Community

Manhattan –The East River Fifties community came together on May 10th for a rally and demonstration, organized by the East River Fifties Alliance (ERFA), asking the City to hurry along approval of its residential rezoning plan and vowing to fight any plans to build megatowers in their community.

“We simply cannot allow wildly out-of-scale supertowers to crush our mostly low-rise residential neighborhood,” said Alan Kersh, ERFA’s President. “Our proposed re-zoning plan, which is currently under review by the Department of City Planning, will guarantee that megatowers cannot be built here. There has already been one attempt to site such a monstrosity here, and we need the City to act as quickly as possible to make our plan a reality and to protect our community,” he added.

"The community has done its part by filing and now it's time for the City to do its part by certifying the application to stop buildings for billionaires in favor of new schools and affordable housing," said Council Member Ben Kallos, who represents the neighborhood and is a co-filer on the ERFA rezoning plan. "The fight against superscrapers in residential neighborhoods is far from over."

“Quality of life is about to improve because not only will these reforms improve the City’s collection efforts, they will more importantly change the behaviors that harm quality of life and jeopardize public health and safety,” said Council Member Ben Kallos. “For far too long, quality of life violations have gone uncollected, with bad actors continuing bad behavior to the detriment of our communities. That is about to change.”