Large Sites Strategic Planning: Turning Potential Into Possibility

Large-scale urban sites with aging buildings and underused zoning aren’t just design puzzles, they’re coordination challenges. Once the high-level development approach is clear, the next question becomes:

How do you make the site actually work?

Site planning at this scale is more than just fitting buildings on a lot. You’re working around legacy infrastructure, layered zoning rules, existing tenants, and often buildings that were never designed to accommodate anything more than their original footprint.

On one recent 6-acre site, the owner unlocked an additional 175,000 square feet of floor area through City of Yes provisions. But the layout , a post-war garden apartment complex, wasn’t built for infill.

The buildings were too close together to allow efficient new construction between them, but just far enough apart that leaving them untouched meant wasting too much of the available FAR. To complicate matters, the complex houses 225 rent-stabilized tenants and only a limited number can be relocated to enable demolition.

Our strategy: targeted removals, smarter connections, and coordinated spacing.

We identified the smallest, least-occupied buildings for selective demolition to open up space. Then, using the City of Yes provision that allows “connected” buildings to be as close as 20 feet apart at upper levels, we pinpointed where we could tie new buildings into the old without displacing tenants or blocking legal windows.

This allowed us to:

• Maximize the zoning envelope

• Preserve livability

• Avoid costly, impractical construction solutions like burying first floors or squeezing floor-to-floor heights

We also restructured building courts, refined separation distances, and coordinated circulation, all to ensure the final layout supports both density and quality of life.

Because on sites like this, good design isn’t just about creativity, it’s about coordination.

Strategic site plan illustrating infill development within an existing garden apartment complex. Meltzer Mandl placed two new 4-story buildings, totaling over 113,000 GSF, within tight constraints while preserving tenant access, daylight, and circulation.