Arrested Development
Why Zoning Reform Isn’t Enough to Get Projects Built
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In 2013, I joined a small company that wanted to open a Montessori preschool in Brooklyn. We’d zeroed in on a landmarked building in a historic district. It needed extensive work, but the prospect of bringing a long-vacant space back to life in a family-friendly neighborhood seemed worth the risk. What made the site especially attractive was its zoning: preschool was allowed by right, so we wouldn’t have to go through a lengthy, expensive, and unpredictable rezoning process. As we would discover, that advantage didn’t matter. Getting the project through the development process would prove far more difficult than expected—and would ultimately send our contractor to prison.
New York’s permitting system didn’t just delay our project. It transformed what should have been a straightforward renovation into something far more complex and uncertain. In many cities, a project can be legal at every step and still fail to get built. In that sense, what we call “permitting” systems don’t actually grant permission.
They don’t just regulate development—they arrest it.
The problem in Brooklyn was that the most straightforward design could not satisfy the competing requirements of multiple agencies all at once. The building code required ADA compliance, which meant adding a ramp and elevator. The ramp conflicted with Department of Transportation rules governing the sidewalk. Both changes altered a historic facade, triggering review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. And everything still needed approval from the Department of Health. The only path forward was a total redesign. It required reengineering the entrance at the expense of precious classroom space, all of which delayed construction and added significant cost. We assembled a small army to navigate the approvals: a construction consultant, a permit expediter, a preservation consultant, and eventually a lobbyist. We met with elected officials to secure their support, and then we relied on them to apply pressure on agencies when our project inevitably got stuck in the process. In practice, getting approvals meant not just satisfying the rules, but navigating the politics around them.
Even that wasn’t enough. The delays and shutdowns pushed our contractor into insolvency. He resorted to fraud to stay afloat—a fact we only discovered after months of inexplicable inactivity on site. Complexity doesn’t justify criminality, but a simpler system might have avoided it. We eventually got our preschool open, but not before spending millions of extra dollars, missing more than an entire school year, losing hired teaching staff and enrolled families, and having to change contractors midway.
New York is an extreme example of dysfunction, but less drastic versions of this kind of development hell are common in many cities.
