Planning for Public Health in Brooklyn

Almost every major city in the world has a long-term comprehensive or strategic spatial plan. The Comprehensive Plan is a document intended to guide the growth and development of the city and often the surrounding metropolitan area. London has the London Plan, Hong Kong has Hong Kong 2030, Lagos the Development Plan 2052, Sao Paulo Urban Management SP, Sydney the Greater Sydney Region Plan, Delhi the Development Authority Master Plan, Mexico City the General Development Plan, Bogotá the Territorial Arrangement Plan 2035. In the United States, most large cities have also developed comprehensive plans. New York is unique among its peers for not having undertaken a similar effort.

Though New York City has traditionally produced various waterfront plans, housing plans and jobs plans, a comprehensive plan is different -because it focuses on the city as a whole. All urban policy, budget and land use decisions are necessarily interrelated. A housing plan is unachievable if land use does not allow for new residential development. A waterfront plan will languish if funding is not allocated to realize its goals. A jobs plan is just a ​“wish list” if policies are not put in place to support workers and businesses. As such, the need for a true comprehensive plan—encompassing all areas of urban planning, all aspects of city governance, and all of its diverse neighborhoods—remain acute and unfulfilled

The idea of more comprehensive planning is not new to New York City, and efforts have been made at the neighborhood, borough, and citywide level. Yet a citywide comprehensive plan, enforceable by law, has thus far eluded policy makers.

The modern history of comprehensive planning in New York City dates back to two efforts in the 1960s. The first was the 1961 citywide revision of the zoning code, under Mayor Robert Wagner, that changed how the City approached land use and development. While other citywide zoning changes have been implemented since, most notably Quality Housing regulations in 1987 and Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) in 2016, the current land-use framework is still largely based on this 61-year-old effort.

While there is a view that the 1961 zoning code functions as New York’s comprehensive plan, substituting one for the other hamper’s a municipality’s ability to address its physical and social needs. Zoning, by nature, is a limited planning tool. By regulating uses and forms, it can limit inappropriate development, but cannot, alone, provide for a city’s physical and social needs.

After implementing the 1961 zoning code, the city fully developed and published a comprehensive plan - the 1969 Plan for New York City. This was a true comprehensive planning effort undertaken by then-Mayor John Lindsay, that yielded a statement of existing conditions, specific policy proposals, and a spatial development strategy for each borough. However, this plan was never adopted by the City Council and as such never officially guided development in New York City.

In addition to the 1969 plan, New York City has produced long-term strategic documents like PlanNYC, OneNYC, and more recently AdaptNYC. There have also been long-term plans for the region, such as the four regional plans developed by Regional Plan Association (RPA). While these strategic documents have laid out objectives and policies, they have all lacked a land use plan that lays out spatial changes needed to achieve the City’s stated goals.

In 2020, the Office of former New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson published Planning Together: A New Comprehensive Planning Framework for New York City. This report proposed legislation that would create a comprehensive planning process and bring coordination to the City’s ad-hoc method of planning and implementation. Though this legislation would not alter the present land-use framework, it would address unmet needs by encouraging greater inter-agency alignment and coordination, while providing an essential template for growth and development. The Speaker’s legislation failed to pass in the previous City Council term and has yet to be reintroduced. However, support for the idea remains strong among many advocates and elected officials.