Regional Plan Association's 100-Year History in New York City

The Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs has its roots in Chicago. Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago helped reshape the city and launched the City Beautiful planning movement. One of the founders of the Chicago Plan was Charles Dyer Norton, a member of the Commercial Club. It was this success in Chicago that inspired Norton to launch a comparable effort in New York.

In the 1920s, New York City was a center for commerce, manufacturing, and culture. Its population grew from approximately 3.4 million in 1900 to 5.6 million by 1920, over 60% in just 20 years. By 1925, well over one-third of New York City residents were immigrants. The living conditions lamented by Jacob Riis in 1890 had not improved much by the 1920s. Poverty and overcrowding were still endemic in many neighborhoods. New York’s economy grew rapidly as a result of its booming industries, as did the scale of shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing facilities and the noise, traffic, and air pollution they produced.

Transportation innovations changed the landscape and greatly expanded the area within a reasonable commute of midtown and lower Manhattan. Underground and elevated subways criss-crossed the city. New long-distance railroads connected New York City with upstate New York, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. Cars became more affordable just as more durable road surfaces were implemented.

New York City and the region were growing - but haphazardly and based on market forces rather than a comprehensive plan. In a letter dictated to Frederic A. Delano, Norton reflected,

“Ever since 1911, you and I have agreed that New York should have a plan and should take a vital interest in it. The New York streets and squares and towers are fascinating. The situation is very grand. The Hudson, the environs of mountain and of shore, the variety of contours, make a situation with which only San Francisco can compare… But this town is enormous; it daunts a stranger by its very size. Then so large a percentage of the population is transient, so many influential residents have one or two country places, and make journeys to Europe or to the South once or twice every year, that even New Yorkers do not feel domesticated. They do not have the same sense of responsibility for their town that is felt in Chicago or any western city. And city planning requires substantial financial support.”

Charles Norton found a supporter of city planning in George McAneny, President of the New York City Board of Alderman, precursor to the modern-day City Council and the former Manhattan Borough President. McAneny appointed Norton as Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the City Plan in 1914. Several individuals involved in this effort would later work on the first Regional Plan and become staff and Board members of Regional Plan Association, including Frederic B. Pratt, Nelson P. Lewis, E. H. Outerbridge, as well as McAneny. Norton and the Committee reviewed the state of urban planning in New York and issued a report. They also discussed organizing a citizens’ group to finance and develop a plan independently of municipal officials. Norton recognized that a plan that failed to take into account the communities surrounding New York City wouldn’t succeed.

Two years later in 1921, the Russell Sage Foundation agreed to support the creation of a plan for New York and authorized the Committee on the Plan of New York and its Environs, appointing Norton as Chairman. The Committee’s goal was to plan the development of the region and enhance the quality of life of residents without regard to political boundaries. Original members of the Committee included Robert W. de Forest, John M. Glenn, Dwight D. Morrow, Frederic A. Delano, and Frank L. Polk, with Frederick Keppel and Flavel Shurtleff serving as secretaries. There were also many external advisors, including but not limited to Mary Dreier, Herbert Hoover, Virginia Gildersleeve, George McAneny, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Elihu Root, Lillian Wald, and Alfred White.

The Committee recognized that they needed to do some groundwork, and commissioned preliminary surveys of the region by Nelson Lewis, former Chief Engineer of New York City. Aided by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and others, Lewis was tasked with creating a new type of map for city planners. The team members were pioneers in using aerial photography as an urban planning tool.

The Committee also commissioned an analysis of zoning laws by Edward Bassett, former Chairman of the Zoning Com­mission of New York, as well as a review of social and living conditions of residents in the region, with a focus on public health, hospitals, housing, the environment, and recreation facilities. This effort was led by Shelby Harrison, who was supported by individuals like Dr. Hermann Biggs, Dr. George David Stewart of the Academy of Medicine, Dr. Josephine Baker, the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health, and Clara Noyes, the President of the American Nurses Association.

The first official Committee meeting was held on May 10, 1922 in the Engineering Societies Building at 29th W 39th Street. The trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation prepared a report for the conference and explained that from these studies, a plan would be developed and shared with residents across the region for feedback. This plan would introduce rationality to the region’s development and was intended to give residents a better quality of life. Speakers included Eleanor Robson Belmont, John J. Carty, Herbert Hoover, Elihu Root, and Lillian Wald.

Unfortunately, Charles Dyer Norton did not live to see the first Regional Plan published. He died in 1923 shortly after the project was announced in the New York Times.

The Committee of the Regional Plan appointed Frederic A. Delano as Chairman and Thomas Adams as General Director of Plans and Surveys. Adams and his team built upon the preliminary surveys and sought to differentiate the Regional Plan from the Burnham Plan by focusing less on a ​“grand architectural conception of city building” to one that elevated ​“the health and general well-being of masses of people, and the highly complicated economic and social structure of the urban community of the present time.”

The Committee’s work garnered the attention of public officials across the region. In May 1924, the Committee hosted a 900-person conference on traffic and congestion, announcing that they had found that traffic jams were costing New York City approximately half a million dollars per day, and for the larger region approximately a million dollars per day. Attendees included Mayor John Hylan of New York, Lieutenant Governor George Lunn of New York, and Governor Silzer of New Jersey, as well as mayors and officials of more than 400 communities.

In 1926, Mayor James Walker appointed a 500-member City Committee on Plan and Survey to create a comprehensive study and prepare plans for the future development of New York City. At the request of the Mayor, the staff of the Regional Plan joined the executive committee and helped the City Committee with its studies and reports. The final report, published in 1928, called for the creation of an official city planning department, which later formed in the mid-1930s.

The Committee continued to publicize early findings in the 1920s to drum up excitement for the plan. Among the recommendations were converting Roosevelt, Randalls, and Wards Islands into parks, deploying more ferries to reduce traffic congestion between New Jersey and Brooklyn, and creating better sanitation facilities. Arguably the Committee’s most notable recommendation was to agree with upstart Port Authority engineer Othmar Amman that the first bridge across the Hudson River should be built at 178th Street, rather than the much larger bridge being proposed at 57th Street. Moving the bridge to the northern tip of Manhattan avoided adding traffic congestion to Midtown, and also prevented a limited access highway from stretching across the southern boundary of Central Park, separating the park from midtown.

The Committee discouraged widespread skyscraper development and also publicly denounced a plan to build a highway through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and sacrifice parkland. Additionally, the Committee drafted laws for consideration by public authorities, such as measures to empower cities and towns to create master plans for streets and parks management, which were signed by New York Governor Al Smith in 1926.

During this time, the Committee stated that Manhattan was overburdened with industries and recommended businesses be shifted to other areas of the city and the region. Thomas Adams, in a presentation to 500 individuals from around the region in 1926, was quoted in the New York Times as saying,

“Decentralization of population as a solution of congestion has proved a fallacy. You cannot correct congestion and you may increase it by more transit lines and more commuting suburbs. Industry must be evenly distributed as well as population… There is too great a tendency to focus every new transit facility on Manhattan. New centers should be encouraged to grow in the suburbs. Brooklyn is one that is well established. Queens and Bronx need to be further developed as main business centers looking only to Manhattan for special needs. Rapid transit and railroad belt lines should be developed so as to create larger centers in Staten Island, in Nassau County, and in New Jersey.”

A Regional Council, composed of 150 individuals representing planning agencies throughout the region, was formed in 1925 and met over the next two years to weigh in on the plan. The Committee also worked with professors Robert Murray Haig and Roswell McCrea on an investigation of the economics of the region. From 1927 to 1929, the Committee published a series of technical volumes as precursors to the first Regional Plan.

Regional Plan Association formally incorporated in the spring of 1929 in New York to foster county, city, town, and village planning, and to help make the first Regional Plan a reality.

The first Regional Plan

The First Volume of the Regional Plan proposed an elaborate network of highways, railroads, and parks, along with residential and commercial centers, as the foundation of the physical and social development of the region. It also identified specific natural areas that could be acquired for public use.

The Second Volume, published in 1931, focused on urban design, including the relationship of development to open space, fitting buildings to streets, and pedestrian ways separated from vehicle traffic. The Regional Plan produced definitive maps of the New York metropolitan area. They contained analyses of demographics, economic conditions, land utilization, population distribution, and other characteristics of the region at a time when such data was difficult to come by.

The first Regional Plan presented a new way of thinking about development and governance and inspired a movement of regional planning in the country and abroad, leading to proposals such as the Abercrombie Plan for London in 1944. Copies of the plan had been purchased in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and many countries in Europe by the 1940s. In 1989, the first Regional Plan was designated a National Planning Landmark by the American Planning Association.

