GVSHP | Detail

Preliminary presentations and public hearings will be held on Wednesday, June 10th, at both Community Board #2 (Greenwich Village, NoHo, SoHo, Little Italy) and Community Board #3 (East Village, Lower East Side) regarding the city’s ‘Zoning for Quality and Affordability’ plan, which would allow taller and larger developments in residential neighborhoods citywide. GVSHP is very concerned about this proposal, which has been scaled back slightly recently but still would do tremendous damage to the scale and character of our neighborhoods, while doing little or nothing to improve the quality or affordability of housing produced. We strongly urge anyone who cares about this issue to attend the public hearings, find out more, and let our Community Boards and the City know that you do not want our neighborhood zoning protections weakened, as this plan would do.

The Mayor’s plan would loosen height limits for new construction in residential neighborhoods, in most cases for purely market rate (i.e. luxury condo) developments. The plan would even further loosen the height limits for those developments in certain areas which set aside a small fraction of units for affordable housing. The height increases would be as great as 31%.

The City claims that by allowing developers to build taller buildings, they will increase the quality of their designs. And the City claims that by further increasing the allowable height of new developments containing a fraction of senior or ‘affordable’ housing, more developers will chose to build these types of units. But there is little or no evidence to indicate that either the quality or affordability of the housing produced will improve at all, while there will clearly be a loss of light, air, sky, scale, and neighborhood character resulting from these zoning rule changes.

The City has released profiles with greater details on how the plan will affect each neighborhood, including Community Board #2 and Community Board #3; you can also see profiles for all Community Boards.

You can find out more about the proposal here, here, here, and here.

HOW TO HELP:

Attend the Community Board hearings next Wednesday, June 10th at 6:30 pm – Community Board #2 at NYU Silver Bldg., 32 Waverly Place (at University Place), rm. 206, and Community Board #3 at Grand Street Settlement, 80 Pitt Street (at Rivington Street).
Write City officials urging them to save our neighborhood zoning protections > >

Next: 06/09/15
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