The Zoning Commission unanimously approved a long-time contentious zoning proposal for Downtown last week, which will allow massive increases in building height for new developments. But the city has no idea how long it will take for those changes to take effect, and economic factors suggest it likely won’t be any time soon.

“We are unable to estimate when residents will see improvements, as it is highly dependent on the market,” a spokesperson for the Boston Planning Department (PD) said in a statement. “But the updated zoning provides much greater clarity and predictability for future projects. Proposals will be able to move forward more efficiently than in the past.”

The zoning project, known as PLAN Downtown, is the product of over six years of work by the PD, developers, and community stakeholders. The city’s stated goals for the project were to make it easier to develop the area and to increase space for affordable housing.

Community stakeholders have repeatedly cautioned planners about impacts on parks, historic structures, tourism and general neighborhood affordability, as the massive towers this plan encourages almost never result in onsite affordable housing, but city and developer perspectives eventually won out.

But, as the PD itself admits, the approved zoning now for the development of those new buildings depends largely on the market, which does not currently look favorable.

“Developers are promising they’re going to develop right away, but the financial conditions are pretty rough right now,” said Kim Trask, a longtime Downtown resident heavily involved with the planning process. “Interest rates are very high. There are tariffs on building materials. The likelihood of building right now is pretty remote.”

Like many of the community members involved in this process, Trask said she was disappointed that the plan was so developer heavy.

“When [Mayor Michelle Wu] campaigned, she said she was going to have community-led planning,” Trask, who has had personal conversations and negotiations with the mayor during the debate over PLAN Downtown, said. “This plan ended up being a developer plan.

It was designed specifically to meet the demands of the developers. And so that was a broken promise.”

Trask pointed specifically to the existence of Planned Development Areas (PDAs), in the zoning. These carveouts allow for specific parcels of land to be more or less exempt from surrounding zoning requirements. Wu has repeatedly gone on record as being against PDAs. In 2019, when writing as a city councilor about the Boston Planning & Development Agency, Wu described PDAs as “a hodgepodge of piecemeal measures with the potential for abuse.”

The PD spokesperson provided a list of 13 developers who were involved with PLAN Downtown. They include The Druker Company, which owns a PDA on Washington Street, and Midwood, which owns a number of properties along Bromfield and Washington Streets, the two most hotly debated areas in this planning proposal.

“The updated zoning for Downtown will enable more housing, including converting office space into housing, and will allow new and diverse businesses like takeout, yoga, or fitness studios,” the city spokesperson said. But Trask is not convinced.

“We’re going to get these towers at these few locations, and those are going to be luxury housing,” Trask said. “I think the public was sold on the idea that it would be affordable, but it’s not. Every time we get a tower, it’s always luxury housing. I think we just gave something away without really getting something in return.”