Following the release of the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs in 1929, an advisory committee of 200 residents of the region was formed to assist in implementation. In 1932, the Committee on the Regional Plan formally dissolved and merged with Regional Plan Association, Inc, which began to implement the plan.

Many proposals from the first Regional Plan were implemented over the next 30 years.

FDR was familiar with the project, as his uncle, Frederic Delano, had been Chairman of the Committee of the Regional Plan and a longtime colleague of Charles Norton. Other key figures in the implementation of the Regional Plan included Lawrence Orton, RPA’s chief administrative officer who served for more than 30 years as one of the first New York City Planning Commissioners. George McAneny, RPA’s President for its first decade, was also integral to the plan’s success. He served New York City in a variety of offices, organized the commission that led to the first city-wide zoning ordinance in New York and the country, and coordinated the 1939 World’s Fair.

Between 1928 and 1940, more than a third of RPA’s 2,548-mile highway program was completed or in progress, with promising developments made toward ideas like Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE). RPA approved of the construction of public housing projects that was taking place by the Federal government and local agencies, and noted 31 new public housing projects in New York City had been constructed or were in progress by 1941. RPA’s design principles for neighborhoods, such as garden apartments, walkable shopping centers, and minimal through-traffic, were put in place in areas like Fresh Meadows in Queens.

RPA’s advocacy also led to the acquisition and preservation of large areas of open space for recreation throughout the region. Parks were acquired and improved, including Pelham Bay Park, Jacob Riis, and marine parks in Brooklyn and Staten Island. In New York City, around $242 million dollars was spent on capital park expenditures in the mid-1930s. In the first four years of the Plan’s publication, New York City added about 2,440 acres to its park system, mostly in the boroughs of Queens and Staten Island, an increase of nearly 20%. A key addition was the creation of Great Kills Park on Staten Island, now part of Gateway National Recreation Area.

The Second Avenue Subway (SAS) in New York City was another recommendation of the first Regional Plan that took generations to implement. Work was supposed to begin in the 1930s but was soon halted by the Great Depression. Progress was made in earnest in the 1970s but stopped because of another financial crisis. In January 2017, the first phase of the SAS opened with three new stations on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from 63rd Street to 96th Street. In 2021, further extensions north were announced. C. McKim Norton, who led RPA for several decades and was the son of Charles D. Norton, reflected in an interview that plans were akin to seeds that were just waiting for a bit of rain and encouragement to sprout.

But the first Regional Plan was not without critics or flaws. Some planners criticized its population growth assumptions and recommendations. Most vocal among them was Lewis Mumford, who suggested that stronger efforts should be made to restrain development and diffuse New York’s urban core. In 1923, Clarence Stein, Mumford, and others launched Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), an informal group of planners who provided an alternate perspective to RPA, though there were areas of alignment, such as neighborhood development in Radburn, Fair Lawn, NJ.

RPA also ran into resistance from government officials who resented the intrusion of planners in development processes. As C. McKim Norton noted in an interview, ​“When an honest, energetic bureaucrat, mayor, or elected official is trying to get something done that he is sure is good for the town and good politics and good everything, and he gets the thing going a little bit, there’s nothing that makes him more furious than to have some civic group come up and ask some irrelevant sounding questions to him that create opposition.” Norton added that planners occasionally complicated matters by devising plans that would raise residents’ expectations but could not be quickly or affordably implemented by current politicians, embarrassing and frustrating those officials in front of constituents.

Highway Construction

The first Regional Plan had many suggestions about highways and parkways in New York City. By 1940, more than a third of the first Regional Plan’s highway program was completed or in progress, and by the time of RPA’s 25th anniversary, more than 400 miles of the arterial parkway system was developed, including the Belt Parkway, Henry Hudson, and East River Drive. These improved connectivity but also contributed to sprawl, increased air pollution, and their construction devastated several low-income communities, predominantly immigrant communities and communities of color. This destruction was not accidental. There is a wealth of academic studies which have underscored the classist and racist nature of highway construction.

In 1929, Black residents of Sandy Ground, a village in Staten Island, were quoted in the New York Times as being excited about the Regional Plan and the prospect of a highway connecting the village to the rest of New York and increasing land values, as pollution in the Hudson had reduced oyster populations and negatively impacted the economy of the village. “(E)xcited talk now runs to land values and road paving and a sidewalk along the great new highway. This will lead from the Outerbridge Crossing, three miles away, to the Goethals Bridge and further on to the Port Richmond-Bayonne Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, and Manhattan.” In a report dated from the mid-1950s, RPA underscored some of the benefits of greater connectivity in The Bronx, writing, ​“An emerging network of express highways should enable the Bronx to exploit its strategic location in relation to New England, to Long Island, and to the northern counties of this metropolitan region. As a consequence, the borough is expected to attract a full proportionate share of the region’s industrial and commercial growth…”

The economic benefits communities hoped for were often not realized. Immigrant and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) residents across the city were displaced to make way for highway construction or were subjected to greater air pollution from highways, such as residents who lived around the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

While RPA continued to highlight the need for rail, as early as 1942, RPA acknowledged that the railroads were losing out to highways, writing in a report that, ​“rail commutation… has failed to hold its own against the convenience of passenger car and bus transportation…(T)he Association holds that neither bus nor private passenger car is the solution for peak-hour mass transportation of people. A coordinated system of suburban rapid transit, along with a better urban distribution… is still needed.”

In a 1980 interview, C. McKim Norton reflected on the situation, noting that the highways were public enterprises and public entities took great interest in implementing RPA’s highway plan, while the rail lines in the 1930s and 1940s were owned by private entities that, while they had been growing in the 1910s and 1920s, had started to struggle.

“I must say that we deplored this and it worried us, but it was so difficult to do anything about it because the railroads were private enterprises, and it was unthinkable… They were the big industry. These were the big moguls - the Harrimans and all these people. And the idea that you would tell them what to do was unthinkable. I mean, you were taking on giants. And the idea that they couldn’t do what they wanted to do or thought they should do was also unthinkable, and we didn’t realize how close to bankruptcy the Pennsylvania Railroad was when it happened.”

Housing Conditions, Urban Blight, and Slum Clearance

On the subject of economic development, housing, and blight, RPA suggested policy solutions which would have repercussions on low-income communities.

City officials took RPA’s slum clearance recommendations into consideration and organized their own Slum Clearance Committee. Over several years, tenements were seized by eminent domain and residents were evicted and encouraged to move into public housing, like those in the Lower East Side to First Houses, built in the mid-1930s. Sometimes residents were given financial support with regards to moving expenses and rent, per the Tenement Museum. Other times, residents were displaced from their neighborhoods, or suffered from neglect as landlords scaled back maintenance while eminent domain projects slowly wound their way through neighborhoods.

Communities across New York City and the country were interested in RPA’s views on economic development and slum clearance. The Topeka Plaindealer, a Black-founded newspaper in Kansas, commented in 1931 that RPA had predicted that Harlem would be a business center of New York in the next 25 years and had outlined a general plan for the development of Harlem. Shortly after in 1933, the Harlem Liberator noted that some landlords were refusing to show Black residents properties in Harlem and were raising rents. The Harlem Liberator cited Regional Plan Association’s statement that, “(A)ttractive dwellings can be secured for $6 per room monthly” to point out that landlords were asking Black tenants for high sums: “$32 to $40 for two and a hall room at 160 West 128th St…. Reports state that all tenants moving into the house must pay two months rent in advance and sign a lease for a year.”

The Harlem Heights Daily Citizen ran a series of articles in January 1934 called, ​“Slums Must Go! - And (If) They Go, Will Harlem Benefit From New Era of Better, Low-Priced Housing?” Journalist Victor Llewellyn Ransom interviewed executives at RPA, the National Public Housing Conference, the Slum Clearance Commission, and the Tenement House Commissioner, and noted that Harlem was not included as a recommended area for slum clearance and rehabilitation by RPA, despite dilapidated conditions, overcrowding, and exploitation by landlords. Llewelyn also noted that there was no Black representation on the Slum Clearance committee, and that, ​“the needs of Harlem are not known to such people who are to advise the Housing Authority, if no adequate survey has or is being made in Harlem by any one.”

In time, government officials at all levels began to neglect public housing projects in New York, leaving residents in segregated and substandard housing to advocate for basic repairs and sanitation.

Harlem was not the only BIPOC community interested in and impacted by RPA and the first Regional Plan. For example, RPA suggested the creation of a cultural center in midtown Manhattan. The development of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts led to the destruction of San Juan Hill, a multi-ethnic community, by Robert Moses.

