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New York Daily News - City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's latest beef: Fast food in city zones
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's latest beef: Fast food in city zones
BY Kathleen Lucadamo
March 24th 2010
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is waging a Big Mac attack.
Hoping to stop fast-food restaurants from saturating poor neighborhoods, she announced plans Tuesday to single out the junk-food joints in the city zoning code.
Currently, fast-food chains are indistinguishable from other restaurants in the city charter, making it impossible for lawmakers to restrict the number of them in poor neighborhoods.
"For me, this comes up as a ... frustration," Quinn told a group yesterday gathered at Hunter College School of Social Work for the release of a CUNY report comparing childhood obesity in London and New York.
The study - which shows higher childhood obesity rates here - suggests New York follow London's lead in combating the epidemic, including passing zoning rules that limit access to fast-food joints.
Quinn vowed to ask a newly formed City Charter Commission to examine whether "the zoning resolution should be reworked to establish fast-food restaurants as an entity separate and apart from other restaurants."
New Yorkers must vote on any zoning changes in the charter.
"As someone whose last name is Quinn," she said, referring to her Irish heritage, "I can't stand that London can do anything better than us.
"If you wanted to pick a city to motivate me, you did," she added.
In New York City, nearly 40% of kids in kindergarten to eighth grade are obese or overweight, but only 23% of those entering school in London are, data show.
London Mayor Boris Johnson recently called for fast-food-free zones around schools and other neighborhoods with troubling obesity rates. City Councilman Joel Rivera (D-Bronx) lobbied for a law to limit fast-food joints here in 2006, but lawmakers quickly realized that city zoning rules stop them from doing so.
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