Upzoning Chrystie Street for luxury housing

The EV/LES rezoning will save much of the LES south of Houston from luxury hotels, but it will push that development onto the Bowery and into Chinatown, which remain unprotected. To reject the rezoning now entails losing the LES, so we are cornered into accepting a rezoning that promises to accelerate luxury development in Chinatown and the Bowery, where that development is already spreading.

It troubles me that Community Board 3 currently supports a planning alternative that upzones Chrystie Street to fourteen stories (from current F.A.R .6 to F.A.R. 8.5), right on the edge of Chinatown. The CB maintains that the inclusionary upzoning will bring 20% affordable housing to the neighborhood. That's still a luxury upzoning to 6.8 F.A.R. And the Department of City Planning (DCP) allows that affordable 20% (1.7 F.A.R.) to be already existing affordable housing, provided the developer renovate it. Even without the IZ bonus, this alternative upzones Chrystie to 6.5 F.A.R.-- that's an upzoning with no affordable housing component at all.

In the worst-case scenario, the CB is inviting a 100% luxury upzoning to 145 feet on Chrystie Street for the sake of a few renovations and no guarantee of any new affordable housing. That's the worst case. When considering development strategies in NYC, the wise assume the worst.

By contrast, the DCP plan actually downzones Chrystie Street, although it allows additional bulk with affordable housing. The DCP plan offers almost as much affordable housing as the CB-supported alternative, but with no luxury upzoning. In fact, DCP actually downzones luxury even with all the bonuses.

I hope the CB will reject the Chrystie Street inclusionary upzoning alternative and accept DCP's downzoning. I don't see how our local community can accept an alternative that brings additional luxury development for only 0.26 F.A.R. (roughly one apartment) more affordable housing than the DCP plan, which actually downzones for luxury.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Current Zoning of Chrystie, C6-1
FAR 6
FAR 6.5 Community Facilities

DCP Rezoning of Chrystie, C6-2A
FAR 5.4 (no affordable housing)
FAR 7.2 (with 20% affordable housing or renovations)
FAR 6.5 for Community Facilities

CB3-supported alternative for Chrystie, C6-3A
FAR 6.5 (no affordable housing)
FAR 8.5 (with 20% affordable housing or renovations)
FAR 7.5 for Community Facilities

As you can see, if CB3 continues to support the alternative, it is asking for 25% larger buildings on Chrystie than are currently allowed, more than twice as large as what is currently built there. This alternative would provide at best 1.7 F.A.R. of affordable housing/renovations along with 0.8 F.A.R. of added luxury over current zoning -- 1.04 luxury F.A.R. more than the DCP plan. And if the developer doesn't take the affordable housing bonus and builds no affordable housing at all, this alternative still gives the developer a 0.5 F.A.R. luxury upzoning. In short, the alternative upzones Chrystie Street for luxury in all circumstances.

The DCP plan would downzone Chrystie Street by 10% from current 6 to 5.4 F.A.R. With affordable housing/renovations, DCP's plan requires 1.44 F.A.R. of affordable housing/renovations, but less additional luxury than what's allowed in the current zoning. DCP's plan allows a maximum of 5.76 F.A.R. luxury, which is 0.24 less luxury than current zoning allows.

In other words, the DCP plan provides almost as much affordable housing/renovations as the alternative, while consistently downzoning luxury F.A.R.

The alternative would allow .8 F.A.R. more luxury than current zoning. The DCP plan allows .24 F.A.R. less luxury than current zoning allows.

Even under the best-case scenario in which we actually get new affordable housing, the DCP plan provides virtually all the "affordable" housing the alternative provides, without the alternative's egregious luxury upzoning. So even accepting the CB's faith that inclusionary upzoning will bring us affordable housing, the alternative has virtually no benefit to the community over the DCP plan. And its price is high: the alternative upzones the street for luxury development without inclusionary upzoning, and significantly upzones it for luxury with inclusionary upzoning.

I hope CB3 changes its position on this alternative that will flood Chinatown with gentrification. It is inconceivable that the local community would welcome significantly more luxury housing than even DCP proposes and without any significant benefit -- possibly no benefit at all.

Public space in danger: Washington Square Park

About ten years ago, Giuliani renovated City Hall Park, entirely eliminating New York City's central location for demonstrations. Moving and down-sizing a fountain, he covered the rest of the park with enclosed, inaccessible lawn, invoking a false utopian past of contented gentry strolling in top hats and parasols through paved paths surrounded by untouched and pristine green -- the new fountain even boasts Disneyesque gaslights -- undisturbed by the desperation and frequent violence in the streets of the immigrant ghettos nearby.

An uncannily similar gentrifying of Washington Square is underway -- moving and down-sizing a fountain, limiting people-space.

A kind of participatory guerrilla theater is planned for Thursday in Washington Square Park that will allow people to express their feelings about a place that defined free expression for generations since Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Roosevelt burnt an automobile in front of the arch in effigy. Here is the advertisement from the organizers:

"Do you have an opinion about the destruction and redesign of Washington Square Park? think it's a tragedy? an outrage? a great idea? want to express that opinion in a quick but effective way?
"On this Thursday, March 13th, Washington Square Park is going to be filled with more than a thousand multi-colored helium balloons, each bearing the opinion of a Village resident, visitor or student about the destruction and redesign of the park.
"Between the hours of 12pm and 8pm organizers will be handing out balloons outside of 11 University Place (just North East of the park) and on the sidewalk just off of the south west corner of the park. Participants are given a balloon, asked to write their thoughts about the changes to WSP on the balloon, then carry it into the park, tie it to something and leave it. At 8pm a group of organizers and volunteers will sweep through the park popping all the balloons and removing them, leaving nothing behind.
"Come by on Thursday and speak your mind, make a statement, show the Parks Department that this space is our space and that we have something to say. The powers that be have been playing deaf to the voice of the public. We aim to see if they'll play blind as well.

"If you would like to be more involved than writing and tying a balloon contact Andrew Butler at theglassco@gmail.com. We need volunteers.

"See you there!"

Serious concerns about the rezoning

Where should a concerned citizen go to comment on the rezoning?

The plan itself is in many ways the creation of Community Board 3's zoning Task Force (197 Task Force). They are proponents of the plan, so, while it would certainly be important to let them know how you feel, if you want to have an effect on the final outcome, it might be more effective to appeal to the more impartial full Community Board and to the Borough President, who also gets to review the proposal. The Community Board will be holding a public hearing on the rezoning as soon as DCP releases the Environmental Impact Statement, expected by or in April.

Concerned citizens are organizing around the rezoning too. E-mail me at
robcuny@gmail.com
for contacts and updates.

Meanwhile, I would like to draw your attention to three troubling features of DCP's Final Scope of Work:

1. The IZ affordable housing is not required on-site. Since renovation of existing affordable housing qualifies for the IZ bonus, off-site allowance means that, in effect, the R8B alternative for the avenues upzones them from current FAR 3.44 to FAR 4.6 without the promise of adding a single unit of affordable housing to our community.

This feature of DCP's Final Scope of Work is contrary to every principle and goal with which CB3 entered the rezoning project.

1st Avenue, for example, is lined with four and five story buildings dating from the Civil War and earlier. Very few structures there are taller than five stories. Under this alternative, the avenue will be vulnerable to as-of-right additions and redevelopment that will transform it beyond recognition. We will see primary and secondary displacement of both residents and businesses in addition to loss of light, context and history without benefit to the local community.

2. DCP proposes to include R8B zones in the commercial discontinuance exemption clause (article V, 52-61). Under this proposal, all commercial storefronts in R8B will remain available for commercial use regardless how long they fall out of such use. This will allow yet more nightlife establishments in oversaturated areas.

3. The C6-3A alternative (8.5 FAR, with off-site IZ renovations of existing units counting toward the bonus) upzones "the affected area" from current FAR 6 to FAR 8.5, once again without the promise of a single unit of new affordable housing. This again is contrary to the principles enunciated by CB3, dangerous to the Chinatown community and without redeeming value for either Chinatown or the LES.

City previews the EV/LES rezoning

City Planning has issued its statement of final intent for rezoning the East Village and Lower East Side ("Final Scope of Work").

The good news is: it's not final. They will continue to consider alternatives as they study the area for their final rezoning proposal. So it is possible to influence the final plan, though time is short.

Also good news:
1. the study will cover a quarter mile around the rezoning area, so all of the Bowery to Pell Street and a large part of Chinatown will be studied
2. the rezoning will end most hotel development south of Houston between Essex and Allen
3. EV sidestreets will remain, in effect, unchanged
4. the end of the Community Facility bonus will protect larger sites like Mary Help of Christians and P.S. 64 from being developed into towering dormitories. Both sites will be limited to eight stories, though Mary's, on the avenue, will be allowed greater bulk
5. underbuilt tenements on 4th-7th Streets between A&B will be protected.

There's bad news too.

A.
Developers will be allowed to build larger buildings on 1st and 2nd Avenues and Avenue A if they develop or recycle affordable housing anywhere in the district or within a half mile of the district.

So the three, four and five story townhouses and tenements from the 1840's through the Civil War which line 1st Avenue and Avenue A, filled with long-term tenants paying truly affordable rents, will be vulnerable to demolition and redevelopment into seven- or eight-story buildings. To get the bonus size, the developer has merely to promise to rent some apartments somewhere at stabilized rates forever.

There appears to be no meaningful oversight for this permanent off-site stabilization, so, in effect, anything goes. And affordable housing bonuses are bought and sold -- according to HPD it's quite a market -- so developers will be getting their height bonus for free and without contributing any affordable housing to our community.

