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INTRODUCTION

This booklet is intended to serve as a guide to the City Planning Commission's proposed Zoning Resolution. In this connection, we are anxious to have everyone who lives and works in New York understand our goals and concepts because in the final analysis, zoning is for people.

What does this resolution seek to do?

- It marks an historic effort by the City of New York to present an official zoning concept which embraces the total impact of building upon the City and its many parts.
- It abandons the shortsighted approach of controlling the shape of a single building on one lot - it steps back to view and regulate the effects of this same building, not only upon its lot, but upon its environment.
- It considers a neighborhood in the light of historical development and future need. Through balanced and related controls it establishes acceptable standards of light, air and open space; it sets limits on building bulk; it provides for parking, and fixes density guidelines to prevent overcrowding and overtaxing of service facilities.
- It provides sensible regulations to accommodate large-scale construction.
- It encourages imaginative planning by relieving the architect of illogical controls which produce stereotyped designs.
- It seeks a balance between the economics of office building development and the needs of millions of office workers who compete each day for space on the sidewalk or a foothold on the subway.
- It takes into account the problems of the largest manufacturing city in the nation and sets aside appropriate areas where industry can locate, expand and be protected.
- It establishes performance standards for manufacturing and industrial uses, so that we will not look upon industry as a nuisance, but as an asset - doing the best job possible where it can best be done.

Our 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first of its kind in this country, no longer serves us as a constructive guide to building. Weighted down and distorted by countless changes and amendments, the now archaic zoning laws are costly to the City in terms of money, time and, most of all, welfare of its residents. What is the price we are paying?
- We are overbuilding and congestion in some sections; vacant, blighted conditions in others.
- We lost competitive ground every time our zoning permits the usurping of scarce sites needed for employment-giving and tax-paying industries.
- We invite paralysis because we have no logical provisions for parking vehicles which grow in size and number each year.
- We handicap our commercial and retail business by strip zoning - uneconomic, inadequate and wasteful.
- We have handicapped our architects by imposing stringent controls on height and shape of structures, which often lead to monotonous conformity of building.

The major weaknesses of the existing resolution cannot be corrected because they are built into its basic framework. Attempts to make new districts or change old ones inevitably results in confusion and contradiction. This lack of internal coordination also reflects the fact that the old resolution is based on "taboos" - no stables in restricted retail districts, for example - and helpless at the outset when stables depart and garages come in.