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TESTIMONY
Testimony by Marla Simpson on land use, city map, and building address reform
1:53:37
·
4 min
Marla Simpson, testifying in a personal capacity, discusses her experiences with land use issues, particularly public land disposition, city map functions, and building addresses, drawing from her work during the 1989 charter revision and with the Manhattan Borough President's office.
She recounts community efforts to ensure elected representation in residential land disposition decisions, which they saw as equivalent to zoning for their communities at the time. Simpson also advocates for centralizing building address assignment due to issues with vanity addresses impacting first responders and suggests modernizing the city map process, currently a paper-based system, through automation and citywide standardization.
- During the 1989 charter revision, communities sought meaningful input in public land disposition, viewing it as critical as zoning.
- Simpson argues for reforming building address assignment to prevent issues caused by vanity addresses and suggests a recurring fee.
- She calls for modernizing the city map process, currently overseen by borough presidents, through automation and standardization.
Marla Simpson
1:53:37
Hello.
1:53:39
Good evening.
1:53:40
I wanna make a note that I'm testifying in a personal capacity having nothing to do with my current employment.
1:53:45
And, with apologies, I'm here to testify on a couple of obscure land use issues, one having to do with disposition, one on the city map, and one on building addresses.
1:53:56
During the 1989 charter revision, I led a community organizing effort on behalf of New York lawyers for the public interest.
1:54:04
The folks we represented put a lot of attention on public land disposition and saw the Koch administration policies as contributing to gentrification in their neighborhoods.
1:54:13
The city and state owned huge amounts of land in lower income communities, about two thirds of East Harlem, for example, and city supported development at the time was generally unaffordable to current residents.
1:54:24
So the 1989 commission initially proposed to treat residential land disposition as a completely technical matter that would be decided by the professionals at City Planning.
1:54:34
Don't get me wrong, I like the professionals at City Planning.
1:54:36
I married one.
1:54:37
But, there was not to be any meaningful role, for local community or their elected representatives.
1:54:43
So our group blanketed the hearings that spring and summer, and the folks we represented, made the point that they did not see city planning as being accessible to them for input.
1:54:53
So and I think I am the one who coined the phrase that was used by chairman Schwartz when I said that for our communities, city land use disposition was the functional equivalent of zoning at least at the time it was being operated at them, and that we needed a role for elected representatives in those decisions.
1:55:10
But context matters.
1:55:12
If you look at the convoluted framing of section one ninety seven d, it shows that the fight in 1989 was not about affordable housing.
1:55:20
We protested the tendency to stick wildly unaffordable housing and commercial development in the places where housing had historically been affordable.
1:55:29
We did not object when the commission limited, review process or tried to limit review process for HDFC transfers.
1:55:36
I can't tell you here with the benefit of hindsight that we would have supported a fast track process for all affordable housing no matter what the scale, but I am certain that we were not trying to slow down the production of affordable housing.
1:55:49
We were aiming at the other end of the spectrum.
1:55:52
So that's my bit for historical context there.
1:55:55
Following the charter adoption, the honorable Ruth Messenger, who is the incoming Manhattan borough president, invited me to help shape her new land use role, and I served there as the director of land use planning and later as council.
1:56:08
Among other things, I oversaw the work on the city map and on address and on address assignment, which were functions that were untouched by the 1989 charter and basically dates for the city's consolidation circa 1898.
1:56:22
There we go here.
1:56:24
There are real public health and safety reasons why it's important to keep address numbers in logical order, but in practice, by encouraging property owners to show how very special their building is by adding a new vanity address, this becomes a city subsidized marketing tool to enhance the value and sale price of property.
1:56:41
It also generates a lot of lobbying, and those requests are often granted to the detriment of first responders and ordinary pedestrians.
1:56:48
We had limited success trying to rein this in, and I urge you to, consider centralizing the function and, if possible, imposing a recurring fee structure that would recognize the significant cost that this, that this results in for communities, particularly for first responder, maintenance.
1:57:06
One more thing on MAP?
Sharon Greenberger
1:57:07
One more thing.
1:57:08
Okay.
Marla Simpson
1:57:10
On the MAP, I know that there are, interests that probably prefer to, again, leave this untouched, but it really doesn't make any sense to me.
1:57:19
I supervised the engineers on the topographical function, and we did not exercise any meaningful role on the city map.
1:57:26
We'd troop over to state planning, their architects and engineers would tell us what to do, our team would go back to our office and function more or less as technical stenographers.
1:57:33
And so even if the BPs do in some areas, exercise more substantive role, in the twenty first century, this paper process needs to be modernized.
1:57:44
There are technical tools that could yield swifter and more accurate outcomes.
1:57:47
I've seen the work up close, and I cannot think of a reason why it shouldn't be automated and standardized citywide.
Sharon Greenberger
1:57:53
Thank you so much.