Robert Moses and RPA

However, Moses wanted to be the sole decision maker and often publicly derided RPA’s observations on how the city and region should develop. Moses and RPA fought over many issues, both major and minor. According to C. McKim Norton, the first clash was over the Henry Hudson Parkway and whether it should be extended to the Bronx. Moses was more invested in getting something done and tackling projects in segments, while RPA encouraged more long-term views and stressed that the parkway should extend to the Bronx.

McAneny and Moses continued to quarrel over issues, including the fate of Castle Clinton at Battery Park and the 1939’s World Fair. When C. McKim Norton met in person with Robert Moses, Moses decried McAneny as an alcoholic and asked Norton why he bothered to work at RPA. Norton, in an interview, reflected that this was just outright false and slanderous and that, ​“this ended any illusion on my part that you could ever deal with him as you would with a generous person or someone who would take criticism and say, ​‘Well, I disagree with you, but you go ahead and we’ll see who wins.’ He just wasn’t made that way.”

Moses also leveled ad hominem attacks against other RPA staff. In one memorable instance, after learning that RPA had hired a young female landscape architect, Moses personally called Norton to say that she should be fired. Apparently, she had previously worked with Moses in the Parks department and had designed a type of bench that Moses didn’t approve of. Upon discovering the bench design in final renderings, Moses fired the landscape architect. To Norton, Moses said, ​“She’ll make nothing but trouble in your office, I’m telling you.” Norton reflected that this pettiness and spitefulness was not new to Moses. “(H)e had this tremendous energy and attention to detail and cantankerousness. It was a complete mixture of things.” RPA did not fire the young woman.

Moses also attacked RPA’s finances. Per C. McKim Norton, an employee of a company that donated to RPA informed Norton that Moses had gone to the company and tried to persuade them not to give to RPA, declaring RPA a waste of time. Upon reaching out to other contributors, Norton discovered that Moses had approached several of them. Thankfully, the companies mostly disregarded Moses’s slander and some increased their contribution to RPA instead.

Despite these recollections, C. McKim Norton did not wholly agree with Robert Caro’s assessment of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, and Norton felt that the book was vindictive. Without Robert Moses, many first Regional Plan recommendations would not have been implemented, for better or for worse. In Norton’s estimation, “(H)e was a dedicated person and a fanatic if you like. Everything he did was right, and he couldn’t stand any criticism. He liked praise, however, if it came along, but then he brushed that aside, you see. There was no way that you could do anything with him except disappear.”

During this time, in addition to quarreling with Robert Moses, RPA was going through several transitions. C. McKim Norton stepped into a leadership role at RPA in the late 1930s as financial support from the Russell Sage Foundation tapered off. Lawrence Orton left to become a Commissioner of the New York City Planning Department, and George McAneny looked to transfer administrative leadership to another person. Norton reflected that that there was not enough focus on new ideas beyond the Regional Plan, though he had great respect for the long-term staff. After speaking with McAneny, Norton negotiated a change in staff, where some moved to part-time while others were helped in finding new full-time jobs elsewhere in the country. Fred Clark was brought in to be the new chief planner of RPA.

With several staff away during the war including C. McKim Norton, the organization was carried by C. Earl Morrow, a landscape architect who encouraged local planning and zoning across the region and spent much time out of the office working with local officials. During this time, George McAneny officially withdrew from organization leadership, and Board leadership transferred to Frederic Horner, and from Horner to Paul Windels, who had worked for Mayor La Guardia.

After Norton returned from WWII, it was agreed with Windels that the organization needed to make a second regional plan, as many of the recommendations of the first Regional Plan had been carried out and the region had evolved so much that some conclusions no longer held.

Postwar Suburban Development

The region changed dramatically after WWII. In the 1930s, 55% of the region’s population growth was in New York City. After the war, there was a massive move to the suburbs, with the suburban population doubling in just 15 years. The new road network RPA outlined encouraged sprawl. The first Regional Plan recommended deconcentration, with the planners envisioning communities organized around rail stations, but the pattern that emerged was different from what the planners anticipated. Per Norton, “(W)hat was happening just after the war was a tremendous scramble to build in the suburbs… And we found ourselves in those days working very hard trying to rationalize and trying to control the almost mad scramble to build subdivisions and housing in that post-war period.” In 1948, RPA took a policy stance against these developments, stating:

RPA found itself in an uphill battle. Fundraising was a bit of a struggle, and RPA had little bandwidth beyond addressing traffic congestion, producing research on demographics, and providing updates on planning and zoning initiatives that were taking place in the region, with the help of Ralph Crolly and Frank Williams. One exception was the effort behind Planning and Community Appearance, a 1958 report of the Joint Committee on Design Control of the New York Chapters of the American Institute of Architects and the American Institute of Planners. RPA helped prepare and finance the report, and Henry Fagin, RPA’s chief planner at the time, served as a co-editor with architect Robert Weinberg. This report contributed greatly to the dialogue around preservation in New York City.

But the passage of time since the first Regional Plan’s publication meant new government officials were in charge who were either not as familiar with the first Regional Plan or resentful of RPA weighing in on development issues. The staff also began to reevaluate some of the conclusions of the first Regional Plan - realizing for example that they needed to scale back the number of bridges and tunnels entering Manhattan to help reduce congestion. This conclusion put RPA in opposition with Robert Moses, the Port Authority, and the Automobile Club.

RPA continued to dispute issues with Robert Moses, but from a weakened stance. For example, per C. McKim Norton’s recollection, RPA publicly denounced Moses’s practice of having an alternate stand in for him at New York City Planning Commission meetings and alleged it was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, Moses maneuvered around this by requesting an exemption from the government. In another example, RPA and other civic groups protested the creation of an elevated highway by Stuyvesant Town, dividing it from the East River. Moses, however, already had the support of the labor unions and the plan went ahead.

In the 1950s, Robert Moses proposed creating housing in six locations across The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan which would allow for older slums to be cleared. RPA came out strongly against the development of housing for 2,400 families in Hunts Point in The Bronx. The area had been targeted for industry and RPA said it was not an appropriate location for families because of the noise and pollution. Paul Windels sent letters to Mayor Vincent Impellitteri and other stakeholders urging against the plan. Robert Moses pushed back against RPA in a letter to Mayor Impellitteri, who shared the letter with RPA with the hope that RPA would agree with Moses’s take.

RPA did gain some attention when it was asked to escort a team of dignitaries around the region in search of a location for a headquarters for the United Nations. The group traveled to Princeton, Tuxedo Park, Kingston, Westchester County, and Greenwich, the last of which allegedly changed their zoning to avoid being host. Ultimately, Robert Moses suggested building the headquarters in New York City in a location the first Regional Plan identified for redevelopment, where it stands today.

RPA also cheered the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which began in 1959, but C. McKim Norton freely admitted in an interview that RPA had very little to do with the timing.

“All we did was to sit on the sidelines I think and say ​‘great!’ and take credit for having conceived it. This is what irritated Moses, you see, because we were inclined to do this. I don’t know what else we could do, but we said, ​‘This is another link and this closes the Regional Plan Metropolitan Loop,’ as they call it, which began at the George Washington Bridge and goes over the Verrazzano Bridge and goes right around Long Island on the parkway system and in New Jersey up the Garden State Parkway and over to the George Washington Bridge.

“…I think in his case - and he said once, ​‘We don’t need any more plans. What we need is elbow grease to get things done. And if the Regional Plan would just stop making plans and tell us how to do something…’ That expressed his (philosophy). And I must say that I sympathized with that, because it would be kind of annoying if you wheeled and dealed and fought and clawed and got something through the legislature and all this and did this and that and then have some group say, ​‘That’s nice - we’ve done it again.’ We tried not to do this, incidentally. We didn’t try to say the plan was original, and we didn’t try to take credit, and we never appeared at the cutting of the ribbon - never.”

A Focus on Policy

With the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, some members of RPA’s Board of Directors considered dissolving the organization on the grounds that its mission, the promotion of the first Regional Plan, was largely done with the completion of the metropolitan loop. RPA also suffered with multiple transitions in the chief planner role, moving from Fred Clark to Henry Fagin, with Fagin leaving after a relatively short period of time. Fortunately, the Board chose not to dissolve the organization but instead began to adjust course.

RPA staff and Board leadership realized that they needed to exchange the drawing board for the conference table and become more policy-oriented. RPA capitalized on an opportunity presented in the mid-1950s. A team of economists assembled by Harvard’s School of Public Administration worked under the direction of Raymond Vernon to examine the region’s economy for RPA in a series of nine volumes. C. McKim Norton mentioned in a letter to a later RPA President, Richard Anderson, that RPA had to persuade David Rockefeller, a project funder, to have RPA house the project and issue news releases and summaries to ensure that RPA staff would be able to contribute.

