Zoning: Is there ever a time when it is ill-advised to rezone from manufacturing to residential?
Right now in my city, commercial real estate zoned manufacturing is comping at 4x the rate of undeveloped residential land. The FAR for residential is historically ~3.44 times manufacturing, which suggests that the perennially good advice to re-zone to “residential” from “manufacturing” is currently ill-advised. 

The conditions that led to this situation appear to be the massive rezoning that has been occurring in the past ten years leading to an actual shortage of manufacturing space. Demand for this category still remains and this has driven the prices up. 

Can I expect this to be cyclical and for residential zoned properties to become more valuable than manufacturing once again?
[{"id": "iertccn", "text": "Depends. Cities are not in the habit of upzoning land from anything to industrial, which is the reason industrial land tends to comp so well. Is there a specific project or reason you're looking to rezone? If you're pursuing a specific project and this is your site, go for it. Otherwise, I don't think you do anything positive for yourself as the landowner if you down zone to residential. If you have desirable land, shop it to a developer. However, rezoning to attract development isn't going to realistically attract development.", "replies": [{"id": "iet2cg5", "text": "Thank you for the quick response. The property is in the Bronx in New York City and there are no development plans for it at this time.", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "iezxa6w", "text": "Theres a lot of local drivers to this like schools, access to highways/rail, and at the localist level site characteristics .  \n\nIts generally easier to figure out how to plunk down some houses vs figure out how to grade a site for a huge building with acres of parking around it.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]