A zoning workout

In the eighth year of his term, Mayor de Blasio, infamous for taking his police detail from Gracie Mansion to the Park Slope YMCA to work out, got around to doing a solid for gyms and related businesses. A proposed change would make zoning rules, which now require a special permit and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to open in a residential neighborhood, much more flexible.

We say amen. Why have especially high city hurdles for people who happen to want to open fitness studios?

But we also say hold on. This is the same Mayor de Blasio who’s been straining with all his might to raise barriers of entry for another type of business, namely hotels, by creating a brand new special permit for them. The only way to explain why he bends over backward to throw obstacles in the path of one type of enterprise while doing the opposite for another is politics. He’s allied with the hotel workers union, which has been a big-money backer for years. (And by the way, what happens when a hotel wants to open with a gym in it?)

The second red flag we place outside the offices of the city’s district attorneys. The relaxed zoning rules would apply not only to gyms but to their cousin establishments, spas and massage studios, all of whose growth has been constrained for decades due to a 1976 zoning amendment intended to make it harder for “adult entertainment” establishments out of residential neighborhoods.

No one should fear fitness centers, spas and legit massage studios, popping up in many more parts of the city (oddly, there’s long been an exemption for yoga studios). But the sure-to-be next Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, has said he will decriminalize sex work for both seller and buyer. That means it will become increasingly hard to distinguish between massage parlors and brothels.

So, liberal zoning for people who stretch muscles will effectively mean liberal zoning for people who, ahem, stretch the definition of massage.