Zoning, industry and the forces of homogenization

In 2006, the city set up Industrial Business Zones [IBZs], in order to create incentives for companies to keep making stuff in New York City. There are several across Brooklyn, though good luck really understanding their boundaries.

The NYCEDC webpage giving IBZ details mostly shows where the zones are by block and lot number. There are zones in East New York, Williamsburg, Flatlands and Southwest Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is also an IBZ.

A fight has begun to brew between the de Blasio administration and a number of advocacy organizations, including housing advocates, as the administration begins to look at the zones as possible places for housing, according to Crain’s. “No housing is affordable without a job,” Leah Archibald, executive director of the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corp, told Crain’s.

Which is (mostly) true (jobs aren’t the only source of money), but it seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. The reasons presented by advocates for industry-only zones in the story (mainly, noise and trucks) seem more like design and engineering problems than insurmountable obstacles. 

A while back we reported on how the hypercoolness of Williamsburg appears to be sowing the seeds of its inevitable warming. That is, as housing becomes so valuable there, it is driving out the commercial and industrial operations that gave the neighborhood its diversity of activity — which made it attractive in the first place. If the neighborhood becomes a bedroom community, developers betting on residential may find their balance sheets a lot sleepier.

Similarly, there’s probably a way that industry can benefit from neighborhood housing (such as workers being happy about walking to work and going home at lunch). There’s a story in the Crain’s piece about a factory that got fined over a noise complaint from an illegal apartment, which is likely to tip the readers’ own internal justice monitors, but the very fact that there was a design solution to this admittedly strange conflict may, in fact, illustrate the mayor’s position, as articulated by Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen in the Crain’s story:

“There could be an opportunity within those zones to do modern manufacturing [or] manufacturing that coexists very well with other uses,” she said. “People who want to be making tables, or making salsa … also want to live, work, walk and bike.”

She dismissed the notion of tension between the mayor’s housing plan and the need for the city to protect industrial centers.

“In our view it’s less [about] that old binary, industrial versus residential,” she said. “Those days are over.”

Jane Jacobs would like that line.