Towards Permanent Outdoor Dining in New York City
The streets of New York City have been undergoing massive transformation, largely attributed to rethinking public space due to the COVID pandemic and due to a movement towards designing urban spaces for people rather than vehicles.
Many streets are now serving many more purposes, they are not only areas to walk, drive, or bike through — they are becoming spaces to gather and some are even becoming destinations themselves. New York City is in the midst of fully embracing the potential of allowing restaurants to extend their seating space out to sidewalks and roadways. The pandemic accelerated a trend and allowed the city to implement a temporary program for restaurants to serve the public and remain open in June 2020, as sharing indoor spaces was deemed a high risk for spreading the airborne virus.
June 2020 had the most number of applications with over 6,000 restaurants throughout New York City applying for outdoor dining approval. Over 14,400 applications from restaurants have been submitted since the program’s inception. As of Fall 2023, New York City is creating a permanent program, called “Dining Out NYC”, which will require restaurants to go through a more vigorous application and approval process when building out their structures.
To understand where these outdoor restaurants are currently located, we conducted an analysis of where the approved restaurants are located by borough. Almost 7,000, or over half of the total amount of outdoor restaurants, are located within Manhattan. The second-largest concentration of outdoor restaurants is within the borough of Brooklyn, with over 3,000 outdoor restaurants. The density of Brooklyn is
This program will be managed by the Department of Transportation (DOT) and has been signed into law by Mayor Eric Adams as of August 16, 2023. The City is establishing the official rules for the permanent program by the end of 2023. The new approval process will initially require approval by the DOT and then move on to a comment period from Community Boards and City Council Districts. This analysis examines which city council districts received the highest quantity of applications and which, if any, had any applications for outdoor dining that were not approved.
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City Councils, along with Community Boards, will be the second step in the application process to open up to a comment period. Analyzing the information of approvals of the temporary program will be important to understand, which, if any, city councils might require additional resources for reviewing applications or which city councils can encourage more dining establishments to apply and help transform the urban environment in their neighborhoods.
From the available data from June 2020 to August 2023, we were able to analyze which City Council District had the most amount of applications and the split of approved and not approved applications. There was no set reason associated with the applications that were not approved but further analysis of that would be helpful in moving towards the implementation of a permanent outdoor dining program. The DOT has created rules to outline what requirements are necessary for building outdoor dining, including a standardized “kit of parts” once these outdoor dining establishments rebuild their structures into permanent seating areas starting in the Spring of 2024. Many existing areas might be required to reconstruct or alter their current set-ups to meet the requirements, similar to the roadway dining standards illustrated below.
We narrowed our research to City Councils that received more than 500 applications for implementing outdoor seating. There were only six city councils that had over 500 outdoor seating establishments, which are shown in the table below. The city council that has the most outdoor seating establishments is located in Manhattan and includes the neighborhoods of Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, and Greenwich Village. Only two of the top six city councils included in this list are located outside of Manhattan. The locations outside of Manhattan are the wealthiest neighborhoods outside of Manhattan.
To ensure Dining Out NYC will be implemented well in all five boroughs of New York City, DOT will need to partner and collaborate closely with City Councils, especially those that have higher rates of applications. It is also essential for the DOT to foster an equitable environment so that small businesses are encouraged to go through the application process since this permanent program is a step towards creating more pleasant and human-centric urban environments throughout the city.
Project data and analysis can be found here.