This sad excuse for an affordable housing program is called "Inclusionary Zoning," widely known as "yet another scam."

Since many stabilized rents have already risen to market rate, developers will feel no pain. However, this plan will add to the pressure to evict tenants and warehouse empty apartments. Currently, large buildings can be developed only on multiple lots. This seems to have protected the avenues from development in recent years. Under the rezoning, larger buildings could be built as-of-right on single lots, facilitating the spread of development at every level, even among smaller owners.

B.
The rezoning plan will protect the Lower East Side from Allen to Essex from new hotel development, but it will allow large developments on Houston, Chrystie, Delancey, Pitt (forming a wall surrounding the LES south of Houston) and on Avenue D. This wall of market-rate luxury development will exacerbate the up-scaling of the LES as a nightlife and tourist destination and the decline of its day-time, residential and arts community.

C.
Upzoning D will threaten the projects, bringing up-scale development and gentrification, adding to the pressure to move the projects out of subsidy and into the market.

D.
The rezoning itself does not include the Bowery or Chinatown, so we can expect that hotel developers, prevented by the rezoning from developing in the LES, will turn all their attention to the Bowery and Chinatown.

E.
In addition, City Planning is changing the zoning text so that residential storefronts in all the planned residential zones can be reverted to commercial use, no matter how long they have been out of commercial use. In plain English: more bars encouraged.

For the intrepid, here are the technical details:

The sidestreets of the EV: FAR 4 (about the size of a six story tenement) -- R7A

The large avenues of the EV (2nd,1st,A): IZ bonus to FAR 4.6 (seven stories) -- R8B

The LES south of Houston: FAR 4 (six stories) -- C4-4A&R7A

EXCEPT
Houston, Delancey, Chrystie, D and parts of Pitt: IZ bonus to FAR 7.2 (with required setbacks this maxes out at 12 stories) -- C6-2A

AND
City Planning is considering an alternative which would allow IZ up to FAR 8.5 (maxing out at 15 stories). So far this alternative is only being considered for Chrystie Street, but their language is vague and evasively non specific.

The plan downzones 7th - 4th Streets between A&B from FAR 3.44 to 3.

Finally, the city will add R8B zones to those zones in which commercial storefronts are deemed perpetually available for commercial use, no matter how long they have been used as residences.

More luxury development in Chinatown

LESRRD's warnings of luxury development in Chinatown have fallen on deaf ears north of Houston Street where the political influences on Community District 3 reside. Chinatown is seriously underrepresented on the Community Board.

Our warnings and predictions have been overtaken by reality. Besides the luxury hotel going up at Hester & Bowery, there's this on a multiple lot site at Canal & Eldridge in Chinatown around the corner from the Eldridge Street Synagogue (from Curbed):

"1) Chinatown: Regarding the mysterious pillars going up at Canal and Eldridge, a commenter files this detailed report: "It will have a three-story commercial base (one floor of stores and two floors of medical offices), then a setback and a floor that will be occupied by a day care center, then an additional setback and twelve floors of apartments. There will also be a commercial parking garage in the cellar levels. The residential portion will be a tower, with floor plates of only about 2,000 square feet, whereas the ground floor will have a footprint of about 7,500 square feet, and there will be one or two apartments per floor. Architect: Peter Poon. (No, Peter Poon does not just design hotels for Sam Chang.)""

One or two apartments per floor implies luxury. Peter Poon is also responsible for a hotel tower on Canal to the west of Chinatown. I'm told that Canal has seen several new constructions recently. I haven't had a chance to check them all out.

Slouching toward Chinatown

Political will and influence wanted an East Village rezoning to eliminate the community facility bonus. As it turned out, in the three years since the rezoning was proposed no tall towers have been built in the residential East Village -- even huge lots like Mary Help of Christians remain untouched -- and the proposed rezoning actually upzones the sidestreets by 14%.

The Community Board took best advantage of that political will to get something truly and desperately needed from it, a contextual down-zoning of the disappearing LES south of Houston, where out-of-context, out-of-scale hotels rise everywhere, just as they do in the commercially zoned 3rd Avenue / east Bowery.

The CB is currently planning a rezoning of the Bowery. If the Bowery and the LES are both rezoned to limit development, Chinatown will be placed at even greater risk as the last frontier for development and gentrification. Currently Chinatown is a C6-1 zone -- the same zoning as 3rd Avenue, Bowery and Chrystie-to-Essex that are seeing hotels rise daily.

That's the future for Chinatown unless the CB acts now.

It's time to think ahead. Chinatown needs zoning protection. The Bowery and Chinatown need to be rezoned as a single package so that the rezoning of the Bowery does not push development into Chinatown.

My friend and fellow community advocate Anna Sawaryn has an exhibit of her photography at the 4th Street Gallery, 67 East 4th Street.

Her technique is rare: she uses a pinhole box, not a camera. The resulting images are unique, haunting, immediate, timeless. Take a look at her image of St. Brigid's on her website and attached. Reception from 2-6. I'll be there around 4. Hope to see you --

Coney Island Through the Invisible Lens
February 2-15, 2008
The 4th Street Photo Gallery
67 East 4th Street
New York, New York 10003
Reception Sunday, February 3, 2-6pm

I am having an exhibit of limited-edition, original, color pinhole photographs. This is photography in it's simplest form, using a wooden box, NOT a camera. The box does not have a lens or automatic shutter. The exposure time ranges from several seconds up to a half hour. This gives the images an 'old world' almost ghostly, sometimes, distorted quality. Pinhole photography best captures the 'essence' of the subject being photographed.

I like to use pinhole photography to document places that are changing and are at risk of vanishing. These are my 'memories' of Coney Island and the East Village.

Anna Sawaryn

Gallery Hours Tuesday-Saturday 2-8 p.m.
Sunday by appointment call 212-673-1021

http://www.annasawaryn.com/

Documenting Loisaida since 1975

Marlis Momber
Umbrella House
21-23 Avenue C/Loisaida Avenue near Houston
Opening reception Feb 8, 6-10pm
Closing auction party Feb 16, 4-7pm

www.vivaloisaida.org

SAVE ST. BRIGID'S PARTY!

Saturday, February 9, 6-10pm
Solas Bar
232 E 9th Street (near 3rd Ave)
on the feast of St. Brigid

from the Save St. Brigid's Committee:
>There will be live music and food. We are not asking for any specific amount -- whatever donation anyone wants to give. We will also give out some T shirts. We have plenty left and they do no one any good stored in boxes. There will be no art auction, just music, food and fun. Hope you can make it.<

More NYU expansion

Two concerns about NYU's latest expansion presentation:

1) Their core campus will absorb at most only half of the 6 million square foot planned expansion

2) The 6 million square foot expansion does not include the 3 million additional square feet of currently leased space that could become unplanned expansion when those leases come due.

They will also add commercial uses to their ground floors, which looks like sound urban design but scares me: given NYU student spending habits, the area and environs could become a luxury shopping center to rival Fifth Avenue -- maybe even rival Columbus Avenue.

There was good news too. Their plans to expand within the core campus are encouraging. They seem to have made the tough decision to build in the plaza spaces between their faculty housing. They've decided, in other words, that angry employees are easier to abuse and placate than angry Villagers.
;-)

Two concerns remain. Their core campus can absorb only about half of the 6 million expansion. The rest could go anywhere. They recently bought Brooklyn Polytechnic and have a dorm nearby, but it's not clear how the development of that remote NYU location will alleviate their housing needs here.

There's also a hidden concern, not adequately dealt with in their presentations or in any of the responses I've seen. In addition to the 6 million sq.ft. of expansion they are planning, there's an additional 3 million sq. ft. they are currently renting -- a third of their students live in leased dormitories.

Universities don't like relying on so much leased space. Rent is money down the drain; leases are not permanent; the space is not theirs to alter or redevelop. The loss of a lease is what pushed NYU to build on St. Ann's, a decision they might have reconsidered in the light of community protest had they not been under the rental gun. Heavily committed in leased space, the university is vulnerable to pressures to shift out of it into owned space, either newly constructed or newly bought.

The role of leased space has been underplayed in these NYU presentations because it doesn't represent an expansion of their student body. Nevertheless, it could entail an expansion of their construction and purchasing plans.

Think of it: a third of their student body in 3 million sq. ft. is not represented in these plans for the 6 million sq. ft. expansion. That's half again the size of the presented expansion.

The situation may not be dire, or it may. Many of their leases do not come due until 2015 and conceivably all could be renewed. But if luxury rents continue to rise in NYC and money continues to pour in, there'll be even more pressure on owners to opt out of dormitory use and into condo or hotel use. That will leave New York City with possibly another 3 million sq. ft. of NYU new construction or new purchases to absorb.

Something to keep an eye on.

View the presentation here:

www.nyu.edu/nyu.plans.2031/pdf/OpenHousePresentation.jan30.pdf

!THE LOCAL VOICE!

Here's a brief video on youtube that sets the record straight on Houston Street, and a couple of strong letters about the loss of history and community that recently appeared in Chelsea Now and the NY Times respectively, all from LES locals:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bi6oyUEWU

http://chelseanow.com/cn_67/letterstotheeditor.html
(scroll down)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE0D81F3BF935A35752C0A96E9C8B63">

BAN!

Help save the Bowery from luxury development:
The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors
Jan. 28, 6:30
JASA, 200 east 5th Street (corner of Bowery).


