When city planners unveiled the new zoning for East Harlem at a community board meeting last month, neighbors wanted to know how many new apartments would grow, and how many people could potentially be displaced. Now the city has revealed estimates of how the rezoning would reshape the upper Manhattan neighborhood in a new set of zoning documents.
City officials unveiled a massive rezoning last night for East Harlem, where the administration hopes to encourage towers as tall as 30 stories, less parking for new buildings, and more ground floor retail.
The city is gearing up to rezone a 73-block stretch of Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, and politicians, activists, and members of local community boards spoke in frustrated tones last Thursday during the first public meeting on what promises to be one of the most controversial neighborhood plans of Mayor de Blasio’s time in office. Major players from the south and west Bronx offered opposing views on who should benefit from new housing and on whether Jerome’s hundreds of auto shops should remain.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first major housing victory came when the City Council successfully rezoned East New York in Brooklyn. Now, his administration is going to try and push another contentious rezoning through the public approval process, in order to redevelop the auto shop-filled Jerome Avenue in the Bronx.
After two weeks of haphazard fits and starts and a confrontational protest with tenant activists, City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez and the City Council Land Use Committee unanimously disapproved a plan to rezone the corner of Broadway and Sherman avenues, which would have paved the way for the construction of a 15-story apartment building known as Sherman Plaza.
