Hundreds Share Fears, Hopes For Inwood Rezoning: Reports

INWOOD, NY — Hundreds of people crowded a middle school auditorium Thursday night to speak about their fears and hopes regarding a city-backed plan to rezone a large swath of Inwood.

Manhattan Community Board 12 — a volunteer-led advisory body that represents the Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods — held a public hearing Thursday at I.S. 52 on Academy Street. About 600 people attended the hearing with roughly 150 people signing up to speak, City Limits first reported.

Most people who spoke Thursday night encouraged the Community Board and local elected officials to reject the rezoning plan proposed by the city Economic Development Corporation, City Limits reported. Many of the speakers instead urged the board to consider adopting a citizen-created plan called the Uptown United Platform, which calls for a more conservative rezoning that matches the neighborhood's existing character.= and would not allow the 20- and 30-story developments that he city's plan would, according to the report.

The Uptown United Platform was created by a coalition of neighborhood groups including Northern Manhattan Is Not For Sale, Inwood Preservation and Save Inwood Library, City Limits reported.

Read City Limits' full coverage of the public hearing here.

On January 16 the Inwood NYC plan — which seeks to implement contextual rezoning to preserve areas west of 10th Avenue while upzoning underused areas east of 10th avenue — was certified for the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure

The city Economic Development Corporation has been pitching a neighborhood-wide rezoning to Inwood for about two years. After being booed out of a community board meeting in 2016, the corporation came back with an updated proposal in the summer of 2017 that featured contextual rezoning for areas west of 10th avenue and north of Dyckman street that aim to preserve the neighborhood's existing character.

The city estimates that the rezoning proposal will create "the potential" for 1,300 new affordable apartments int he neighborhood and publicly accessible waterfront spaces along the Harlem River.

Community Board 12 is currently in its second month of analyzing the city's proposed rezoning plan as part of the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). The board must pass a resolution to either approve or reject the plan, either with or without additional conditions, by the end of March.

The community board vote is the first in a series of votes required for the rezoning plan to be passed into law. After the community board votes, Borough President Gale Brewer will weigh in on the rezoning plan. The first two votes are considered advisory, so even if both the community board and Brewer reject the plan it could still pass.

The City Planning Commission and City Council will then vote on the plan. It's during these votes when the city can choose to alter its proposal to reflect the conditions and recommendations of the public, the community board and the borough president.

"We take your conditions very seriously and we will look at that very closely," EDC representative Charlie Samboy told Community Board 12's land use committee in February. "When the board makes a recommendation if it comes with conditions, we will look at those conditions and seek to address them throughout the process, and our hope is that at the end of it we can provide a response to each of those conditions."

The Community Board 12 land use committee will meet March 7 to form its resolution on the rezoning plan, and the full community board will meet March 20 for its final vote.

Photo by NYC Economic Development Corportation