Chair Riley asks how community vision will shape White Plains Road zoning

Okay.

As we approach the conclusion of the community engagement phase, how is the city planning to incorporate the community's shared vision into the zoning framework that facilitates much-needed affordable housing while balancing the community's input on size and scale of buildings?

So, although we've been engaging community for quite some time, that will continue significantly.

So, right now we are at the stage, as you know, Councilmember, of starting to really pull together a draft zoning framework.

We have not moved into public review yet with that project and taking your feedback, Councilmember Dinowitz, as well as the working group and community before we can even really move forward with a study.

And so we are incorporating what we heard from community members around the need for growth.

As you know, I joined you and members of the community on our walk shop, and we walked through the neighborhood to really figure out.

the different nodes and connections within White Plains Road where we can accommodate much more growth, but also places where we know there's sensitivity based on homeowners and other sorts of low-scale characteristics of the neighborhood.

So that work is underway.

We have been in conversation, right, to make sure that we're figuring out a draft zoning that really makes sense, but we really need to have conversation with community members first to really get to where we need.

We will then move that into public review and start studying the zoning while we also talk about all of the other components of the project, jobs, commercial vitalization, street safety, public realm, all of the things that are critical to a neighborhood plan.

So we have a long road ahead of continued conversations with you as well as with the community.