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OLIVER UNZONED MEDIA


City of Yes Changed NYC’s Investment Map — Quietly, Permanently
New York City didn’t “announce a boom.” It rewrote the rulebook that determines what is even possible to build, where, and how fast. That’s why zoning text amendments matter more than ribbon cuttings: they quietly change the math for thousands of parcels at once. And in NYC, that quiet rewrite has a name — City of Yes . City of Yes isn’t one project, one neighborhood, or one developer. It’s a citywide zoning reset that adjusts baseline feasibility: unit counts, allowed uses
Jan 122 min read


The “City of Yes” Era: Why Citywide Rule-Change Packages Still Dominate the Housing Conversation
The loudest housing debates aren’t always about a single tower, a single block, or a single rezoning. More and more, the fight is over the operating system of the city: citywide zoning packages that tweak the rules everywhere, unlocking “small” amounts of additional housing across thousands of lots. That’s the “ City of Yes” template —and it stays a core conversation because it touches every neighborhood, shifts what’s legal by default , and rewrites baseline feasibility for
Jan 122 min read


Citywide Zoning Text Amendments: “Gentle Density” at Scale (and Why It’s the New Power Tool)
The biggest housing reshuffles in America aren’t always announced with a flashy “rezoning map.” Increasingly, they arrive as something more technical—and more consequential: citywide zoning text amendments. These are rulebook rewrites that change what’s legal everywhere at once , turning “maybe, with a variance” into “yes, by-right” for small-to-mid intensity housing types. That’s what “gentle density at scale” really means. Not a handful of tower sites. Not a few corridor up
Jan 123 min read
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