Mayor de Blasio has learned the hard way that people — even New York City liberals — have their own opinions about how they want to live. Neighborhood after neighborhood has rebelled against de Blasio’s heavy-handed social engineering.
In August, the people of Upper Manhattan forced City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a progressive and strident de Blasio ally, to reject the first major rezoning under the city’s new mandatory inclusionary housing policy.
“As long as the mayor and his progressive allies continue to force their grand vision on an unwilling populace, they can expect to face local revolts from a notoriously and proudly insubordinate city.”
MIH was a citywide revision of land-use rules allowing developers to build taller residential buildings with greater density if they also include subsidized apartments for lower- and middle-income New Yorkers.
The policy is key to the success of de Blasio’s goal to expand “affordable” housing: Unless market-rate developers are given incentives in the form of looser zoning rules, his target of 200,000 subsidized units would never be met.
The development in question, called Sherman Plaza, at the corner of Broadway and Sherman Avenue around 196th Street, would turn an old Packard dealership into a 15-story apartment tower. Up to 50 percent of the units would be subsidized. The proposed “upzoning” infuriated the local community, which saw it as an effort to gentrify the mixed Latino and white neighborhood with luxury housing.
Pressure built until Rodriguez, who voted for MIH as a citywide policy a few months before, nixed the Sherman Plaza proposal as not in the “best interests” of the neighborhood.
To the mayor, the city’s future lies in more thickly populated neighborhoods in outlying areas that are served by public transit. He envisions that the new developments will melt New York City’s “two cities” class structure by putting low-income people in the same buildings — and on the same floors — as so-called luxury tenants. Without the proposed upzoning, the developers will still be allowed to build at Sherman and Broadway; the building will simply be smaller and all the apartments will be market-rate.
From the perspective of a city planner, the neighborhood’s actions are irrational. From the community’s point of view, the additional capacity was a corporate giveaway, not a local benefit.
A similar scenario played out in Sunnyside, Queens, where progressive council Majority Leader Jimmy van Bramer rejected a proposed development...
Read the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Seth Barron is project director of the Manhattan Institute’s NYC Initiative. He blogs about New York City politics at City Council Watch.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post