(My letter to Borough President Gale Brewer to oppose the proposed SoHo NoHo rezoning)
Dear Borough President Brewer,
As a former resident of SoHo and a native New Yorker, I oppose the city's proposed rezoning for SoHo and NoHo because there is no guarantee that any affordable housing will even be created and also because it is foolish and gratuitous to ruin one of New York City's most beautiful and historic tourist destinations, an area which is already dense and already has existing deeply affordable housing which will be threatened by a rezoning and will thus displace hundreds of NYC residents, mostly elderly.
This proposal has remained unpopular with area residents and worldwide fans alike since its inception. The only proponents of this idea are the real estate developers who are eager to build for their own profit and their aggressive transient Yimby fan boys, like real estate lobbying group Open New York. Elderly area residents attending the June 23, 2021 Manhattan Community Board 2 meeting, the first in-person gathering regarding this proposal, were viciously targeted and slandered on social media by Open New York for being members of the Ku Klux Klan for having simply shown up to try and fight to be able to stay in their apartments.
It is nothing short of evil to purposefully lie about old folks in an attempt to evict those old folks from their homes. All of us should be rallying around these aged New Yorkers and protecting them during this time of their lives.
Last month, at the July 8, 2021 CB2 meeting of their SoHo NoHo Working Group, the Department of City Planning's Senior Counsel John Mangin was directly asked if the city can guarantee that affordable housing, even one unit of it, will be created and Mr. Mangin refused to answer. Meanwhile, alleged "affordable" MIH developments are sprouting up all over the city, requiring annual income starting at the $80k level. These "affordable housing" projects are so unaffordable to lower income earners that developers are even starting to market them to 6-figure households with instructions on how to apply.
DCP cannot guarantee any affordable housing will be built in SoHo NoHo but they do anticipate the elimination of as many as 185 buildings and the inevitable eviction of residents in over 600 deeply affordable units, some one thousand souls or more. DCP Senior Planner Sylvia Li casually and vaguely referenced the displacement of these tenants during the few ULURP Zoom calls as if their inconvenient presence, many for decades of their lives, was a simple yet messy hurdle for this city to manage.
These residents built SoHo NoHo into the popular tourist hub it is today and their reward is to be now kicked out of it in their twilight years while also being referred to as the KKK. This is cruel and unconscionable.
And I question the legal appropriateness of those ULURP meetings, which averaged 2 1/2 hours and allowed for about only 20 or so public comments while hundreds of people were left out of participating; for the first Zoom call back in October 2020, my question was #354 and I was never called on.
Oddly enough though, members of Open New York were picked to speak on almost every single call, despite none of them even being residents of either SoHo or NoHo, which makes me question the fairness of how DCP managed their public engagement; no wonder there is a pending lawsuit addressing this lack of impartiality.
SoHo NoHo would benefit from more thoughtful, focused and deliberate development, given the historic buildings, their allowance of luscious sunlight and the iconic, world-renowned magic of New York City's downtown. Future generations will be disappointed and curious that we destroyed all this beauty and antiquity because we were essentially bullied by real estate developers and their lobbyists.
SoHo NoHo deserves more careful consideration and this city's legacy deserves protection but most of all, our residents who are aging in place in the amazing neighborhood, which they literally developed all by themselves, deserve to be heard, deserve to be respected and deserve to stay in their homes.
Please reject the current plan by DCP and let's do better for NYC.
