Time for a Moratorium on the Moratorium Talk?

It is high time to demand concrete actions be taken to safeguard our neighborhood. CG CORD is calling for a BUILDING MORATORIUM effective immediately! In a remarkable show of grassroots derring-do, a group known as CORD has succeeded in getting thousands of Carroll Gardens residents to sign a petition demanding a moratorium on all new construction over 50 feet. The group’s accomplished this in a few short months by posting regular updates on community message boards; bringing its concerns to the fore of neighborhood meetings; sending out mass email updates (like the one quoted above); and rallying support so there are monuments to the CORD cause scattered throughout Carroll Gardens, most impressively at the Smith Street site where a developer intends to build a 70-foot building. But are the calls for a moratorium realistic, and is there any precedent for such an action? Not really, and no.

For starters, the Department of City Planning has already pledged to study Carroll Gardens with a mind to rezoning it. Even if there was the will within the department to consider a moratorium, such an effort would almost certainly drag out the rezoning process. Further, a building moratorium would require an environmental impact study followed by ULURP—basically the same things a rezoning would require, steps that can take a few years. The biggest difference—and hitch to CORD’s plan—is that there’s no precedent for a building moratorium. As far as anyone we’ve talked to could recall, there hasn’t been an instance of the city enacting a moratorium in recent memory, although there have been cases of communities calling for them (for example, on Staten Island).

Although it seems doubtful that a moratorium will come to pass, CORD’s done an impressive job of drawing attention to the fact that Carroll Gardens’ outdated, as-of-right zoning leaves the door open for developers to construct buildings that could disrupt the look and feel of the neighborhood. Councilman Bill de Blasio says he lobbied City Planning for two years to downzone Carroll Gardens but only got a commitment from the department to study downzoning this June, and he credits CORD’s activism with helping to change the department’s mind. Although he says that in an ideal world, “we could achieve a legal moratorium right now,” in the real world, “rezonings are the only way to achieve what the community is looking for.” The question now for CORD is whether it’s possible that a single-minded focus on a building moratorium could end up undermining their cause by sidetracking rezoning efforts. Because if that happens, no one wins—not CORD, not the city, and certainly not Carroll Gardens.
Calls for Reining in Development at Carroll Gardens Meeting [Brownstoner]
City Planning to Look at Carroll Gardens Downzoning [Brownstoner]