Some Urban Oases Are Closed to the Public

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at little public spaces around the city that add up to a big bonus for developers — and how some of them are not being used the way the developers promised.

They are a part of the cityscape in New York that you might never notice — privately owned public spaces, sometimes referred to as POPS, in the shadow of tall, newish buildings. The zoning incentives for these street-level urban oases make it possible for the buildings that tower over them to have more floor space, making them larger or taller than the city would normally allow.

But now, about one in five privately owned public spaces is not in compliance with the agreements the city struck with the developers who built the adjacent buildings. I asked our colleague Urvashi Uberoy, who with Keith Collins wrote an extensively detailed article about POPS last month, to take another look at the problems with these spaces.

You focused on nearly 600 privately owned public spaces — smallish parks or plazas — that are adjacent to about 400 buildings. The thing is, they’re right there in plain sight, but most of us never pay attention to them.

Exactly. You walk by them every day. That’s how I found this story. I saw a plaza in my neighborhood and I looked it up and found out about this web of spaces. Everyone interacts with them.

Or doesn’t. You looked at one building where the plaza has been closed for a long time, and the landscape architect who designed it said it breaks his heart to see it going unused, but it’s not the only one. Why do so many seem to be violating the terms of their agreements?

Building owners could potentially save on operating and maintenance costs.

Another reason is preventing homeless people from using the spaces. A lot of them are adjacent to luxury buildings. Sometimes, building owners introduce hostile architecture like spikes on ledges, which critics say discourages use and disproportionately targets people who are homeless.

Why did the city create the program for public spaces in the first place?

This was set up as a zoning incentive to bring light and air to a city that was rapidly becoming more dense. In 1961, the city thought a way of creating more open space was by encouraging developers to build these public spaces.

Interestingly, the city initially had virtually no requirements for these spaces, so many of the earlier spaces don’t even look like plazas. Some resemble driveways. There was no process of requiring features like seating in the beginning. There is now. But there were over 200 of these spaces built between 1961 and when the design requirements were put in.

Driveways were clearly not what were intended. What else did you find that goes against what city planners had in mind?

City inspectors have observed that some spaces don’t have signage indicating they are public, so people who walk by assume those spaces are for tenants of the building and they would be intruding if they stopped and sat down — when plazas are supposed to be open to everybody.

In 2017, the city passed a law that mandates that all of these spaces have signs identifying them as open to the public, but whether all building owners have complied and put up signs is still a question. A subset of the violations issued in the city’s most recent inspection cycle relate to missing signage.

You looked at one building in particular — 325 Fifth Avenue. What did the plaza there mean in extra floor space and in dollars?

By building the plaza, the developers of the building got nearly 50,000 extra square feet to build with, which translates to several extra floors. We got an appraiser to value the additional floor area. He said it was worth about $80 million if it was used for residential space.

What other violations did you find in your reporting?

On one end of the spectrum, we found violations for closures and privatization. On the other end, we found violations for spaces that had too many rules-of-conduct signs. You can’t have multiple rules-of-conduct signs in plazas because it makes them unwelcoming, and the city does not want that.

The rules listed on these signs are defined by the building owners and developers. The city doesn’t define a standard set of rules. When I was visiting these spaces for the story, I saw one sign that said “no skateboarding.” I saw another that said “no lying down on the ground.” Some building owners write the rules in a way that discourages people from using the spaces in ways they don’t want.

What about restaurants or cafes? Can there be a cafe in a privately owned public plaza?

That’s one of the main subcategories of violations. In our story, we highlighted Brooklyn Diner. In 2022, a city inspector found that Brooklyn Diner, a tenant of 888 Seventh Avenue, had illegally privatized the public plaza near the building. I visited a couple of weeks ago, and the restaurant still had tables and umbrellas laid out in the plaza.

Jerold Kayden, a lawyer and professor of urban planning at Harvard who is an advocate for keeping privately owned public spaces open to the public, calls this “cafe creep.” It’s partly a remnant from the pandemic, because when the pandemic happened, the city relaxed its rules concerning these spaces, allowing restaurants to occupy some privately owned plazas to create outdoor seating.

The interesting thing is the city doesn’t issue the violation to the restaurant owners. The building owners are the ones paying the fine, not the restaurants.

Some owners have been fined, but aren’t the fines almost infinitesimally small compared with the amount the developers have made from the extra space they got?

The standard penalty is $5,000. Aggravated offenses sometimes run up to $25,000. But that’s a drop in the bucket from what developers are making off the bonus area. We had an appraiser evaluate one square foot of space in Manhattan at $500. Twenty million bonus square feet, the amount of extra floor space we calculated the city has allowed for buildings that put in these public spaces, translates to $10 billion in added value.

We also saw that there are patterns with developers. Privately owned public spaces are a way for developers to gain more space to build with, and some of them have used the zoning provision again and again, across multiple properties.

What was the city’s reaction to your reporting?

We have not received any response from the Department of City Planning or the Real Estate Board of New York, which represents developers and building owners.

One reader suggested this proposal: When the city gives a developer permission to build a public plaza, the developer would put money into a city fund that would be in charge of maintaining these spaces. This would create a centralized maintenance system where it would be the city’s responsibility to manage these spaces.

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