Around this time, RPA grew its Board of Directors, turned its attention to the encroachment of development on open space and the impacts and alternatives to sprawl, and raised $1.5 million for research. In the 1960s, RPA got a new spring in its step, as it worked on this and other reports and began laying the groundwork for what would become the Second Regional Plan.

The Race for Open Space set off a new wave of park acquisitions. RPA identified 10 new regional parks, including Fire Island, Lloyd Neck, Moriches Inlet, and the Shawangunks in New York, as well as the Taconic Tri State Park in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The study was also cited in the introduction of the first federal aid for open space.

RPA also turned to residents to get their take on changes in the built and natural environment. Since its inception, RPA has been an innovator in using media to involve the public in planning decisions. For example, a memo in 1923 discussed educating the public about urban planning through newspaper articles and the newly-established radio and film industries. In 1948, RPA hosted a conference that highlighted how residents could get involved in their neighborhood’s development. In 1963, RPA launched Goals for the Region, a town hall meeting series that used television, listener groups, and written questionnaires to survey approximately 5,600 people about regional planning. RPA observed that 99% of participants urged improvements in the public transportation system to reduce traffic conditions.

Residents were right to be concerned about the public transportation system. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the railroad companies in the region approached bankruptcy. As more people purchased cars and the highways expanded, ridership on public transportation plummeted. The U.S. Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff in particular, asked RPA to investigate commuter travel patterns in the region. With the help of economist Dick Netzer, RPA’s​Commuter Report made the case that public transportation was essential to the region’s economy and that the federal government should provide funds to support it. RPA also discussed with legislators the idea of placing private railroads in public ownership and creating one agency that would own and operate a tri-state regional network. There were many obstacles, but eventually, the parties reached a compromise: multiple public rail agencies would be created.

Creating Gateway National Recreation Area

One of the most contentious RPA initiatives in this era was the fight to convert Breezy Point in Queens, the last open oceanfront in New York City, into a public park. Stanley Tankel led the fight. A former student of C. McKim Norton, Tankel was hired in the 1950s and managed RPA’s Parks, Recreation, and Open Space project. He was promoted to Planning Director in 1959. In C. McKim Norton’s view, Tankel had a better grasp on the metropolitan area than any previous planning directors, and he worked tirelessly to promote the preservation of open space as well as the development of regional city centers, which the staff nicknamed ​“Tankeltowns.”

The idea of Breezy Point as a park originated in a Hyland Committee Report on parks around 1920 that RPA President George McAneny and Charles D. Norton were involved with, making it in a way RPA’s oldest park recommendation. But the issue at play was sparked by plans by Atlantic Improvement Corporation to develop the beachfront with almost 7,000 housing units, which was supported by residents at the The Breezy Point Cooperative, who stood to benefit financially.

Tankel persuaded Norton and the RPA Board Executive Committee that RPA should involve itself in the fight to protect Breezy Point. Tankel heard from members of the City Planning Commission, including Lawrence Orton, that the opportunity for a park at Breezy Point was in danger. Despite the fact that construction was at hand, RPA leapt into the fight. The organization found support from several areas, including Ruth Field of the Citizens Committee for Children, the Governor’s office, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Stephen Courier of the Taconic Foundation, Raymond Rubinow of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Bill Ogden of the New York Times, and Eleanor Roosevelt. By the end of 1962, RPA and its partners had coordinated a coalition of over 50 organizations, managed by Ann Singer and Stanley Tankel.

The turning point according to Norton was when RPA connected with civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE), and the National Urban League. Formal endorsements for making Breezy Point a park came from Edward Lewis of the Urban League of Greater New York, James Farmer of CORE, Joseph Monseratt of the Labor Department of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and psychologist Kenneth Clark. The Taconic Foundation and RPA tried to coordinate a meeting with Mayor Robert Wagner with these groups.

As Norton shared in an interview, “(T)he opposition became quite intense and quite physical. There had been rallies opposing the park at the times that we met in the Mayor’s office in Gracie Mansion. We’d find a picket line outside Gracie Mansion sometimes. Our office had dirty words scrawled on the glass door in lipstick. … And we could feel the pressure coming from the people living in the cooperative. The expression ​‘Black power’ had not yet been coined, but we had really called in the Black civil rights movement to help us, and I think hit the scale perhaps. And this raised the tensions in the whole situation because what the people on Breezy Point were and still are afraid of is that thousands and thousands of people would come down from the ghettos from New York and Newark even and inundate the beach right outside their homes.”

When pressed by the interviewer, Norton tempered his comments on the role of race and commented that class discrimination also played a decisive role in the resistance of the Breezy Point Cooperative members to opening the beach to the public. According to Norton, it was soon after the endorsements by the Urban League and others that Mayor Wagner came out publicly in favor of the park, stating that he’d go to the Board of Estimate with a park proposal.

RPA testified in support of the park with other stakeholders in hearings, including a very tense meeting before the City Planning Commission that dragged on past midnight. The fight continued to drag on. Norton recalled, ​“An announcement wasn’t made until September 12th, as I remember, after an executive session of the Board of Estimate, and the vote was recorded as 20 in favor to 2 opposed. What went on at that session (we were told that it lasted until four in the morning) I don’t know. I hope that Bob Wagner some day tells his story because what we heard was that he simply waited the issue out until everybody (those in favor and those opposed) were so exhausted that they finally disposed of the manner the way the Mayor wanted them to.”

However, the actual acquisition of Breezy Point dragged on and hit roadblock after roadblock, as the city couldn’t identify funding to acquire the acres that had belonged to the Atlantic Improvement Corporation, and the New York State Park Commission created a New York City jurisdiction that deliberately excluded Breezy Point. RPA continued to advocate for the site, even recommending that children in the city be bused to Breezy Point so that they could enjoy the beach during the summer. Eventually though, RPA realized that federal funds would need to be deployed in order to make the park a reality.

This was the genesis of Gateway National Recreation Area. RPA proposed that a New York harbor national seashore be created, which would incorporate Breezy Point, Sandy Hook State Park in New Jersey, Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, and Great Kills and other parks in Staten Island. RPA formed the Gateway Citizens’ Committee under the direction of staff member Sheldon Pollack, and funded by the Taconic Foundation and the Fund for the City of New York. In 1972, the federal government created Gateway National Recreation Area, the first national park in an urban area.

Stanley Tankel did not get a chance to witness this victory. He died of a heart attack in 1968 at the age of 45, in the midst of work on the Second Regional Plan. But his contributions to the preservation of Breezy Point were not forgotten. The Federal Government recognized Stanley’s contributions by naming a portion of the beach after him, which can be seen in a 1979 report from the National Parks Service. Unfortunately, the name does not appear on current maps.

Consisting of a series of reports, the Plan contained analytical studies on the economic and demographic features of the region by chief economist Emanuel Tobier and specific case studies that illustrated novel ideas advanced in the Plan, such as better urban design, the redevelopment of regional city centers, and more public participation in planning.

The Second Regional Plan broadened the concept of public participation from simple dissemination of proposals to community engagement and consultation. This new approach consisted of several steps: preparation of basic projections for the region’s future, creation of sketches based on these projections illustrating what the living conditions might be like if present trends and policies continued, and presentation of the sketches to the public in organized meetings and workshops.

For example, in 1966, RPA hosted an 850-person conference to brainstorm ideas for the plan. According to a summary report, ​“The turnout was all the more remarkable coming as it did the morning after the massive power failure that crip­pled the Northeast, a day when a New York Times survey showed only half of the employees of surveyed firms at work.” RPA also coordinated a 125-member committee, composed of civic, business, educational, labor, professional, and religious leaders to provide feedback on the Plan, which included notable figures such as I.M. Pei, Richard Ravitch, Anna Lord Strauss, and William H. Whyte.

In 1968, after a decade of public discussions and research, RPA published its key recommendations in a draft for discussion and presented them to an audience of around 1,000 people in New York City. The audience broke out into smaller groups to discuss the issues raised and fill out questionnaires. Concerns raised by residents included growing income inequality, racial segregation, inadequate housing, long commutes, the loss of green space, and a lack of a sense of community. RPA published supplemental reports on individual counties in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The approach to public participation in the Second Regional Plan provided a template for community engagement in urban planning. In 1995, the American Planning Association designated the Second Regional Plan a National Planning Landmark.

After the death of Stanley Tankel in 1968, much of the project coordination for the Second Region Plan was managed by John P. Keith, Executive Vice President, William Shore, Information Director, and Boris Pushkarev, Chief Planner, all of whom worked for RPA for several decades. Boris led RPA’s research work until the late 1980s.

