Protecting and improving the community for the people who live and work here

“After City Lifts Deed Restriction, Rivington House Building Sold For $116 Million to Luxury Developers”

Lousy news for this neighborhood.

Rivington House sold for $116 million dollars. The city “lifted the deed restrictions without any guarantees that the property would remain a community asset”.

At the same time that Cuomo and de Blasio are frantic to find housing for people with HIV AIDs this building, a former AIDs hospice, was let go for $16 million to the Allure Group (who just flipped a nursing home for condos in Bed Sty).

To read more detail: Lo-Down.

Thanks to the Lo-Down for their thorough reporting.

 

Read More“After City Lifts Deed Restriction, Rivington House Building Sold For $116 Million to Luxury Developers”
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Two -way bike lane on Chrystie Street proposal: CB3 Transportation Committee Meeting

Transportation Alternatives Manhattan activists would like to remind the neighborhood about their Chrystie Street bike campaign.

For those members who are able make this meeting please do attend and lend your expertise.

On March 8th, the Community Board 3 Transportation Committee will see a redesign proposal from DOT (supported by Transportation Alternatives) for a two-way protected bicycle lane alongside Sara D. Roosevelt Park.

The Coalition was also promised by DOT that an accessible, local, daytime meeting (with translation?) for the affected neighborhood to weigh in would be held! We will keep you posted.

Manhattan Community Board 3 Transportation Committee Meeting

When: Tuesday, March 8th at 6:30pm

Where: Grand Street Settlement Cornerstone, Seward Park Extension, 56 Essex St. (between Grand St. and Broome St.)

Transportation Alternative plans to call 600 constituents in the district, and recently distributed 200 bilingual flyers to advertise the event. If you would like more information about the campaign, please visit our website here: transalt.org/Chrystie

From the Transportation Alternatives website:

“Chrystie Street is one of the Lower East Side’s busiest and most traveled streets. On one side, Chrystie St. is framed by mixed-use commercial and residential space. On the other side lies the historic Sara D. Roosevelt Park, the Lower East Side’s largest green space, which serves people of all ages with space for play and events, a senior center, and seasonal vendors’ markets. A two-way protected bicycle lane can improve the streetscape alongside the park, increase flow for bicycling and improve parkside access.

People walking or biking on Chrystie Street deserve safer access at critical intersections that are the nexus with adjoining neighborhoods. Its intersections with major thoroughfares should take priority for traffic-calming measures.

 

We call on the Community Board 3 and Department of Transportation to implement the following improvements on Chrystie Street:

  • Safer and improved sidewalks and crosswalks, and the addition of pedestrian refuge islands
  • Traffic calming measures at the base of the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges
  • A two-way, protected bicycle lane along the edge of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and access to bicycle parking
  • Separated turning lanes and signal-phased traffic lights to facilitate direction to motorists and reduce traffic crashes by up to 58%”
Read MoreTwo -way bike lane on Chrystie Street proposal: CB3 Transportation Committee Meeting
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Noise survey from The New York State Comptroller’s Office

Dear New Yorkers:

The New York State Comptroller’s Office is conducting a survey on noise in New York City neighborhoods and would like you to take the survey.

You can access the survey through your Community Board. Your Community Board will email the survey weekly so make sure that you are on your Community Board’s email distribution list.

Community Boards may also choose to post  the survey links on their websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and other social media.

Research has demonstrated that noise can adversely impact public health. For example, noise can disturb sleep and increase stress levels.
We want to learn about your experience of noise in your community and solicit your ideas for reducing noise.

Toward that end, we are asking all community residents take the survey by March 15, 2016.

Thank you!

State Government Accountability
New York State Comptroller’s Office

Survey Links:

English: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5B9QWY5


Chinese: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/B5DC5TR


Spanish: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8YTWYXV

Read MoreNoise survey from The New York State Comptroller’s Office
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The Rivington House Give Away

Happy New Year Everyone

Sometimes things matter enough to take action on even in the midst of our overwhelming lives.

Tonight, Thursday January 7th at 6:30 Community Board 3 Committee will take up the issue of the sale of Rivington House which has been left exposed to becoming market rate housing.

Please come to the meeting below, call 311 or email 311 ( Office of the Mayor) and email the mayor’s liaison: Tommy Lin (TLin@cityhall.nyc.gov).