Also, in case you're wondering whom to vote for in the mayoral election next year, read this:
http://www.nysun.com/article/69640
Tony Avella has been consistently on the side of tenant and community rights, against displacement and eminent domain.

How fast can you say "gone"?

CB3 will hold its monthly Bowery zoning subcommittee meeting this Wednesday (1/16) from 6:30 to 7pm, 184 Eldridge Street.

While the Bowery north of Houston will be permanently transformed by the huge Frank Gehry knock-off destination hotel on 5th Street & Bowery, yet another giant luxury hotel is being built, this one all the way down on Bowery & Hester Street right at the heart of Chinatown.

The Bowery, lined with small commercial buildings that can be bought out overnight, is an easy target for developers. A swank, new museum towering at more than twice the height of the tenements on the Bowery between Stanton and Rivington, a new luxury hotel right in the midst of Chinatown -- these are not isolated aberrations on the Bowery. These are signs of rapid transformation about to occur.

Meanwhile, the mayor is cutting the budgets of all the city agencies that protect tenants, buildings and communities, and the mayor's advisers are leaving the administration for positions in real estate development to carry on the Bloomberg program of developing everything in sight, leaving no ungentrified neighborhood intact, displacing every ethnic community -- West Harlem, 125th Street, the Dominican neighborhood in Inwood, the East River waterfront running along Chinatown and the LES -- all are targeted for development.

Jane Jacobs at MAS

The Municipal Arts Society's free exhibit, Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York (at 475 Madison Avenue & 51st Street), has been extended through January 26.

I urge you to go see it. No exhibit in the city is as relevant or important to New Yorkers.

It is not an in-depth treatment of Jacobs or her legacy. Rather, it is a summary of her achievement in New York and, most important, a loud and clear call to action.

After highlighting Jacobs' decisive successes in protecting her community from broad government plans that would have destroyed it, the exhibit then focuses on Jacobs' notion of community, culling examples of urban successes and failures from New York today. The argument of the exhibit is transparent: Jacobs identified basic principles conducive to successful urban community life; ordinary people can and must protect their community from the administrative and market forces that hold no regard for those principles.

Go see it.

It's a small exhibit with limited historical background, so it may be useful to consider the broader context of urban planning in the last century:

The twentieth century began with a modernist movement bent on eradicating class differences through functional architecture and rational urban design. Modernists replaced the lavish, opulent, classist Beaux Arts façades of the latter 19th century with plain, unadorned, egalitarian working-class mass residences surrounded by grass. Businesses would be segregated into districts away from the quiet residential districts. If it sounds like projects and malls, that's exactly their utopian idea.

Jacobs wisely caught the flaw in their theoretical approach. Their principles had no empirical basis. If you want to know what kind of urban environment works for people, look at successful neighborhoods.

Jacobs immediately observed the importance of street-life to the vitality of urban community. She identified four principles of successful urban planning: mixed uses (residences with storefronts for small businesses like delis, restaurants, hardware stores, clothing stores, even small manufacturing); varied building types (old buildings with new, tall with short, all on small lots to maximize variety); short blocks to enhance freedom of movement; population density. These foster vital communities in contrast with the monolithism, segregation, sterility and oppression of modernism.

The elements that create community are fragile and depend on preservation -- protecting the old from the new, the small from the large, the mom and pop from the chain. Without preservation, the variety and small scale essential to community are swallowed up by market forces of big money, big businesses, big chains, big developers. And so, Jacobs also came to understand the importance of getting involved in saving urban community: she coordinated the effort to save Greenwich Village from Robert Moses' plan to rip it apart with a highway.

Moses himself belonged to a modernist age of optimistic futurism. He concocted a grand scheme to create a megalopolis of infrastructure linking city to suburb with concourses, parkways and bridges. In his success lay an unanticipated failure. The bridges and highways enabled white flight into the suburbs which eroded the city's tax base leading to municipal abandonment of the inner city, degraded services and programs, more white flight, including industrial and business flight to the suburbs and the eventual bankrupting of the city in 1975.

The city did not fully recover until the boom of the '90's which brought us the rampant gentrification we are living with today. The cure is worse than the disease: where Moses had a plan, our current city administration simply gives swaths of the city over to developers out for the quickest buck, with no plan at all, no infrastructure to support their projects, no thought of community impact, no thought of sustainability, no thought of the future of the city. Just money.

What we most desperately need in this big-money-market free-for-all is a plan -- not the kind of top-down, half-baked, grandiose futurism of a Moses, but the empirically informed, humanist observation of Jane Jacobs.

The exhibit extols Jacobs' battle with Moses and then focuses on her vision of urban community by contrasting "good" streets with "bad" streets in today's New York. "Good" streets have a mix of buildings of varied ages and heights, mostly one-lot in size, full of what I like to call the three st's: storefronts, stoops and street-life. The "bad" streets have one huge street wall with no entry points, just an oppressive wall to keep people out and walking past. The exhibit uses, among others, the Avalon building (Whole Foods on Bowery and Houston) as a paradigmatic example of urban design that fails to meet the basic virtues Jacobs identified for urban community.

Today, Avalon style is everywhere. Look at the Chase Bank on Astor Place. It's as if Jane Jacobs never lived: one long glass wall; nothing to do there, nothing to see. A friend from City Lore/Place Matters says it served the community better when it was a parking lot because then at least you could walk through it.

Let's face it, there is no plan for the future of housing in this city. Since the "triumph" of capitalism, government sees only the developer, and the developer sees only as far as his pocket. Ordinary people's social needs play no role, only their money. And community is not in this picture at all.

I recently came across a brief bio of Julia Richman -- she has a school named after her near Hunter College. Sy Brody writes, "Julia Richman was the first woman district superintendent of schools in the City of New York. Her innovations, leadership and curriculum brought an entire new dimension to public school education at the beginning of the twentieth century." She chose the Lower East Side as her district where "she started ... special schools for delinquents, chronic absentees and above average pupils."


I am struck by her story. She was one of many reformers in an age of social reform -- from Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald to Clara Lemlich and Dorothy Day. But Richman was in government: school district superintendent. A reformer holding a government post? Can you imagine such a reformer in a government post today? Today our commissioners and city administrators are all toadies. "Toad" seems to be one of the qualifications for the job, perhaps the sole qualification.

To celebrate Jacobs' success in getting Washington Square closed to all vehicular traffic, a car was burned at the arch. The Times reports that "Mrs. Roosevelt" was present at the burning along with Jane.

Such a celebration seems unimaginable today.

Can't say it better

Reprinted from a letter to the NY Sun, written by local LES resident, Rima Finzi-Strauss:

"I believe that Manhattan dies a little each time middle and working class housing is lost to planned luxury condominium development. Without diversity, which has always made New York special, Manhattan will shortly become a dull sprawling bedroom community for celebrities, Wall Street financiers, rich out-of-towners, and foreign investors. The transformation, unfortunately, seems almost complete."

Holiday news

Friends and neighbors,

Get ready for more development: Streit's Matzohs is selling its four-lot factory on Rivington Street for $25 million. If the buyer digs his foundation before the new zoning of the LES, he can use the community facility bonus to increase the size by over 40%. Fortunately, it's not in the LES commercial zone, so it won't be another huge hotel. But the site is next-door to ABC No Rio and the block is lined with one architectural gem after another, some of the oldest in the city.

Some holiday presents
As we watch history disappear around us, artists have turned to a mode older than scripture: the lament. Photographers publish their work on blogs with names like Lost New York, Vanishing New York, Lost City:
http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com/
http://lostnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/

To see the real LES, don't miss the inside, underside photo chronicle
http://neithermorenorless.blogspot.com/

There's a documentary just out too, New York Lost. For a limited time you can view it here:
www.youtube.com/newyorklost
(Well say, is that developer Sion Misrahi waxing poetic about the inevitability of change? He doesn't mention that change means hundreds of millions in profit for him. Could it be that's why contemplating change moves him so profoundly? I know change is a necessary law of the universe, that change is time itself. I didn't know that glass towers, yuppie invasions, banks and chain stores were a law of the universe or that the end of community and neighborhood were universally necessary. Must all change be for the worse? Misrahi, couldn't you find a way of filling your pockets that doesn't entail destroying neighborhood communities, killing their arts, culture, character and history? What happened to the time when "change" meant approaching a better future for all, not just bulldozing the past for one man's profit?)

New Yorkers seem to have given up on all the cherished utopian dreams that motivated movements and held us to a hopeful future that might someday reflect our deepest and most heartfelt aspirations. We've settled for Whole Foods instead.

For the record, I haven't spent a penny at Whole Foods and I don't see any reason why I would. Its glass wall, extending the entire length of the block, prevents any street life from gathering. The place is an affront to any vision of urban improvement, urban life, urban culture, urban activity, urban taste.

Greatest city in the world? You've got to be kidding. There are dozens of cities in newly industrialized, developing countries all over the world that do the oppressive glass wall just as well or better. New York is becoming just a cold Singapore with chewing gum freckles.

Years ago, Jane Jacobs explained to us what was wrong with modernism: communities need street-life, storefronts, stoops. Community is folks hanging out in their neighborhood. That's what stoops, storefronts and street-life give you -- community.

Yuppies from the suburbs haven't got a clue what a neighborhood community is, never having experienced one outside the window of their SUV. But here they come, imposing the suburban mall on the one place in the world where the cure for mall-aise grows indigenously. Like the rain forest, once you raze the urban neighborhood you lose all the unique species of urban character. And once you replace it with glass and steel, you can't grow it back again. Instead of great corned beef and kielbasa you get banks that smell like stale disinfectant. Stomach that with your Starbucks.

