It's hard for anyone involved in New York City land use, zoning, and real estate to believe, but the city once had very permissive residential zoning.
The deal, taking effect a year later and known as the 1961 Zoning Resolution, was the culmination of a multidecade effort to replace the city's 1916 zoning framework with one ostensibly suitable to the modern age.
The 1916 zoning was enacted in an era of reform that included two other key actions: the 1901 New York State Tenement House Act, known as the New Law, and the 1913 Dual Contracts, which greatly enlarged the subway system and spread development throughout the newly consolidated city.
Little updating of the zoning had occurred, and the 1936 City Charter, pushed through under the reform-minded La Guardia administration, created the City Planning Commission with the idea of drafting a new Zoning Resolution.
In 1940, the CPC approved wide-ranging zoning amendments that included additional restrictive-zoning districts, "Designed to foster and protect types of development until now inadequately protected in the City of New York, including low density garden apartments, row and group houses," according to the CPC's report.
Advocates for good zoning that implements "Planning relating to the orderly growth, improvement and future development of the city," to cite the City Planning Commission's mandate, face issues familiar to advocates of freer markets.
New York City's housing problem is citywide; fundamentally, it stems from the city's adherence to the structure of a zoning plan envisioning a slow-growing city.
https://www.city-journal.org/nyc-zoning-reform-needed-for-housing-growth
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