Chinatown rezoning call keeps resounding at C.B. 3

By Heather Murray

Although Community Board 3 Chairperson David McWater has said the board won't ask the Department of Planning to expand a 114-block East Village/Lower East Side rezoning plan to include the Bowery and Chinatown, a coalition determined to expand the rezoning's area is working to mobilize the community.

The Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side was formed earlier this year to promote rezoning all of Community Board 3. The umbrella organization includes the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, Two Bridges Neighborhood Housing Council, the Sixth Street Community Center, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Chinese Restaurant Alliance and the Community Coalition Against the Business Improvement District.
The original rezoning study that jumpstarted the plan was brought to the community board in 2005 by the East Village Community Coalition. The coalition was formed in 2004 to fight Gregg Singer's high-rise dormitory plan on the site of the old P.S. 64 on E. Ninth St.

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C.S.W.A.’s Lee is worried that if the areas surrounding Chinatown are rezoned, it would entice developers to buy up property on the Bowery and in Chinatown. She feels for this reason it’s the Chinatown developers who are pushing for the redevelopment plan, not the working class.

“The community board, too, has a role to represent the entire community, not to draw a circle around where the leaders live,” Lee said. “They also need to represent the community, instead of pushing the government’s racist agenda upon the people, instead of becoming the mouthpiece for the developers in this community.”
Hoon Kim first spoke on behalf of the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops at C.B. 3’s January meeting.

Since then, his organization and others in the coalition have been spreading the word about their opposition to the rezoning. Within the past couple of weeks, he has disseminated information and gathered petition signatures at several intersections in the area, including Avenue B and Sixth St. and Delancey and Pitt Sts., and visited local churches, senior centers and small businesses. The coalition has gathered more than 5,000 petition signatures thus far. Speaking last week, Kim said he knew of another 100 people in the past few previous days alone who had signed on to the coalition’s cause.

 

Volume 77, Number 10 | August 08 - 14, 2007

Editorial

Chinatown bus chaos

Chinatown's private bus business is booming. That this industry has grown to its current level in a little under 10 years is amazing. The rates are cheap and if one is not too fussy these rides are just the ticket.

Yet, while the busy bus business is good news for Chinatown's economy over all, it also has brought a host of problems that are affecting Chinatown as well as the Lower East Side.

The buses increase traffic, pollution, noise, garbage and even violence, due to the fights that sometimes flare between rival operators in their competition for passengers. Police say it's hard to oversee these problems because the buses are so spread out. And the buses' picking up at the curb at scattered locations means traffic is being impacted in a haphazard, irrational way. Residents, in particular, are feeling the bus invasion's effects.

As The Villager reported last week, the city recently proposed a 30-day pilot program under which all the Chinatown interstate buses would be shunted toward the end of Pike St., with no more than seven dropping off or picking up at any one time. However, neighbors at Knickerbocker Village and the Rutgers Houses opposed the idea and so did Community Board 3.