An idea to boost New York City’s efforts to house more people in more places
On the banks of Lake Erie in 1922, a small village abutting Cleveland, Ohio, passed a controversial law. Under the new ordinance, the village drew lines across its jurisdiction and, within the polygons those lines created, set requirements for the type of buildings that could be built in each.
One landowner, Ambler Realty, sued the village, claiming an infringement of its property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Ambler, allowing a new form of urban policy: zoning.
New York City, as it often is, was already ahead of the curve. The City had established the United States’ first zoning code in 1916, and New York State courts had signed off on its legality. Now, such rules would be permissible nationwide.
The type of zoning that Ohio village instituted — setting fixed spatial boundaries for building types, dividing up residential, industrial, commercial and other uses — came to be called Euclidean zoning; not for the Greek mathematician, but after the defendant in the suit, the Village of Euclid. Today, Euclidean zoning is the most common form of regulating land use across the country.
Euclidean zoning makes intuitive sense. Separating hazardous factories from places where people live is uncontroversial, as is relegating Times Square to only one tourist-crowded zone. But the top-down urban planning scheme, under which neighborhoods could be categorized and divided, created opportunities for discrimination. New York’s original 1916 zoning code pushed garment factories and their working-class employees out of the tony Fifth Avenue shopping corridor. Districts zoned for only single-family houses made those areas too expensive for low-income residents, dividing wealthier households on larger lots from low-income neighborhoods.
The Godlike planning power of Euclidean zoning also made it easy to treat poor neighborhoods differently. In her book “Noxious New York,” Julie Sze argued that Euclidean zoning tools allowed planners to spare whiter, wealthier communities from the brunt of environmental hazards — shunting high-polluting industrial zones to locate next to already disadvantaged residential neighborhoods.
Even the most well-intentioned Euclidean system has elements that are too rigid for modern urban development. Cities change, and so do patterns of demand for land. There is no clearer example than the past several decades in New York City, where many people want to live (Yay! Urban density is good!), but limited supply is pushing up rents and pushing out our neighbors. Euclidean zoning makes it hard to transition neighborhood-use type when needs have shifted. (On this front, New York’s current zoning is actually stricter than the kind in Euclid, Ohio: Early Euclidean zones were “cumulative,” which meant that putatively higher-value uses, like single-family housing, could locate in lower-value districts like industrial lots. Today, New York’s housing cannot be built in industrial zones without a rezoning.)
Transitioning is what New York neighborhoods do best, but under our current land-use system, it takes time for the built environment to catch up. Wall Street hosts more apartments and fewer Wall Street firms — but that took long years of clever regulatory rethinking. When a coalition of elected and planning officials sought to rezone the Garment District — no longer home to many garment factories, and in a top-tier transit zone — for housing, it took nine months to get from rezoning application in late 2024 to City Council approval this summer. Not to mention historic preservation restrictions under the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which subject zones covering 3.4% of the city (and 27% of Manhattan) to additional review prior to construction, and which research from the Furman Center found reduce development in affected neighborhoods.
Cities change, and so do patterns of demand for land. Euclidean zoning makes it hard to transition neighborhood-use type when needs have shifted.
Planners, urbanists and academics have argued that it’s time to move on from Euclidean zoning, and its use is softening.
(Some have gone so far as to champion the no-zoning model exemplified by Houston, which planner and native Houstonian Sara Bronin describes as “the poster child of urban anarchy.” That no-zoning model is, in part, why Houston has such a strong track record of adapting to the housing needs of its residents and keeping prices down. Yet even in the most land-use-anarchic city, Bronin points out that residents can lose flexibility in a different way: Homeowners, seeking more stability, have created de facto zoning through an above-national-average number of homeowner association covenants — which, among other effects, can foster residential inequality.)
Once more, New York is ahead of the curve — this time in moving away from rigid Euclidean boundaries in favor of programs that allow neighborhoods to adapt to changing use needs.
The City has a track record of seeing a need for more or different types of housing and finding ways to build it. Where a trek out to the industrial meatpacking district once felt like fulfilling manifest destiny, the City began to encourage housing and commercial activity, developing the affordable artists’ complex, Westbeth, in 1969. In 1982, as artists took over underused, formerly industrial buildings in SoHo, the State Legislature amended the Multiple Dwelling Law to formally recognize the lofts as residential. A 1968 rule change allowed property owners to transfer unused development rights to lots elsewhere in the city, a mechanism that helped pay for ambitious development projects like the High Line and South Street Seaport. In the past decade, the City has passed a series of rezonings that increase residential buildability in formerly industrial areas like Gowanus, Brooklyn, and a swath of Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. This year, the City upzoned part of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, paving the way for 4,600 new apartments.
We still live under a Euclidean system, but New York has made large strides toward developing more adaptive zoning processes.
Can we push the rigid boundaries of Euclidean zoning even further and make it easier for development to follow demand? One New York urban planner said yes.
Peter Marcuse (1928-2022) was a lawyer and Chair of the Division of Urban Planning at Columbia University. In 1985, he published an article in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change proposing that New York adopt neighborhood-wide “floating zones.” Floating zones are predrafted sections of zoning code that describe regulations like size or use requirements, but are not placed in a specific location on the map. They only come into play when the planning department decides they should be used in a certain area and then applies them there (which is called “drawing down” the zone to that area, as though pulling down clouds from the sky and placing them on earth). Where Euclidean zones assign specific uses to neighborhoods in the zoning ordinance, floating zones leave the location of certain district types to future decisions by planning officials.
Floating zones could allow for streamlined, targeted upzonings in neighborhoods that most need additional housing, releasing the demand pressure valve where it is easiest or most essential to do so.
