Local representatives are beginning the long-awaited move to define just what area of lower Manhattan might be covered by a “Chinatown” rezoning that the de Blasio administration has said it will initiate.
After years of pushing for a comprehensive rezoning, community leaders are waiting to see the city’s outline for a smaller ‘Chinatown Core’ study as a separate public-review process begins for a row of skyscrapers in Two Bridges.
Community advocates have been at odds with the city over whether the rezonings will create deeper needs for classroom seats than the city’s school-building plans accommodate.
We asked nine developers about rezonings, displacement and how they would solve the affordability crisis.
Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible for many forms of housing assistance and can be less likely to report landlord harassment. That could make them uniquely vulnerable to the displacement that can come from development.
A new documentary looks at the rise, fall and rebirth of Georgia’s New Communities, Inc., which aimed to empower Black sharecroppers in the 1960s but might offer lessons for urban dwellers of today.
The Regional Plan Association found nearly 1 million people in the metropolitan region are at risk of displacement. Needed are programs to offset development pressure—and more caution about policies that make the pressure worse.
There were good intentions, but some boards and certainly the Bloomberg administration underestimated the threat of gentrification, board members say.
In the three days before the final State of the City address before he faces re-election, Mayor de Blasio unveiled two major shifts to address critics of his housing policies. On Friday, he revealed a major shift toward lower-income families in the allocation of units to be created under his housing plan. And on Sunday he and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced they had agree to create a universal right to legal services for tenants facing eviction. The starkly unequal playing field in housing court, where most landlords have lawyers and most tenants do not, has long infuriated advocates and was a focus of City Limits’ 2015 series on that court. The de Blasio administration has for years offered some funding for housing-court legal services but had resisted creating a universal right.
The number of units in the ten-year housing plan that target families making below $40,800 will be increased from 20 to 25 percent.
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