New Residential Zoning Rules Okayed

The City Planning Commission (CPC) has unanimously approved new zoning rules to help maintain the residential nature of Queens neighborhoods currently impacted by new houses of worship, large medical facilities, and new community facilities.
Already okayed by the City Councils Land Use Committee, the full Council is expected to approve the proposed rules next week.
CPC Chair Amanda Burden stressed the importance of the proposed rule changes, which are aimed at reducing land use conflicts.
The new regulations, according to Burden, are designed to cut neighborhood traffic congestion, parking conflicts, blocked backyards, and oversized buildings which have diminished the quality of life in primarily residential communities.
While limiting the size of certain community facilities in Queens low density residential neighborhoods, the new rules also promise opportunities to expand services where land use conflicts would be minimized.
City Council Land Use Chair Melinda Katz, who worked closely with the CPC in the development of these changes, called them "a great step in providing much-needed relief to our communities."
The rules had to change, Katz said, because transportation priorities to and from medical providers and houses of worship had changed as well.
"Adopting zoning changes to ensure the stability of our citys ever-changing communities is, and must continue to be, a city priority."
Key changes in the community zoning rules include:
Increasing parking lot requirements for some houses of worship based on the proximity of worshippers.
Banning large medical offices in single-family districts and limiting their size in one- or two-family districts.
Requiring parking lots in low-density communities with ten or more spaces to be screened with planting strips.
Hardest hit would be health care providers, many of whom jointly use medical facilities that generate heavy local traffic in residential zones. Under the proposed rule changes, new medical offices would be banned in one-family, R-1, and R-2 districts.
The new regulations will make it easier to locate houses of worship in light manufacturing districts. "Adult" uses in these districts would be prohibited from locating within 500 feet of new or existing houses of worship.
Zoning rules would also extend to providing increased light and air for adjacent homes and their rear yards in residential districts.
Germane to concerns about the heavy impact of houses of worship on local residential communities is the Sunday morning stop-and-go traffic bustle on Parsons Boulevard in north Flushing. Congregants are often seen busily hunting for parking spaces at about ten churches, synagogues, and a mosque. Nearby, a block away from a Seventh Day Adventist church, a new Salvation Army meeting place is under construction on an empty lot.