Lobenthal.com

Village Preservation (Geenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) notes:

“The revised plan is a bit less awful and harmful than the plan approved by the Mayor’s City Planning Commission, but will still encourage woefully out-of-scale luxury condo, office, hotel, and big-box retail development with little or no affordable housing; demolition of buildings containing truly affordable rent-regulated housing and the displacement of its long-term, largely lower-income, disproportionately senior, artist, and Asian American residents; demolition of historic buildings; and displacement of smaller independent businesses and arts-related uses.”

Council Members Chin and Rivera demonstrate their contempt for New York City by urging the NYC Council’s land-use and zoning committees to approve de Blasio’s catastrophic Soho/Noho/Chinatown upzoning. These two committees fell into line yesterday. The full council vote comes later this month. We know what it will be.

How stupid do Chin and Rivera think New Yorkers are? These two negotiated some niggling, tinkering-around-the-edges improvements to the Soho/Noho proposal, but these modifications in no way mitigate the enormous damage this unprecedently ghastly upzoning will do to the city and the net loss in affordable housing it ensures.

Chin is leaving at the end of this council term, fortunately. Her successor, Christopher Marte, has been outspoken in his opposition to this upzoning. But he is not yet in office.

This is the second time that Rivera has delivered a knock-out land-use punch to her constituents. Back in 2018, she betrayed her campaign pledge not to support upzoning for Union Square South without landmark and tenant protections by pivoting at the last minute to support a proposal that contained no such protections. And Rivera continues to refuse to support historic district designation for this district of amazingly historic heirloom architecture.

Bloomberg and de Blasio’s upzoning debauch has been disastrous for the city. Our city council has shown itself to be putrid with corruption, composed for the most part of real-estate shills who are totally subservient to the mayor.

NYC is doomed unless we do something about the New York City Council.

is on full view as he frets over alleged instances of COVID-19 reducing big, strong, manly men’s performance scores.

They’re discussing a military takeover “when Trump wins in 2024.”

And still our Attorney General refuses to hold Trump accountable.

and we taxpayers, of course, are the ones who are expected to finance it.

The latest act of civic annihilation proposed by NYC/NYS would demolish one historic building after another so that no fewer than ten new office buildings can be built in a district glutted with empty office space.

I wonder who will be left holding the bag when the entirely ill-conceived project defaults, btw? We’re on the hook to pay for its construction, that we know.

Speak at the public hearing by Zoom tomorrow evening. Register here.

For the West View News, I recapitulate De Blasio’s attempts to wreck more neighborhoods through upzoning, and to undermine landmark protection in NYC.

or planning a coup, he’s internalizing the projection techniques of his Lord and Master, Donald J. Trump. As part of Rep. Jordan’s campaign to become Speaker of the House, Jordan accuses the Democrats of committing the Republicans’ sins of racism and religious persecution.

Now Trump lip syncer De Santis wants his own private militia. I assume he’s planning a military takeover of Florida, so that Trump could be awarded immunity from deportation to America to face charges.

Whenever a Trumpist in office says he wants more “flexibility,” watch out.

have declared that they are the most co-equal of the branches.

Partisan hack Amy Coney Barrett finds herself in very like-minded company.

These unelected elitists are determined to seize control of this country.

Biden is allowing a putrid, Trump-hatched Medicare privatization scheme to go forward.

And Congress is sitting on its ass. But physicians are travelling to Washington, D.C. today to make their opposition heard and felt.

Jake Johnson at Common Dreams reports on the alarms being sounded.