Vacca Emerges As the ‘Sheriff’ Of N.Y. Zoning
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In the neighborhoods of Pelham Bay and Throgs Neck in the east Bronx, Council Member James Vacca could be called the sheriff of zoning.
Every night before he goes to bed, Jimmy (as he is known to just about everyone) trolls the Department of Buildings database for new permits, alterations, demolitions — any sign of looming change to the hundreds of blocks he knows by heart. On many days, Mr. Vacca gets in his car and drives around the neighborhoods, checking work sites and scanning for cranes and lumber, the signposts of construction. He misses nothing.
Anything suspicious or even new merits a call to his office, where an aide receives the address and checks online for a permit.If the dates don’t match, or if the zoning code is wrong, or if there is no permit registered, Mr. Vacca fires off an e-mail to the borough’s commissioner of the city Buildings Department. Over and over again.
Armed with what his supporters say is an unparalleled level of energy and an encyclopedic knowledge of the zoning code, Mr. Vacca, 51, embodies the battle now raging in the outer boroughs between development and what some call overdevelopment.
The struggle began with the onset of the real estate boom, when developers seeking to take advantage of the strong market routinely built houses to the maximum size allowed by the city’s zoning laws. In residential areas, community activists decried the jumbo-size, multifamily homes as monstrosities, saying they disrupted the neighborhood and clogged the streets with cars.
“The increase in density really changed the character of many quiet, small streets,” Mr. Vacca said in an interview. “It created a situation where when you came home at night, you could not park your car.”
Mr. Vacca took office as a council member in January after serving as the district manager of a local community board for 26 years. He and other critics of overdevelopment across the city won the first phase of their fight, as more than 50 neighborhoods have been rezoned for lower densities in recent years. About 75% of Mr. Vacca’s district has been downzoned since 2001.
The challenge now is enforcement of the new rules, and city lawmakers have railed against the buildings department for lax training of inspectors and for not being aggressive enough in cracking down on violators.
“Without a monitoring component, downzoning is on paper,” Mr. Vacca said.
He has been active on a council task force headed by the Republican leader, James Oddo of Staten Island, which is examining ways to improve the buildings department. The task force is holding town-hall meetings in each borough and is expected to release a report and recommendations before the end of the year.
In the meantime, there is Mr. Vacca. A short, spry man with a thick — some may even say shrill — Bronx accent, he can come off a bit cartoonish at times, but he has forged an amicable relationship with Marshall Kaminer, the Bronx buildings commissioner who has been on the receiving end of Mr. Vacca’s seemingly endless stream of e-mails and complaints.
Mr. Kaminer called Mr. Vacca “a real asset” whose complaints are often constructive and useful. “That helps the community. That helps my office,” he said.
Of the volume of calls coming in from the 13th council district, Mr. Kaminer said, “I can’t tell you if it’s something about his neighborhood, or if it’s something about Mr. Vacca.”
Mr. Kaminer also said he welcomed Mr. Vacca’s push to bolster resources at the buildings department, saying that with more staff, there could be more frequent inspections. In this year’s budget, Mr. Vacca helped secure $2.5 million for the department to hire more inspectors and to perform inspections on nights and weekends in downzoned areas of the city.
On 80 Longstreet Ave. in the secluded development of Locust Point in Throgs Neck, the fruit of Mr. Vacca’s vigilance has been a wrecking ball. He noticed last summer that three separate houses were going up on a lot built for two. Unlike many areas of the district, the block had not been re-zoned; it was already a low-density neighborhood. Mr. Vacca complained to the buildings department, but to little avail — the houses were erected.
Mr. Vacca kept at it, and city officials halted further work on the site earlier this year.Then, in a first for the district, the middle house was demolished this month. The credit, many acknowledge, belongs to the man who first flagged the violation more than a year ago.
“That’s a huge win for Jimmy Vacca,” Mr. Oddo said. “There’s nobody more vigilant than him.”
To longtime critics of the buildings department, the demolition is an example of what needs to happen more frequently against builders who flout the zoning code.
“You need to come down like a ton of bricks on these people,” Mr. Oddo said. He added, “They need to be real penalties where if they violate a stop-work order, it’s not a slap on the wrist.”
Calls for more stringent enforcement have irked some in the real estate industry, who say the restrictions discourage much-needed development and needlessly delay projects.
“Especially when there is such a housing shortage in this city, I don’t know why the buildings department is so strict,” a building designer, Herbert Quinteros, said. Mr. Quinteros’s plan to build a two-family home on Throgs Neck Expressway has been stalled for more a year since Mr. Vacca flagged it as oversize and lacking space for sufficient parking. “The process is just terrible,” Mr. Quinteros said of the delay.
While the city’s inspection procedures have drawn little praise, Mr. Kaminer said officials had a responsibility to enforce the code and encourage economic development at the same time.
“We have a balancing act to do,” he said. “We have to balance the public and the industry.”
Mr. Oddo says he will propose a package of legislation once his council task force has completed its report, but for now, some lawmakers, including Mr. Vacca, are pushing for an end to self-certification, the process that allows architects to rubberstamp their own building plans.The Bloomberg administration has resisted a ban, saying self-certification was needed to accommodate the construction boom and to avoid overburdening the buildings department.
In the east Bronx, Mr. Vacca acknowledges that he has focused more on serving as the watchdog for new development and addressing the day-to-day complaints of his constituents than on tackling citywide issues, a style that puts him at odds with the many council members who routinely take their grievances to the steps of City Hall.
A lifelong Bronx resident who graduated from Christopher Columbus High School and then state and city public universities, Mr. Vacca rarely strays far from his roots.
“I know people will say to me, ‘Jimmy, you know the streetlights and the buildings department things, you know we have bigger fish to fry,'” he said. Mr. Vacca argues that it’s the little things that matter. “To people today, their block is the context to how they view quality of life. Their block is the context,” he said.
Mr. Vacca’s energy and activism on the issue of overdevelopment has endeared him to his constituents, almost to a fault.
During the height of the downzoning, he recalled, people would come up to him and say, “‘Jimmy, they’re building a house down the block from me. I thought you stopped it.’ And I would tell them, ‘No, this is America. I can’t stop people from building. I can’t stop people from selling their property.'”