Thank you to everyone who has already written or called.

Health, Seniors, & Human Services 

Thursday, January 7th at 6:30pm — Chinatown YMCA Cornerstone at Rutgers – 200 Madison Street (btwn Rutgers & Pike Sts)

Item will be third:

3.  Position on future of Rivington House nursing facility—replacement of beds and future of facility

This has been a building that served its low-income neighborhood from its inception. As a public school, then AIDs hospice and finally as a non-profit, low-income nursing home.

The mayor’s administration has seen fit to remove the protection of a carefully crafted deed restriction (which required it to stay a non-profit health care facility in perpetuity). Leaving it utterly vulnerable to market rate conversion. 

They removed the restriction in an obscure and opaque procedure this June – knowing this neighborhood and our electeds  had rallied successfully to save the building, just months before, as a low-income community facility. We did this despite our scarce and stretched resources, time and energy.

It is an insult to ask us to listen to the rhetoric of a “Tale of Two Cities”, to be asked to trust an “affordable housing” plan when this valuable resource was sold cheaply and silently to a corporation with a for-profit agenda. Sold away from a community that sorely needs it for any kind of low-income housing.

Either this is incompetence or egregious contempt for the “unimportant people” whose lives have been or will be greatly impacted, disrupted or destroyed.

We have lost three nursing homes in our Community Board to market rate conversions. Forcing elders to leave their neighborhoods (when they can no longer live at home) breaks relationships, leaves our elders without the care of their families and friends, it dismantles the communities we built out of love and caring  – the only real security anyone ever really has –  and leaves our most vulnerable citizens as refuse in the wake of stupid and short-sighted profiteers.

It sends a clear message: No elders, no disabled, no one in need of help will be allowed to live in our brave new (and very hip) world. 

To follow the saga of Rivington House please see the excellent coverage in the Lo-Down. http://www.thelodownny.com/?s=rivington+house

And most recent news: http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2015/12/followup-city-cleared-the-way-for-luxury-housing-at-former-rivington-street-nursing-home.html

Read MoreThe Rivington House Give Away
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“Homage” or Marketing opportunity?

NYTimes: “Meant as Homage, Bar’s Naming for Downtown Squatter Is Perceived as a Slight”

By

“Adam Purple was an opinionated, sometimes cantankerous, freethinker who lived as a squatter on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, avoided commerce and considered real estate development to be a scourge….

…By nearly any measure, Mr. Purple — a dedicated ascetic who lived in an abandoned tenement, got water from a hydrant, read by candlelight and kept warm with a wood-burning stove — is an odd symbol for a 24-story hotel with “spalike bathrooms” and a terrace swimming pool.

…“The gentrification, the consumerism, it’s the opposite of everything he stood for,” said the photographer Harvey Wang, who began documenting Mr. Purple…in 1977. “It’s just appalling.”

…Patty Astor who ran the Fun Gallery in the 80’s “…said it … hurt to see a new symbol of affluence on the Lower East Side linked in any way to the neighborhood’s grittier past.

[she]…is among those depicted in that work, and she has objected to the use of her image and Mr. Purple’s to ‘validate and advertise‘ the hotel…..”

“They are trying to say that this new, manufactured reality is O.K.,” she said. “I’m saying not in my name.”

Read More“Homage” or Marketing opportunity?
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Fight for Rivington House

Dear Neighbors,

We see the continuing displacement of our community members most in need to benefit those least in need.

We need answers, we need City Hall to find a way out of decisions made that would sell Rivington House to the highest bidder.

Send this simple message.

Call 311 (I’m hearing this is the most effective)

Email Tommy Lin <tlin@cityhall.nyc.gov>

Come to the Community Board hearing on January 7th (see below for details)

Health, Seniors, & Human Services / Youth, Education, & Human Rights Committee Joint Committee with 

Public Housing & Section 8 Housing Subcommittee

Thursday, January 7th at 6:30pm — Chinatown YMCA Cornerstone at Rutgers – 200 Madison Street (btwn Rutgers & Pike Sts)

 agenda

1.       Approval of previous month’s minutes

2.       Presentation by 3 Cornerstone program providers of their programs in CB 3

3.       Position on future of Rivington House nursing facility—replacement of beds and future of facility

4.       Request for support for new Admissions policy in School District 1

5.       Request for support for K-8 school at Essex Crossing

With thanks.

