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Stencil on building wall by Crosby St..Soho (JQ)
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The Village Sun
The City Planning Commission on Tuesday announced the start of the
public review for the Soho/Noho rezoning. The plan was officially
certified, kicking off the city’s land-use review process, known as
ULURP.
Village Preservation, the largest neighborhood preservation
organization in New York City and largest membership organization in
Greenwich Village, the East Village and Noho, promptly issued a defiant
statement in response. Its director, Andrew Berman, blasted the rezoning
as “a massive giveaway” to developers salivating to strike it rich in
their coveted holy grail — the world-renowned, cachet-laden Downtown
enclaves of Soho and Noho.
According to the city, the scheme, which it calls the Soho/Noho Neighborhood Plan, would
allow as many as 3,500 new homes to be created, 900 of which would be
permanently affordable under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing
(MIH) program.
Outside of the Soho and Noho historic districts and along Canal St.
and the Bowery, the plan calls for “Opportunity Areas” that would allow
increased density and a maximum height of 275 feet, “which is
appropriate to the existing context,” according to City Planning.
The proposed changes would cover an area generally bounded by Canal
St. to the south, Houston St. and Astor Place to the north, Lafayette
St. and the Bowery to the east, and Sixth Ave. and West Broadway to the
west. The area’s unique zoning dates to the early 1970s, when vacant
manufacturing buildings were repurposed by artists. About 85 percent of
the proposed rezoning area is landmarked due to being included in
historic districts.
“Every New Yorker should have the opportunity to live in
transit-rich, amenity-filled neighborhoods like Soho and Noho,” said
Marisa Lago, the chairperson of the City Planning Commission. “Built on
years of community engagement, this proposal was crafted with a lens
focused on fair housing, an equitable recovery from the COVID-19
pandemic, reinforcing Soho/Noho as a regional hub for jobs and commerce,
and preserving and augmenting the arts. Through permanently affordable
housing requirements and support for the arts, this plan is a giant step
forward toward a more equitable and even livelier New York City.”
Under ULURP, Community Board 2 now has 60 days to review the
proposal, after which it will go to Borough President Gale Brewer for
her consideration, then back to the City Planning Commission and
ultimately to the City Council for a binding vote. The process typically
can take around seven months, which would just barely get under the
wire before de Blasio is forced out of City Hall due to term limits.
But despite the city’s lofty rhetoric, preservationist Berman said
the Soho/Noho rezoning is, at heart, a transparent payback for the
mayor’s deep-pocketed developer pals.
“In the dying days of the de Blasio administration, the mayor is
indulging in an orgy of payback to the special interests who donated
generously to his campaign and his legally suspect, ethically tarred,
now-defunct Campaign for One New York,” Berman said. “High up on that
list is a massive giveaway of real estate development rights in Soho,
Noho and Chinatown to his generous donors, like Edison Properties,
which will enable them to build enormous office buildings, big-box
chain retail stores, and super-luxury condos where current rules
prohibit them from doing so.
“Wrapped in a false veneer of affordable housing and social-justice
equity,” Berman said, “de Blasio’s Soho/Noho proposal is a fire-sale
giveaway of enormously valuable real estate that will destroy hundreds
of units of existing affordable housing and create few if any new ones;
displace hundreds of lower-income residents and residents of color; make
these neighborhoods richer, more expensive and less diverse than they
are now; and destroy locally and nationally recognized historic
neighborhoods while pushing out the remaining independent small
businesses with a flood of big-box chain retail. It’s a classic de
Blasio bait and switch, and one has to wonder, after seven-and-a-half
years of seeing this mayor in action, who is naive or desperate enough
to not see it for what it is?”
Village Preservation recently released a study
that analyzed the de Blasio plan and found that, in every case where
the city predicted affordable housing would be included in new
development, the plan actually makes it more lucrative to build without
the affordable housing, and to utilize the many loopholes in the plan
for avoiding affordable housing requirements. Specifically, commercial,
retail and community-facility space, as well as market-rate residential
space of no more than 25,000 square feet per zoning lot are all exempted
from affordable housing requirements. Thus, according to Village
Preservation, the chances of any affordable housing being generated by
the plan are exceedingly small.
The group’s study also found that the Soho/Noho plan only accounts
for about 37 percent of the 10.3 million square feet of new development
potential it would create (nearly four Empire State Buildings’ worth),
thus “hiding millions of square feet of additional development likely to
take place that will almost undoubtedly take the form of luxury condos,
big-box chain retail, and high-end commercial office space with no
affordable housing.”
Earlier this month, the Soho Alliance, Broadway Residents Coalition
and individual plaintiffs filed a lawsuit to block the rezoning plan’s
certification, but the city, at the last minute, delayed the certification.
As a result, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled that he
could not issue an injunction yet. He set a return court date of June 3,
likely figuring the city would have certified the plan before then.
Last Friday and this Monday, the plaintiffs returned to court to try
to block the certification once again and the judge denied them again.
But that does not mean, as has been incorrectly reported by some media
outlets, that the lawsuit was tossed out of court, noted Sean Sweeney,
the director of the Soho Alliance. Sweeney paraphrased their attorney,
who related Engoron’s latest response:
“The judge said, ‘Look, I’ll give a T.R.O. [temporary restraining
order] if the bulldozers are coming in to destroy a building. But I’m
not going to give an emergency T.R.O. for a process [ULURP] that will
last seventh months.”
Engoron, however, said that the issue of an emergency T.R.O. would be discussed during the return court date of June 3.
The lawsuit argues that public in-person meetings, not Zoom virtual
meetings, are required under ULURP and also that the city did not make
sufficient information about the plan available to Community Board 2 the
required 30 days before the certification.
According to Sweeney, C.B. 2 was only sent a couple of sentences
notifying the board that the certification was planned. That’s
insufficient under a referendum to the City Charter that voters approved
in 2019, he noted. Meanwhile, the Soho/Noho rezoning plan is a massive
document.
“One appendix [for the rezoning] has 13,000 pages, so how can the
community board, let alone the public, review a long, long attachment?”
the Soho activist asked, incredulously.
