A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan

The Third Plan In Context

A cornerstone of RPA’s Third Regional Plan was the recognition that the region’s continued prosperity and global standing were no longer guaranteed.

The gap between the rich and poor accelerated in the late 20th century. RPA and the United Way of Tri-State released a report in 1986 warning that inequality would strain the region. Then, a severe economic downturn hit New York, and from 1989 to 1992, the region shed 770,000 jobs, one of the largest job losses of any U.S. metropolitan region since World War II.

A generation of underinvestment had left the region in a precarious situation. Lack of investment in the region’s schools, rail systems, community design, and natural resources threatened to slow the economic recovery. Social divisions and tensions were palpable, particularly as crime rates soared in New York City and other urban centers.

By the time of the Third Plan’s publication in 1996, it was still not clear if the economy could fully recover. Success in the region could no longer be defined in simple terms of economic growth without accounting for social and environmental costs and benefits.

The Plan put forth five initiatives: Greensward, Centers, Mobility, Workforce and Governance. Each campaign addressed equity, equality, and the environment. Together they were designed to re-energize the region by re-greening, reconnecting and re-centering it. These strategies would try to guide the region towards sustainable growth in the 21st century.

Greensward

Between the publication of the Second and Third Regional Plan, environmental degradation had increased and suburbanization had accelerated. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the region’s population grew by 13 percent, but the amount of land devoted to businesses and residences shot up by 60 percent.

The Third Regional Plan supported new initiatives to green and revitalize parks and streetscapes in cities, especially the underutilized urban waterfronts of the New York-New Jersey harbor and the Long Island Sound. It recommended establishing eleven regional reserves to protect open space and function as an urban growth boundary, and creating regional growth management systems to contain sprawl. The Third Regional Plan also envisioned a regional network of greenways to provide access to recreational areas.

RPA educated the public about how alternative planning and zoning could meet local needs without compromising the region’s resources. Below, the future of an urban center was projected under conventional and alternative planning and development guidelines.

City Centers

The Centers campaign focused the next generation of growth in the region’s existing downtown employment and residential areas. The campaign recommended strengthening Manhattan’s Central Business District by expanding transit access to Lower Manhattan and the Jersey City waterfront, as well as revitalizing Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens.

The Third Regional Plan also called for investing in regional downtowns, such as New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, White Plains, Poughkeepsie, Hicksville, Mineola, Jamaica, Newark, New Brunswick, and Trenton, to concentrate job growth and rebuild communities. The Plan supported mixed-use districts and arts and cultural institutions in these regional city centers, and encouraged development of ​“brownfield” sites - abandoned industrial sites, landfill, and waterfronts.

Mobility

The growth of the region depended on the ability to move people and goods quickly and efficiently. Yet, between the 1960s and the 1990s, the region’s highway network had grown by nearly a third, while the transit network stagnated. Ridership fell by 20 percent on the New York City subway.

The Third Regional Plan emphasized the importance of creating a new transportation network that could support a more concentrated form of suburban growth that stayed largely within the core of the region. RPA proposed a reconfigured Regional Express Rail system that would operate seamlessly between New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

RPA also recommended making better use of the region’s existing highway system by instituting market pricing and eliminating bottlenecks, as well as implementing congestion pricing in Manhattan.

Workforce

The Third Regional Plan acknowledged that the region was facing a future that offered new opportunities. Increasing globalization gave New York City the chance to compete and do business with London, Tokyo and other first-tier cities around the world. A new era of information technology was dawning, with the potential to transform the way people lived and worked, although in ways that were difficult to predict.

The Third Regional Plan posited that a new system of lifelong learning that would guarantee that every worker was ready to succeed at a variety of jobs. Bringing low-income communities into the economic mainstream was of central importance to the long-term success of the region.

Governance

Achieving these goals would require new ways of organizing and energizing political and civic institutions. The Third Regional Plan proposed a regional compact between the three governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to coordinate policies and investments and to reduce ​“border warfare” economic development policies.

It also put forth the ideas of a tri-state congressional coalition to fight for essential federal tax and regulatory reforms as well as infrastructure funds, in addition to a tri-state Business Council composed of the major regional chambers of commerce.

The Third Regional Plan envisioned the creation of new public institutions to finance and provide regional services, such as a tri-state regional transportation authority and a tri-state infrastructure bank. It pushed forth improvements in public and private decision-making, advocating for making processes more transparent, incorporating sustainable economics in accounting and tax and regulatory systems, and using smart infrastructure approaches to capital investment.

The Third Regional Plan proposed that world cities should be developed as polycentric regions, organized around networks of regional centers, and linked by modern rail networks.

Major recommendations of the Third Regional Plan built or in progress include: