Permission to Innovate: Transforming the Permitting Landscape

PlacemakingUS recently hosted the NYC Public Realm Roundtable at Pratt Institute School of Architecture with a halo of stars, including Mayor Adams' Office of the Public Realm, the incredible Department of Transportation (NYC DOT), leading firms in the cities-for-people space like Street Plans and Street Lab, and think-and-do tanks like the Design Trust for Public Space, Urban Design Forum and the Alliance for Public Space Leadership.

It was an incredible event to be a part of and to organize from afar. To put it together, I spent a lot of time on the phone listening to New Yorkers kvetch about what's keeping their city from achieving the public realm greatness of international peers they highlighted, like Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris, and Montreal.

And when it came down to it, by the 15th call, I was pretty surprised to be hearing the same lamentations I've gleaned from my own city, and towns across the country: our local permitting systems are squeezing the creativity, connectedness and joy out of American civic life.

I know the story well from my own experience, long before I ever picked up the phone and dialed a 212 number. If you want to host a public space activation for your community, be prepared to fill out a ton of paperwork at a pre-determined time, get signatures from those affected by the "inconvenience," and pay a hefty fee before you're even assured that the permit will be issued. Once you receive your permit, you learn that this is a permit to get more permits. You might need a fire permit, a structural permit for a stage, a liquor permit, or a bunch of permits for individual food vendors. And don't get me started on insurance and three-compartment sinks!

And while I get it—I understand why we, in principle, need some ways of permitting these activities and that there is liability and bad actors and abusers out there—it's truly long past time we recognize the amount of positive activities, programs, and stewardship we're denying in our public spaces every day by treating everybody like they're unauthorized actors needing to go through this rigmarole to support their local park, provide an economic platform for neighbors wanting to start businesses, or create additional playspaces for children and social spaces for us all.

It was great learning about all the hard work being done in NYC to overturn this system, particularly the work of the Design Trust for Public Space. They recently completed a report called Neighborhood Commons: Reimagining Public Space Governance and Programming in Commercial Districts.

The report's methodology brilliantly reminds me of the famed Chicago Sun-Times endeavor to open a fake bar called The Mirage Tavern in the 1970s. By actually going through the steps of trying to open the aptly named "Mirage" Tavern, the reporters and a watchdog group were able to meticulously illustrate the corrupt and flawed aspects of the procedures, which were riddled with shake-downs and graft.

This isn't to say NYC's permitting process is run by Tammany Hall, but rather that the byzantine and inconsistent laws on the books and interdepartmental confusion create an impossible scenario for even trusted community-based organizations like Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Open Streets management organizations to maintain their noble efforts of creating, maintaining, and enlivening public space across the city.

Another thorough exploration of these issues as they relate in particular to BIDs is presented in the Regional Plan Association's recent report entitled, GO LOCAL! Nurturing Neighborhoods & Advancing Equity, which postulates that "the City has an extraordinary opportunity to catalyze equitable public space investment in all neighborhoods by lifting constraints and actively affirming BIDs and other place-based partners in less-resourced areas." The author of the report, Tim Tompkins, who formerly ran the Times Square Alliance and is the Founding Director of Partnerships for Parks, is on a mission to say this goes beyond the BIDs to impacting all public space partners, from Friends of the Parks organizations to Community Boards.

Now it's true: across the spectrum, the permitting process is not 100% impossible. We've encountered rare talented individuals who are permit masters. David Tamulonis, Events & Marketing Manager for the Erie Downtown Partnership, sits down one day a year with every department in his small city and gets hundreds of downtown activations permitted. He comes from a development background and is used to rigorous 18-month planning approaches and has adapted that to the lowly event permitting process.

In Portland, Oregon, they've made great strides towards simplifying permitting and creating more categories of permits with easy web access to facilitate the process under the banner, Portland in the Streets.
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When I ran a BID in Santa Ana, California, our city's permitting process was a real clunker, requiring you to show up at City Hall and drop off paper documents and handwritten checks. My incredible operations manager, Jose Romo, went toe-to-toe with the City, crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' such that the City eventually recognized the burden it was putting itself through and innovated to allow us to turn in one permit to cover up to six events, as well as simplifying and lowering the costs of pop-up vendors to a more equitable rate of $25/year for artisans and micro-retailers selling a few thousand dollars per year or less on our city streets.

And though there are these rare bright spots, I think a former Mayor of Denver said it best when he lamented that "our challenge in government is to create an atmosphere where people don't have to use up their creativity fighting the system."

Though well-resourced and employed experts are able to figure out the permitting systems, most citizens are left in the dark, and that results in a lack of their creativity and care hitting the streets in a meaningful way. 

The Better Block Foundation, a non-profit that specializes in turning underutilized public spaces into temporary demonstrations of vibrant areas, has dealt with dozens of permitting offices across the country. While they're quite adept and have honed their process to a 120-day start-to-finish approach, they encountered one city whose process was so overly complex that they hired a graphic artist to illustrate it. The resulting flowchart looked more complicated than the ones used to launch a SpaceX Super Heavy Rocket and demonstrates the need for cities to be aware of how they may be stifling lively, connected places in parks, plazas, commercial centers, and neighborhoods.

