Trash City takes a step towards cleaning up its act
Last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams released the first draft of his administration’s major zoning proposal, called City of Yes. Unlike most zoning changes, this one isn’t a plan for rezoning any one site or neighborhood, but rather it tweaks zoning rules across the whole city. The idea is to make it a little easier to build everywhere, without concentrating changes in any one area.
The plan’s major elements include much-needed measures like cutting minimum parking requirements for new multifamily development, loosening unit density limits that require all new apartment buildings to more or less have a minimum average unit size of 680 sq. ft., and allowing more density for buildings that include affordable apartments.
After the plan was released, the Center for Building in North America and the Center for Zero Waste Design reached out to the Department of City Planning (DCP)to ask that the zoning code’s requirement for on-floor trash rooms in new multifamily buildings with at least nine units be removed. DCP listened, and last week, when it released its draft zoning text, the provision (ZR 28-12, on pg. 507) was marked to be stricken.
The removal of the requirement is in keeping with the Center for Building’s broader mission of improving the quality and affordability of new multifamily development in the United States through reforms of the details of how buildings are built and maintained, through building and zoning code provisions, technical standards, and other policies. Bigger-picture land use and zoning reforms are critical in allowing the density that American cities need to meet growing urban housing demand and climate goals, but getting the finer details of regulation right ensures that zoned capacity can be built out affordably and to an acceptable level of quality.
The on-floor trash room requirement that has been in the city’s code for decades started from an admirable idea: that residents of all buildings should have convenient access to waste disposal. But the requirement ballooned and morphed over the years into something much more onerous, which adds to both construction and ongoing maintenance costs, and which must ultimately be paid for by residents. On-floor trash rooms also reinforce a waste collection model that is not working to keep the city clean or to encourage waste reduction and recycling, and are falling out of favor in much of the developed world. While developers would still be able to choose to build them after the zoning text amendment is passed, many would likely choose not to, particularly in non-luxury and non-high-rise buildings.
NYC Department of Buildings guidance for how large each on-floor trash room must be designed to meet accessibility standards
The problems with on-floor trash rooms and chutes start in the design phase of a building’s life. When on-floor waste disposal was first provided in New York City buildings at the start of the 20th century, it consisted of trash chutes that open directly onto common hallways. Over time, these morphed into rooms that can accommodate bulkier items and bins for recycling. Modern accessibility standards caused these rooms to become even more expensive as they grew in size to accommodate people in wheelchairs, and grew in complexity as automatic door openers and occupancy sensors were even required in some cases. Sprinklers, required in every room and in the shaft itself, added to this cost. Each of these requirements make sense on its own, but the sum total grew to be quite expensive compared to the typical alternative of simply having a room on the ground floor or in the cellar where residents can leave their trash.
Brooklyn-based developer Eli Lever put the entire cost of waste infrastructure in a seven-story building in the Bronx at around $153,000 (which includes a compactor and its room in the cellar in addition to the chute and on-floor infrastructure, some of which may still have to be built even without the on-floor requirement). For a large building, that may be a minor expense, but this infrastructure is currently required for all but the smallest buildings – including in affordable housing, as the developer was building.
And that’s just the construction cost of the space and equipment. The floor area that the rooms and chute occupy eat into the amount of housing that a developer can build according to zoning (there was and will still be some zoning deduction for trash rooms and chutes, but nowhere near as much as it actually takes up). Beyond that expense, having one room per floor filled with rotting garbage means that maintenance staff have half a dozen or more extra rooms to visit every time they need to take out the trash, and eventually clean (or, as it sometimes happens, not clean, leaving sanitary issues for building residents to deal with).
Because one trash chute and rooms are required for each vertical circulation core, the requirement makes it more onerous for developers to develop so-called point access blocks. These buildings only have a few apartments per floor, allowing units to stretch from the front of a building to the rear, accommodating more efficient family-sized layouts with multiple bedrooms. But because these types of buildings only have a few apartments on each floor, the per-unit cost – in both space and dollars – of having an on-floor trash room can be quite high.
Charred rash chute hopper door, from a fire that killed a six-year-old boy in the Bronx
New York City isn’t alone in rethinking the utility of on-floor access to trash rooms and chutes. States covering at least half of Germany’s population, for example, disallow the use of trash chutes, sometimes even ordering existing ones to be closed. Single-stream waste chutes without trash rooms discourage recycling, since they make it more convenient to toss recyclables down the chute rather than trudge down the basement to leave it in bins. The chutes can be loud and smelly. And there is fire risk to a shaft that can easily be clogged with combustible garbage, with one trash chute fire killing a six-year-old boy in 2021 in a Bronx public housing project.
Removing the requirement to build hundreds of square feet of space devoted to moving trash down a building is also in keeping with the Adams administration’s goal of rethinking waste collection more broadly. Many cities in Europe and around the world have relieved buildings of the responsibility to handle trash at all, with residents instead carrying their garbage directly from their apartments to bins or underground storage containers on the street. Operating costs for apartment buildings in America are much higher than in peer countries – whether these are expressed as condo or co-op maintenance fees, or operating costs to owners of market-rate, rent-stabilized, or subsidized affordable rental buildings – and the convenience of having building staff handle our trash comes at a significant cost. If New York City ever fully transitions to on-street containers the way that many cities abroad use, trash rooms and chutes will become obsolete. It makes sense to look forward to that future now and stop requiring their construction going forward.
On-street containers in Barcelona, which residents bring their trash out to directly, relieving buildings of any operating expense associated with waste collection and handling
The Department of City Planning has now done its job in accommodating a more progressive vision of waste collection in New York, but there’s more to do at other agencies and with other stakeholders. The Department of Sanitation's push to get leaking bags of garbage off the city’s sidewalks should be widened to consider the costs to buildings of handling trash at all. The New York City Housing Authority’s request for proposals for on-street containers that residents bring their trash to directly, as is common abroad, is one model. Center for Zero Waste Design’s proposal for wheelie bins for large buildings, drawing on different models abroad, is another. To that end, housing stakeholders – the Department of Housing Preservation and Development which funds new affordable housing, tenant advocates and the New York Apartment Association (formerly the RSA and CHIP) which both have a stake in bringing down building operating costs, and the Real Estate Board of New York which represents larger developers and landlords – should take a more active role in advocating for new collection methods.