While RPA worked on the Second Regional Plan, it continued its advocacy work. One area where RPA struggled was highway construction. RPA leadership had come to recognize that highway construction was inducing more traffic, polluting the air, dislocating communities, and changing the fabric of neighborhoods. In a 1962 Bulletin, RPA wrote, ​“Further, the highway cost figures do not include the non-monetary social costs of highway-building - dislocation when homes and businesses are torn down for rights-of-way, air pollution, noise, the broad destruction of vistas and countryside by expressways.”

At the end of the decade, RPA found itself caught by surprise when protests disrupted its 40th anniversary conference held at the Hilton Hotel in 1969. NYC Planning Commission Chair Donald Elliott came to present the city’s proposed master plan as part of the conference’s luncheon program. A group of more than 40 individuals, including white, Puerto Rican, and Black activists like attorney Fritz Alexander, Damu Hassan Shabaka of the Community Coalition, Morris Gant of the Urban League, and Robert (Sonny) Carson of Brooklyn CORE protested against the plan. RPA tabled the meeting as demonstrators with bullhorns interrupted to decry the lack of community participation in the plan by people of color. Alexander J. Allen, Eastern Regional Director of the National Urban League and one of the first Black men on RPA’s Board of Directors, was one of the panelists during the 1969 conference, and it was noted by the New York Times that he met with the luncheon protestors to work with them to identify a spokesperson that day.

The New York Amsterdam News, New York City’s oldest Black newspaper, covered the incident and suggested that residents would no longer sit by while others made decisions for them. The New York Times offered a less positive take, decrying the protestors as militants, and noting that dinner rolls were thrown at the protestors and a gas was released in the air that caused coughing. The New York Times also flagged, however, that there was a lack of consultation by the city, and that members of the City Planning Commission and other high-ranking municipal officials were in the dark over the plan.

Events like this reaffirmed to RPA the importance of community consultation and engagement. It began preparing for more ambitious community engagement projects and broadened the diversity of its Board of Directors. RPA recruited new members such as H. Carl McCall, President, Inner City Broadcasting Corp; Martha Greenawalt, who was active with RPA’s Westchester 2000 project; Verdell Roundtree, an educator and vice president for national programs of the United Negro College Fund; Katharine Elkus White, Mayor of Red Bank, NJ; Yolanda Sanchez, Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs; and Josephine Nieves, head of the Puerto Rican Institute at Brooklyn College at CUNY. Several, including Verdell Roundtree, Katharine Elkus White, and Josephine Nieves, were members of the RPA Executive Committee, advising on the strategic direction of the organization. Also around this time, leadership at RPA transitioned from C. McKim Noton to John P. Keith, RPA’s longtime Executive Vice President, who led RPA from 1969 through 1989.

The Committee on Minority Affairs (COMA) for CHOICES was composed of 57 members, chaired by RPA Board member H. Carl McCall and led by Executive Director Junius Williams, a Newark at­torney. It was established because Black and Puerto Rican members of RPA noted that urging residents to engage in planning for their communities, while giving little voice to Black and Puerto Rican members in planning the outreach campaign, was contradictory. To strengthen the CHOICES project, RPA allocated a large portion of project funds to COMA and COMA had autonomy in their engagement with residents. COMA provided their own background reading and questionnaires for the town halls focused on housing and poverty, distributed fliers, and made many phone calls on a tight timeframe.

Walking and Driving in the Region

Segregation and Opportunity

Shortly after he joined RPA’s Board, William Ellinghaus was appointed chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, member of the Emergency Financial Control Board, and advisor to Mayor Abraham Beame. In these roles, Ellinghaus worked with the mayor and governor to repair New York City’s finances. Ellinghaus would lead RPA’s Board as chairman from 1976 through 1979.

A Struggling Subway System

Ridership of the subway system dropped dramatically. When Mayor Abraham Beame proposed raising the subway and bus fare by 50 cents, he received much pushback from a wide variety of stakeholders. RPA warned that raising the fares would lead to a further 6% decline in subway riders and a 13% decline in bus riders.

RPA also strongly discouraged Mayor Beame’s stance on halting work on the Second Avenue Subway, an idea from RPA’s first Regional Plan.

Unfortunately, work on the Second Avenue Subway would be halted for decades. Despite these setbacks, RPA didn’t give up on public transportation advocacy and research. In the mid-1970s, RPA published Where Transit Works: Urban Densities for Public Transportation, Financing Public Transportation and a follow-up report, ​Public Transportation and Land Use Policy, which provided quantitative guidelines to help metropolitan areas of all sizes decide what kind of public transportation to build. RPA then expanded on this work in Urban Rail in America, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The report used economic, environmental, and land use criteria to identify places in the U.S. where new rail transit or light rail systems and extensions of existing lines could be built. After the book was published, rail transit systems were built or expanded in more than a dozen urban areas. The MTA then asked RPA to embark on a study for the agency’s Strategic Planning Initiative. Over the course of three years, RPA reviewed current and projected public transit needs, analyzed the MTA’s financial and productivity challenges, and proposed a dramatic reconfiguration of the subway system.​A Framework for Transit Planning in the New York Region illustrated a new system that could service parts of the city that had no stations but did have sufficient population density to support them and make use of abandoned or underused railroad rights-of-way.

Economics and Planning for the City and Region

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter announced the first National Urban Policy, which reflected many of RPA’s recommendations. In a telegram sent to RPA on the eve of its 50th anniversary dinner, President Carter stated that RPA’s support and leadership had been critical for his administration’s policy. According to RPA staff member William Shore’s unpublished memoir, RPA helped organize and provide background reading for two public participation programs on national urban policy for the Carter Administration, and organized a regional conference with more than 2,000 attendees that was co-sponsored by Tri-State Regional Planning Commission, the Federal Regional Council, and the Metropolitan Regional Council.

Around this time, RPA published several groundbreaking economic analyses led by Regina Belz Armstrong, such as The Office Industry and Regional Accounts. Regional Accounts in particular measured how money flowed among consumers, producers, and the government in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region and between the region and the rest of the country. It showed that businesses in the New York metropolitan region were more productive and profitable than in the rest of the country, and also documented for the first time how much more the region paid in federal taxes than the federal government invested back in the region.

RPA also publicly lambasted the Tri-State Planning Commission, the region’s metropolitan planning organization, for avoiding hard decisions about several pressing issues regarding development in the region. RPA had called for its creation in the 1960s. Tri-State eventually dissolved in the early 1980s after Connecticut pulled out of the arrangement.

Building on the work of CHOICES, RPA worked on several county-specific community engagement initiatives in the 1980s. In the Bronx, RPA worked with Borough President Fernando Ferrer on New Directions for the Bronx, a community engagement project that proposed county-wide planning initiatives from the 1980s to the 2000s. RPA also advocated for more support towards downtown Brooklyn in several reports. The reports cataloged downtown Brooklyn’s assets and integrated them into a new plan to guide future development.

Towards the end of Mayor Ed Koch’s time in office, he hailed the groundbreaking of the Metroplex complex in downtown Brooklyn and was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ​”I believe that this project can be traced back to a hearing organized by Howard Golden and the Regional Plan Association,’ They produced a document that said that the next locale for business in New York City would be downtown Brooklyn.” However, development in downtown Brooklyn took many years to pick up steam. And, as the federal government tapered support for urban planning initiatives in the 1980s, RPA was not able to scale its on-the-ground work to match the level of output during the Second Regional Plan and the CHOICES era. However, RPA was still very active in its advocacy work in New York City in the 1980s.

In addition to its county-specific projects, RPA came out against the concept of ​“zoning bonuses” that would allow developers to build larger structures if they contributed to pots of funding for creating low- to moderate-income housing, saying it undermined zoning ordinances. In 1981, when President Ronald Regan proposed phasing out federal subsidies for public transportation, RPA and Mayor Ed Koch argued against it. The Mayor cited RPA research that suggested cutting federal support would lead to more car traffic and more air pollution. Towards the end of the decade, RPA supported a proposal to charge motorists $10 to enter Manhattan south of 59th Street, which Mayor Koch endorsed and testified in favor of at a Congressional subcommittee meeting. The city’s Transportation Commissioner, Ross Sandler, cited RPA’s stance in favor of congestion pricing as a reason to support the initiative. Unfortunately, it was not implemented at that time.

