On June 28 he wrote to Council Member Rivera and Mayor de Blasio and his letter
was reproduced in Town and Village.
Berman notes that “the extremely modest commitments made to provide protections or mitigations to the surrounding neighborhood for the negative impact of the planned development have neither been implemented nor even proposed. And several key commitments made by the developer and the city regarding protecting the surrounding community from the impacts of the construction have already been broken.”
The full extent of de Blasio’s scandalous gift of this site to his developer friends at the cost of vast amounts of lost revenue and neighborhood degradation is told on the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s home page.
Among other revelations:
“The developer of the planned 21-story office tower on the site will actually be
paying less in rent to the City for the first three years than the 2-story PC Richards store which operated there for decades. After 3 years RAL will pay the City $2.3 million in rent, only $600,000 more that P.C. Richards was paying, but for a building 19 floors taller.”
De Blasio and Rivera gave NYC the bum’s rush. Tech Hub stinks to high heaven.
This is a major, major scandal.
De Blasio had before him myriad plans for the publicly-owned site that would have provided more public space, more public revenue that the one his developer friend submitted–and they would not have required the disastrous upzoning that is the death knell of this neighborhood. De Blasio gave a sweetheart deal to his friend while at the same time using that deal as pretext to upzone.