Today, July 13th 2009, is the first day of the NYC Department of Buildings new online development challenge policy -
“The Department has formalized a new 45-day formal development challenge process. This gives the public a greater voice in the development process and provides developers further clarity about when and how a project can move forward. This Development Challenge process applies to zoning approvals on all existing building.”
Changes to the DOB policy include lengthening the public comment period from 30 to 45 days limiting public comment to 45 days (see update below) and enabling constituents to search for proposed developments using an online search mechanism.
While we applaud this policy improvement we also see room for more progress. In particular, it seems challenges submitted to the department will exist in a black box until the department has made its decision.
“Zoning-related challenges that are part of the new process will be posted on the Department’s website after the Department’s review and decision. “
We feel its important that public comments be made visible to all while the challenge period is still open - as is standard in most agency RFC processes - enabling both the developer of the proposed buildings and public-at-large to submit followup comments supporting or refuting a given statement.
Secondly, it seems that searches are onetime only with no mechanism to “Notify when new developments are proposed” or similar style functionality. Given that constituents are unlikely to manually check and re-check their neighborhood, adding a subscription model would be very helpful.
Finally, it would be ideal if the department provided an XML feed or API for querying the underlying database. This would enable third party organizations to develop additional functionality on top of this data - for instance, what if I’m only concerned with developments on a single block? Rather than asking the city to develop functionality for each and every use case (a single entity, the city, serving a broad range of constituents) we feel the city should open up the ability for third-party web developers to add build any/all new functionality (search by distance from line? search by distance from schools? search by distance from water?) or analytical analysis approaches (compare population density to zoning change request rates? compare income levels to zoning approvals?) as they see fit.
Read the press release, visual description of changes (pdf) and skim the FAQ (pdf).
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Update: As we just learned from the Gotham Gazette’s writeup, public comment hadn’t been limited to 30 days as we’d come to believe when reading the Department’s press release - but had been open for an indefinite period of time prior to this policy change. We do not believe that placing new limits public discourse is in the public interest and hope to see this aspect of the new policy revised ASAP.