Michael Goldblum featured in Crain’s Business
Here’s a short opinion piece by partner Michael Goldblum (pdf) that was published last week in Crain’s NY Business (to read on their website). He discusses one of our perennial struggles, the approvals process at the NYC Department of Buildings.
OP-ED
Here’s a radical proposal: Let’s make ’yes’ the objective in every Buildings Department interaction
By Michael Goldblum
New York City is troubled by homelessness, gentrification, income inequality, structural racism, and a lot of other big problems. All - and more - are exacerbated by the indecently high cost of creating new housing here.
Mayor Eric Adams can help by fixing the administrative process.
The city Department of Buildings enforces standards and livability guidelines, ensuring that our homes and offices are safe, energy-efficient and appropriate to their neighborhood. But the process of obtaining approvals to build is flawed.
Our regulations in New York certainly can be improved.
Academic studies repeatedly identify a causal relationship between the complexity of building regulations and procedures in any city and the cost of housing there.
Our regulations in New York certainly can be improved: a bottomless topic on its own. But the review system itself contributes uncertainty, delays, frustration and chaos to every construction effort.
The uncertainty carries a high price for anyone who wants to build anything. A process with so many hidden opportunities for derailment and disapproval undermines your confidence that you can do what you plan to do at all, even if you navigate dutifully through the process.
‘No’ is the default
The result is a department that seems to say no as a default. But the mayor can change the incentive structure at the Buildings Department to make it an enabler of construction, rather than an inhibitor. The goal is to make “yes” the objective of every interaction there, to work with applicants to find ways to do what they want, within the law and in adherence with the codes.
A change to “yes” would have remarkable effects:
More time for Buildings Department staff to work collaboratively with applicants to find solutions that are acceptable and meet the rules.
Staff attorneys who would see their job as enabling safe responsible development through clear, consistent, logical, transparent regulations, and to seek ways to protect the city while meeting its desperate need for affordable housing.
The department could simplify the now-complex, dense application process and root out obstacles to responsible approvals.
The department’s examiners now have an impossible job. They must master a dozen relevant code books; deal with professionals and homeowners with varying degrees of expertise (and patience); and surf an unceasing flow of new regulations, forms, requirements and memoranda that govern decisions. Many are newer hires, retained to respond to the recent flood or applications and forced to learn on the fly under extreme pressure.
Change is possible
Implementing changes could ease their job, encouraging them to be helpers instead of taskmasters, and giving them more time and leeway-and rewards-to solve problems.
Could such changes really happen here? Yes.
I saw it happen. In 2011 I went to the Brooklyn Department of Buildings to try out the Get It Done Together pilot program. I felt as though I had stepped through the looking glass. Friendly, relaxed, congenial staff worked together - supervisors and examiners - to remove obstacles and solve problems. I left smiling incredulous, and with approvals in hand.
If we are to try to solve the housing crisis and its pernicious offshoots, we might have to bite the bullet and become an easier, friendlier place to build safely and well. Reforming the plan-review process could be one of a series of changes, deep in the weeds of government bureaucracy, that would meaningfully improve the future of New York.
Michael Golbum is a partner with Building Studio Architects in Manhattan.
Reprinted with permission from Crain’s New York Business. (c) 2022 Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved.
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