Read MoreFight for Rivington House
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Peter Lambert 1936- 2015

We mourn the loss of a true friend: generous, funny, self-effacing, and kind. He had tremendous integrity. Old school.

“Bowery Pete”

From Jane Barrer Co-President of M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden:

“Dear Gardeners:

I am sorry to tell you that we lost our friend and gardener Pete Lambert early this morning.  Pete passed away shortly after midnight at Beth Israel. 

…We will all miss him.

Rest in peace, Pete.”

 

Read MorePeter Lambert 1936- 2015
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Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) on UN Paris Climate Agreement

WEDO Reflections on COP21

Since the final deal was agreed in Paris, we have seen numerous reactions from Governments, UN agencies, and civil society groups on what was achieved at COP21. Many voiced celebration of an historic agreement over 20 years in the making- an agreement that marks a turning point in the fight against climate change. Others hailed the ‘end of the fossil fuel era‘, and the start of a clear transition to a renewable energy future. And many climate justice advocates, including the members of the Women and Gender Constituency, were quick to provide a ‘reality check‘ to the world, of what this agreement does and does not do.

There is a sense that to move forward we must find hope in what is, in essence, the best outcome that could be achieved in an unjust and unequal world. However, at WEDO, our hope is not in the words agreed in Paris but clearly grounded in the determined activism and voice of a growing climate justice movement which is unafraid to challenge the Paris Agreement for the numerous ways in which the outcome failed to rise to the moment to ensure protection for people, communities and countries most vulnerable to climate impacts. 

We went to Paris calling for system change, not climate change. We went with determination to ensure human rights, gender equality, indigenous people’s rights, intergenerational equity, a just transition were securely anchored in the final outcome. 

We didn’t get system change in Paris. Far from it. Too much power (political, financial, media, etc) remains in the hands of the wealthy and connected. We are missing specific language to urgently phase out fossil fuels, to move from a floor of $100 billion to predictably and adequately finance adaptation and mitigation, to provide compensation for loss and damage already happening in places that had no hand in causing climate change, to ensure safe, environmentally and socially sound technologies. We are missing language on gender equality in mitigation, technology and finance. Our colleagues at Heinrich Boell Foundation – North America have provided an excellent issue by issue analysis of the final agreement. 

So where can we point to progress? We can and absolutely should recognize the significance of having an articulated temperature goal in the Paris Agreement of keeping warming well under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the point at which we know that communities in the Pacific will lose their homelands, and countries across the Global South will suffer increasing loss and damage. It is no easy feat to get countries to agree in multilateral processes, let alone recognize the need for a united ambitious goal. But it should be clear to all that while the Paris agreement gives us aspiration, it fails to follow through on action. 

The achievement of this goal is in the hands of our movement- to hold Governments accountable – to call out hypocrisy in policies which go against the achievement of this goal- such as two in the last few days, the lift of a 40-year oil export ban by the U.S., or the U.K.  slashing solar subsidies. We also must continue to hold leaders to account when they enter into unjust trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which allow for companies to potentially sue governments for policies made in the public’s interest- such as reforms in the energy sector. 

In an excellent piece on the next steps for an ever growing and inclusive climate justice movement- one which women, youth, indigenous peoples and workers are at the heart of- The Guardian’s Martin Lukacs quotes Amilcar Cabral, leader of the anti-colonial liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau, who reminded the movement to: “Tell no lies. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” 

As the Women and Gender Constituency concluded in final hours of the closing plenary at COP21 on Saturday evening, “We will not be silenced from telling the truth to power, to highlight the lack of ambition and injustice in this agreement. We have used this space of international policy-making to raise our voices and embolden our movements. Together, we will continue to challenge injustice for the protection of the people and the planet.”

The climate justice movement is rising, with women at the center, unafraid to speak truth to power, and unwavering in our campaign for climate justice. This is where you can find hope that COP21 will be the turning point for a more just and sustainable world, as we are more determined than ever to push world leaders to keep their promises. 
Read MoreWomen’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) on UN Paris Climate Agreement
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