The holidays afford us reflection on the past and a moment looking toward the future -- a briefly hopeful moment, before that future is upon us and we turn again to mourning. Why can't we take that moment to renew our utopian dreams and envision the kind of city we'd like New York to be?

The future doesn't have to be just for Misrahi. It can be about us and for us.

A joyful holiday to you and yours,

--R

The effects of deregulation

In case you think deregulation of housing will bring rental prices down by a general leveling of the market, here's what's actually happening as a result of deregulation (from Liz Peek, NY Sun, of all places):

"According to a report from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, the stock of what is considered low-cost rentals in America fell by 1.2 million units between 1993 and 2003. For a variety of reasons, "affordable" rental units have been disappearing, causing prices for the remaining properties to rise. In 2005, according to the MacArthur Foundation, almost 9 million middle- and low-income Americans spent more than half of their income on housing, an all-time record.

"According to a study by the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy, median rents in New York have risen considerably faster than incomes. It says the number of rental units "affordable to low and moderate income households in the city fell significantly" between 2002 and 2005. During that period, the report says, the total number of rental units in New York grew by only 0.4%, while the number of condos and other owned units grew by 3.5%. Adding to the problems of low-income citizens, the new housing stock shifted significantly upmarket, with higher-priced units growing by almost 25%. These trends are also in place across the country."

http://www.nysun.com/article/68414?page_no=1

In other words, the effect of deregulation is not a leveling of the market. The effect is more upscale housing in the city, more of the labor force moving out of the city. No leveling, just up or out.

Same thing happened in Boston when they deregulated housing there: no leveling, just more upscaling and gentrification. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute's study couldn't find any beneficial effect on rents in Boston's deregulation.

Why do you think regulations were created in the first place?

Testify on landlord harassment!

City Council Hearing on a Landlord Harassment Bill
City Council Chambers, City Hall
Monday Dec. 17, 10am
(Arrive early -- the line will be long -- or late in the afternoon, after many have left.)

This Monday, the City Council will hold a hearing on legislation to protect tenants from landlord harassment. This hearing affords tenants the opportunity to testify
on the increasing problem of landlord harassment,
on the difficulty of bringing harassment charges against a landlord under current law,
on the lack of anti-harassment enforcement and investigation by government agencies charged with tenant protection,
and on the ineffectiveness of fines against large corporate landlords.

Under current law, "harassment" does not include landlords repeatedly filing baseless law suits against tenants, and all harassment charges against a landlord must be initiated by the tenant and filed not in housing court but through the state by a difficult and often ineffective process. The Council is considering a bill which will allow tenants who are being taken to court by a landlord on a baseless, frivolous suit, to charge the landlord in housing court with harassment.

Unfortunately, the bill's penalties for harassment are meager fines -- only up to $5,000, an insignificant sum, especially for large corporate landlords. No jail sentences are being considered, nor surrender of premises, even for repeat offenders.

Of course, the ideal solution would be for city agencies to investigate and prosecute landlords themselves, rather than rely on harassed tenants to file charges. But while the Bloomberg administration continues to defund the agencies responsible for protecting tenants, this bill is a needed protection.

(The Council is also considering a bill that would allow landlords to sue tenants who file frivolous suits against the landlord, but this pro-landlord bill appears to be dead. It was introduced under the pretense of "fairness," but when you consider that tenants have no economic incentive to harass landlords (a bankrupted landlord can't provide services), while landlords have strong economic incentive to harass and bankrupt tenants out of stabilized apartments, it's quite clear that the "fairness" argument is misapplied and disguises a subversive strategy: to prevent tenants from filing any kind of suit against a landlord who could retaliate with a corporate legal team charging the tenant with harassing the landlord. The sponsors of this pro-landlord bill, Maria Baez and Joel Rivera, have been appropriately exposed and excoriated in the press.)

Rally Monday

The statement below impressed on me the scale of the destructive impact the Cooper Square Hotel will have. The rally: this Monday, 6pm, 5th & Bowery.
---

Hi-
I'm Stuart Zamsky, a longtime resident of East Fifth Street between 2-3rd Aves., and a retail merchant on Fifth Street between 1-2nd Aves. I am writing to entreat you to attend a Rally Against the Cooper Square Hotel this Monday, December 10th at the Corner of 5th Street & The Bowery, and to attend the subsequent Community Board 3's SLA Meeting at the same location.

You may or may not be inclined towards community meetings and rallies. I have never been, but when I heard about the plans the hotel had for it's outdoor spaces; Large areas (some just 30 inches from existing resident's windows!), Open Late with huge capacities, a Door to this Beer Garden exiting directly on to Quiet Fifth Street, I realized that if ever there was a time to act, to help rouse neighbors, and get the Cooper Square Hotel to behave as a reasonable, considerate neighbor, it was now. This hotel has the potential to impact our neighborhood in the manner that the Maritime Hotel,the Gansevort, or the Hotel Rivington has forever changed their neighborhoods, turning them into the loudest of scenes, Bourbon Street Theme Parks.

And so, I beseech you to consider your schedule Monday night, and put your body where it will really make a difference...a strong show of neighborhood support and passion is our biggest asset, if you have kids BRING THEM, TELL a neighbor or Friend, Forward this e to someone who might be interested, and if you ARE active in the Bowery Political Scene and are affiliated with a group PLEASE let them know...The Cooper Square Neighborhood needs their support.

All the best,
Stuart Zamsky, 5th Street Block Association, CSH Task Force

RALLY AGAINST THE COOPER SQUARE HOTEL


Los Angeles luxury developers Peck/Moss want to turn the Bowery into Bourbon Street with the Cooper Square Hotel.

Peck/Moss demands that the state liquor authority give them everything they want and ignore their neighbors.

Peck/Moss demands approval for 3 indoor bars plus an outdoor bar/restaurant that abuts 10 apartments and is feet from about 50 others.

Peck/Moss demands a door on 5th Street that will disturb the JASA Home for the Elderly and Disabled.

TELL COMMUNITY BOARD 3 THAT

THE EAST VILLAGE SAYS NO TO THE COOPER SQ HOTEL

6pm

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10th

200 EAST 5th Street (5th & Bowery)
PLEASE attend the subsequent Community Board 3 State Liquor Authority Committee Meeting afterwards and speak out.

"Dubai on the Bowery"--New York Magazine

“We’re going to put Cooper Square on the map.” —Developer Gregory Peck

Sign the letter on the Bowery

I've got about ninety signatures and counting. To sign, just send me your name and zip code. I'll attach the signature when I print out to send it to the elected officials. My e-mail:
robCUNY@gmail.com


November 1, 2007

To the Honorable Borough President Stringer, State Senator Connor, State Assembly Speaker Silver and Assemblymembers Glick and Kavanagh and City Councilmembers Gerson and Mendez,

The Department of City Planning has removed the Bowery from the Lower East Side rezoning plan, exposing the Bowery to out-of-scale hotel development. If the current LES rezoning is approved, prohibiting large-scale development to the east of the Bowery, the pressure to develop hotels on the Bowery will be irresistible. Such upscale development extending south to Canal Street will also transform Chinatown beyond recognition.

New York is losing its ethnic, historic neighborhoods to overdevelopment and gentrification. Chinatown and the Bowery are still lined with many of New York's unique and historically significant structures. The area is thriving, busy, socially and economically successful, full of lively, commercial and residential street life and commercial activity that serves local low-income residents among human-scale mixed-use structures. These low-income neighborhoods are safe, viable, vibrant and community-oriented. They do not need gentrification or development and they will not benefit by gentrification or development.

Rather, overdevelopment will eliminate the street life, the small commercial operations and the local community orientation. Chain stores and commercial and residential displacement follow upscale development. Landlord harassment, already on the rise in the Lower East Side and East Village, will spread throughout the rest of Community District 3. Local businesses and residents will be driven out. Upscale nightlife will replace ethnic eateries. The unique character of Chinatown will be lost.

Is this City Planning's intent for the Bowery and Chinatown?

If this is the City's plan, then all New Yorkers deserve to know it.

Will you ask the city administration and DCP to announce publicly their plans for the Bowery and Chinatown? Will you ask DCP and the Mayor:

1. Does the City intend the Bowery to be lined with out-of-scale hotels?

2. If the City does not intend the Bowery to be lined with out-of-scale hotels, what immediate action will the City take to avert hotel development along the Bowery?

3. Will DCP include the Bowery in the current LES/EV rezoning to save the Bowery from destruction?

The people of this city urgently need to know if their government intends to rob them of their history, of their ethnic variety, of their favorite neighborhoods and of the character and beauty of their city, to replace these with revenue-generating glass-and-steel anonymity, banks, Duane Reades and chain stores, devoid of community, of street life, of human interaction, of stability, of community commitment, of any character that could be called New York's.

