Council Member Rivera is downtown Manhattan’s doyenne of displacement and demolition, consistently pleasuring the developers who are ruining our city and funding her campaigns, while making ersatz proclamations of new victories for affordable housing. In reality, everything that Member Rivera does is a net loss for affordable housing.
Now that her council catchment has been redrawn to include part of the West Village, Villagers must ensure that she does not win this seat.
In 2018, Rivera pledged that she would remain faithful to her campaign pledge of opposing the Union Square South upzoning unless neighborhood and landmarks protections were baked into the deal. Then she pivoted to rubber -stamping a terrible deal that was and is an assault on neighborhood and landmark preservation.
Even in NYC, it’s rare to see an elected representative sell out that brazenly, that completely that quickly.
And adopt her degree of duplicity.
During Rivera’s failed, developer-funded Congressional run last year, she had the audacity to get huffy about the fact that wealthy inhabitants don’t want affordable housing built in their neighborhoods and she was holding their feet to the fire.
Bullshit. Complete fabrication. Not a word of it true.
She was referring to, and totally distorting the dreadful Soho-Noho-Chinatown upzoning bill she went to the mat for in 2021. There is not a single guarantee in that piece of legislation that a single piece of affordable or even “affordable” (given the income minimums demanded in Manhattan subsidized housing) housing will be built. Just the opposite: developers have now been incentivized to tear down more low-rise, rent-regulated buildings to put up behemoths for the international investment strata.
If Rivera gets her claws into the West Village, we are on a runway path to upzoning and 100-story buildings. Rivera will also do her best to undo landmark protections in the historic district, since she was completely on board with De Blasio’s successful initiative to cripple the Landmarks “Preservation” Commission.