At various times, Mayor Bloomberg and his deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel Doctoroff, have tried to convince New Yorkers that the property occupied by the West Side rail yards has essentially no value and that a new football stadium for the Jets represents the only economical use for the site. “The rail yards are no secret and to our knowledge, no one to date has ever made an offer, which strongly suggests they aren’t worth much,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg, Jennifer Falk, has said of the site. “It’s a wasteland,” according to Mr. Doctoroff. “There is no there there.” Yet the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the site, has an appraisal putting the site’s value at $923 million.

Well, on one level, Messrs. Bloomberg and Doctoroff are right. The authority’s appraisal concluded that the highest and best use for the property would be residential development and valued the property accordingly. But the site’s current zoning allows only for low-scale manufacturing, which isn’t an economical use in New York City – and hasn’t been for some time. “The property is worthless as currently zoned,” the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Rethinking Development, Julia Vitullo-Martin, told us. “You can’t do anything on that property without a rezoning.”

The Jets already have a standing agreement with the city and the state to rezone the property for a stadium. But no other developer does. So when the MTA announced it would accept proposals for developing the site under its current zoning, some developers cried foul. “It’s not a level playing field for other developers to bid,” the president of a real-estate advisory company, M. Myers Mermel, told Newsday. “It’s as if they’re selling a Hummer to the Jets but it’s a Pinto to everybody else.”

Mr. Doctoroff told reporters it was “highly unlikely” that the city would rezone the property for any buyer other than the Jets. Thus, under the current regime, the West Side stadium really does represent the only possible use for the site, but only because the Bloomberg administration has rigged the process to exclude all alternatives. At least so far. Mr. Bloomberg did sound a more sensible note late last week. “The city will look at anybody who wants to have a zoning change,” the mayor said on Thursday. “Whoever winds up with a piece of property, we will treat them exactly the same ways.”

The president of the Empire State Development Corporation, Charles Gargano, also promised fair treatment from the state. “If the MTA completes an agreement with a different developer, we would certainly look at that project,” he said. But the playing field isn’t exactly level. According to Mr. Bloomberg, a new developer would need to wait several years to win the approvals already granted to the Jets. According to Mr. Gargano, the approvals would take “a minimum of eight to 12 months.” Even these guarantees remain at the whim of the city administration, which controls the zoning process. The state has the power to override local zoning rules, but aides to Governor Pataki have already said it would not do so without Mr. Bloomberg’s approval.

Try to put yourself in a potential developer’s shoes: The mayor and his deputy have signaled both their determination to build a stadium for the Jets and their disdain for all rival development projects. They control the value of the property on the West Side – and all other zoning in the city. Mr. Doctoroff, whose self-appointed purpose in life is to bring the Olympics to New York City, runs the development agencies that hold sway over properties across the city. No wonder that developers have been reluctant to bid on the West Side rail yards – or even to criticize the stadium plan in public.

The whole process underscores how bankrupt New York’s zoning regime really is. “In New York we would not have a shortage of residential property if New York did nothing more than allow residential in manufacturing zones,” said Ms. Vitullo-Martin. “There would be houses built in every empty lot if developers were allowed to do that. The demand is so great.” Which is why these columns have been arguing that New York would be vastly better off if the real estate marketplace were not artificially constrained by the political culture. If the city didn’t prevent owners from upgrading their properties to a higher use, the West Side rail yards would not be the wasteland that the city has made it.

Yet the control that Messrs. Bloomberg and Doctoroff enjoy over the city’s real estate market is a more immediate problem if the MTA really wants to conduct a fair and open bidding process – not to mention one that results in the biggest windfall to the cash-strapped state agency. “For the MTA to get full value, the whole site has to be rezoned,” a spokesman for the MTA chairman, Peter Kalikow, said last week. “In effect, the city is withholding value on that property,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said of the West Side rail yards. If the mayor really wants to be even-handed, he’ll cease depressing the value of the West Side rail yards – and rezone the wasteland now.