Small businesses often given cheaper rents for the first year of a lease as an incentive, but then “it doubles in year two because the landlord is trying to make up what they lost during Covid.”
"We're no longer talking about a developer's fantasy world," said Paula Segal, a senior staff attorney with TakeRoot Justice.
Daniel Carpenter-Gold, of TakeRoot Justice, which represents the tenants association, said the proposed commercial upzoning is tailored more for big box stores ... “Why would they need this [commercial] rezoning?” he said. “Their renderings showed a coffee shop.”
TakeRoot threatened a court challenge over the project's environmental impact statement, which it says is insufficient because it assumed a wetlands permit that the state refused to be bullied into issuing in 2012 and has not issued yet.
"The message is that the rule of law applies to people who want to spend a lot of money building big buildings in New York, In 2019, that is a change."
Paula Segal, an attorney on one of the lawsuits against the broader Two Bridges plan, said the Lower East Side groups she represents have already initiated conversations with the Department of City Planning on an application to change the zoning
