New York City’s Department of City Planning claims that the original 1916 zoning code allowed enough building stock growth to accomodate as many as 55 million people in the city. Readers can probably guess that today’s code is a bit less liberal, but Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate put some numbers on it for the Times: 765 million square feet of development allowed in Manhattan, and 4 billion throughout the five boroughs. An apples-to-oranges comparison suggests that for every ten people that NYC planners sought to accomodate in 1916, today’s code only leaves room for one or two.
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