Respectfully,

(zip code)
Alice Abell 10002
Alyssa Adams 10009
Teri Ananda 10003
Deanna Anderson 10012
James Battaglia 10128
Martin Brown 10009
Gwendolyn Bucci 10012
Brent Buell 10012
Keefe Butler 10002
Ed Cahill 10009
Elizabeth Capelle 10011
Barbara Caporale 10009
Janice Cline 10012
Carol Conway 10012
Ellin Crane 10009
Eve Cusson 10009
Martha Danziger 10003
Wendy Davidson 10003
Philip DePaolo 11211
Lou Dembrow LES Girls Club 10003
Udo Drescher 10009
Susannah Driver 10280
Nancy English 10012
Eric Ferrara 10003
Zeke Finkelstein 10009
Martha Fishkin 10009
Eden Fromberg 10009
Meghan Gille 10009
Christabel Gough 10014
Frances Goldin 10003
Mark Hatalak 10003
Rob Hollander 10009
Joseph Iberti 10003
Elissa Iberti 10003
Rafael A. Jaquez 10009
Sarah Johnson 10009
Zella Jones 10012
Virginia Kaycoff 10003
Weiwen Ke 10003
Susan Ko 10002
Bill Koehnlein 10003
Diana Lakis
Ronald Latigano 10009
Marilyn Leong 10002
Linda Levit 10012
Adriana Lopez 10003
Iris Lopez 10009
Jennifer Lynch 10009
Don MacPherson 10013
William Manfredi 10012
Michael Mauriel 10003
Marilyn Mccall 10002
John McDermott 10002
Matt Metzgar 10009
Louise Millmann 10003
Maria Muentes 10002
David Mulkins 10003
Cate Nailor 10009
MaryBeth O'Hara 10009
Michele O'Neal 10009
Bob Ortiz 10003
Tom Ostoyich 10009
Gilda Pervin 10013
Kenny Petricig 10009
Daniel Peckham 10011
Anthony Piantieri 10003
Marie-Claire Picher 10003
Don Pollock 10009
Kathryn Posin 10012
Gayle Raskin 10009
Quinn Raymond 10003
Ephraim Rosenbaum 10002
Felice Rosser 10009
Elizabeth Ruf 10009
Elissa Sampson 10009
John Schmerling 10012
Roberto Serrini 10003
Monte P. Schapiro 10009
Joelle Shefts 10012
David Sheldon 10025
Bonnie Sue Stein 10003
Dr. Harlan and Rima Strauss 10002
Dean Clarke Taylor 10003
Ed Torres 10009
Michelle Vergara 10003
George Wachtel 10012
Max Weissberg 10002
Sue Williams 10012
Katharine B. Wolpe 10003
Philip Van Aver 10009

Letting the city get away with it again

For the last three months I've been asking Community Board 3 to demand that the Department of City Planning (DCP) state publicly its intentions for the Bowery so that
a) all the the people of New York will know what DCP has planned for the Bowery, and, by extension, Chinatown, and
b) DCP can face public scrutiny.

In response, the CB has written a letter to the Department of City Planning telling them that the community wants DCP to preserve the context of the Bowery.

While it is great to see the CB go on record in support of preserving the Bowery, it's hard to see what this letter is intended to accomplish:

1. DCP already knows the CB wants to preserve the Bowery: the CB included the Bowery in its original contextual rezoning plan two years ago.

2. DCP clearly doesn't care what the CB wants: it removed the Bowery from the rezoning area.

3. The letter was neither public nor demanded a public response.

This letter, though well-intentioned, doesn't say anything new or compel any response from DCP.

It's like calling up your landlord, telling him you want heat, after he's purposely cut off your heat to harass you out of your apartment. Why call him? He already knows you want heat. Calling him doesn't help you. You need outside help -- from HPD, from the courts, from the media.

So, once again, I ask the CB to push this issue into the public realm. The current city administration has been supporting development, gentrification and displacement throughout the city. All the old communities where real New Yorkers live, all the ethnic neighborhoods that make New York interesting and beautiful are threatened, from Harlem to Williamsburg to Fort Greene to Chinatown. This is an issue for ALL New Yorkers. It is not a local issue.

A victory

The Shalom Tenants Alliance won a long-fought battle to prevent their landlord from illegally converting their lower floors into a restaurant on a street that has become an unrestrained nightlife hell.

The Board of Standards and Appeals, the city agency that grants variances to allow commercial uses in residential spaces, ruled that the landlord did not need relief from hardship, the common ground for a variance. The landlord, the Shalom family, owners of several buildings around town, claimed that they tried to rent the basement as office space but had failed, and so they needed a restaurant. The BSA didn't buy that pretense: the family repeatedly refused the Board's request for evidence of having tried to rent it as office space.

Anticipating commercial use, the landlord had already removed the stoop of the building, damaging the façade, which he never bothered to repair. It's quite an eyesore. This is what happens in a city where landlords expect to get away with anything. The Shaloms were no doubt expecting a restaurant tenant to fix up the façade for them. Now they are stuck with a mess of their own making.

Next city-wide tenants union meeting

The city-wide tenants union UNYTE will meet
Monday, October 15, 7pm at the
6th Street Community Center, 638 East 6th Street
between Avenues B&C.

On the agenda: planning our
City-wide Town Hall Symposium & Speak Out
on New York's out-of-control rents,
out-of-control development,
out-of-control landlords,
out-of-control city agencies,
out-of-control harassment and displacement
and the loss of tenants' rights and protections.

We're growing. Join us.

Look what's goin' down

For real estate speculators, the destabilization of regulated apartments is an investment strategy.

Normandy Real Estate recently bought a building here for $6.4 million, up from $4.5 million, for which the building sold in March 2006. The City of New York got a hefty $167,952.83 in real property transfer taxes for this transaction; the State of New York got another $25,594.00.

Who is Normandy? They are located in New Jersey and hold properties all over the East Coast. Their expressed goal here is to turn stabilized apartments into market-rate apartments.

From their website:
"This portfolio of primarily rent-stabilized apartments is strategically located in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Upper Manhattan. The investment strategy is to capitalize on the strength of the local economy and New York City rental market as well as the increased institutional appetite for New York City rent stabilized housing transactions. There is a near-term opportunity to increase cash flow by converting rent stabilized apartments to market rate as tenants vacate units."

On the East Village, from their website:
"This newly-gentrified area ... has exceptional potential for growth. There is an opportunity to increase rental income at the properties by renovating units and releasing at market rate."

Investors profit from deregulation; the city profits from investors. The fix is in.

Check out their website
http://www.normandyrealty.com/normandycorporate/home/tabid/37/Default.aspx)

These folks are big:
"Normandy Real Estate Partners, LLC is a fully integrated real estate investment management firm based in Morristown, NJ with offices in New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. Normandy has invested over $1 billion of equity totaling approximately $4 billion in asset value. Normandy recently closed on its current discretionary real estate fund, Normandy Real Estate Fund, L.P., with projected total purchasing power of approximately $1.8 billion. Targeting the northeast and mid-Atlantic markets of Boston, Metro New York City, Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Metro Washington D.C., ..."

Columbia expansion and our future

Last week, Borough President Scott Stringer endorsed Columbia University's expansion plan despite community opposition. Susi Schropp has expressed the implications clearly:

"the department of city planning (= mayor bloomberg) has developed systems of up-zoning that guarantee displacement of low and moderate income citizens. bloomberg's dream of the "island of luxury," manhattan, is being implemented at an increased pace...what happens with columbia will have a profound impact on plans in other areas (nyu, fordham, atlantic yards, husdon yards, the rezoning of the lower east side, jamaica, queens, west harlem, eminent domain abuse to further profit of private entities, etc.)."

Tomorrow (Wednesday) City Planning will hold a Hearing on the
197-a Community Plan and Columbia's 197-c,
at City College's Aaron Davis Hall,
135th Street and Convent Avenue
(one block east of Amsterdam Avenue).
Doors open at 8:30am. CB 9 and Columbia will present first, followed by elected officials. Then ordinary citizens may speak.

Registration to speak is only in person at the hearing. Testimony will be heard as late as 11:00 P.M. if there is no break in the speakers. If there are no speakers signed up and ready to speak, the commission will terminate the hearing. So if you can attend during the day, you will be helping to extend the hearing into the evening when working people will be able to attend.

Persons who cannot testify on October 3 may submit written testimony to City Planning Commission, Calendar Information Office, 22 Reade Street - Room 2E, New York, New York 10007-1216.

For details of community opposition, visit
http://www.stopcolumbia.org/

For additional information contact:
Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC)
bfrappy24@aol.com
(212)-666-6426,
(212) 234-5005,
o se habla espanol: (212) 234-3002)
www.stopcolumbia.org

Open letter to Community Board 3

Esteemed members of Community Board 3,

Time is running out to save the oldest avenue in New York, the Bowery. Once the City's LES rezoning prohibits out-of-scale hotels east of the Bowery, developers will dig up the Bowery, edging development and displacement toward Chinatown.

The CB3 197 Zoning Task Force plans to propose a new zoning plan for the east side of the Bowery (the side in CD3), pending the funding and execution of a study of the area, a lengthy process. By the time the City implements such a plan two years or more from now, the Bowery will likely have been overrun with hotels. Such a new zoning plan will face a fait accompli of development.

There is, however, a means for CB3 to save its side of the Bowery from becoming the next target of hotel development:

LESRRD, the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors and the Coalition to Save the East Village all asked the City to include the Bowery in the City's current LES rezoning. These Scoping Hearing public record requests give the CB leverage now. A public letter to the Borough President and City Planning indicating that without a rezoning now, the City is handing over the Bowery to developers, will place the burden of responsibility on the City for not including the Bowery in the rezoning plan. The City will be compelled either to take action or accept responsibility for hotel development.

The Community Board must ask City Planning publicly what it intends for the Bowery.

The question must be put publicly , not privately. The goal is not to gather information but to put the case openly that if no rezoning=huge hotels then the City must take responsibility for abandoning the Bowery to hotels or act now. If the City doesn't respond to the public question, then the City is admitting its intention to open the Bowery to luxury hotels.

