What Tehran could learn from New York City’s experience with local participation (Part 2)
Finding the right balance between participation, governance and markets
A few weeks ago, I participated in an online conference with professional urbanists and community activists from Iran to discuss ways to make city government more accountable in decisions like land use (what gets built where) and the delivery of services. There was general agreement that cities in Europe and the US are more responsive, and thus a colleague in Tehran, knowing my background, asked me if there were any lessons New York might have for Tehran.
My reply was: well, yes and no.
Some of New York’s framework might be a starting point for Iranian urbanists and activists. First all, like all cities, New York must respond to a number of core demands or pressures and so applies to Tehran as well. Cities must maintain their economic and fiscal health, making sure revenues cover the amenities and public services necessary for the city economy to keep running smoothly. Chief among these are transportation, public safety and ease of doing business so as to attract tax paying households and business. Cities also must maintain civil harmony and social cohesion among diverse social, ethnic or racial groups and economic classes, each with divergent interests and demands. Cities are also nested within a larger governmental system with which they must negotiate for resources and permissions; Tehran’s relationship with the central government parallels that between New York City and New York State in that both are subject to laws and decisions made by higher levels of government. And all governments must maintain a certain legitimacy if they are to maintain power. Transparency, responsiveness and accountability can be a way to address concerns with corruption or local capture by powerful interest groups.
At the end of the day, whatever the system of local participation, they should be evaluated in terms of their contribution to these more or less universal objectives. These points of similarity made my colleague’s question reasonable, and as this blog has been arguing the two cities’ many differences are not always a reason that what works in one place cannot work in the other.
The “menu of participation”: voting, talking, organizing, lobbying, legislating, litigating, protesting, and moving (voting with one’s feet).
Another lesson to learn from New York’s complex system is that “participation” should be defined broadly to cover the full range of the seven or eight types of ways citizens can try to exert influence. The usual “menu of participation” open to New Yorker’s are: voting, talking (or “deliberating” such as in neighborhood meetings or in the public media), organizing, lobbying, legislating, litigating, protesting, and moving, i.e. voting with one’s feet. Moreover, we should not overlook a broader definition which includes legislating as a form of public participation; after all, government regulations (ie city planning regulations) are imposed in the name of a purported “public” interest as decided by elected representatives, and designed by specialists (or technocrats). All these forms of participation can be seen playing out in the domain of land-use decisions in NYC.
New York City’s system of local participation: “good enough” or too much of a good thing?
New York City has a well-organized system of public review for any land use development that requires a modification to the current zoning regulations. This system operates within a broader context of political and legal rights, enabling a wide range of forms of public participation: voting in elections, political party competition, interest group lobbying, unionization and collective bargaining, free media coverage of local issues, organizing in civic associations and so on. In Iran, each one of these is either effectively absent or, as in the case of voting, highly restricted and manipulated.
New York’s system of public participation in land use decisions incorporates input from multiple levels and types of representation, from the 59 community boards and five borough leaders (both bodies have only an advisory role), to the 13-member City Planning Commission (a technocratic body made up of mostly Mayoral appointees), and finally the 51-member City Council that must ultimately approve major changes into zoning law. The system is designed to be transparent and orderly; it is designed, in theory, to follow a predictable clock of about 7 months from the time applicants file a formal land use application with the Department of City Planning (DCP) to the end of the ULURP process, after which (if approved) the developer applies for the necessary building permits. An adequate and predictable time-frame is critical in securing two objectives: (1) Allowing residents and their representatives to review and have some input. And (2) providing developers the ability to estimate the cost of the approval process (which will of course become factored into the final costs of development) as well as providing adequate signals to the real estate market about future development in the city. Unfortunately the reality in NYC falls far short of this orderly and predictable process due to an overgrown, complex and cumbersome thicket of regulatory hurdles, resulting in the land-use approval process taking an additional two or more years of delay.
A 2022 report from NYC’s Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) which conducted a detailed review private zoning applications found that the median application took two and a half years (rather than 7 months intended by the law) much of which was devoted to the city’s environmental review process. This two year delay is estimated to increase development costs by up to 16 percent, adding between an astonishing $60k to $70k cost to residential units. Building on these findings, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration published a major report calling for a thorough review and streamlining of the land-use regulatory process to reverse what it decried as the “city of no” which blocks badly needed development for all New Yorkers:
The City’s ability to deliver affordable housing, support the creation of small businesses, and deliver capital projects for the benefit of New Yorkers depends heavily on three governmental processes: (1) City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR), (2) the Land Use approval process, and (3) the Department of Buildings’ permitting process. These three processes were created to safeguard the environment, ensure public participation, and protect public safety, respectively.
While these protections are necessary, these processes have become unnecessarily complicated, costly, and time-consuming—delaying critical projects like affordable housing. These increased costs are then passed down to New Yorkers in the form of higher rents, fewer units of affordable housing, and reduced job opportunities. In short, New York has become the “City of No”.
Let’s turn to the public participation component of the land-use review process. This input can be sometimes constructive or disruptive. For example, local activists and progressive (left-wing) city council members succeeded in blocking Amazon’s plan to build a headquarters in the city in 2019; they also voted against the city’s plan to rezone a decrepit former industrial area to allow new private sector investment. On the other hand, many major developments have proceeded despite widespread neighborhood opposition. (The extent to which community boards can be said to be truly representative of neighborhood preferences is an open question.)
