Between 2003 and 2007, the Bloomberg Administration rezoned 18 percent of the city's property lots, according to a report issued today by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy of New York University.

The report found that 86 percent of the lots that were covered by 76 rezonings during that time had their building "envelopes" reduced or limited, or had limits placed on the kind of building that could be erected on them.

The cumulative effect of all the changes, however, was to increase residential capacity by 1.7 percent.

"While we find that on paper, the upzonings have added more capacity than the downzonings have taken away, we also find reason to doubt that all of this new capacity will be built out for residential use, and it remains unclear whether we are on track for creating enough new residential capacity to accommodate the one million new New Yorkers that are expected to live in the City by 2030," declared Vicki Been, the author of the report and the faculty director of the Furman Center.

The report found that the vast majority of new residential capacity was added in "transit rich areas (those within a half-mile walk of a rail entrance," which, it added, is "consistent with the City's announced goal of channeling growth" to such neighborhoods. "However," it continued, "the report also finds that a majority of downzoned lots were located in transit rich areas, raising questions about whether rezoning decisions are sufficiently coordinated with infrastructure planning."

An article by Kareem Fahim in today's edition of The New York Times noted that "The report suggests that the rezoning actions have created the capacity for as many as 80,000 new housing units, or as many as 200,000 more people, but city officials said they were on track to meet the population projections and were not relying on rezoning alone to provide new places for people to live."

"Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who has been an informal adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg," the article continued, "said that for decades, the city had been zoned for too many people, and that it was overdue for the kind of adjustment pursued by the Bloomberg administration."

"Rezoning mostly concerned with neighborhood preservation," it said, "was more likely to occur in census tracts with higher white populations and higher incomes, the report found, while lots where restrictions were loosened to allow for more density tended to be in census tracts with more black or Hispanic residents than the city median."