GVSHP Rejoices: Far West Village & Far East Village Rezoning Passed

 

Dear friend,

 

The City Council has just voted to approve the Far West Village and East Village (3rd and 4th Avenue corridors) rezonings we have been fighting to enact for years, which means they take immediate effect. These two rezonings will go a long way towards stemming the tide of inappropriate development in these two historic residential neighborhoods, and are a tremendous victory for community efforts in the face of stiff initial resistance from the city!   Read the coverage in today’s CRAINS NY BUSINESS here.

 

The Far West Village Rezoning (also known as the Washington and Greenwich Streets Rezoning) covers six blocks between Washington and Greenwich Streets and West 10th and West 12th Streets (see MAP). The rezoning was first proposed by GVSHP and community groups in April of 2008 in response to a planned out-of-scale 100-room hotel at Perry and Washington Streets and a planned outsized mixed-use building at Charles and Washington Streets. GVSHP had also identified more than a dozen potential development sites in this six block area which could have had large-scale hotels built upon them if this rezoning had not taken effect. The rezoning will limit the size and height of allowable new developments and eliminate the possibility of large-scale hotel construction, which had begun to threaten the area.

 

GVSHP pushed very hard to expedite the consideration of the rezoning in order to ensure that it took effect before either project was “vested” and could be built under the terms of the older, more permissive zoning (read HERE and HERE). Because the rezoning has now taken effect before either project got foundations in the ground,neither can now be built in their currently planned forms. After refusing to support the proposed rezoning for more that a year and a half, in November of 2009 the Department of City Planning agreed to move ahead with the rezoning following extensive letter-writing campaigns and a widely-attended Town Hall meeting calling for zoning changes for the area conducted by GVSHP and allied community groups.

For more information on the Far West Village Rezoning, CLICK HERE.

 

The East Village Rezoning (also known as the Third and Fourth Avenue Corridors Rezoning) covers eight blocks between Third and Fourth Avenues, 9th and 13th Streets (see MAP). The East Village rezoning was first proposed by GVSHP and Community Board 3 in 2005 with help from Borough President Stringer’s office in response to NYU's highly controversial 26-story dorm on East 12th Street, now the tallest building in the East Village.  The new zoning will for the first time impose height caps of approximately 12 stories and eliminate the current zoning bonus for dorms and hotels in the predominantly residential area, thus prohibiting the construction in the area of more of the types of mega-dorms we have seen from NYU in recent years.  

 

The City initially refused to consider the proposed rezoning or to include it in the larger 111-block East Village rezoning passed in 2008.Special thanks go to Councilmember Rosie Mendez, under whose leadership in 2009 the Department of City Planning agreed to move ahead with the rezoning. The rezoning was also supported by State Senator Tom Duane.

  

For more information on the East Village Rezoning, CLICK HERE. 

 

 

Sincerely,

Andrew Berman
Executive Director