Upper West Side Down-Zoning

This Tuesday, Community Board 7 gave the nod to a proposed down-zoning of a swath of land from 97th to 110th streets between Riverside Drive and Central Park West. Most of the parcels of land will be rezoned from a classification of R7-2 to R8A or B, which will effectively limit the height of new buildings (interestingly, the R7-A classification, unlike most others, does not mandate a maximum height; rather, it's governed by "sky exposure planes"--see illustration from the Department of City Planning's Zoning Handbook).
(Update: Word's come down that, besides the Park West Village complex, most of the zoning will change from R8 to R8B--limiting heights to 50- to 60-foot street walls and 75-foot buildings.)

The D.C.P. has yet to weigh in, but it seems to be quite amenable lately to these types of down-zonings, which have happened recently in the Far West Village and the South Slope in Brooklyn.
-Matthew Grace