. @ERPAction Another monster real estate deal in Manhattan

THREAD:

After Superstorm Sandy the Lower East Side community engaged in planning meetings with the city to develop a plan to protect more than a mile of coastal parkland and adjacent waterfront communities on LES.

In 2014, this resulted in a design that won $338M in federal funding. There were four additional years of planning work, which engaged the local community to refine the vision and design.

In 2018 BdB abruptly scrapped this collaborative design for the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR); this bait and switch was and remains an outrage to the community. The new City plan will destroy 57 acres of coastal parkland, fell nearly 1000 mature trees and eliminate the only

large outdoor greenspace residents on LES for recreation and wellness. The City plan is twice as expensive, provides no interim flood protection during the many years of construction, & requires unprecedented ecological destruction of the largest municipal park on the LES

impacting the residents of the predominantly low income, BIPOC neighborhood of LES.

The switch to the City’s ESCR plan is based on a “value engineering study” cited by BdB but a FOIL revealed this value engineering study does not exist.

Why would the city scrap the original plan for a new plan that costs twice as much and inserts @AECOM (who is also overseeing the construction of the 4 new tower jails) into the project? Is it because of AECOM’s connection to @REBNY? via @MelissaKleinNYP https://bit.ly/39XEkhX