NEWS: Building Slows in Staten Island and no one thinks that's a bad thing
From the New York Times
Staten Island Sees a Decline in New Homes
By ANDY NEWMAN and MAUREEN SEABERG
The 20-year building boom on Staten Island, long the city’s fastest-growing borough, is decelerating drastically, thanks largely to a reining-in of the island’s freewheeling zoning laws, officials say. According to city figures released yesterday, permits for new buildings plunged by 43 percent last year.
So substantial was the decline that Staten Island almost single-handedly accounted for a 10 percent dip in building permits citywide last year, which was the first drop in the city in a decade.
In the other four boroughs, permits fell by 1.6 percent, the figures from the City Buildings Department show.
Of course, the real estate market has been cooling all over the city and the country, but city officials and real estate professionals attributed the disproportionate chill on Staten Island to zoning and tax changes.
New zoning rules passed in 2004, which were aimed at stemming a flood of town house developments that residents complained were disfiguring communities and overloading streets with traffic, require larger lots and yards and more parking. A tax abatement for new one- and two-family homes was also rescinded last year, further discouraging construction.
“It’s one of these perfect-storm situations,” said Sandy Krueger, chief executive officer of the Staten Island Board of Realtors. “Everything kind of came together at once: the downzoning, the tax abatement removal and the change in the market. I think everybody is sort of taking a breath here and waiting this out a little bit to see what happens.”
Last year, 826 permits for new buildings were issued in Staten Island, compared with 1,441 in 2005 and nearly 2,000 in 2003. Permits for new units of housing also declined more than 40 percent through November, compared with a 1 percent drop elsewhere in the city, according to census statistics.
The downturn was broadly welcomed in a place where for years development appeared to proceed with pile driver and shoehorn. A one-acre parcel where 18 units of housing could once be built is limited to 7.
“I don’t want Staten Island to stop growing,” said the borough president, James P. Molinaro, who helped lead the drive for the zoning changes, “but I want proper growth.”
The decline in new housing permits issued on Staten Island affected multifamily dwellings as well as smaller buildings. Permits for one-family homes fell 49 percent.
City officials pointed to several developments planned for the island that they said would be more carefully managed, including a 700-unit waterfront complex in Stapleton, north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which is expected to bring new life to a vacant port.
As for the slight citywide drop in new building and housing permits outside of Staten Island, the city’s deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel L. Doctoroff, said he saw little cause for concern. New housing construction is slowing dramatically across the country, he said, and total construction spending in New York City is increasing as builders focus on commercial projects.
“Particularly relative to the overall national housing market,” Mr. Doctoroff said, “and taking into account the fact that through much of the year interest rates were rising, I think by every indicator the market here was very resilient.”
Frank Naso, one of Staten Island’s biggest builders and the former president of the Building Industry Association of New York City, a trade group, said that zoning changes had been long overdue.
“We needed some kind of reform,” he said. “We’ll continue to build, but instead of building 10 you might build 6. It’s not the end of the world.”
Mr. Naso was more upset about the loss of the tax abatement, which cut a homeowner’s property taxes for the first eight years after purchase and allowed many first-time buyers into the market.
Jeff Gallo, an opponent of sprawl and a member of the Preservation League of Staten Island, who lives in a turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Stapleton, said he had noticed a slight calming in the air.
“There’s a feeling out in Staten Island now that you just can’t get away with everything,” said Mr. Gallo, a real estate broker who works in Brooklyn.
Ever since the Verrazano-Narrows bridge was completed in 1964, linking Staten Island to the rest of New York City, people have flocked to the island, developers have worked frenetically to accommodate them, and longtime residents have bemoaned the disappearance of open space and the strain on the island’s infrastructure. During the 1990s, Staten Island’s population grew by 17 percent and civic discontent skyrocketed. Eventually the clamor brought results.
Before the zoning change, you were permitted to build a house with a 4-foot backyard,” Mr. Molinaro said. “Now you have to have a minimum of 30 feet. You were able to buy a house on Staten Island where your bottom step was the street — there was no sidewalk. That was legal! You can’t do it no more.”
Staten Island, still by far the least-populous borough in the city, was the fastest-growing county in the state, according to the 2000 census.
It is not even the fastest-growing borough in the city anymore, having fallen into a virtual tie with Manhattan. From 2003 to 2005, the population in both boroughs grew by about 0.9 percent, according to census estimates.
Helen Siegel, 52, a schoolteacher who lives in New Springville, in the center of the island, thought back yesterday to the days when cows and pigs from nearby farms used to stroll across her yard.
“It might have been better had they done this sooner,” she said. “It’s all built up on every spare inch of land already.”
Maureen Seaberg contributed reporting.