Juan Gonzalez checks in on the LES rezoning plan in the Daily News today in a piece titled Lower East Side rezone plan another Mike Bloomberg boondoggle:
Wah Lee, a slight, middle-aged factory worker, stood in front of the Municipal Building Tuesday vowing a long fight to save her Chinatown neighborhood.
All around her were dozens of Chinese and Hispanic residents of the lower East Side. They held up placards with words like: "Stop Racist Rezoning" and "Chinatown/Lower East Side Are Not For Sale."
They brought a box of petitions with the signatures of some 10,000 of their neighbors - all opposed to the City Planning Commission's new rezoning proposal.
Theirs is a story that has become all-too familiar during the Bloomberg era: another stable neighborhood turned upside down by a massive rezoning.
The sheer number of these rezonings - from Columbia University to Hudson Yards to Greenpoint-Williamsburg to Willets Point, boggles the mind.
City officials routinely claim it's for the good of the neighborhoods, but in the end a handful of well-connected developers and Big Box stores end up the big winners.
Small businesses and low-income New Yorkers keep getting pushed out.
[Downtown Express photo by Shoshanna Bettencourt]
Wow, I can't believe the Daily News actually acknowledged this reality, but I suppose that shows the ultimate value of protest: the louder and angrier you are, the harder it is for them to pretend you don't exist.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see that the Asians and Hispanics in Chinatown, as well as the Blacks in Harlem, the Hasidims in Williamsberg, and all the other ethnic groups in this city that taditionally were hostile to each other are finally starting to realize that they have a common interest together.
After all, the yuppie/hipsters call them all by one name: "losers".