In Defense of Shadows

Please note: While New York City is where the bulk of examples in this piece came from, the arguments can be extended to most major American cities mired with excessive zoning regulations.

Community Board? Good luck with that

It was a breezy spring day in early 2018. On my iPhone, I pulled up once again the address shown on the bulletin of the NYC.gov community board meetings site for CB2, just to double check–I couldn’t believe that this damp, gray and unwelcoming building before me in the middle of Chelsea was an elementary school. It took me five minutes to get up the guts and head in. I knew what I was in for: an ugly shouting match between frustrated and beleaguered city planners, and a room full of peculiar, yet very vigorous homeowners, hoping to keep their neighborhoods just the way it was. I remember leaving the meeting slightly disenchanted with what I heard, and slightly deafened by how loud one specific gentleman was.

Needless to say, I went to that board meeting because it was (ironically) a part of my Historic Preservation class assignment. I have since learned that most CB meetings in the city are characterized by the same intensity and, uh, vitality. It’s hard to imagine anyone finding the discourse that goes on there pleasant, even the most passionate residents who routinely show up.

Big trouble from the big shortage

Cities like New York are facing a severe, ongoing housing shortage. Barring some denialist arguments (such as this one which is sadly inching close to 30k likes on Twitter), everyone agrees more people deserve to live in comfortable spaces, located where they prefer, with dignity and without breaking their banks. Unfortunately, people who have already reached that status often engage in the worst form of gatekeeping by severely jacking up real estate prices where they live.

Obviously, this is never their openly declared intent: One can put together a long list of words that should be eyebrow-raising from the get go; “new buildings create shadows” is one of the worst offenders.

To be fair, this is not a new concern. A century ago, New Yorkers still rode horse carriages, wore hats that added at least five inches to their heights, and most notably, protested against skyscrapers whose footprints took up entire blocks & sprung up for more than three dozen stories. At a time when sunshine and ample airflow was believed to cure all infectious diseases, people were nuts over how much sun these comically huge buildings blocked! As a result, the infamous 1916 Zoning Resolution was passed. It introduced mandatory “setbacks”, seen in skyscrapers from the Empire State Building to the UN headquarters, and its impact still reverberates to this day.

I am not here to analyze the triumphs and failures of the 1916 resolution. However, I do believe that after all these years, people still come to think about shadows the same way they did a century ago; that they are fundamentally undesirable, dampen any corner of the city they reach, and introduce danger whenever they’re present. This is an ingenuous misunderstanding of the role shadows play.

Shadows are good, actually

Take a trip down memory lane to the cities you have traveled to, in Europe, Asia, or some parts of the US and beyond. The gathering places are almost always vendor-lined streets where people are close to one another, buildings are close to one another, and there’s always opportunity to take some respite in the shades when the sun is too brutal. At night, many of these streets are guaranteed to become more vital, with people taking over entire sidewalks or even car lanes.

Subconsciously, we all know that providing areas to shield people from the sun makes places more livable. Somehow, rhetorically, we never acknowledge it. A big reason why New Yorkers embrace their city on foot is because you’re not perpetually exposed to the sun when it’s hot out! The Hudson River Park, Central Park, and Prospect Park are more than enough when people want to soak up some vitamin D, but come the humid summer months, I bet most people would rather indoor spaces to be reasonably cool without completely blocking window views with blinds.

Skyscrapers these days still obey setback rules, but given new engineering breakthroughs, they can contain many more units in a more slender profile, thus minimizing their disruption to the neighborhood they’re built in. This is why on some occasions, you hear legitimate complaints on how a building is too commanding in a neighborhood full of uniform, low-profile tenement buildings (West Village, for instance); on most occasions, however, neighborhoods are arbitrarily bunched together as a living organism, and new constructions are treated as a virus ready to infect & ruin the area.

Think Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side: Two neighborhoods that are notably middle-upper class, neither of which uniformly built in one single period. It is fair to say they are architecturally so diverse that new buildings, by the time their proposals moved beyond the initial paperworks and analyses & are being discussed at community boards, are already scaled down enough to not disrupt any existing “neighborhood character” (another word often touted as an excuse). But these neighborhoods are also the notorious NIMBY centrals of Manhattan.

…but they don’t think so

There are two names behind these two communities’ ardent activism at CB meetings: Greenwich Village Society of Historic Preservation (GVSHP) and Landmark West (LW). Both organizations have very noble mission statements and deny that they are anti-construction. I will leave that up to your interpretation; personally, though, I believe that no new developments will ever fully satiate GVSHP or LW’s requirements if, hypothetically, they were granted full control and/or the right to veto.

I personally do not harbor too much hostility against these organizations, since they legitimately have preservationists and art historians who value the significance of valuable buildings among their members. As a whole, though, they routinely assemble and show up at CB meetings, funneling the most development-averse people who clearly aren’t architecture experts to participate and protest. The “shadows bad” argument is one of many terms that humanize and legitimize their word salads, which has little to do with architectural merit but a whole lot with “my condo’s Zestimate value should never dip below $2 million”.

What makes it all more hypocritical is the fact that their neighborhoods likely benefit from said shadows. Upper West Side, right next to one of the most revered urban park in the world AND the riverfront, is so luxuriously surrounded by access to the sun that it’s unthinkable residents there believe their homes should also be sun-soaked throughout the day. This neighborhood has a history of being vocal, yet I still believe none of their complaints can match the foolishness of expecting a monopoly of sunshine in a neighborhood that’s historically dense. Greenwich Village is no different, as office spaces have been consistently expanding below 14th Street for years; NYU, an institution that I’ve called home for four years and guaranteed the economic vitality of the area, also has plenty of buildings beyond ten stories. None of them have threatened the pristine brownstones and prewar Baroque co-ops that define how we identify Greenwich Village. Neither did their shadows. While there’s no Central Park here, Washington Square Park remains at the heart of the village, and is always brimming with people of all sorts of identities. Surprise, there is sun there!

to wrap this up

Americans tend to embrace traveling to destinations known for their dense cityscapes. Some of the cities most choked with tourists (before COVID-19) were Paris, Venice, Bangkok, Mexico City, and Tokyo; every one of these cities is easily denser than New York, the densest major city in the US. It’s still a mystery to me why many find these places so addictively charming on honeymoons, yet they won’t let their own neighborhoods become this way.

Likewise, we are long past the age when the sun is considered the ultimate cure-all secret potion. The UV rays cause skin cancer, the heat it emits penetrate glass windows and subsequently gets trapped there; given how few residential buildings have embraced floor-to-ceiling windows, we just know people aren’t truly into them. Their excuses might crumble, but their sentiment remains, on display at every community board meeting in perpetuity.

If you are not a stakeholder in all this and do not have real estate values’ fluctuation as a part of your calculus, I just need you to acknowledge one thing: Shadows are good, actually.