Queens upzoned more than the other boroughs

From the NY Times:

Amanda M. Burden, the city’s planning director since 2002, said the city’s approach to zoning was based on a “finely grained” process of listening to the needs of separate communities and neighborhoods. “We respond to communities where the threat is the greatest to the neighborhood fabric,” she said. “We upzone where it’s sustainable, and where reinvestment is needed.”

Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who has been an informal adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said that for decades, the city had been zoned for too many people, and that it was overdue for the kind of adjustment pursued by the Bloomberg administration. Ms. Burden “has done more to reshape the city than anything Robert Moses ever did,” he said.

Whether or not that is true, the Furman Center report starts to paint a picture of significant change, finding that city planners were, in many cases, successful in their goal of creating housing within half a mile of existing transportation hubs. In other places, though, zoning regulations that restricted new building have taken “capacity away from communities well served by transit,” the report says.

Most of the new residential capacity was created in Queens, followed by Manhattan and then Brooklyn. In the Bronx, rezoning measures that affected more than 18 percent of the borough added virtually no residential capacity, the report found.

No kidding! Queens has long been the place to dump more people on top of an infrastructure from the early 1900s.