Neighborhood advocates struck a critical hit to the towers in a David and Goliath battle that is far from over
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“There’s a lot of ways in which we’ve already won. The community has already won because we’ve stood together to really fight for this neighborhood,” says Melanie Wang, an organizer with CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits. “But we have bigger fish to fry. Fundamentally, in order to protect the neighborhood we can’t just use these tools, we’ve got to change the laws about what can be built here.”
In July, community groups CAAAV, Tenants United Fighting for the Lower East Side (TUFF-LES), and Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) filed a rezoning application with the Department of City Planning (DCP) that targets an area spanning from Catherine to Montgomery streets, between South and Cherry streets for changes…