In contrast to our current zoning amendment process, in which changes to neighborhood zoning are written on a case-by-case basis and must be approved by the City Council each time, the floating zones would be preapproved by the Council and not require legislative sign-off to apply to a given neighborhood. And floating zones can also be designed to restrict too-dramatic change, where appropriate: For example, New Rochelle’s zoning ordinance contains a floating zone that encourages affordable housing development, but that floating zone can only be drawn down in already residential neighborhoods. Once the floating zones pass through the Council once, the City Planning Commission would be empowered to draw down the zones to neighborhoods that need them. With floating zones, theoretically, planners could move faster to accommodate market or social demand than they can under our current process.
As in Japan, which has only 12 simple zoning categories nationwide, Marcuse suggested a limited set of floating zones to meet different types of neighborhood needs.
There’s suddenly more demand for housing in a previously unpopular neighborhood? City Planning could draw down a higher-density floating zone. Need to encourage commercial activity along a subway corridor? It could draw down a mixed-use district.
Neighborhood-wide floating zones were Marcuse’s idea, but traditional floating zones — which apply only to one property at a time and are drawn down based on the request of the property owner — had already been around for several decades. (New York, conveniently for the drumbeat of this article, had been at the forefront of floating zones, too: In 1951, the State was the first to declare them legal.)
The original idea for floating zones came about during the growing-pain years of zoning. Within a few short decades of Euclid v. Ambler, cities realized that Euclidean zoning wasn’t flexible enough. In the postwar suburban boom, planners had to rethink the division of residential and commercial. The growing popularity of residential subdivisions whetted Americans’ appetite for grocery stores and small retail in previously monolithic single-family zones. Floating zones could allow property owners to apply to use their lot in a suburban residential district for retail. During the Cold War, the federal government wanted to build defense manufacturing plants close enough to cities to be easily accessible but far enough to mitigate wartime risks to major centers of commerce. In Maryland, a light-industrial floating zone was designed. In each of these cases, Euclidean zoning would not have allowed for such an interspersion — a full rezoning of the neighborhood to allow these uses everywhere would have been too politically unpopular to pass and could have resulted in oversaturation of certain facilities needed only in moderation.
Rather than make guesses about where future demand would fall, floating zones were intended to let planners wait and see — and then adjust zoning accordingly.
It’s New York’s adaptability and appetite for change, more than anything else, that has allowed it to grow from a cramped seaport 200 years ago to the five-boroughed metropolis it is today — and will let us thrive for the next two centuries.
Marcuse wanted to use floating zones to mitigate the residential displacement he was witnessing. The 1980s were a period of growing economic divides in New York City. Coming off a decade of urban crisis — in the 1970s, the lights went out (1977), the Bronx burned (1977), and the city was told to drop dead (1975) — New Yorkers’ incomes diverged dramatically. The top fifth of earners brought home 32 times as much income as did the bottom. Estimates clocked that New York was losing 140,000 households a year. Following the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, we see these trends accelerated.
Traditional, one-parcel-at-a-time floating zones worked well for a landowner who wanted to apply for a commercial zone to build a shopping plaza, or for a defense contractor to apply for an industrial zone to build a factory. But to adjust zoning to meet residential demand, Marcuse looked to the neighborhood level.
While his plan was, by his own admission, only a first sketch, it offers a model for neighborhood groups (such as nonprofits, community boards or local legislators) to raise their hand and ask for more buildable area for housing in their communities. And it offers a regulatory strategy for city planning to provide that area efficiently, meet market demand quickly and stave off the risk of cost-induced displacement.
New York’s recent rezonings have brought great wins to increase buildability, but citywide upzonings likely won’t get us there alone. City of Yes, the lauded 2024 zoning initiative to expand housing stock, is estimated to enable the construction of an incredible 80,000 additional units. Yet still, estimates of demand are closer to 500,000. Floating zones could allow for streamlined, targeted upzonings in neighborhoods that most need additional housing or in neighborhoods where building more is politically salient — releasing the demand pressure valve where it is easiest or most essential to do so.
Marcuse’s idea isn’t the only supra-Euclidean one floating around. In his 2025 mayoral campaign, Zellnor Myrie proposed “sandwich rezonings,” under which new housing could be built in industrial zones squeezed between residential areas. Legal academics Roderick Hills and David Schleicher (both Vital City contributors) have proposed allowing housing development along Brooklyn’s in-demand industrial waterfront, providing flexibility more akin to the very early cumulative Euclidean zones. Since the publication of their article, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation has started making strides in that direction.
Fast changes don’t always move in the right direction. Some New York zoning overlays, which are a schema to allow planners to design bespoke edits to certain zones without displacing the underlying requirements, actually reduce the amount that can be built — so an ideal floating zone system may be designed to allow only zone drawdowns that increase buildability. Other built-in safeguards may protect Marcusian zones from abuse: By streamlining legislative review, a Marcusian system would organically shift power from individual council members to the mayor — an approach that has gained momentum with this year’s Charter Revision Commission report in response to a system that overaccords power to the politically cautious and sometimes development-phobic local council member for a given rezoning. (Disclosure: I served as a policy advisor to the Commission.)
It’s New York’s adaptability and appetite for change, more than anything else, that has allowed it to grow from a cramped seaport 200 years ago, where pigs roamed downtown’s streets, to the five-boroughed metropolis it is today — and will let us thrive for the next two centuries. As Jerry Seinfeld argued at the beginning of COVID, New York isn’t and will never be dead, because all good cities facing a crisis change. “They mutate. They re-form.”
New York moves fast. As we move toward more flexible land-use regulation, our zoning should be able to keep up.