Two Bridges lawsuit
overturned following
several legal battles
BY DEAN MOSES
After several legal battles, the court
overturned the lawsuit that halted
developers from proceeding to build
four mega towers in the Two Bridges neighborhood
of Lower Manhattan on Feb. 16.
The unanimous decision, made Tuesday,
deemed that the city did not need to
justify the rezoning of the project, since it
falls under the purview of the reasonable
interpretation by the Department of City
Planning.
Since the inception of this project, local
residents have pushed back with the argument
that it will harm those living in the
community due to upzoning.
The Lower East Side Organized Neighbors
and the Coalition to Project Chinatown
have been battling for over four years
to prevent the installation of three luxury
high-rise “megatowers” through protests,
organized meetings, and lawsuits.
The state Appellate Court ruling dealt a
hard blow to the groups’ prevention efforts.
Despite this, they say they will continue to
fi ght the planned construction.
“We remember when four years ago,
Councilmember Margaret Chin told us
these out-of-scale towers were a done
deal and there was nothing to be done to
stop them. We were able to fi nd out that
the City violated its zoning law to approve
the towers that would signifi cantly
displace the community and damage the
neighborhood environment,” according to
a joint statement from the Lower East Side
Organized Neighbors and the Coalition to
Project Chinatown. “We have stood up
to our Councilmember, our Speaker, and
our Borough President when they fi led a
phony lawsuit, which seeks to approve the
towers through another process and actually
undermined our chances at victory in
the court. ... Our victories in delaying the
towers have been won by the thousands
of people we have done outreach to and
brought into our fi ght.”
The groups say they have the support of
the people behind them, with this in mind
they are spurred forward.
“Lower East Side and Chinatown deserve
the protection granted to the East
Village, and now this demand is even
more urgent as we see the passage of the
Plan as the only way to stop these towers,
and all future towers that might cause displacement,
permanently. We are currently
exploring our next steps for legal action,
but every day we continue to organize and
fi ght against displacement and for the full
plan,” the statement said.
A spokesperson for Two Bridges applauded
the court’s decision in a statement:
“We applaud the court’s decision, which
confi rms what we’ve said all along: these
projects were lawfully approved and comply
with zoning that’s been in place for
more than 30 years.Private investmentsin
affordable housing and essential communityinfrastructurearecritical
asthe city
emerges from the pandemic, and these
projects will deliver a range of meaningful
and lasting benefi ts for the Two Bridges
neighborhood,including one of Manhattan’s
largest infusions of new affordable
housing in decades.We appreciate the
court’s careful review and look forward
to moving ahead with these important
projects for the city’s recovery.”
PHOTO BY DEAN MOSES
Protesters against the Two Bridges Luxury Towers compared Mayor Bill de
Blasio to President Donald Trump at a rally on Jan. 18.
HIGHER ED TODAY
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It has been an extraordinarily difficult
year for New Yorkers, including the 270,000
students enrolled every year in the City University
of New York. In the last 12 months, our
students have weathered a global pandemic,
suffered the loss of loved ones and withstood
economic hardships, all while transitioning
to remote learning — a daunting and at times
overwhelming experience, especially for students
juggling multiple responsibilities — as
they tried to hold onto their academic dreams.
Despite their perseverance — the University
awarded 56,527 diplomas last year, the
second-highest total in our history — our current
students, and high school seniors who will
soon be CUNY students, will need additional
support to succeed after this once-in-a-lifetime
experience and nearly a year and half of distance
learning. CUNY has been building on existing
and new student-support programs and
partnerships to help students navigate a classroom
experience that has been upended by the
pandemic.
CUNY students who participated in focus
groups after the Spring 2020 semester described
how the change in their learning environments
from campus to home impacted their focus and
motivation, making it difficult for them to be
as productive at home as they were on campus.
The feedback, obtained in partnership with
independent non-profit research group Ithaka
S+R, suggested colleges could improve remote
learning for students by — among other steps
— making a concerted push to increase professional
development for faculty in online instruction.
In response, CUNY’s School of Professional
Studies created an award-winning
series of workshops in online instruction that
drew 3,400 faculty members.
Other existing support programs were
quickly adjusted to a distance-learning environment.
One of those, CUNY Edge, targets
students who receive public benefits. Supports
such as virtual “walk-in hours” provide a platform
for students to ask questions and request
assistance without having to wait for an appointment.
It’s also a way of building community
for our students in a time of increasing social
isolation. CUNY ASAP and ACE, programs
that provide wraparound support to ensure
timely graduation, maintained their engagement
with nearly 100 percent of students via
Zoom, email and telephone, sustaining the high
contact rates of semesters when students were
on campus. Similarly, we have intensified our
campaign to provide students with step-by-step
virtual support as they file for financial aid.
And the payoff is clear: the number of CUNY
students submitting a FAFSA application is on
the rise, bucking the national trend.
We also redoubled efforts to make sure students
graduating from city public schools continue
on to college. We expanded the reach of
CUNY Tutor Corps, a successful program in
which CUNY students mentor middle and high
school students from the NYC Department
of Education (DOE). CUNY and the DOE are
working with the City’s Young Men’s Initiative
to hire an additional 50 diverse mentors. That
means 10,600 public school students in all five
boroughs will have access to 350 CUNY students
to support their needs.
The pandemic exposed the systemic injustice
of long-standing social and economic inequities,
conditions that so many CUNY students
— 80 percent of whom are either Black, Latino
or Asian — struggle to overcome even in the
best of times. Students derive greater benefit
from mentors who can address their linguistic
and cultural needs, as well as their educational
ones. Because they are students themselves,
CUNY mentors can speak from the perspective
of personal experience.
As Nataly Toro, a John Jay senior and Tutor
Corps mentor says: “It’s important for students
to hear from current college students like
myself because it lets them know they are not
alone. We were high school students not too
long ago; we can relate.”
Another new program, the Application Advisors
Initiative, is enabling CUNY to support
7,000 New York City high school graduating seniors.
Working under the supervision of high
school counseling staff from February through
May, CUNY students will ensure that seniors
complete their college applications, file for financial
aid and complete all of the requisite paperwork,
as they transition to college.
We also recently launched CUNY Winter
Bridge, a new program to re-engage seniors
who committed to a CUNY college last fall but
for a variety of reasons never matriculated.
An outgrowth of our College Bridge for All
program, which helped support 57,000 DOE
high school seniors thanks to a $1.1 million
grant from both Bloomberg Philanthropies
and the Petrie Foundation, Winter Bridge college
coaches reached out to 8,000 recent DOE
graduates by Zoom, email and text, starting
last December, to guide them through the full
enrollment process. I’m happy to say 1,000 of
those students were already participating in
one of our transition programs such as CUNY
Start/Math Start, or polishing their English
language skills in our CUNY Language Immersion
Program.
These are just some of the ways that CUNY
is making sure the pandemic doesn’t erase
the progress we have made. As I’ve said many
times, CUNY is an integral New York institution.
By helping CUNY students, current and
future, obtain a college education and learn the
skills they need to succeed in the job market,
we are helping our beloved city to rebuild, and
planting the seeds for its steady rebound.
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12 February 25, 2021 Schneps Media