Chapter 4
The Zoning Magnet
City Planning Fails to Plan
You might expect the City Planning Department would take note of this situation and use its planning and zoning powers to better locate and regulate waste facilities. But New York City's zoning, which limits waste transfer stations to heavy industrial zones, is partly to blame for the concentration of these facilities.
When the city enacted its last large-scale rezoning in 1961, light- and heavy-industrial zones ended up being concentrated in waterfront neighborhoods that were actually mixed in character. According to Wilbur Woods, Director of Waterfront Planning for the Department of City Planning, the expectation was that the residential uses would gradually be replaced by manufacturing in both the light and heavy manufacturing zones.
Forty years later, a visitor to these districts will find that the residential uses have held on even while industry and middle-class residents have moved away. In areas like Greenpoint-Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, which has the largest percentage of manufacturing-zoned land of any district in the city, residential uses have thrived even while industry has declined. High proportions of home ownership, new immigration, and even some artist-led gentrification, along with a surprising amount of light manufacturing, have maintained the area's mixed character.
Even though they retained their mix of residential and industrial uses, zoning and the lack of planning made these neighborhoods magnets for waste transfer stations. There are now almost 90 transfer stations in the city, and over half of them are located in a few low-income areas: Red Hook and Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn; Hunter's Point and South Jamaica in Queens; and the South Bronx. Greenpoint-Williamsburg has the highest concentration (26% of the city's total), as well as the most noxious facilities, with almost 90% of the "permitted capacity" for putrescible waste -- the mixed, wet garbage that gives off rotten odors that can be smelled for blocks around.
Chapter 5 -- Neighborhoods Call for Fair Share:
Local Law 40 of 1990
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