Was Jane Jacobs a YIMBY?

The legendary urbanist would be more open to New York's 'City of Yes' rezoning plan than many assume

This article originally appeared in Vital City, an excellent new policy journal focused on improving civic life in New York and cities across the country. It is republished here with permission.

Jane Jacobs’ writings, particularly her 1961 magnum opus, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” have achieved a Talmudic stature among urbanists. Her works are crackling with impassioned opinions about the ideal city that at times appear to contradict one another. Readers can — and do — endlessly parse her words for insight into contemporary urban planning debates. Followers of a certain faith like to consider how their messiah would respond to a given quandary: What would Jane do?

Jacobs in 1961, the year of Death and Life’s publication. (Credit: Phil Stanziola via Wikimedia Commons)

As New York City, under Mayor Eric Adams, embarks on its most significant rezoning since the year of the publication of “Death and Life,” the question is naturally being aired again. A recent article in Common Edge by one influential Jacobs admirer, Roberta Brandes Gratz, comes down definitively: “Jane Jacobs Would Reject NYC’s Proposed ‘City of Yes.’” 

Gratz, a well-respected urbanist whose books include “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,” argues that Jacobs would take issue with the “cataclysmic” height and density allowances permitted by the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity rezoning initiative. She further claims that Jacobs would oppose the demolition of historic buildings and the displacement of low-income tenants that, Gratz argues, will inevitably result from City of Yes. 

This is not just one person’s opinion. It seems to be a fairly widely held belief among those who are carrying the banner of Jacobs into the second quarter of the 21st century. But it stems from a very selective reading of the great urbanist. 

Gratz’s article comes as the debate over City of Yes reaches a fever pitch. Architectural preservation groups like Village Preservation have been some of the most vocal critics of the policy in Manhattan. However, most of the opposition to the proposal comes not from Jacobs’ old stomping grounds, but from low-density outer-borough neighborhoods where local leaders have voiced concerns about parking, traffic and demographic change, fearing that the city will become a “chaotic mess.” A map of community board support for the initiative published by City Limits resembles a map of car ownership across the five boroughs, with community boards in Manhattan and adjacent neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx largely in support, and more far-flung neighborhoods in opposition. 

Leaving aside Jacobs for a moment, both flavors of opposition to City of Yes tend to traffic in hyperbole. The City of Yes plan, often described by Adams as adding “a little more housing in every neighborhood,” would adopt commonplace zoning reforms that have recently been enacted in cities across the country. These include an end to parking requirements for new development, the legalization of accessory dwelling units like backyard cottages, a 20% density increase in exchange for all of the additional units being offered at below-market rates, and the legalization of four-story apartment buildings near subway stations. None of these policies would produce “cataclysmic” change anywhere close to the scale of Robert Moses’ urban renewal initiatives. 

As for Gratz’s other concerns, the city has in place policies to protect historic buildings and vulnerable tenants. Though imperfect, these policies are much stronger than those in most other American cities, and they’re not being touched by City of Yes. The purpose of the rezoning is to ameliorate the housing shortage. And on that score, it’s clear that it will make it easier to build new housing, and particularly affordable housing, throughout more of New York City.

The Genius of Vancouverism

But the question remains: Faced with City of Yes, what would Jane do?

Gratz implores people to actually read “Death and Life” before speculating. But the evidence she cites doesn’t fit her argument. She quotes from Chapter 10, “The need for aged buildings,” in which Jacobs writes, “The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.” Since a variety of building ages in a neighborhood presumably includes a smattering of new buildings, it’s hard to understand how Gratz reaches the conclusion that “City of Yes has no respect for this concept.”  

Elsewhere in her work, Jacobs offers perspectives that go against both Gratz and the larger community of outer-borough opponents of City of Yes.

In Chapter 13, “The self-destruction of diversity,” Jacobs reckons with the way “diverse” neighborhoods — her all-encompassing term for a diversity of residents, buildings and street activity — have a propensity to become victims of their own success. As a neighborhood becomes more desirable, “both visually and functionally, the place becomes more monotonous,” she writes. 

Jacobs effectively describes, if not defines, the process of gentrification as it is commonly understood. In the early 1960s, this process of aesthetic, demographic and economic change was already underway in her own neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Jacobs sees two potential ways of heading off this transformation. One is through “zoning for deliberate diversity.” This could look like the 1959 downzoning of the Village, where “[o]n certain streets, the height limitations for buildings were drastically reduced.” By preventing urban renewal-style redevelopment of the neighborhood, and preserving the existing, eclectic mix of old and new buildings, “sameness was being zoned out,” she writes. (This was before the establishment of historic districts, which put significant limitations on new construction in neighborhoods like the Village, regardless of zoning.)

A Genealogy of Gentrification

Here, Jacobs closely resembles Gratz’s portrayal. The solution to gentrification, in this view, is less development; preserving the cityscape as it was at a particular moment in time. But Jacobs concludes the chapter on a different note. “Defensive tools” like zoning can only go so far in combating gentrification, Jacobs writes. Cities also need structural solutions. “At bottom, this problem of the self-destruction of outstanding success is the problem of getting the supply of vital diversified city streets and districts into a saner relationship with demand.” In other words, more neighborhoods should be allowed to become more like the Village. 

This is essentially what City of Yes is intended to accomplish. The proposal is not unleashing developers to construct skyscrapers throughout the city. It will produce the most change, and has generated the most opposition, in outer-borough neighborhoods that have transit but not much transit-oriented development. Jacobs surely would have approved of the gradual densification of eastern Queens and Staten Island. She loathed “‘in-between densities — too low for cities, too high for suburbs,” calling them “as impractical for transportation as they are for other economic or social purposes.”

Jacobs was also, famously, no fan of cars. Part of her prescription for increasing the supply of lively neighborhoods was to get cars out of the picture. “So close and so organic is the tie between vital, diverse city districts and a reduction in absolute numbers of vehicles using their streets,” she writes. City of Yes’ provisions to end parking requirements and encourage development on the parking lots of schools and religious institutions would be welcomed by Jacobs, as Gratz concedes. 

Finally, the provisions in City of Yes that would make it easier to convert commercial buildings into housing offer a very direct means of increasing the diversity of neighborhoods that are today office monocultures. Jacobs would be glad to see more neighborhoods with “eyes on the street” 24 hours a day — not only from 9 to 5.  

So, Jacobs likely would have supported many, if not all, of the provisions of City of Yes. And even where she may have quibbled, Jacobs, unlike most City of Yes critics, would have understood its purpose. Jacobs’ later works are all about urban economics. Toward the end of her life, she was asked what she hoped she’d be remembered for most. Would it be standing up to Robert Moses, or changing the conversation on highways and urban renewal? No, she responded, “the most important thing I’ve contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen.”

“Housing reform must not be allowed to make house famines”

Surely, Jacobs the economist would see statistics like the city’s 1.4% residential vacancy rate, or a jobs/ housing imbalance of more than two to one over the 2010s, or that half of all households are rent-burdened, and think something needs to be done to increase the supply of housing. Perhaps she’d even recognize, as many housing experts and urban planners have, that City of Yes is actually quite modest in its ambitions. It’s projected to produce 100,000 additional homes over 15 years. That’s compared to the New York City area’s current housing need of over 500,000 homes, and a projected housing deficit of over 900,000 homes by 2035, according to a recent Regional Plan Association report. 

Some of Jacobs’ views have aged well, while others have not. But in the end, what interested her most was the life of the city. And life, by definition, entails growth. “A city cannot be a work of art,” she writes. To assume otherwise would be “to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.”