City taking owner's business for peanuts

From the Daily News:

New York City is using eminent domain to take an East Harlem businessman to the cleaners.

Damon Bae, whose family success story embodies the American Dream, is about to lose the shirt off his back — after a 12-year battle with the city for control of his dry cleaning enterprise.

Fancy Cleaners, a 6,000-square-foot facility at the corner of 126th St. and Third Ave., was supposed to be the cornerstone of a family empire built by a Korean couple who came to the U.S. in 1981, bringing their tailoring skills with them along with two young children and endless ambition.

But an eminent domain claim filed by the city in 2008 and enforced — after years of legal challenges — in March 2017 means Bae’s family no longer owns its premier property.

Now Fancy Cleaners has nowhere to go, and the whole enterprise will likely shutter, said Bae, 42, who runs the business created through decades of hard work by his immigrant parents.

“The city has offered my family about 30 cents on the dollar on the market value for what our three lots are worth — that’s not enough to buy anything comparable in East Harlem today,” Bae said. “The city’s working so hard to meet the developer’s timeline; meanwhile, we’re trying to stay in business.”

The city said it would pay the Bae family $3.5 million for the lot holding Fancy Cleaners when it took the property title through eminent domain in the spring, Bae said.

The asking price for a similar 5,000-square-foot lot about five blocks south of Fancy Cleaners’ current location is $11 million, Bae said.

East Harlem building evacuated due to enormous crack

From NBC:

Lara Wilson can see through her wall.

That’s because her upper Manhattan apartment building has a gaping crack -- at least a couple centimeters wide -- up an exterior wall that has splintered up from the second floor to the roof. And the crack is growing -- leading fire officials to hastily evacuate Wilson and nearly 30 other tenants while they assess the stability of the structure.

“Today, we looked out it and you could see out to the street,” she said. “So it’s pretty bad.”

Fire officials said it’s unclear what caused the crack at the building on East 96th Street and Second Avenue -- directly over the new Second Avenue subway’s final stop.

East Harlem tells City Planning to shove their rezoning plan

Protesters shut down East Harlem rezoning meeting, citing demands pic.twitter.com/InD1LdW7PU

— Dartunorro Clark (@DartDClark) November 18, 2016

From DNA Info:

Community activists shut down an East Harlem rezoning forum on Thursday in protest of an effort to dramatically redraw the neighborhood.

Residents packed the gymnasium at Taino Towers but, before speakers from the city Department of Planning could present their plan, protesters took to the floor with a bullhorn to oppose the rezoning.

Residents from Community Voices Heard demanded that the city first put $200 million towards repairs for existing New York City Housing Authority properties and lower levels of affordability for new developments.

"We're demanding that 30 percent of the new units built on public land are for low-income residents," said one woman from the organization. "And by low-income, we mean $23,000 and less."

The city laid out a rough rezoning proposal, which in some areas would include buildings as tall as 35 stories and development on NYCHA land.