02/08/2021
Last year, our community won an injunction in court against the four out-of-scale luxury towers proposed in Two Bridges, proving that Mayor de Blasio violated the City’s own zoning law and temporarily stopping their construction. Two weeks ago, the communities of Chinatown and the Lower East Side and allies from across the city held a successful virtual rally against the mayor’s attempt to overturn our victory, and to galvanize support for passing the full Chinatown Working Group Rezoning Plan (CWG) to protect the neighborhood from overdevelopment.
However, recently there has been a disturbing flyer of misinformation circulated in the Two Bridges neighborhood and the adjacent NYCHA buildings, which claims that, “According to the current rules, the towers are legally allowed to be built in the future.” This is a blatant attempt to defend the City’s illegal approval of the towers when the community’s LESON (Lower East Side Organized Neighbors) lawsuit is still going on! It implies that the City has done nothing wrong and we should let them get away with destroying our community with luxury overdevelopment. Unsurprisingly, the flyer comes from supporters of Council Member Margaret Chin, who has been spreading the same lie for years while trying to approve the towers through the City Council’s land use process.
The flyer also asks the community to support the so-called “Two Bridges Community Plan” that sets a height limit on development in ONLY the Two Bridges area. It purposefully leaves out that this so-called “community plan” is a small part of the much more comprehensive CWG plan that protects all of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, including NYCHA. Despite claiming this plan “was created by and for residents,” it conveniently ignores how the CWG plan was originally created.
In 2008, the City passed the racist East Village Rezoning that set a height limit on new development in the mostly White, middle-class East Village, but excluded Chinatown and the Lower East Side, communities made up of predominantly working-class Chinese, Black and Latino people. Without protection against speculation, luxury developments have poured into our neighborhood, driving up rents and real estate tax, displacing tenants, workers and small businesses. We came together to create the CWG plan with the goal of having the same protection as the East Village, and to not let the City pit communities against each other. In 2015, the plan was rejected by Mayor de Blasio, who represents the interests of big developers, and who later went on to greenlight the Two Bridges towers.
Proponents of the so-called “Two Bridges Community Plan” are actually helping the City to repeat what it did in 2008: protecting one small piece of the area and leaving the rest of the community vulnerable to displacement. Without any action to pass the rest of the CWG plan, their message is: Two Bridges matters most, screw the rest of you. This is what Mayor de Blasio and the big developers want to see: communities that are too divided to hold the City accountable for its displacement agenda.
We will not be fooled by these lackeys of corrupt politicians into seeing our neighbors as enemies and Chin and de Blasio as our friends. Our fight against the Two Bridges towers and for equal protection has shown that only through unifying all of Chinatown and the Lower East Side are we able to take control over the future of our communities. United we stand, divided we fall. Let’s reject the City and its supporters’ misleading and divisive narrative, and instead, join forces to demand the City pass the full CWG plan!
For more information about the CWG plan, visit: chinatownworkinggroup.com
