar relative construction periods or where a series of projects all relate to a common city goal could be evaluated through a “tiered” review process. In these cases, agencies would undertake a review of common or program-wide impacts in a GEIS and set forth criteria for when supplemental EISs will be required for site-specific or project-specific actions that follow the approval of the initial program.
Promote early and inclusive participation by enabling scenario planning
Limited scenario planning and inadequate public engagement early in the process often result in a lack of consensus and increased community opposition. At first glance, there may seem to be an inherent tension between expanding stakeholder engagement and making the planning process faster and more predictable. However, experience has shown that not taking stakeholder input into account — and especially early in the process — can slow down projects or even stall them indefinitely. Early and inclusive participation in project planning can reduce opposition and litigation — especially when combined with clear timelines and evaluation criteria — and thereby provide greater predictability overall.
In most cases, CEQR scoping documents only examine one projected development, with limited or no other alternatives scenarios evaluated, even when stakeholders are advocating other options. While computational urban design shows much promise for providing an iterative, quantitative approach to neighborhood planning, its place within formal scoping procedures remains vastly underutilized, and hardly accessible to the public.
The city could promote increased participation by enabling iterative scenario planning, now possible by advancements in spatial data analysis and computational urban design. Public participation could be done within a framework that facilitates assessment and public debate of multiple scenarios during the scoping stages, prior to a Draft EIS (DEIS) or certification of the discretionary action under review. Instead of the narrow analysis based on the binary with-action or no action scenario evaluation, CEQR guidelines should adopt innovative approaches that have vastly improved access and analysis of spatial data in ways that facilitate and streamline scenario planning.
Innovations in this sector include both public and private tools aimed at projecting development, exploring iterative urban design options, identifying social vulnerabilities, as well as measuring social and physical determinants of health. Changes to CEQR, especially during the early stages of the scoping process, should adopt these innovations in ways that promote proactive planning and broader, more inclusive participation.
Update and provide consistent methodologies to improve the reliability of development projections and conclusions pertinent to mitigation requirements
Inaccurate methodologies and off-target projections call into question disclosed conclusions, as well as recommended mitigation requirements for each of the technical areas of analysis. Inaccuracies in these documents often compound planning fatigue across communities, overload capacity at city agencies, promote obstructionism of new affordable housing in amenity-rich areas, and adds cost overruns to private and non-profit developments alike. In general terms, limited and off-target CEQR projections are a root cause of inefficient planning and contribute to a reactionary public review process.
RPA supports measures that seek to refine and improve the accuracy of the CEQR Technical Manual methodologies used to project development and determine potential adverse impacts. Improving methods for identifying development sites, as well as impacts to socioeconomic conditions and displacement, are of particular relevance to implement the city’s fair housing plan and a comprehensive planning framework. From the onset of any land use review process, this would inform both communities and developers about the implications of the actions considered and provide a better understanding of the mitigations needed to avoid or minimize adverse impacts.
The city can improve CEQR methodologies by examining past land use actions and rezonings. The city should change CEQR methods based on the statistical examination of historical trends and previous decisions on discretionary actions as a way to identify the probability of development scenarios. In this aspect, New York City offers a unique opportunity to inform such methods based on rigorous data analysis. Identifying statistical correlations between the built environment, regulatory actions, and social factors could help define predictor variables, informing development scenarios and determining specific outcomes with greater reliability.
Identification of Soft Sites
Many inaccurate projections are a result of limited guidelines for identifying and evaluating soft sites. Soft site identification criteria are typically but not consistently disclosed in environmental review documents and based on general guidelines described in the CEQR Technical Manual. Identifying soft sites and classifying them as either a projected or potential development site is the first step in creating the analysis framework by which the development scenario is evaluated. While potential sites are disclosed in environmental review documents, only projected sites are considered when forecasting new development, and the amount of new housing units (including affordable), population increases, and potential adverse impacts. Such analysis serves as the basis for all nineteen technical areas assessed by CEQR and directly affects the conclusions of each area of analysis.
There is a lack of consistency of soft site definitions across individual environmental assessments. There is even less consistency when making distinctions between projected and potential development sites. Often the number of projected development is vastly underestimated; in other instances, identified sites get built with different uses or density. When a soft analysis fails to forecast development accurately, the entire environmental review may be called into question.
The city should develop and require through the CEQR Technical Manual a quantifiable and replicable soft site methodology. Such methods can be site-specific, responding to local conditions, and consistent in ways that provide minimum method standards and greater reliability overall. Such methods should consider plausible local real estate market trends, the land to improvement ratio of parcels, lease conditions and existing lot development agreements, neighborhood accessibility in terms of jobs, infrastructure, and amenities, as well as the shape of a lot and amount of development rights granted by zoning. A consistent methodology and site-specific criteria for defining projected and potential development sites would provide more statistically accurate and comprehensive development scenarios, as well as a more reliable analysis framework.
Social Vulnerabilities and Displacement
The displacement analysis described in the CEQR socioeconomic chapter should incorporate a more nuanced analysis of socioeconomic, household composition, race/ethnicity, public health, and housing conditions. These factors are often interrelated and compound over one another, creating different levels of vulnerability and displacement risk. Displacement for both residents and businesses has dramatically increased by the ongoing public health and economic crisis, a housing market that fails to deliver enough supply for low-moderate income earners, and an unprecedented wave of evictions that is coming into sight. CEQR displacement methodologies should recognize the ways in which all these factors compound and exacerbate the social vulnerabilities and displacement of communities.
The city should adopt systemic assessment methods to proactively identify levels of displacement risk across different areas and neighborhoods. In 2017 RPA issued a report that focused on the impact of rising rents and neighborhood change on low and moderate-income households throughout the region. The study found that low and moderate-income residents are being replaced by wealthier populations in walkable neighborhoods with good access to jobs. In this report RPA demonstrated that the instability caused by indirect displacement has a much more significant impact on people with few resources to adapt to the resulting financial, social, and psychological disruptions. More recently, and in collaboration with the Municipal Art Society (MAS), RPA developed a social vulnerability index that includes multiple themes and dozens of indicators. Incorporating these types of methodologies would offer ways to proactively measure social risk by linking development scenarios with socioeconomic, demographic, and public health conditions.
Finally, the socioeconomic chapter and evaluation of residential displacement must also take into account site specific housing conditions. Recent academic literature has identified underlying relationships between vulnerabilities by comparing housing precarity based on eviction rates, cost burden, and overcrowding metrics, against COVID-19 impacts. These may include, rent stabilized units, subsidized housing, private or public ownership, built year, structural conditions, and maintenance deficiencies.
We appreciate the City’s effort to improve the CEQR Technical Manual and the environmental review process in general. Due to the unique experiences of this year, the 2021 update of the Technical Manual is the most significant revision to date. This roundtable is an excellent first step in a much larger discussion involving decision-makers, the public, and stakeholders to arrive at critical solutions.