Overall, the current system achieves a workable balance between four pairs of competing interests and perspectives:
1. professional vs. political
2. executive vs. legislative
3. city-wide vs. neighborhood standpoints
4. private sector vs. “public” interests.
What do these four dimensions look like in Tehran?
The first seems to be in place: Professional private consulting planning firms have a seat at the table with bureaucrats and politicians. But (2) is very weak in that elected local councils have almost no role in land use decisions. (It’s not clear how significant this is, however. After all, the central government ministry that is responsible for land-use presumably is answerable to the elected executive as well as the parliament. This is similar to Japan’s centralized system which experts view as quite successful.) Likewise (3) though is almost entirely absent, with neighborhood voices pretty much absent and on the brink of being eliminated. Regarding (4), while it is true that over 80 percent of Tehran’s real estate market operates in the private market (which surprises many people), the role of regime-aligned investors, large swaths of government-controlled land, and the absence of a transparent, independent judiciary that people can trust to adjudicate disputes over property-related transactions, renders the public/private balance opaque. The lack of transparency over the mushrooming of mall construction since 2010 throughout Tehran may be a case in point.
In sum, Tehran could do worse than aiming to balance the four dimensions in the way that New York does. The framework for organizing local participation in land use in the city that never sleeps contains some useful elements for reformers in Tehran as they envision city government over the long term, but only trial and error will reveal what approaches might work in the Iranian context. This being said, I have two major concerns about considering NYC’s model relevant for Iran. The first is that New York’s land use system may be overly regulated and in some ways perhaps excessively participatory.
The problem with too much regulation and local participation
New York City, a leading global city attracting immigrants from around the world and with a growing population, produces far less housing than it needs. One of the results is that the city is facing a housing affordability crisis and plummeting housing production, and many experts argue the cause is excessive regulation and public participation, including in some cases, environmental reviews of projects.
Government restrictions have often blocked the production of higher density housing as government responds to the NIMBYism of participatory locals. Many leftists applaud measures that obstruct real estate development as a way of countering a so-called “neo-liberal” urban system allegedly designed only for the benefit of a minority group of capitalist investors. In defense of such opposition, critics often assert that “we cannot build our way out of the housing crisis”; while it is true that increased supply will not address entirely the housing needs of the poorest sections of the population, there can be no long term solution without increasing market-rate housing production which then “filters” down. Thus in NY there is a widespread complaint that every type of development – even the 80 percent of housing development that does not go through public review (so-called “as-of-right” development) – is subject to far too much regulation. (Recall I suggested we view government regulations as an indirect form of participation, in the form of legislation.) It is true that 40% of Manhattan’s buildings and almost the same percentage of all residential buildings in the city could not be built today under the zoning code developed in 1961. Stringent height, bulk, and density restrictions have choked off the supply of housing in the city.
The direct result is exorbitant land and housing prices that hurt the working and middle class of the city and by making migration to the city harder, stifles the local economy.
This has led to proposals by the NY State Governor to call for reforming restrictions on building in the state including calling for the removal of the current height restrictions for residential buildings in NYC (now capped at 12 FAR). Unfortunately the suburban “homevoters” interests forced her to scrap some these plans for now but the pressure behind these proposals will probably not go away. In sum, there is a growing acknowledgment of the fact that restrictions on supply is one cause of the lack of affordable housing in major cities in the US.
This is in sharp contrast with cities such as Tokyo that do not restrict supply through density regulations and which allow the market to respond to demand, such that housing prices have not increased over the last decades despite increasing population.
Maintaining adequate supply is important to maintain affordability of the housing market, something cities such as San Francisco or New York have struggled to do as the chart below shows.
Many housing activists and professionals in Tehran appear committed to restrictive regulations similar to those in New York City and other large American cities. I have heard the same “supply skepticism” in Tehran. Yet housing affordability is deteriorating in Iran: between 1993 and 2014, the share of housing in household expenditures rose from 26 to 36 percent and the ratio of average home price to average annual household expenditure rose from 7 to 12, which places Iran in the least affordable category somewhere between Sydney and Hong Kong. According to the government the lowest income groups spend 90 percent of income on housing and food. Affordability in Tehran and other large cities is a real problem too: renters pay over 60 percent of their income on housing.
Iran may have some of the least affordable housing in the world, somewhere between Sydney and Hong Kong. Affordability in Tehran is a real problem: some renters pay over 60 percent of their income on housing.
Given these trends, it’s possible that these activists will face pushback similar to their American counterparts. If regulation and participation hurt the welfare of the poor and working class of Tehran as they have in New York, this could incite a backlash in a context where transparency is far less normalized. Indeed, an increasing number of critics have decried the way regulations have “frozen” the population, size, and density of cities such as Tehran. They argue that this negatively impacts housing affordability for residents and for migrants seeking to move to, and around, the city for job opportunities. In other words, Tehran might want to avoid the way government land-use regulations and NIMBY-type groups have added to the housing woes in New York City.