The organization also warned against a growing housing crisis in New York City, with analyses showing that job growth was outpacing housing supply. In response to RPA and other civic organizations, Mayor Ed Koch declared in his State of the City speech that he’d commit more than $4 billion over five years to build and rehabilitate 100,000 housing units for low- to moderate-income residents. In his unpublished memoir, RPA staff member William Shore noted that RPA also staffed two public participation projects as part of a national Urban Land Institute and U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development-sponsored program in order to encourage more compact development patterns nationwide.

In the mid-1980s, RPA found itself enmeshed in debates about rising crime rates in New York City. Downtown Safety, Security, and Economic Development was a joint report with RPA and the Citizens Crime Commission published for the Department of Justice in 1987. In it, RPA wrote:

“Regional Plan’s research indicates that the fear of crime makes people hesitant to walk on downtown streets, thus impeding development by reducing the number of downtown activities they will engage in… Regional Plan’s survey of residents in the trade areas of Downtown Brooklyn, Fordham Road, and Jamaica Center found that the perceived level of crime among trade area residents can be demonstrated to be substantially exaggerated. … 70% of the respondents had estimates of the number of street robberies in Jamaica Center that were between 2 and 7 times higher than a very conservative estimate based on actual police department records. 50% had estimates that were between 3 and 7 times higher than RPA’s conservative estimate.”

During this time, RPA leadership transitioned from John P. Keith to Richard Anderson, who had worked his way from junior planner in 1964 to president in 1989, and had also served as the first president of the American Planning Association.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, income inequality in New York City and the region escalated sharply. 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, causing the region to shed 770,000 jobs from 1989 to 1992, one of the largest job losses of any U.S. metropolitan region since World War II. Lack of investment in the region’s schools, rail systems, community design, and natural resources slowed the economic recovery. RPA, too, suffered heavily. There was staff and Board turnover, and several initiatives stalled out. The financial crisis heavily influenced both RPA’s current scope of work as well as its views for the future of the region as it prepared its Third Regional Plan.

The deep 1989-1992 recession was different from previous downturns and shattered much of the confidence that New York City had regained in the 1980s. In addition to its depth, it was also broadly felt by residents and businesses throughout the region in sectors ranging from manufacturing and telecommunications to finance and corporate headquarters. Job losses were almost as deep in New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley as they were in the city. RPA kept underscoring the importance of regionalism to climb out of the recession. In 1991, it decided to bring together some of the most prominent policymakers and thought leaders for an all-day conference on how New York City and the region could recover from the economic crisis and evolve going forward. RPA’s first official regional Assembly was called Shaping the Region Tomorrow: Strategies to Improve Working and Living in the Tri-State Region into the 21st Century. The day’s activities included remarks by Mayor David Dinkins as well as discussions focused on regional competitiveness, accessibility, sustainability, and equity.

RPA also noted the impacts of new immigrants to New York City and the surrounding region. It has since been recognized by historians that new immigrants in the 1970s through 1990s were critical in bringing New York City back from the brink. This immigration also profoundly changed the demographics of the city, with Latinos and Asians, as well as Blacks from the Caribbean, growing rapidly both in number and as a share of the population. These new New Yorkers were critical to New York’s recovery and growth, and they brought new complexity to the city’s racial and economic divides, affecting everything from neighborhood change to language barriers in schools and the workforce.

These economic and demographic changes, along with questions of how rapid globalization and new computer and telecommunications technologies would affect the region’s competitiveness, led RPA’s launch of a process that resulted in its Third Regional Plan.

The Third Regional Plan

According to Robert Yaro, the ​“fundamental shape of the plan” was created by The Council for the Region Tomorrow, which was made up of 100 business, civic, religious, and community leaders, chaired by Richard Ravitch. The business community had a significant influence on the tenor and recommendations of the Third Regional Plan. For example, the Competitive Regional Initiative (CRI) helped inform the plan’s economic recommendations. CRI was made up of 220 business leaders and was chaired by Richard Leone of the 20th Century Fund and then Richard Kahan of the Urban Assembly.

New York City and the region were suffering from underinvestment in infrastructure, social divisions, and environmental degradation. In A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan, RPA argued that economy, equity, and the environment were intersecting spheres that determined the region’s quality of life, and that these needed to be improved simultaneously. At the same time, sustainable economic growth driven by productivity gains and access to larger markets could fail without new investments in infrastructure, open space, and communities. Without these investments, the region would be at risk of a slow and painful recovery and continued decline as a global center.

Between the publication of the Second and Third Regional Plan, environmental degradation increased and suburbanization accelerated. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the region’s population grew by 13%, but the amount of land devoted to businesses and residences shot up by 60%. 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. It recommended establishing 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, and RPA educated the public about how alternative planning and zoning could meet local needs without compromising the region’s resources.

The Third Regional Plan acknowledged that the region was facing a future that offered new opportunities but risked leaving much of the region’s population behind. Increasing globalization gave New York City the chance to compete and do business with London, Tokyo, and other major cities around the world, with new technology promising to transform the way people lived and worked. The Workforce campaign posited a new system of lifelong learning that would prepare every worker to succeed in rapidly changing careers. Bringing low-income communities into what the Third Regional Plan called ​“the economic mainstream” was promoted not only to create an equitable region, but also as something of central importance to the region’s success.

Achieving these goals would require new ways of organizing and energizing political and civic institutions. In its Governance campaign, 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 reduce​“border warfare” that used expensive tax subsidies to lure companies from one state to another. 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 for 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. To promote an equitable distribution of education funding and reduce incentives for sprawl, it proposed local school property taxes be replaced with a statewide education tax.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Third Regional Plan was helping to launch an era of investment in new infrastructure and development projects following decades of disinvestment. It promoted and anticipated tangible physical projects across New York City and the region, some of which were more successful than others. The release of the plan gave new life to long dormant projects like the Second Avenue Subway and completing the 63rd street rail tunnel to connect the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal. It accelerated or initiated open space conservation projects, including the opening of Governors Island and the creation of the Central Pine Barrens Commission.

RPA also made sure during this period to continue the groundwork laid by earlier staff members. Continuing its work from the 1960s and 1970s, RPA advocated for investments in Breezy Point Park and Gateway National Recreation Area, working with the National Park Service on studies and workshops throughout the first decade of the 21st century, as well as explorations of new trails. RPA also partnered with groups on the planning and creation of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, an ongoing project with several reports.

In order to see some of its major transportation priorities implemented, RPA convened the Empire State Transportation Alliance (ESTA), a coalition of more than 40 civic, business, labor, and environmental groups. In 2004, as the MTA was finalizing its 2005-2009 capital program, RPA released several reports analyzing the plan’s assumptions, financing, scope, and priorities. ESTA’s major achievement was successfully advocating for the adoption of the 2005 MTA capital plan that helped fund the Second Avenue Subway and the East Side Access project connecting the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central. The extension of the #7 subway line was completed in 2015, the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway was completed in 2017, and East Side Access was nearing completion by early 2022.

RPA’s largest civic engagement projects of the 2000s came on the heels of tragedy. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, there was intense debate on how to rebuild the area around the World Trade Center towers. RPA convened the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a coalition of more than 75 business, community, and environmental groups. Representing a cross-section of New York and the region, the alliance helped the civic community play a crucial role in the rebuilding process, hosted​​“Listening to the City” forums attended by thousands, and worked closely with officials on development principles and project ideas.

As Lower Manhattan started to recover and new buildings began to rise on the WTC site, the Bloomberg administration began to focus its attention on the Far West Side of Manhattan, particularly the undeveloped rail yards west of Penn Station. RPA had previously laid out a vision for Manhattan’s Far West Side in its Third Plan that included mixed-use development and an expansion of West Midtown’s business district. RPA was supportive of many of these proposals, including turning the High Line into a public park, extending the #7 subway to the west side, and rezoning the area for commercial development.

This was not the only contentious encounter RPA would have in the early 2000s. In 2000, RPA and Straphangers Campaign paid for ad space on the subway system calling for more transit investments and decrying overcrowded conditions. The ad said, ​”With livestock it’s called animal cruelty. With people it’s called a morning commute.”

The MTA rejected the proposed advertisement, arguing that it was antithetical to its rule against ads that would harm its commercial interests. RPA President H. Claude Shostal was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ​”The M.T.A. cannot stifle public discourse whose sole purpose is to build support for a real Second Avenue subway and other transit investments.”

RPA and Straphangers Campaign sued the MTA for violating the First Amendment. According to RPA Board and staff members involved in the litigation, the matter was settled fairly quickly in favor of RPA and Straphangers after negotiations with the presiding judge.

In other instances, however, RPA and New York City politicians and agencies saw eye-to-eye. RPA supported Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal for congestion pricing, pointing to its long advocacy for such a pricing framework to manage traffic in Midtown and lower Manhattan. And RPA, as a member of the Campaign for New York’s Future coalition, worked hard to implement Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC proposal which intended to make the city more environmentally sustainable and resilient.

New York City suffered several setbacks during the first two decades of the 21st Century. In addition to a recession that was exacerbated by the World Trade Center attack, New York City was threatened by the financial crisis of 2008. While a sharp downturn ensued, the city and region recovered more quickly than the rest of the United States, due in large part to federal dollars that flowed into financial institutions. However, the lingering effects of high unemployment and the crashing housing market exacerbated existing crises of poverty and housing affordability.

During this time, RPA doubled down on infrastructure investments to spur economic recovery and create capacity for long-term growth. RPA formed the Northeast Alliance for Rail and the America 2050 program to provide leadership in the Northeast and across the U.S. on a broad range of transportation and economic development issues.

Between 2012 and 2014, RPA convened more than 24 transit executives from 17 different metropolitan areas for three multi-day summits in New York, Singapore, and London. The lessons from these distinguished participants and case studies were later incorporated into the recommendations of the Fourth Regional Plan.

Closer to home, RPA highlighted signal issues within the subway system and transit issues within the outer boroughs and called for more investments in poorly-served communities. ​“A well-functioning transit system is especially important for both low- and average-income New Yorkers, the majority of whom don’t own a car. Not only does the system put them in reach of millions of jobs, but it enables them to get to schools, hospitals, cultural facilities, parks and services. This helps mitigate New York’s high cost of housing, and it is part of the reason that low-income New Yorkers have a better chance of getting ahead than residents of many other U.S. regions.”

In terms of open space, there were ongoing collaborations with the National Park Service (NPS). For example, in 2011, RPA joined forces with NPS to improve access to the Jamaica Bay Greenway and waterfront for neighboring communities. The Jamaica Bay Greenway, a 19-mile loop route in Brooklyn and Queens and part of Gateway National Recreation Area, would serve approximately 300,000 people who lived within a 20-minute walk as well as millions of annual visitors, connecting them to more than 10,000 acres of federal, state, and city parkland. The Jamaica Bay Greenway Coalition also organized bike and hike tours, and released a report on water trails in the Bay.

RPA also increased its focus on the impacts of sustainability and climate change, and how New York City could best adapt to this new reality and mitigate the worst of the damage. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 underscored the importance of greater investments in sustainability, resilience and management. The storm killed more than 40 New York City residents and heavily impacted infrastructure systems, including utilities, transit networks, and the healthcare system. In the months that followed, concerns grew about the long-term loss of affordable housing stock, unfulfilled insurance claims, displaced communities, and job losses. RPA launched a scenario planning effort to help municipalities make reconstruction decisions and build more community resilience. RPA later helped coordinate Rebuild by Design, a post-Sandy design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and published reports on buy-outs, the changing coastline, and how best to integrate community resilience around tidal wetlands. RPA predicted that by 2050, more than two million people and 60% of the region’s power-generating capacity, as well as dozens of miles of critical roads and rail lines, would be at risk or simply be underwater from sea level rise.

A New Regional Plan

Between the publication of the Third Regional Plan in 1996 and the Fourth Regional Plan in 2017, growth patterns within the region dramatically changed. New York City was able to capitalize on global trends that favored places with large concentrations of highly educated workers and walkable, transit-oriented communities. As job growth climbed steadily, more people moved into New York City. But the Great Recession and Hurricane Sandy emphasized how fragile and uneven New York City and the region’s success was. More and more, residents had to make difficult decisions between an affordable home and a good school, a better job or a safe environment, and a community they valued or one from which they could be displaced. And although the New York metropolitan region was one of the most diverse in the country - nearly half of all residents were people of color and a third were foreign-born - it was also one of the most segregated by race and income.

In 2014, Bob Yaro retired and Tom Wright became President, and two years later Scott Rechler would step up to chair the RPA Board, taking over for former MTA CEO Lee Sander. The plan development was led by staff members Chris Jones, Juliette Michaelson, and Kate Slevin, with contributions from individuals such as but not limited to Pierina Ana Sanchez, Richard Barone, Robert Freudenberg, Moses Gates, Melissa Kaplan-Macey, Robert Lane, Mandu Sen, and Jeffrey Zupan. The Committee on the Fourth Regional Plan, a diverse group of civic partners, provided input on the plan’s research and recommendations. The Committee was chaired by Rohit Aggarwala, PhD, who had previously led the development of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative. He was joined by co-chair Anthony Shorris until newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio named Shorris his First Deputy Mayor.

In April 2014, RPA laid the groundwork for the plan with the publication of Fragile Success, RPA’s first interactive web-based report.

This problem diagnosis acknowledged that the tri-state region had made tremendous strides since the Third Regional Plan was released, but also identified worsening problems and growing fault lines: opportunities were limited for far too many; an affordability crisis threatened the region’s prosperity and its most vulnerable residents; the region’s smaller cities and many suburban communities were underperforming and falling behind; the region was increasingly vulnerable to climate-related and other disasters; and government institutions were failing to make the hard decisions the region needed.

As RPA developed the plan, it also pushed for policies to address the immediate crises of unaffordable housing and a failing transit system. RPA studied the proliferation of pied-a-terres and insisted that the city needed to reevaluate its property tax structure. Concerns about displacement and affordable housing were top of mind for many residents. In East Harlem, RPA estimated that the neighborhood could lose between 200 and 500 units of affordable housing each year over the next 30 years if existing programs were not extended or made permanent. In a larger subsequent report, Pushed Out, RPA highlighted the negative impact of rising rents and neighborhood change on vulnerable households in the region, conducting interviews with low- and moderate-income residents in order to better understand current living conditions and experiences with displacement.

RPA later followed up with The High Cost of Bad Landlords, which found that residents living in buildings owned by landlords with high levels of evictions and violations were disproportionately concentrated in The Bronx, as well as in a few specific neighborhoods in the other boroughs.

The rapidly deteriorating condition of New York City’s public housing also became apparent during this time. It was estimated that, due to years of neglect and disinvestment, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) needed $45 billion in capital repairs. As more news came out regarding the precarious state of NYCHA, RPA analyzed its physical infrastructure and finances and made recommendations regarding its unmet capital needs, how to streamline and restructure systems of management and accountability to improve operations, and how to form a dynamic civic coalition to advocate for residents. In 2018, RPA partnered with Community Voices Heard leaders, all of whom were living in public housing, to conduct a comprehensive survey of NYCHA residents in Far Rockaway. This included more than 700 face-to-face conversations at five different developments, and was one of the most comprehensive efforts to document what residents were experiencing everyday in public housing on an individual level. The survey identified important findings regarding NYCHA conditions on physical and mental health, as well as management responsiveness and building conditions.

Growing evidence of the built environment’s impact on health was also a concern. RPA’s first Regional Plan in the 1920s tied urban planning with public health outcomes. Almost a century later, RPA’s 2016 report, State of the Region’s Health, investigated the socioeconomic factors that impact health, such as transportation, housing, inequality, and resilient infrastructure systems. RPA found that there were stark differences in health by race, income, and geography within the region, with health problems concentrated in low-income Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities, such as residents of the Bronx who had suffered the harmful effects of the Cross-Bronx Expressway’s vehicular pollution.

Hurricane Sandy also accelerated concerns about aging tunnels connecting Manhattan to New Jersey and the other boroughs and the overall condition of public transit in New York City. During the ​“Summer of Hell” in 2017, commuters suffered greatly with overcrowding, derailments, and other crises. In the mid-2010s, the MTA considered shutting down the L train tunnel under the East River for more than a year to repair the severe damage caused by the storm. RPA released a series of reports on the shutdown, including a community consensus proposal, which recommended a comprehensive investment plan to take advantage of a rare extended shutdown of one of the City’s busiest subway lines.

RPA recommended that the MTA rebuild a quarter of L stations to modern standards, and make a series of additional investments to unlock the line’s capacity. However Governor Andrew Cuomo canceled the MTA’s plan to close the L train tunnel for repairs and proposed an alternative plan, and repairs to the tunnel were completed by 2020.

It was clear that housing policies, local land use practices, tax structures, and transit services in the 2010s were deficient and reinforced inequality and segregation. These crises reinforced RPA’s conclusions that public institutions were failing to address persistent problems. Institutions in New York City were slow to incorporate technology to improve their services. The transit system was technologically outdated and couldn’t keep pace with growing ridership. When faced with challenges such as climate change, public institutions were slow to take action, and did so piecemeal and without adequate funding. RPA issued a vision of the region’s potential in Charting a New Course.

RPA undertook a robust public engagement program to ensure that the Fourth Plan’s recommendations reflected the needs and priorities of all residents of the region. It used a range of tools including issue area working groups, surveys, focus groups, public forums, and stakeholder briefings to reach a broad audience. RPA worked with hundreds of experts in housing, transportation, land use, and environmental issues and received regular feedback at nearly 200 meetings and forums where discussions were held with more than 4,000 people. Most importantly, RPA entered multi-year collaborations with leading organizations representing community voices throughout the region to make sure that its recommendations addressed the needs of under-represented and under-privileged communities. In New York City, these included Make the Road New York, Community Voices Heard, and Right to the City Alliance. RPA would go on to partner with Make the Road New York on a series of projects regarding equitable adaptation and accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

This process, particularly the partnerships with community members-based organizations, resulted in RPA adopting four values that would guide both the plan’s recommendations and ongoing agenda: Equity, Health, Prosperity, and Sustainability. Each of the plan’s recommendations were scored with how well they advanced these priorities.

The Fourth Regional Plan: Making the Region Work for All of Us was released on November 1, 2017. Its 61 recommendations were organized under four action themes: fix the institutions that are failing us; create a dynamic, customer-oriented transportation network; rise to the challenge of climate change; and make the region affordable for everyone.

Addressing these challenges and implementing RPA’s recommendations would require significant financial investment. The Fourth Regional Plan recommended ways to reform the way that new rail infrastructure projects were designed and built to reduce their cost, in addition to redirecting funding from low-impact programs to more effective ones. But even with significant budget savings and a growing economy, more funding would still be needed to fund the Fourth Plan’s recommendations. The plan proposed new funding streams that would more fairly distribute the burden of taxes, fees, and tolls, while promoting strategic policy goals.

To demonstrate how the policies and projects recommended could shape the region, the Fourth Regional Plan described potential futures for flagship places that represented unique communities, built environments, and natural landscapes. In New York City, RPA highlighted four locations that had been long-time focus areas: Jamaica, Queens; the Far West Side of Manhattan; the Triboro; and the Inner Long Island Sound, including Rikers Island.

Implementing the Plan

After the plan’s release, RPA worked with its partners to implement its recommendations. More than 150 organizations in the region signed a pledge to advocate for equity as the Fourth Regional Plan moved from idea to implementation. Signers agreed to further fair housing by both strengthening disadvantaged communities and opening up exclusionary places; make land use decisions more inclusively; reduce inequality by expanding access to economic opportunity; invest in transportation and lower costs for those with the least ability to pay; and create new relationships between communities, industry, and nature to provide dignified, productive, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods.

Several RPA campaigns and initiatives saw strong interest after the publication of the Fourth Regional Plan. Following a year of meetings, a working group of more than 40 organizations and elected officials released a white paper containing recommendations on how to make New York City’s land use governance more inclusive, especially of community voices. The​Inclusive City report sparked a renewed conversation about comprehensive city planning in New York and was discussed by the New York City Council in 2021.

Follow-up reports to the plan went into greater depth on many of the plan’s recommendations. With regards to airports, the 2018 report Upgrading to World Class: Revisited updated a 2011 RPA study and recommended adding new runways at both Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) and John F. Kennedy International (JFK) airports in order to accommodate future demand. RPA suggested several land-side and ground access improvements, including a one-seat AirTrain ride from JFK to midtown Manhattan and a redesigned EWR.

The same year, RPA’ issued Building Rail Transit Projects Better for Less, an in-depth study noting that the extraordinarily high costs associated with large transit projects in the City were due to many factors causes at every stage of project implementation, from decisions made by political leaders at the inception of the projects to the final stages of lengthy planning, design, and construction processes. RPA also conducted extensive interviews with experts locally and abroad and researched the best practices of other world cities.

In 2018, the New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to close the Rikers Island prison complex and replace it with borough-based jails, opening the land for future uses. There have since been discussions about repurposing the island for green infrastructure, a cause that RPA has supported with community, criminal justice reform, and environmental organizations.

In May 2018, NYC Transit Authority President Andy Byford launched Fast Forward, a plan to completely modernize New York City’s subways and buses. RPA co-hosted an event at NYU School of Law for the report’s release, which echoed many of RPA’s recommendations in the Fourth Regional Plan.

Also in 2019, New York City released a plan to rebuild the BQE’s triple cantilever that called for a temporary six-lane highway on the Brooklyn Promenade. RPA published Reimagining the BQE, a pivotal report that recommended demand management strategies to reduce traffic on the BQE, fundamentally shifting the dialogue among agencies and stakeholders. The report spurred the Mayor to appoint a panel of the City’s leading experts, including RPA’s President Tom Wright, to examine new solutions. As of early 2022, discussions on the future of the BQE were ongoing.

When progress on the Gateway Tunnel linking New York City and New Jersey stalled, RPA with Amtrak led the effort to show the crumbling state of the current Hudson River tunnels to key stakeholders, and published A Preventable Crisis in 2019, which quantified the impact of a partial shutdown. RPA found that a shutdown would cost the U.S. at least $16 billion in lost economic activity, $22 billion in lost home value, and cause slower commutes for nearly half a million commuters. In 2020, 15 Senators issued a letter to the Federal Railroad Administration regarding delays on the Gateway project, and cited RPA’s report to underscore the severity of the issue.

As Gateway began moving towards construction, several design ideas were proposed for a reimagined Penn Station district. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey considered plans to improve the 42nd Street Bus Terminal in New York, which was a key recommendation of RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan, though RPA’s preferred solution was not the primary one. The Interborough Express, a portion of the Triboro connecting Brooklyn and Queens, took a step forward in 2022 with the MTA’s publication of the feasibility study.

The New York State Legislature passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which set the state on a path to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 and net-zero economy-wide by 2050. RPA supported CLCPA and discussed potential renewable energy implementation strategies in a series of public forums. New York later announced a goal for 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035 and committed several hundred million dollars to an offshore wind infrastructure fund.

Going back to the roots of the first Regional Plan, RPA focused on how the built environment impacted health by forming the Healthy Regions Planning Exchange, a first-of-its-kind learning network convening 31 planners, public health officials, and community advocates from New York City and around the country to discuss how meaningful community partnerships inform better planning, and how race and racism shape planning, often to the detriment of communities of color.

In June 2020, amid unrest after the killing of George Floyd and several others, RPA released a statement on racial segregation, Black Lives Matter protests, and the urban planning’s field responsibility and response:

These ties between the built environment and health became stark in 2020, when New York City and the region became the first U.S. epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease swept through the city, with some residents fleeing to the other parts of the region and the country, many sheltering in place, while others, often essential workers, had to brave treacherous conditions in their work environments with little protection. Often, these selfsame workers lived in overcrowded housing due to the affordability crisis in the city. Between 2020 and 2022, almost 40,000 residents perished from COVID-19, with many more suffering from infections and debilitating symptoms in the aftermath. Two years after the start of the pandemic, New York City’s unemployment rate was still almost 8%, much higher than the national average.

In the wake of the pandemic, RPA pivoted to addressing this immediate threat, focusing on protecting the most vulnerable citizens, supporting a transit system threatened by sharp declines in ridership and revenue, and helping to keep the crisis from mushrooming into a long period of decline. COVID-19 had no regard for political jurisdictions, and RPA argued that collaboration on the post-COVID-19 recovery could lay the foundation for long-term regional cooperation on equitable economic development, transportation, and the environment. RPA demonstrated how infrastructure investments could speed the recovery, advocated for federal recovery packages, and advanced policies for inclusive growth in support of an equitable recovery. Several reports were published in 2020 that addressed different elements of the crisis. They included supporting public transit for frontline workers and creating a protected bikeway network for essential workers making e-commerce deliveries and residents who wanted to travel and exercise safely, and developing more opportunities for affordable housing so that residents could safely shelter in place. It issued New York’s Next Comeback to counter myths about the death of New York City with data and policy recommendations. RPA also elevated outdoor dining structures as a way to safely patronize restaurants during the pandemic and reclaim streets from cars.

Before New York City could climb out of the COVID-19 crisis, however, it was hit again by climate change-induced storms. Torrential downpours brought devastation in 2021. RPA warned that subway stations were at risk of inundation, and that many residents were at risk in basement apartments. RPA pushed for basement apartments to be legalized and brought up to code as part of its larger campaign on ADUs. And, as energy production greatly impacts climate change outcomes, RPA emphasized the importance of developing a robust offshore wind industry off the coasts of New Jersey and New York to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and advocated for decarbonizing by electrifying buildings and vehicles. In 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed landmark legislation which banned the use of fossil fuels in new buildings, which RPA testified in support of.