The City's position on the Bowery should be a matter of public record, and CB3 should not allow the City to get away with hiding its intentions any longer.

In lieu of a clear, public position from the City, the CB Task Force has been speculating that it's useless to fight to get the Bowery in the rezoning because:

1) the City doesn't want to rezone the Bowery. (If that's the reason then why has the CB3 Task Force begun to work on a separate, new rezoning plan for the Bowery now?)

2) the west side of the Bowery is in a different district and DCP doesn't zone one side of a street. (But DCP zones single sides of streets all the time; DCP Deputy Director for Manhattan has plainly told me that one-side-of-the-street- zoning is and was never a problem for them.)

3) DCP does whatever it wants. (If that's so, why has the CB3 Task Force been working for a full year on a rezoning of 3rd & 4th Avenues, an area the City has publicly and insistently refused to rezone?)

The CB has no reason not to ask publicly, now:

What does the City want for the Bowery?
City delay = huge luxury hotels.

A separate zoning plan will be completed too late.
Please ask DCP publicly now!

Respectfully yours,
Rob Hollander
LESRRD (LES Residents for Responsible Development)

Phil DePaolo tells it like it is

Mayor Bloomberg, Second Mayoral Debate, November 1 , 2005:
“This is an expensive city; it always has been, probably always will be.”

We have seen first hand the devastating effects of the New York City housing boom on the residents of our city, mainly low income people who cannot afford to live in their apartments with all the rent increases applied to rent stabilized apartments.

In the 1970s, when no one was developing, the 421a program was a wonderful plan. The original intent of the law establishing the 421-a tax abatement was to encourage housing development in an area where market rate development was not occurring and would not occur without the tax abatement. In return a developer could expect that by the time the full tax on the building had phased in, tenants would be paying rents that were high enough to cover the higher tax bill. But now the incentive is used as nothing more than a come on to entice prospective buyers of luxury units. The abatement is a crutch for developers that costs the city millions in tax revenue, dollars badly needed to fund affordable housing and improve the city's increasingly overloaded infrastructure.
The 421-a program has subsidized over 100,000 housing units since the program’s inception. However, according to a 2003 report by the Independent Budget Office, only about 8% of the units were affordable to low or moderate income families. The cost of the program to the City of New York has grown 150% in the last four years. Another report by the Pratt Center for Community Development also found that while the 421-a program did subsidize the building of more than 100,000 units since 1971, again only 8 percent of them were actually affordable for low and moderate income residents and with soaring rents and record numbers of homeless the city and state must continue to do what they can to fill the void.

A huge problem we see is that affordable housing is calculated off of the HUD AMI charts, which groups all of NYC together, so that the median income for a family of four is 70,900, and 80% of AMI is considered low income. With a community AMI of $30,000 and average renter wages of under $14.00 an hour even at 60% of AMI most residents in Williamsburg and Greenpoint Brooklyn will not be able to afford the units proposed under Chairman Lopez's Bill. We also worry about the fine print in the new HDC programs, which now has affordable housing rent to income ratios going all the way up to 35%, when the entire country uses 30% as a standard. It seems like it might not be much, but if you do the math, that extra 5% really squeezes working families!

The current zoning incentives are not working, Inclusionary Zoning is not working and expanding the 421a program with the use of IZ will not stabilize low and middle income neighborhoods. It will kill them!

It's very important to focus on the luxury units which invariably change the economic demographics of less affluent communities and have the effect of forcing out the less affluent. The wealthy residents that move in have larger incomes putting pressures on local retail outlets to change the mix of amenities. Instead of hardware stores, affordable supermarkets and Laundromats, the commercial core changes to noisier bars, expensive restaurants, boutique food markets and so on. Stores offering less expensive goods can no longer pay the cost per square foot of the gentrified neighborhood.

While some affordable units are built, there's a larger net loss of affordable housing in the surrounding areas as real estate values and rents rise. With the loss of protections and enforcement of any meaningful rent regulation, surrounding neighborhoods are being torn apart.

I reject the idea that private developers need to have hefty 421a tax incentives to provide construction where the majority of the new units are market rate. Such developments are destroying low and working class neighborhoods, and the home to generations of immigrants are becoming unrecognizable.

If our elected are going to allow what is basically fair market rate housing to pass as "affordable" to residents of our City we need to hold our elected accountable as well.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition the Fair Market Rent (FMR) in New York for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,076 a month. In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing, a household must earn $3,588 monthly or $43,051 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $20.70 hr.

In New York, a minimum wage worker earns an hourly wage of $6.75. In order to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom apartment, a minimum wage earner must work 123 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Or, a household must include 3.1 minimum wage earners working 40 hours per week year round in order to make the two bedroom FMR affordable.

I believe that this new Bill will not create substantial amounts of real affordable housing .At this time, market rate housing development is clearly occurring and will continue to occur in the city without the benefit of the 421-a tax abatement. Therefore, the tax abatement is no longer needed as an incentive. I believe this Bill as written still gives way too much to developers and will not stabilize communities that are being targeted by rezoning and gentrification. Once again the City and State have missed an opportunity to pass meaningful 421a reform and the low and Middle income residents of our City will continue to be the victims.

Phil

City-wide tenants union meeting

Spread the word --

City-wide Tenants Union Meeting!
to plan
A MAJOR FALL EVENT
on rent regulations,
on tenant protections,
on displacement, harassment, tenant law,
the failure of city agencies to uphold the law,
and the upscale overdevelopment of our city

Wednesday, August 15, 7pm
ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION
172 Norfolk Street
(one block east of Essex/Ave. A, just south of Houston)
basement level.
The Orensanz Foundation is a landmark of community organizing and the arts.
Grateful thanks to Al for donating his space!

New York is under assault from developers and landlords. Our legal rights and protections have been eroded, loopholes have been exploited and there is little or no regulatory oversight. Affordable housing that sustains communities is rapidly disappearing. We are in crisis.

UNYTE is a New York city-wide tenant's empowerment group formed to confront this crisis. We are a democratic grassroots organization open to all renters in New York: tenants organizing tenants into a powerful political voice to strengthen tenant protections, laws and regulations and ensure government accountability, transparency, oversight, responsibility and enforcement.

Come help us plan an event that will bring the city's attention to the needs of its people.

TENANTS UNITE!

Landmarks, repairs and the Tenement Museum

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about this Historic District for Orchard and Ludlow, from east Allen to west Essex.

The hand-wringing is not about the project itself, but about its initiator, the Tenement Museum. Several years ago, in an effort to acquire the building next door, the Museum tried to use eminent domain (!!) to evict everyone from it.

That's not easy to forget. People are reluctant to support anything initiated by the Tenement Museum for the sake of that memory and its lesson. But this landmarking project is a good one that benefits residents and the community at large, not just the Museum.

All the opposition I heard to the Historical District project has come from property owners. Well, of course -- their properties lose value if they can't sell them to developers to demolish and build skyscraper hotels. Personally, I don't think the right to make a huge profit by demolishing history and putting tenants at risk deserves protection. If they were good landlords all those years before this real-estate surge, I'm sure they can continue to be good landlords without it now -- especially now, when there are so many new market-rate tenants paying and arm and a leg to live in their buildings. Two arms and two legs if you count their roommates. I can't imagine that any landlords in the LES are hurting.

Residents don't lose anything in this deal. In fact, I think they will come out ahead, not having to deal with landlords and developers trying to squeeze them, but just with landlords. The only repairs that will be more expensive will be external repairs. How often do you complain about the pointing of your exterior brick? I never have. Most of my complaints are about heat, hot water and plumbing. These will not be affected by Historic District status. From the Landmarks Preservation Commission:

"You do not need a permit from the Landmarks Commission to perform ordinary repairs or maintenance chores. For example, you do not need a permit to replace broken window glass, repaint a building exterior to match the existing color, or caulk around windows and doors. If you have any doubt about whether a permit is needed, call the Commission at (212) 669-7817."
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/faqs/faq_permit.shtml

Strategic error: last chance for the Bowery

CB3 is planning a new zoning study for the Bowery. Once it is finished, they will draw up a zoning proposal for City Planning. It'll all take about a year and who knows how long before the City responds if ever. To further this plan, they intend now to speak to DCP privately to ascertain what the City will consider for the Bowery.

This strategy, though well-meaning, is both strategically misguided and destined to produce too little too late.

By not publicly questioning the City on the Bowery, and by starting a new plan for the Bowery, the CB is taking on the burden of responsibility for the future of the Bowery and taking it off the City. That's an egregious strategic error. It means the City won't have to answer for anything, even though it's the City alone that has created this problem by leaving the Bowery out of the rezoning.

By the time the CB has a plan to present to the City for the Bowery, the Bowery will already have been developed and the City will blame the CB for it. And the City will be right.

Fortunately, the CB can still act strategically. LESRRD, the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors (BAN) and the Coalition to Save the East Village all asked at City Planning's Scoping Session that the Bowery be included in the rezoning. These public record requests give the CB leverage now. A public letter to the Borough President -- indicating that without a rezoning now, the City is handing over the Bowery to developers -- will place the burden of public responsibility on the City for not including the Bowery in the rezoning plan. The City will be compelled either to take action or to accept responsibility for hotel development.


