Chinatown's Overdevelopment A Crisis Under Margaret Chin, City Council Opponent Says

TWO BRIDGES, NY — NYC Council Member Margaret Chin's main opponent in the upcoming primary elections faulted her on Tuesday for not doing enough to stop a "crisis of overdevelopment" in the Lower East Side.

Christopher Marte, the leading opponent running against Chin for her District 1 seat, said the council member had "forgotten the promises she made to this community." Chin, a Democrat, is facing three challengers in the upcoming primary election next month.

In recent years, developers have launched or introduced plans to build a up to five high high-rise towers in the Two Bridges area, additions that would dramatically reshape the Lower East Side waterfront. Community members opposed to the planned towards worry that the buildings will exacerbate the problems of an already gentrifying neighborhood. (For more information on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

Marte addressed the increase in high-end development on Tuesday morning and blamed Chin for not backing the Chinatown Working Group's plan to rezone the neighborhood more forcefully. The working group was born of local activists and community members looking for a way to implement height limits and other restrictions on future developments in the area. In 2015, the city's Department of City Planning indicated that the plan was a non-starter.

Chin supports the goals of the working group's plan, a spokesman for her campaign said, and has supported a separate rezoning initiative that is currently being reviewed by Community Board 3.

Marte called for the complete passage of the ambitious plan on Tuesday.

"She came into office to represent a community of activists, preservationists, and organizers. She lost sight of the causes that got her elected," Marte said Tuesday morning, according to a copy of his prepared remarks.

Paul Leonard, a spokesman for Chin's campaign, said Chin was looking at multiple immediate measures to protect her district from over development.

"Though Margaret worked for more than 10 years with the community as part of the Chinatown Working Group, the Department of City Planning refused to consider the proposal, which never made it to the City Council," Paul Leonard, a spokesman for Chin's campaign, said in a statement to Patch.

"She is a strong supporter of the Community Board's ongoing efforts to move forward with a neighborhood rezoning plan that would include badly needed protections for the Two Bridges neighborhood...Instead of engaging in meaningless and misguiding rhetoric, Margaret is partnering with advocates from organizations like GOLES, CAAAV and the Urban Justice Center who, unlike her opponents, have a long record of fighting for our communities."

Lead image credit: Slaven Vlasic / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment.