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From the Queens Chronicle:In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg announced that specific areas of city land would be preserved for industrial purposes solely and called Industrial Business Zones. To go along with the IBZ, the mayor also created the Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses to support the city’s ailing industrial sector.
But eight years later, the OIMB has been dismantled and slowly, more and more of the IBZs are losing manufacturing businesses, which are being replaced by residential buildings and superstores.
“Creating these zones was the correct strategy for the city,” Adam Friedman of the Pratt Center for Community Development said. “The mayor recognized that manufacturers needed stability and said they would discourage nonindustrial uses and even created an office and conducted studies on the infrastructure of the industrial areas to better implement discouraging of nonindustrial uses. Those groups have gone steadily down and now have been eliminated.”
Since Bloomberg took office, the city has lost 1,800 acres of M-zoned industrial land.
In 2009, the New York Industrial Retention Network, which has since been consolidated to the Pratt Center, studied commercial uses invading IBZs. The 10-page document lays out every commercial superstore or chain hotel to move into each of the eight zones over several years.
“I don’t believe the city is doing everything the can to protect these companies,” Councilwoman Diana Reyna (D-Maspeth) said. “In my tenure as a council member, I’ve always had a specific interest in the industrial sector which dates back to the fact that my mother was a seamstress when the textile industry was predominately immigrants. She eventually had to change careers because of the shrinking industry buildings.”
Reyna and others cite real estate prices as one of the key reasons that more and more buildings are becoming residential. Building owners have found that commercial and residential companies are more likely to pay higher prices than manufacturers. So when leases come up, the owners hike up rents so high that industrial companies cannot afford to remain in the area.
This year, the IBZ fund that grants industrial businesses tax incentives for remaining in the zones has been zeroed out.
13 comments:
NYC can't do everything all at once. Manufacturing has been on a downward trend nationwide for years, especially in big cities. It's all going to Asia and won't be coming back. Housing prices in NYC are skyrocketing, and we're squeezing out the middle class. With all respect to councilwoman Reyna and her mother, the sewing industry in this city, in this country is dead. It's from another era. You wanna landmark a few buildings, fine, but let's start building the the commercial zones that are really going to create jobs and start addressing the city's affordable housing issues.
You wanna landmark a few buildings, fine, but let's start building the the commercial zones that are really going to create jobs and start addressing the city's affordable housing issues.
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Whatever you're smoking, please feel free to share so more of us can enjoy your hallucinations.
PS did you really need to say "the" twice? Do you check your comments before you post?
This is not from the poster who you attacked for more than one "the". How dumb and petty you are, I have an idea where you should put the extra "the"
Anonymous said...
"This is not from the poster who you attacked for more than one "the". How dumb and petty you are, I have an idea where you should put the extra 'the'"
Yeah! Why should we ridicule anyone who seems to favor more overdevelopment in Queens? That NEVER happens on Queens Crap. It would be nice if the first poster could explain how "squeezing out the middle class" is solved by creating more commercial zones that favor developers and more "affordable" housing to solve the already overcrowded infrastructure problems that now exist and are growing worse.
"Do you check your comments before you post?"
"Whatever you're smoking, please feel free to share so more of us can enjoy your hallucinations."
Try using the appropriate number of commas in that sentence before you criticize others.
I'm waiting to hear the solution for continually escalating housing prices from the "never build anything" kneejerk crowd like anonymous #2 and #4. To these people, ANY development is overdevelopment.
These IBZ areas do employ people, but at a much lower density.
NYC has a growing population and significant unemployment for the lesser educated. So what do you propose aside from curmudgeonly grunts? Show some thinking.
Yes, housing prices have gone up. But in most neighborhoods, they haven't gone up at an unaffordable rate. It's the neighborhoods that have been overdeveloped, like LIC, Williamsburg, Flushing, etc. that have had the highest rent increases and are driving long time residents out because their landlords are now catering to a more upscale market. So BUILD, BUILD, BUILD is not the answer, either.
By keeping manufacturing here, we keep people employed. It used to be that you could live and work in the same neighborhood. Lots of Maspeth people used to move to a residential area in order to be able to work in the manufacturing area of the same town. Now they have to drive or use really crappy buses to get to work. Loss of manufacturing affects quality of life and housing as well.
Queens Crapper said...
Yes, housing prices have gone up. But in most neighborhoods, they haven't gone up at an unaffordable rate. It's the neighborhoods that have been overdeveloped, like LIC, Williamsburg, Flushing, etc. that have had the highest rent increases and are driving long time residents out because their landlords are now catering to a more upscale market. So BUILD, BUILD, BUILD is not the answer, either.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
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Shhhhh.... You're making sense and the grammar trolls won't like that!
To the original point, it seems the city is conceding that it cannot come up with any ideas to attract private-sector manufacturing to New York City.
The result is to continue to bleed away old manufacturing lots to residential and retail. How hard should the city resist the tide?
Greetings from Staten Island - home of MS-1 zones across the street from R-2 and 3.... I am glad to see this falling through, frankly. We view this as a way to open up more industrially zoned areas, a la Billyburg, by "incentivizing" manufacturers to relocate to IBZs with the promises of never changing the zoning. We've been working on improving waterfront access, cleaning up contaminated sites... and some zoning changes which would encourage light industrial, rather than the "ok to build nuclear bomb/waste incerator" uses allowed by M3-1. The IBZ program was a slap in the face.
As to employment, maybe it's different in Queens, but here in Staten Island most of the workers are coming from New Jersey, judging by license plates - and the rest are undocumented, based on the repeated ICE raids.
There's a upscale fixture maker in East NY that makes high end stuff for NYC and for export. That is the key to NY manufacturing. Upscale and high value added with the benefits from proximity with NYC.
There is a problem with not combining rezoning with conditions for complementary mixed used development and much higher densities. The JMZ trains can handle more people, but the rezoning around Marcy, Hewes, and Lorimer are paltry. Thus we get higher rents that kick out manufacturers and low income families.
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