On the phone with New Yorkers, I was both saddened and inspired when I was put in touch with Trey Jenkins, a BID leader in the Bronx in the 161st Street BID adjacent to Yankee Stadium. Without losing his upbeat positive attitude, Trey explained to me the challenges he was surmounting to provide public space amenities and proof of concepts to garner public-private investments to give the Bronx the type of public space pizzazz you might encounter in Manhattan or Brooklyn. "This is the greatest city in the world," Trey added, "let's make it happen."

I heard a similar story from Tiera Mack, the Pitkin Avenue BID leader in Brownsville, Brooklyn. She wanted to create a small business opportunity and activate her public plaza, Zion Triangle, with a coffee cart, but a New York City Department of Parks & Recreation moratorium on concession agreements left the neighborhood uncaffeinated and the plaza underutilized.

Beyond the BIDs, we were even more shocked to hear about the permitting woes of the neighborhood organizations partnering with the City to run hundreds of Open Streets across the cities. These pandemic-era programs have iterated year after year to provide unprecedented social space, play streets, outdoor dining, and biking and walking paths throughout the boroughs. We visited the legendary 26-block 34th Avenue Open Street and an emerging gem on 31st Avenue, along with the incredible commercial strip in Brooklyn along Vanderbilt Avenue managed by a dedicated group of neighbors. It was tearful to hear about the way these community-managed social spaces had brought whole communities together, kept businesses thriving, and provided critical space for well-being and activity. And yet, these Open Streets need to reapply for their permit every single month. They need to apply for special permits for certain types of activities the community wants to do, they have to maintain robust insurance policies, and rely on wide networks of volunteers without paid staff. Despite all these challenges, they persevere and even have a network where they can cry on each other's shoulders and vie for advice.

An intriguing tale we encountered as we heard these stories was that of "The Hort," an equity-minded program of the Horticultural Society of New York that provides scaled services to these public space providers like the Open Streets and Plaza Programs across the City. The Hort gives one clue on how more services could scale up to support hundreds of public spaces across the City. Started as an entrepreneurial partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Horticultural Society of New York, The Hort began with a million dollars to provide those critical services that underpin these public spaces, including moving the barricades daily, landscaping, and maintenance. This program quickly proved its worth and has scaled to a $27 million NYC DOT contract, which underpins the success of most of the public-public partnership spaces we visited in areas outside of the uber-resourced Midtown Manhattan. This miracle at The Hort was lauded by all as a success and is a program that should be resourced, expanded, and brought to other cities. In addition, other platform services like insurance, gap funding, and even activities could follow a similar path.

We were exposed to another public space platform at Street Lab, a design studio that has created a library of temporary furniture for public space activation that works with philanthropy, institutions, and the City to provide prototypical furniture to Open Streets in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens so they can begin to figure out the more long-term needs and wants of the community. Truly inspiring and incredible work from those rising to the occasion in our nation's most urban and densely-populated landscape.

Through the action of the NYC Public Realm Roundtable, we heard the stories of individual actors experiencing pain points and red tape, where they should be invited as trusted partners to make great places for residents. We also learned these issues have been well-documented, and each of the plans mentioned above has a dozen recommendations put forth to streamline and enable positive action to move forward. Some of the participants in our roundtable, Jackson Chabot and Elana Ehrenberg, along with Rebecca Macklis of the Municipal Arts Society (MAS), even wrote an Op-Ed in May, Opinion: Free NYC’s Block Parties from Suffocating Red Tape, opining the same thing we're talking about here. So is there any hope?

There is a glimmer on the horizon. In May, Mayor Adams and the Small Business Services Division (SBS), which oversees 75 BIDs across the city, made an announcement aimed at addressing these issues. These include making $500,000 in grants available to offset insurance costs, launching a new "Trusted Partner" program to cut red tape for consistent partners delivering services and value to New York residents and visitors, and initiating a new pilot partnership with the Urban Design Forum. This partnership, called "Connected Corridors," will provide legal and logistical support to small BIDs like Trey’s and Tiera’s, who may have limited staff time to tackle giant recurring topics that can be better approached through a subject matter expert, third-party partner.

We're writing about this topic so that it doesn't just get tackled in New York City but to present all cities and citizens with the opportunity to take stock of their permitting process and recognize the dead and dangerous spaces that pervade our cities. These spaces could be co-activated by citizens through easier and less expensive processes. We got the good news that the Design Trust for Public Space has received funds to continue their work and continue to present their materials to the New York City Law Department, where they feel legal language and liability aversion are where the rubber needs to meet the road.

If there are cities out there, philanthropies, political action groups, or even economically-minded groups who see the potential of public space as a platform for the regeneration of our places and our economy, we hope you will get in touch and we can mutually support this body of work and this changing of the guard from one-size-fits-none to loosening the levers for many more to utilize public space for cultural activities, social gatherings, micro and mobile businesses, and health and well-being.

The other option is to watch as our public spaces continue to wither under bureaucratic constraints. It's time to break free and let our cities flourish with creativity and community spirit.

Story by Ryan Smolar
Photos by Ryan Smolar, TJ Maguire and Ethan Kent