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Better Cities Project
  • Home
  • About Us
    Our Vision
    BCP’s vision is that free-market municipal policy solutions are broadly available, widely acceptable, and regularly employed, enabling American cities to achieve their full potential as engines of economic prosperity. We reject the idea that cities are lost to free-market principles or policies.
    Our Mission
    BCP uncovers ideas that work, promotes realistic solutions, and forges partnerships that help people in America’s largest cities live free and happy lives.
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    Address

    304 S. Jones Blvd #2826
    Las Vegas NV 89107

    Phone

    (702) 608-2046‬

    Hours

    Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.

    Email

    info@better-cities.org

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Home Economic Prosperity

A path forward for downtown development

The challenge of building downtown is not insurmountable, one city is succeeding.

Patrick TuoheybyPatrick Tuohey
October 24, 2023
in Clean, Open and Fair Government, Community, Growth and Housing, Economic Prosperity
Reading Time: 2 mins read
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New Rochelle

Main Street New Rochelle, photo credit: K. Friend

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Cover of New Rochelle study

Maggie Eastland at The Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece a few weeks ago about the success that New Rochelle, New York has had in increasing the construction of housing in its downtown.

Since 2015, New Rochelle added 2,500 new housing units and approved nearly 4,000 more. What leaders did there can be instructive for policymakers across the country. “We have a model that can be replicated,” Mayor Noam Bramson told the Journal reporter, who added,

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New Rochelle is emerging as a potential blueprint for overcoming the various political, financial and community obstacles that have made efforts to build multifamily housing in the suburbs an often insurmountable task.

In fact, there is such a blueprint. In 2021 BCP published, “Zoning & Permitting Innovations Unlock Opportunity,” co-authored by Salim Furth, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Phil Wharton, who oversaw the project in New Rochelle for RXR Realty.

In my years researching municipal economic development policy, I’ve learned that developers are OK with being told no, though they prefer a yes. The worst answer they can get is maybe or, “Apply for approval and let’s see.” The startup costs for development projects are high, and to incur costs with no certainty of completion date or even approval only drives them higher.

New Rochelle’s leadership worked with RXR to do the environmental impact analysis and public discussions early. In doing so, they developed a process by which RXR — and other developers — could meet public priorities without incurring the costs of a drawn-out and uncertain future. This was a dramatic improvement. Over the previous eight years, the downtown saw no significant development.

The paper spells out exactly what New Rochelle did to spur this development. A video discussion with the authors and New Rochelle’s Mayor Bramson is available here.

 

Tags: Economic DevelopmentHousing AffordabilityPolicyRegulationRental HousingZoning
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Patrick Tuohey

Patrick Tuohey

Patrick Tuohey is co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project. He works with taxpayers, media, and policymakers to foster understanding of the consequences — sometimes unintended — of policies such as economic development, taxation, education, and transportation. He also serves as a senior fellow at Missouri's Show-Me Institute and a visiting fellow at the Virginia-based Yorktown Foundation for Public Policy.

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