Mayor Adams’s legacy project is his “City of Yes” rezoning push, which the City Council is reviewing.
The proposals would make New York more of a “mixed-use” city — where stores, mini-factories, offices and apartments coexist.
This can have benefits, but the mayor must understand that without competent enforcement of existing laws and rules, different uses don’t so much mix as clash.
Most controversially, the city wants to allow “corner” stores in purely residential neighborhoods.
The city also wants to let more types of businesses with up to three workers operate from homes, including barber shops, kennels and vets and pharmacists.
Adams & Co. would also change what people can do in commercial districts. This affects residents, as these districts also include mid-scale apartment houses and some smaller homes.
The city would allow small-scale “comedy, DJs, dancing and ticketed events in all commercial districts.”
If dancing is not your thing, you can also start an indoor farm or small-scale food-processing business in a commercial district.
The city would also allow “clean and quiet production uses in commercial zones, such as pottery studios, bike repair, bakeries, craft-making, carpentry and apparel production.”
Finally, it would allow “small amusements” — the penny arcade and ping pong — on commercial streets, and larger amusements in office districts.
Separately, City Hall would ease rules around office buildings, including the requirement to add more off-street loading docks, if its use changes — say, if an office building wanted to rent to an indoor farm.
This sounds like the model city, during which, after a hard day running a kennel out of your apartment, you can pick up your spouse from his shift at the local pottery kiln and relax at the penny arcade before buying vegetables grown in your local office building’s vertical farm from your new corner store.
But this is New York.
Let’s take the corner store.
Here is what people are worried about, if they live nearby: Will the store attract people to hang out outside, eating their snacks, drinking beer, smoking pot and talking loudly at all hours?
Will the store do a delivery business? Then it’s going to become home base for e-bike delivery workers . . . who are also playing music and talking loudly at all hours.
Uses will also clash if you’re a small law firm that finds itself next to the all-day dance club with loud music, or the mom living below the dog kennel (woof, woof).
Further, it will be harder to regulate health-related or financial businesses when they’re not in plain sight.
Running a barbershop or a pharmacy (or both, why not?) from your apartment won’t exempt you from the normal rules governing such businesses, like having to sterilize bloody instruments or going to pharmacy school.
But it will be harder to inspect for violations — harder to do a drop-in inspection of a barber who doesn’t keep regular hours.
How will a salon owner who dyes her customers’ hair dispose of her heavy-duty chemicals?
Then there’s loading and unloading.
Office buildings already do much of their loading and unloading on the street, subjecting neighbors to noise; that will get worse, as congestion pricing pushes deliveries to nighttime hours.
Small businesses receiving all types of industrial supplies may mean more deliveries.
It would be one thing if New York had proven itself a marvel of adaptable enforcement when it comes to new things.
Nope: The city’s enforcement against illegal pot shops has been a disaster for two years — and it’s too early to say whether Adams’ latest push, under new state laws, will succeed.
The city’s regulation of e-bikes since it legalized them in 2020 has likewise been a disaster.
It’s not just new danger on the streets, including an increase in both cyclist and pedestrian deaths, but e-bike fires that have killed 28 New Yorkers in their apartments.
Then, there’s the fact that everyday noise complaints have exploded since the pandemic, and neither the Department of Environmental Protection nor the NYPD, which split up enforcement between them, has been effective in enforcing existing law.
The Adams administration should achieve some measure of success in enforcing quality-of-life laws New York has now — before it makes this world a lot more complicated.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
