[co-author: Jennifer Dickson, Land Use Planner]

The New York City Department of City Planning (DCP) has scheduled a public scoping meeting for Friday January 22, 2021 for the Citywide Hotel Text Amendment. The Citywide Hotel Text Amendment seeks to establish a new City Planning Commission special permit for new and enlarged transient hotels, motels, tourist cabins, and boatels in districts where such uses are currently allowed as-of-right, including C1, C2, C4, C5, C6, C8, Mixed-Use (MX), and paired M1/R districts. The new hotel special permit would require new hotels and other transient uses to go through ULURP, the city’s land use review process. The proposed text amendment would retain existing regulations for hotels in M1 districts where a special permit was previously adopted in December 2018. The draft scoping materials state that DCP is also evaluating changes to the Zoning Resolution’s discontinuance provisions for existing commercial hotels in all zoning districts citywide, to consider allowing hotels that are currently closed due to conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic to retain their legal transient use status, as-of-right, until after demand recovers.

The public scoping meeting is the first step in the process of adopting the proposed text amendment, which will need to go through a public review process prior to its adoption. We will continue to follow the progress of this text amendment and advise on updates.