commercial overlay
Could someone please explain exactly how a commercial overlay works? My big question is do you basically take the FAR of the commercial overlay and add it to the FAR of the residential zone to achieve the max FAR (providing of course that the floor area of each use does not exceed its component FAR)?…
Could someone please explain exactly how a commercial overlay works? My big question is do you basically take the FAR of the commercial overlay and add it to the FAR of the residential zone to achieve the max FAR (providing of course that the floor area of each use does not exceed its component FAR)?
Than can you just add the FAR for the community facility the same way?
You should take the advise of Flatbushwhacker, find an Architect within the NYC limits.
See last paragraph of Flatbushwhacker’s 2:56 post. There are a whole bunch of permutations and combinations (e.g.: corner lot, through lot, historic district) beyond the ones OP identified (community facility bonus, quality housing program). It really makes sense to hire professional assistance.
For practical purposes you can only do 2.0 FAR of commercial if it’s a purely commercial building. If it’s a mixed-use building, commercial uses cannot be above the first floor, effectively limiting you to something less than 1.0 FAR, since part of your first floor needs to be lobby spaces for upstairs uses. You could have a full-coverage first floor, but upper floors have to provide a rear yard.
You can have as much commercial use in the cellar as you want, since the cellar doesn’t count as floor area. But you’d probably need to use your cellar for parking, since C1-1 has a very high parking requirement for commercial uses.
If you’re at all serious about this, you need to hire an architect who really knows NYC zoning, and have him look at your site and tell you what’s permitted and what’s feasible.
Flatbushwhacker:
Thank you very much for the reply. I’d like to follow this up with another question to make this crystal clear to me.
We’re in an R6 district with a C1-1 overlay. The overlay gives me FAR 2, and we can do the quality housing thing, so the FAR for Residential is 3, as you said.
I look at the table (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/zone/zh_tables.pdf#r6-r7) and see that the community facility can be 4.8 for R6QH, as you already pointed out.
So according to what you say, all this means I can build a maximum of 4.8 overall, made up of let’s say 3.0 of residential and 1.8 of commercial (or 2.8 of residential and 2.0 commercial – or somewhere between the two cases), instead of 5.0 made up of 3.0 of residential and 2.0 of commercial.
Likewise, you’re saying I would not be able to just add them all together: 2.0 commercial + 3.0 residential + 4.8 community facility = 9.8 FAR overall, right?
Thanks again
The maximum allowable FAR for a mixed building is the same as the maximum for whichever of the permitted uses is highest. So you can max out each component’s permitted FAR, but the total FAR can’t exceed the highest permitted for any one use.
For example, if you’re in an R6/C2 district you could have a total of 4.8 FAR, which is the allowable FAR for community facility. Of this amount, up to 1.0 FAR could be for commercial, and up to 2.43 FAR could be for residential use (3.0 FAR for residential if you build on a wide street under quality housing.