The Jersey City Planning Board is set to approve its master plan Tuesday, giving official guidance on a range of issues from detailed points of zoning law to big-picture visions of the future of New Jersey’s second-largest city.
The master plan is not a law, but a report on land-use issues facing the city and recommendations for how to solve them. Even though it’s not legally binding, the city and planning board are required to refer back to the master plan when making future zoning decisions.
The plan, will influence everything from bike lanes and parking spaces, to height restrictions and impermeable surface coverage, to high-level decisions like how to balance the need for development with benefits for the community.
”It’s a guiding document,” said Max Herman, an urban sociology professor at New Jersey City University. “It sends a message to potential developers and to potential merchants and people who want to develop businesses that these are the kinds of areas we’re going to focus on and this is how we’re going to do it.”
The board will approve three parts of the plan: the land use element, the open space element and the master plan vision.
The land use element is mostly concerned with “fixing some zoning that doesn’t work anymore,” said Tanya Marione, the director of planning.
She highlighted the “R-1″ zoning designation — that is, one- to two-family residential housing — as a particular problem for Jersey City dating back to the 1970s. At that time, many different zoning districts were collapsed into that one zone even if they were not similar to each other.
Now, R-1 zones are a major problem for the planning board. Although that zone comprises about 25% of land in the city, more than 50% of requests for variances come from it. Often residents ignore the zoning code entirely and build illegal projects, like a third unit on their two-unit lot.
The zoning encourages residents to create a “Bayonne Box” style of building by transforming their front yards into a private parking space, which ends up worsening the parking squeeze in that neighborhood. Adding this “curb cut” also interrupts the sidewalk and exacerbates flooding by not leaving any unpaved surfaces for rainwater to escape.
And when older, architecturally consistent buildings are torn down, they end up replaced with these kinds of buildings, Marione said, something residents complain about.
The problems with R-1 zoning, the largest single zoning district in the city, are “multi-faceted,” Marione said. But the master plan offers some first steps, including the creation of smaller, neighborhood-specific “Small Area Vision Plans,” instead of a one-size-fits-all model.
“We have to fix the legacy of some bad zoning in order to take away the issues that at this point it has created,” Marione said.
The city examined the “Lower Heights Area,” near Summit and Baldwin avenues; “The Junction” where Grand Street, Summit Avenue and Communipaw Avenue nearly intersect; and the area near the West Side Avenue light rail station.
Those small area plans relied on close engagement with local residents to produce recommendations. Mobility and safety was a top priority for the Lower Heights, especially crossing upper Route 139, also known as State Highway. At The Junction and the West Side Avenue Station area, revitalization, pedestrian safety and litter were major resident concerns that the plans addressed.
The open space element of the plan deals mostly with Jersey City’s parks. The report found that 94% of Jersey City residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park.
Still, “some of them are really small, they don’t have a lot of programming in them,” said Liz Opper, the city’s urban designer for planning. The challenge facing Jersey City regarding its parks is how to “enhance every square inch,” increase coverage so 100% of residents are within 10 minutes of a park and improve the programming and features of every park.
Finally, the planning board will take a vote on its master plan vision, a document that lists out in more abstract terms than the other two what direction Jersey City should head in for the next 10 years.
The report lays out a vision of the city that may already be familiar to residents, but on a larger scale: a city that prioritizes non-automobile transportation, that encourages dense population growth near transit centers, a “15-minute city” where every amenity a resident needs can be reached by a 15-minute walk.
The document is lighter on specific recommendations, and draws on work done in previous elements of the master plan like the circulation plan, which addressed transportation.
It emphasizes the need for bike lanes, greenways, measures to guarantee pedestrian and cyclist safety, as well as mass transit infrastructure like bus rapid transit and water transit options.
The document addresses the need for Jersey City to create an equitable and inclusive economy in the future. Part of that is striking the right balance between the needs of residents and the needs of developers. Marione said that tension is often played out while deciding what, if anything, developers should be responsible for providing in return for building in the city.
“We’ve been blessed as a city to be so close to places like New York that we can benefit from that increase in development,” Marione said, “but now that we’re at the place where we have this development and have this demand, we can start really looking to get some value back out of the zoning.”
The master plan vision also takes on the issue of climate change. It recommends measures like upgrading sewer and storm water infrastructure, building green infrastructure to collect rainwater, revising zoning rules to increase the amount of pervious land and retrofitting existing buildings to be more resilient in the face of flooding.
”Generally speaking, I would give this planning document high grades,” Herman, the sociology professor, said. “It’s an A report on paper, but then it’s up to the city to actually implement the plan and to give incentives to developers to abide by the plan.”
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He noted that one area the plan was deficient in was the people they surveyed for feedback, who skewed white and relatively young. That may have influenced why certain topics, like gentrification and affordable housing, did not receive more attention, Herman said.
All of the materials the planning board is voting on Nov. 30 were prepared with community input in mind. The process, which started about a year and a half ago, began with online surveys and featured online and in-person meetings.
Because the plan isn’t legally binding, there will be no city council vote. Marione said she expects the plan to be fully approved and finalized at the Nov. 30 meeting. Work on the historic preservation element of the plan will begin next year.
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