Rivera Seeks To Regulate Hotel Development After Tech Hub Approal

EAST VILLAGE, NY — Councilwoman Carlina Rivera called on the city to regulate hotel development in a chunk of the East Village Monday with the creation of a special permit, but critics call the proposal a "pale shadow" of the zoning protections the community demanded in return for an approval of the Union Square Tech Training Center.

Last week, Rivera voted to approve the 21-story tech hub on 14th Street at Irving Place and the rezoning required to build the massive structure beyond what current commercial zoning allows. She and area preservationists held the position that land use protections should accompany the plan to shield the surrounding neighborhoods from a wave of out of character development, but the City Council approved the project without sweeping protections.

Instead, the councilwoman was able to secure several measures from the city, including what she described in an Aug. 8 letter to her district as "a protective zoning measure in neighborhoods south of 14th Street that has proven to regulate commercial development."

Rivera penned a letter with the proposal to Marisa Lago, the director of the City's Department of Planning, on Aug. 13, calling on the agency to establish a special permit for hotel developments rising in the area south of Union Square from Third Avenue to University Place. The permit would require an additional site-specific review process for extra time to review a given project's impacts on a community.

It would be a first step toward protecting the area's character, according to Rivera's letter to the city.

"I’m ready to work together, as I have been for months, to create a framework for development that is responsive to the existing built character and the need to protect affordable and rent-regulated housing," Rivera wrote in the letter.

"I don’t believe the construction of out-of-scale purely market rate development at the prices we’re seeing in the area around Union Square serve New York City or my community well and it is our responsibility to implement protections as soon as possible," the letter continued.

Rivera noted an “outrageous example” of the type of behavior she aims to stop, citing the five tenement buildings that were razed on East 11th Street between Third and Fourth avenues to make way for a 13-story, 300-room Moxy Hotel.

"In the absence of such discretionary review, this area will continue to see the replacement of older buildings and vacant properties to hotel developments," Rivera's letter continued.

But the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which spearheaded the push for protections, panned the plan and said it "hardly qualifies as “zoning protections.”'

"The requirement of a special permit for hotels will have little to no effect on the development problems the Tech Hub will exacerbate," Andrew Berman said in a statement.

"Hotels are only one of many forms of bad development this area is experiencing which this measure will not address, such as office buildings and high-rise condos, as well as doing nothing about affordable housing which the community rezoning plan Rivera promised to hold out for would have," Berman continued.

Berman noted that the City Council could approve any hotel development with or without the special permit and that the extra step for developers would only apply to a portion of the affected area because part of the section already places limitations on hotels development.

Any measure the city would adopt would also require months to be approved while "development pressure from the Tech Hub approval takes effect now," Berman said.

"Thus it is like firing a starting gun to developers, letting them know if they want to build a hotel in this area without going though the special permit process, they just need to get underway over the next several months before this measure takes effect," said Berman.

The head of the preservationists group finally charged Rivera with breaking her promises and misleading the communities that surround the site now slated for the Union Square tech hub.

"Councilmember Rivera broke her promise to the community and voted for a commercial upzoning which will increase development pressure on these neighborhoods without providing anything like the protections they need or she promised," he said. "Trying to pass off flimsy measures with little effect as the protections this community fought for won’t change that."

Photo courtesy of New York City Council