A person rides a bike past the Marriott hotel in Times Square on March 22, 2020. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
With the hospitality industry gutted by the pandemic, the de Blasio administration is quietly making good on a promise to restrict hotel development across the five boroughs — a policy sought by an influential union but panned by the mayor’s own planning department.
The Department of City Planning signed a $900,000 contract with the consulting firm VHB to produce an environmental impact statement — an exhaustive report required at the onset of major city land use actions — on a special permitting measure for new hotels.
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The contract was signed in January, but has not been previously reported. It marks the first significant step in forcing all hotel development through the City Council's land use process — a priority long sought by the influential Hotel Trades Council, which handed Mayor Bill de Blasio the most significant endorsement of his short-lived presidential run.
City Hall characterized the impact statement as an exploratory effort to see whether the policy makes sense citywide.
"Since the start of this administration, we have examined ways to better regulate construction of hotels across the city, including the use of a special permit process citywide," mayoral spokesperson Julia Arredondo said in a statement. "The Department of City Planning is working on its study regarding the measure, and we look forward to reviewing the results."
The administration has alluded to a departmental study for more than a year, but officials have not mentioned the pursuit of a formal impact statement. The contract runs through February of next year, which would theoretically leave enough time for the policy to traverse the public review process and become law before de Blasio leaves office.
The contract does include a preliminary study, and city planning spokesperson Melissa Grace said if the city decides not to move past that stage, it can cancel the remainder of the pact. However, multiple land use experts and former city officials said that it is highly unlikely the administration would sign a contract to pursue all of the formalities of an environmental impact statement unless it planned to go forward with a land use application.
The Hotel Trades Council has sought a restriction on new hotel growth for more than a decade and has succeeded in achieving piecemeal restrictions under both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations. The policy requires new hotel projects to go through a roughly yearlong permitting process that ends with a vote from the labor-friendly Council — home to members such as Speaker Corey Johnson who reached their perch with support from HTC.
As recently as 2018, the planning department characterized a blanket restriction on hotel development as unduly harming the travel and tourism industry, and has cast doubt that a viable land-use rationale exists to justify the policy. However, planners appeared to do an about-face around the time of de Blasio's ill-fated presidential bid last year — a campaign that HTC subsequently endorsed and showered with cash.
The mayor has justified the policy as necessary to protect neighborhoods from the ills of hotels, which he argues are more intrusive than other projects built as-of-right, outside of the Council-controlled process.
“When a hotel comes in, you’re talking about a lot more activity, vehicular traffic, folks staying in the hotel,” de Blasio said during a television appearance last year. “It has an impact that’s different than a residential building, for example.”
Yet the world has been upended since the contract was signed, and new hotel construction seems to be the least of the city's current worries.
The industry has been decimated by Covid-19. Year-over-year occupancy for New York City hotels is down more than 50 percent, according to data from STR, and a full recovery nationwide is up to four years away, according to current predictions. That suggests that many of the 8,000 rooms in the New York City pipeline that have not begun construction will be delayed or scrapped, at least until business and tourism activity picks up again.
“We will see some projects breaking ground, but it will be a much lower number than in 2018 and 2019,” said Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights at STR.
The union, too, is a far different entity than it was when it backed de Blasio, with swaths of its membership laid off and its longtime leader, Peter Ward, recently retired.
And whether or not the administration plans to enter the special permit policy into public review next spring, the $1 million initiative remains on track — executed at a time of scarce resources at the planning department, when officials have acknowledged a backlog of projects and a budget crunch.
The land use process has been on hold for months, and Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Vicki Been said during a recent webinar that the administration has developed a decision matrix to determine which projects and rezonings will get priority over others that will have to wait.
“Does this project provide services, infrastructure, housing in a neighborhood disproportionately affected by Covid?” she asked. “Does it bring infrastructure that can help the city recover? Does it bring jobs and what kind of jobs and to what neighborhoods?”
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August 26, 2020 at 04:00PM
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With industry in free fall, De Blasio quietly pursues citywide hotel restriction sought by union - Politico
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