The reasons CB3 gives not to fight to get the Bowery returned to the zoning area do not hold up under scrutiny. CB3 has said that it's useless to fight to get the Bowery in the rezoning because:
1) the City doesn't want to rezone the Bowery
(if that's the reason then why has CB3 begun to work on a rezoning plan for the Bowery now?);

2) the west side of the Bowery is in a different district and DCP doesn't zone one side of a street
(DCP zones single sides of streets all the time; DCP Deputy Director for Manhattan has plainly told me that one-side-of-the-street- zoning is and was never a problem for them);

3) DCP does whatever it wants
(if that's so, why has the CB been working for a full year on a rezoning of 3rd & 4th Avenues, an area the City has openly refused to rezone?).

CB3 should stop stalling and ask publicly, now: what does the City want for the Bowery?
No rezoning now=huge luxury hotels

St. Brigid's a year later

From the Committee to Save St. Brigid's:

--This Friday marks one year since the demolition of St. Brigid's was begun by the archdiocese, one year since the bulldozing of a hole through the East wall and the smashing of the stained glass windows.

There will be a rally at 7:30 AM outside the Church. Politicians and press will be attending. Please turn out to make our ongoing presence and resistance known.--

They've got a website too:
http://www.savestbrigid.com/

Good things at the Community Board

Two important items coming up at the July 24 Community Board meeting:
1) Historic Landmark District for Allen, Orchard, Ludlow & Essex
2) rewording the liquor license moratorium resolutions

1) The CB will vote to aprove the Lower East Side Preservation Coalition's proposal to create a Historic Landmark District of a substantial portion of the LES from Houston down to Division, Allen east to Essex. The LESPC has done an excellent and comprehensive job putting it together: an important project every resident dedicated to LES preservation can support.

2) Over the last two years I and others have complained to the CB that the State Liquor Authority ignored our liquor license moratoria because the moratoria violate due process . Under the old moratorium resolutions, the CB would deny, without a hearing, any liquor license in a moratorium area: the bar owner would not have to appear before the CB but go straight to the SLA.

Everyone deserves a fair hearing under the law, even a bar, otherwise there can be no rule of law. Without due process, CB3 pro forma denials were considered by the SLA to be improper abuses of authority, abrogations of legal charge and therefore meaningless grandstanding.

In every case in which they threaten to undermine residential, cultural or commercial life, liquor licenses should be denied by the CB -- but after a hearing, not without a hearing. The hearing establishes through due process under the law the specific facts that the SLA must consider. The new moratorium wording will require a due process hearing in which the bar owner will have to show how the liquor license will improve and not harm the neighborhood.

If you can attend the CB full board meeting, please express your support for these two items. You may sign up 6:15-6:30 to speak for two minutes at the public session which precedes the voting session.

CB3 full board meeting
Middle School 131
100 Hester Street
(Eldridge & Forsythe )
July 24, 6:15pm

It's happening everywhere

Take a look at the NY Press
CHAIN INVASION
Neighborhood haunts lose out in the restaurant renovation battle

By Jill Colvin

"From Yorkville on the Upper East Side to Astor Place in the East Village, the bar and restaurant landscape is becoming shinier and more corporate, and, as in the Heights, robbing residents of their cozy long-time local dens."
http://www.nypress.com/20/29/news&columns/feature.cfm

Report on the Scoping Session

For those who missed the June 25 Scoping Meeting:
A couple of us presented the case for including the Bowery in the City's rezoning plan -- David Mulkins of 5th Street was particularly eloquent -- but most of the testimony in the evening session I attended was devoted to support for the Community Board's 11-point plan, the best features of which are unfortunately beyond the purview of zoning: the tenants' legal fund and the anti-harassment & anti-demolition measures to protect tenants.

Below is a generalized comparison of just the differences between 1) the City's proposal, 2) the CB's 11 points, 3) the LESRRD alternative, and 4) the current zoning. Instead of talking zoning jargon, I'm translating F.A.R. into stories of a typical tenement with a 70'X25' floor-space. The translation is not exact, but it's better than reading jargon:

DCP (the City's plan)
Most streets and avenues: construction no larger than 6 tenement-sized stories (4FAR)* height cap: 75-80'

Houston, Delancey, Chrystie, D: construction no larger than 8 tenement-sized stories (5.4FAR) , but 9 tenement-sized stories (7.2FAR) if 20% affordable housing is included height cap: 120'

The Bowery is left out of the plan


CB3
Avenues: construction no larger than 5 tenement-sized stories (3.45 FAR) or 7 tenement-sized stories (4.6FAR) if affordable housing is included
Most side streets: construction no larger than 4 tenement-sized stories (3FAR)

Houston, Delancey: 7 tenement-sized stories or 9 tenement-sized stories with affordable housing
Chrystie: 9 tenement-sized stories or 12 tenement-sized stories with affordable housing


LESRRD
All streets and avenues including the Bowery: construction no larger than 5 tenement-sized stories (3.44FAR), but 6 tenement-sized stories (4FAR) with affordable housing


CURRENT ZONING
All streets and avenues: no larger than 5 stories (3.44FAR ) but much, much more is allowed on large, combined lots if a community facility (e.g., dormitory) is included north of Houston or a hotel south of Houston. If you can bring enough lots together, you can build to the sky. Hotel owners are cashing in on the south of Houston zoning as I write. Hotels cannot be built north of Houston, under current zoning, except in the commercial zones on 3rd Avenue and The Bowery. That's why it's so important to try to get the Bowery included in the rezoning. If the rezoning goes through without the Bowery, developers, unable to build any more huge hotels south of Houston, will line the Bowery with them all the way down to Canal, and Chinatown will become the next frontier for the bulldozer Gentrification.

All three rezoning proposals would end the community facility/dormitory and hotel bonuses. The DCP plan would bring upscale development, only 20% of it affordable, to Delancey, Chrystie, Houston and D.

The CB3 plan would bring less development to the avenues, 30% of it affordable, more significant development, 30% affordable, to Houston and Delancey and huge development, 30% affordable, to Chrystie.

The LESRRD alternative would bring, in effect, no development at all of any kind.

The controversy in rezoning in a nutshell: to get 20% affordable housing, the neighborhood must accept the development of 80% market-rate housing. The CB's 30%-70% is better, but still not good from a preservationist point of view.

It's been my position that inviting developers in will irreparably harm the LES/EV. The neighborhood would be transformed into an upscale playground -- more banks, bars and chain stores. No more Loisaida. Lots more pressure to evict low-rent long-time tenants. As the wealthy are drawn to development, the trend will edge towards Chinatown, threatening one of Manhattan's few remaining vital, ethnic communities and New York's first outsider immigrant neighborhood -- it is the site of Five Points.

If, however, the entire neighborhood is capped, including the Bowery, the rich will have to invade someplace else, and that someplace else will become the trendy place to be and the pressure will shift off us. That would help save what's left of Loisaida and the affordable housing that's still here.

* FAR is a measure of volume, so it's not the same as number of stories. With an FAR of 1, you can build a one story building covering the entire lot or a two story building covering half the lot or a three story building covering a third of the lot etc. In New York, buildings generally must leave 30'-deep courtyard space, so an FAR of 3.44 works out to at least 5 stories. If the building is built more shallowly, it could rise higher. All the above plans include height caps as well as FAR caps, but the FAR caps are more important because they limit the actual amount of space the building occupies regardless of its shape.

Saving the Bowery

The Community Board zoning task force will meet this Monday, July 16, 6:30, 184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington & Delancey -- University Settlement, Speyer Hall) to discuss rezoning 3rd Avenue as well as the Bowery between 1st and 7th Streets.

I do not know why the rest of the Bowery going south to Canal is not on their agenda: it's much more vulnerable to development than the area north of Houston. There is little left to save on the CB3 side -- the east side -- of the Bowery north of Houston. There are, however, several important men's shelters as well as a couple of remaining historic buildings. But the place is changing so fast that googlemaps' satellite photo may as well be of a different street.

If you go to the meeting: The Bowery is currently zoned commercial, mostly C6-1, just like the area south of Houston where the crazy-huge hotels are being built -- that's why crazy-huge hotels are going up on the Bowery too. And that's why the Bowery needs protection: if the LES south of Houston is rezoned to exclude big hotels, where do you think they're going to be built next? The Bowery.

The Avalon complex that extends from 1st Street to just south of Houston (the Whole Foods building in glass and steel that makes me fear for the future of the world) actually has a special zoning all to itself. It is the face of Inclusionary up-Zoning. This is what happens when government serves the development market first, people second. You get a few units of affordable housing included in the development, but what kind of street-life is a glass wall a block long? And who can afford Whole Foods? What neighborhood is this?

Petition to save the Bowery

The window of opportunity is still open to save the Bowery from overdevelopment: City Planning is accepting submissions for its zoning study until July 5. Now is the time to sign the petition to save the Bowery and distribute it to your contacts.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html

Please help.

Here is the petition notice from the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors:
>>We are continuing our petition drive to Save The Bowery. The character of the Bowery, including Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side, is being quickly destroyed with all the new development in the area. The history of this area should be preserved.

The new luxury buildings, and hotels will further destroy the quality of life for all of us living in the vicinity. There will be more traffic, more noise, more sidewalk congestion, more air pollution, etc.

Please take a minute to sign our petition, and please forward this to your email lists. We are asking the City of New York to do an Environmental Study to evaluate the how our community will be affected by this development, and then to mitigate the negative impact.

Please click on the link below to sign our petition:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html

PETITION TO SAVE THE BOWERY FROM OVER DEVELOPMENT

The Bowery, which comes from the Dutch word "bouwerij" for farm, has always been significant in New York City history. Before the Dutch settled here, in the 1600's, this was a Native American trail. By the end of the 18th century the Bowery was lined with fashionable shops and mansions, which later became Restaurant Supply, and Lighting Districts. With its neighboring Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side immigrant communities, this is one of the most culturally and historically diverse regions of the City. The Bowery remains one of the last true north/south running streets in New York City.

