Do Industrial Preservation Policies Protect and Promote Urban Industrial Activity?

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: In recent years, several major cities have implemented industrial preservation policies to attract and retain industrial uses after facing acute pressures to rezone often centrally located industrial land to “higher and better” uses. Minimal research to date, however, has examined how effective industrial preservation policies have been at protecting and promoting urban industrial activity. In this study, we ask how New York City’s (NY) Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) program affected four measures of urban industrial activity—industrial business registrations, industrial employment, industrial building permits, and industrial land—in IBZs in New York City. We benchmark our results against a comparison group established using propensity score matching. We find that the IBZ program had a significant impact on retaining industrial land in IBZs but that it did not have a significant impact on promoting new industrial business registrations, employment, or building permits in IBZs.

Takeaway for practice: Our research provides evidence of how various measures of urban industrial activity change following the designation of an industrial preservation policy. This research suggests that industrial preservation policies can be an effective tool to stem urban industrial land losses in cities facing land use conversion pressures, but that such policies need to create more robust linkages with economic development planning objectives. In the interest of continuing to protect middle-class industrial job opportunities in central cities, planners and practitioners should consider how to strengthen ties between physical land use planning and economic development planning.

Keywords:

• gentrification
• industrial employment
• industrial land
• industrial preservation policies
• urban manufacturing

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher’s website.

Notes

Notes

1 We conducted an outlier analysis and excluded one census block in Brooklyn prior to conducting the propensity score matching due to a likely data entry error.

2 We conducted a sensitivity analysis to ensure that our initial findings conducted at the citywide level were robust. For the sensitivity analysis, we reran our model without the comparison census blocks in Manhattan and Staten Island and examined each of the industrial outcome variables again. We found minimal differences in industrial outcomes between the initial model (containing all census blocks citywide) and the second model (excluding Manhattan and Staten Island census blocks). Technical Appendix Tables A2–A7 include the sensitivity analysis results.

3 We conducted the difference of means tests in Tables 3–6 on the difference of change for each industrial outcome variable rather than the percentage change. The difference of change measures the absolute difference in the industrial outcome variable at Time_A and Time_B. The percentage change measures the absolute difference in the industrial outcome variable at Time_A and Time_B divided by Time_A.

4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

5 We thank one anonymous reviewer for this feedback.

6 We thank one anonymous reviewer for this feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenna Davis

JENNA DAVIS ([email protected]) is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Henry Renski

HENRY RENSKI ([email protected]) is an associate professor of regional planning at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.