Burnham’s Blog

New York City has undertaken a number of significant rezoning efforts in recent years. The latest change received City Council approval on August 9, 2017, the rezoning of a section of Midtown Manhattan known as East Midtown.The amendment of the Zoning Resolution of the City of New York is intended to encourage development in a major business center. The inability to construct larger-scale office towers has slowed growth in East Midtown. Rezoning the area to encourage development while accounting for the needs of different stakeholders has been a number of years in the making.

Recent residential high-rise fires are calling attention to sprinkler and other fire safety code requirements in the United States. While the horrific Grenfell Tower fire in London has received a great deal of press, the July Honolulu residential high-rise fire that killed three people is more representative of conditions in many American cities.The 36-floor Marco Polo was built in 1971, predating Honolulu’s 1975 law requiring sprinkler systems. An automatic sprinkler system would have expedited fire extinguishment and prevented the deaths.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation (National Trust) provides historic designations and advocates for the preservation of historic buildings throughout the country. The organization assists with funding efforts to save threatened structures and proposes ways to preserve buildings as part of sustainable development. The organization advocates for Adaptive Reuse, a preservation strategy that develops existing buildings for new uses without demolition or severe loss of historic character.

One of these efforts involved the thorough study of the role of older buildings in modern cities by the Preservation Green Lab, leading to the development of the ReUrbanism Initiative and the “Atlas of ReUrbanism”, an outline of the benefits of mixed-aged cities that we’ll explore in this post.

image credit: Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash

Chicago and other cities across the globe are undertaking resilience planning to respond to climate change and other stresses on our communities. In 2016, Chicago’s first Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), Aaron Koch, was appointed. The CRO’s office is currently working on Chicago’s Resilience Strategy, projected to be released in the fall of 2017. However, important resilience planning affecting Chicago is also being conducted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) as part of their comprehensive plan. It is important to be aware of CMAP’s planning process and resilience recommendations because they will shape future decisions about building design, land use, and infrastructure.

Earlier this year, the City of Denver unveiled changes to their permitting processing within the City’s Community Planning and Development Department (CPDD) and Development Services Department (DSD). The updates affect commercial building permitting and expedite application submittals by combining some eligible Zoning and Building Code Reviews into a concurrent process. Detailed below, the City of Denver’s changes offer new procedures for obtaining necessary permits more quickly for projects of all complexities, sizes, and scopes.