This rich history is being systematically eradicated by unprecedented development. The low-rise character of the Bowery is being replaced by high-rise dormitories, boutique hotels and luxury buildings which are out-of-scale with the rest of the residential community, including the historic NOHO District. In addition to preservation issues, this development will have a horrendous effect on the "quality of life" for community residents - more noise, traffic, sidewalk and street congestion, air pollution, bars, clubs, etc. What was a commercial "daytime" shopping strip is quickly turning into a raucous nightlife district.

Most of the development is "as-of-right", meaning that it does not require a special permit or variance. Developers are simply taking advantage of existing zoning bonuses and the transfer of air rights, therefore environmental studies are not required.

We respectfully request that:
- The Department of City Planning include the Bowery in the current 197C Plan being drafted for the Lower East Side. - The Department of City Planning and City Council pass immediate legislation to ensure that this "as of right" development does not continue.
- The Department of City Planning perform an Environmental Impact Study and take measures to mitigate the negative impact of this development on our community.<

Scoping testimony

Friends,
If you care about living here
If you care about this place
If you care about history
If you care about the future
If you care about community
If you care about overdevelopment
If you care about the eviction of tenants
If you care about the warehousing of apartments
If you care about giant hotels and mega-dormitories
If you care about life in the Lower East Side & East Village

then tell the Department of City Planning Monday.

The DCP's Scoping Session is the moment for you to express what the community wants for the future of the LES and East Village. If you care about preserving this neighborhood from increasing development and gentrification, come forward and tell DCP that

you do not want construction on your rooftop,
you do not want demolitions and redevelopment,
you do not want to lose our broad, bright avenues,
you do not want upzoning,

that you want this neighborhood to survive as it is and has been for over a hundred years. A community. The downest, homiest, funkyest, realest, mixedest, anarchistest, leftest, best community in the world.

I will ask that the three following alternatives be included in the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement:
1. include the Bowery in the C4-4A zone,
2. do not increase the current 3.44 FAR on the avenues,
3. do not upzone Houston, Delancey, Chrystie or D.

1. Inclusion of the Bowery: the impact of this zoning on the Bowery could be devastating. Unable to build their hotels south of Houston, developers will look to the Bowery where hotels can still be built. The EIS must include a study of the Bowery. LESRRD asks that DCP extend the C4-4A zoning to the Bowery. Most Bowery buildings are four stories or lower. Nearly all the rest are only five stories tall. It is home to some of the oldest, most historic structures in New York (e.g. 185 & 357).

2. Keep the current 3.44 FAR for the avenues: virtually all of 1st Avenue and most of 2nd, A, B and C are lined with buildings 5-stories or lower , FAR 3.44 or less. Raising the FAR to 4 will mean rooftop additions all across the avenues. Landlords use the construction of extensions as a means of turning residences into construction sites to harass tenants out of their homes. Four-story buildings will be warehoused in preparation for demolition and redevelopment. The low-rise, broad, open Civil War context of the East Village avenues will be darkened beyond recognition and solely for money, no other reason.

3. No upzoning on Houston, Delancey, Chrystie or D: Inclusionary up-Zoning on Houston has already brought us the Avalon Building and Whole Foods. The character of the neighborhood cannot survive more 80% market-rate glass&steel intrusions. Added development causes secondary displacement of residents and mom-and-pop businesses. Let's keep developers away, let's not invite them in. A reasonable zoning for these streets: R7B (FAR 3, height cap 75 ft) perhaps with an inclusionary housing bonus to 4. That will ensure that no one currently living in affordable housing will be displaced for the sake of promises of affordable housing.

A general alternative proposal for the entire district including the Bowery:

* maintain the current 3.44 FAR,
* remove the community facility bonus,
* cap heights at 70 feet (3.44 FAR = an average 5 story tenement, so the added height won't threaten existing tenements.)


The closest existing contextual zonings would be R6A and R7B and for south of Houston, C4-3A. Zoning designations like these but with 3.44 FAR would fit the neighborhood like a glove.

Don't forget to sign the petition to include the Bowery:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html

Scoping Meeting for the Environmental Impact Statement on the EV/LES Rezoning:
Department of City Planning,
Spector Hall,
22 Reade Street
June 25, 2-5pm, 6-8:45pm

The Scoping Meeting explained

1. What is a Scoping Meeting and why is it so important?

Ordinary residents (!) can get their concerns included in the rezoning.
Zoning=the future: housing & community preservation or development, displacement, eviction.

Before the Department of City Planning (DCP) can rezone a neighborhood, it must study the "environmental impact" of the rezoning -- the impact on population density, on construction and development, on mass transit, on traffic, on local businesses.

The Scoping Meeting is a hearing at which DCP will consider what to include in the scope of this Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). It is the one, big chance for the ordinary citizen to propose additions or revisions -- "alternatives" -- to the rezoning plan.

Since the plan has to go through both the Borough President's Office and the City Council, DCP is under pressure to include well justified, broadly supported alternatives, otherwise their plan loses credibility with the elected officials who must vote on it.

So Scoping is your chance to be heard where it counts.


2. What will happen at this Scoping Meeting?

The Community Board will present its 11 point alternative.
You can present your concerns too. I will ask DCP to
1. include the Bowery in the good preservation zone DCP proposed for the area from Chystie to Essex,
2. not increase the current 3.44 FAR on the avenues so that landlords can't destroy 1st & 2nd Avenues with rooftop additions and harass tenants with their construction
3. not upzone Houston, Delancey, Chrystie or D: to slow the rapid change here, we need to keep developers out, not invite them in.

Please join me. The more support for preservation, the more likely the neighborhood will be preserved.
Community pressure helped bring about the 11 point alternative. There's more to ask for. Let's ask.

And don't forget to sign the petition to include the Bowery:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html

Scoping Testimony

The Scoping Meeting on June 25 is the most important opportunity for community input into the impending rezoning of the East Village and Lower East Side. If enough of us testify, we can make a difference.

I will ask that the three following alternatives be included in the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement. This is just a sketch. I'll provide more detail soon for anyone who wants to join me:

1. Inclusion of the Bowery: the impact of this zoning on the Bowery could be devastating. Unable to build their hotels south of Houston, developers will look to the Bowery where hotels can still be built. The EIS must include a study of the Bowery.

2. Keep the current 3.44 FAR for the avenues: virtually all of 1st Avenue and most of 2nd, A, B and C are lined with buildings 5-stories or less , FAR 3.44 or less. Raising the FAR to 4 will mean rooftop additions all across the avenues. Landlords use the construction of extensions as a means of turning residences into construction sites to harass tenants out of their homes. Four-story buildings will be warehoused in preparation for demolition and redevelopment. The low-rise, broad, open Civil War context of the East Village avenues will be darkened beyond recognition and solely for money, no other reason.

3. No upzoning on Houston, Delancey, Chrystie or D: Inclusionary up-Zoning on Houston has already brought us the Avalon Building and Whole Foods. The character of the neighborhood cannot survive more 80% market-rate glass&steel intrusions. Added development causes secondary displacement of residents and mom-and-pop businesses. Let's keep developers away, let's not invite them in. A reasonable zoning for these streets: R7B (FAR 3, height cap 75 ft) perhaps with an inclusionary housing bonus to 4. That will ensure that no one currently living in affordable housing will be displaced for the sake of promises of affordable housing.

A general alternative proposal for the entire district including the Bowery: maintain the current 3.44 FAR, remove the community facility bonus, cap heights at 70 feet (3.44 FAR = an average 5 story tenement, so the added height won't threaten existing tenements.) The closest existing contextual zonings would be R6A and R7B and for south of Houston, C4-3A. Zoning designations like these but with 3.44 FAR would fit the neighborhood like a glove.

Scoping Meeting for the Environmental Impact Statement on the EV/LES Rezoning:
Department of City Planning,
Spector Hall,
22 Reade Street
June 25, 2-5pm, 6-8:45pm

Scope it out

On June 25, the Department of City Planning will hold the public "scoping meeting" for the proposed EV/LES Rezoning. This is the critical moment for community input into the rezoning plan. You may address the agency for 3 minutes and submit your comments in writing as well. Soon I will post the comments I plan to submit myself.

Department of City Planning,
Spector Hall,
22 Reade Street
June 25, 2-5pm, 6-8:45pm

The DCP website has all the documents relevant to the scoping and the hearing:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/env_review/scope.shtml#evles

No answer yet

I seem to have hit a nerve with my explanation for why the 3rd and 4th Avenue study was completed before the Bowery study has even begun. No one has yet offered a better explanation or any explanation. I'd like to understand why the Bowery was not prioritized. I invite the explanation for all to read here.

Rezoning the Bowery

The Community Board Zoning Task Force Subcommittee will meet Monday, June 11, 6:30pm at 113 Second Avenue (between 6th & 7th Streets), in the NYU "Black Room." Rezoning the Bowery will be on the agenda.

The rezoning study for the triangle between 3rd & 4th Avenues has been completed and the CB is about to move forward on a rezoning plan. Meanwhile, the CB has only just begun to discuss raising the money for a study of the east side of the Bowery down to Canal.

Community groups have already studied the area for height and density. I'd like to see the CB accept these studies and move forward with a rezoning for the Bowery without delay. If the CB were to ask DCP for a 197-c plan as it did for the EV/LES rezoning, it would save a lot of time and make up for some of the time lost already.