Most cities say they want more development. Few have done the hard work of actually making it easy. The typical American municipal permitting process is a gauntlet of community meetings, zoning variance requests, environmental reviews, and political negotiations that can stretch a project from conception to groundbreaking across years of uncertainty. Developers price that uncertainty into their decisions, and the cities that created it wonder why the investment doesn’t come. New Rochelle, a city of roughly 80,000 people in Westchester County, about 25 minutes from Manhattan by train, decided more than a decade ago to do something different. What it built since then, more than a billion dollars in private investment, thousands of new housing units, and a pipeline of projects that keeps growing, is starting to look like one of the more instructive case studies in urban development policy seen so far.The foundation was laid about eleven years ago, when the city made a decision that required significant political will and a willingness to rethink how municipalities relate to the development process. “About 11 years ago we streamlined the process of approving new development,” said Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert...
RSK: Madison and several of the cities surrounding it, might benefit from doing this.
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- - Volume: 26 - WEEK: 27 Date: 6/30/2026 3:20:46 PM -