The metro section of today's New York Times carries a story about the death of a plan to reshape the city's skyline. The article runs under the headline, "Plan to Revise Zoning Laws Seems to Face an Early Death." Because the headline contains the phrase "Revise Zoning Laws," very few persons are likely actually to read the article, because the phrase "revise laws" suggests an incremental governmental process, which readers are bored by, and because the word "zoning" also bores readers. But if you read past the headline to the actual article, you get a sense of the importance of what's at stake -- the future of the built environment in New York City. That makes this a story worthy of front-page treatment, much more so than the tired tale of another failed dot-com company in North Carolina or the third story of the day about Florida chads.
The Times news report conveys some of the issues underlying the city's plan to reshape the skyline. The plan would impose more height limits while cutting back on the awful, bare, windswept urban plazas that are a feature of the "tower in a park" model dictated by the city's current building regulations. The news report favors the plan and complains that it was killed by politically powerful developers. The news report says the plan "began with so much promise" and "won early endorsements from community boards, good-government groups and newspaper editorial boards. They all favored overhauling the convoluted regulations that they said allowed developers to erect oversized towers and austere plazas that robbed neighborhoods of street life and resulted in chaos."
What the Times news article does not mention is that the plan got a scathing review from the Times' own architecture critic, who on May 14, 2000, wrote that the plan's "cultural pretensions" were "ludicrous" and that "city planning has reheated stale ideas and proposes to pass them into law." The architecture critic went so far as to question the motives of the public servant who proposed the new plan, writing, "With only two years remaining in his term as planning chairman, Joseph B. Rose wants to be remembered for doing Something. The Something could just as easily be Something Else. It happens to be this."
Smartertimes.com isn't a particularly big fan of height limits. Such limits are one of the reasons that downtown Washington D.C. is as grim as it is. Smartertimes.com isn't a particularly big fan of bleak, windswept urban plazas, either, or of government regulations telling private property owners how big to build and on what sort of footprint. But regardless of your views on city planning, it does seem a bit disingenuous of the Times to fetch up with a news story blaming politically "powerful developers" for killing a promising plan backed by newspaper editorialists and good-government groups -- while neglecting to mention that the Times' own architecture critic was among the plan's most dyspeptic opponents.