Cea Weaver

2) …first, *most* recent, actual community pushbacks to rezoning plans in NYC aren’t coming from an exclusionary/racist place. They’re in opposition to MIH developments, which are always mostly luxury and offer only crumbs of affordability. They’ve been engines of displacement.

3)…the second & most important thing is that these rezonings are almost always hatched in back rooms with developers & city agencies like CPC & EDC. Absent deep reform of these agencies, any citywide rezoning plan will and should be looked at with suspicion by average NYers.

4) So the solution should probably be a 2-pronged approach balancing out truly public city agencies that sever ties to for-profit developers, and strong community input. Checks & balances. But including developers in planning decisions is literally a conflict of interest.

in good faith: #2 is objectively untrue. e.g. soho/noho: ppl honestly concerned w/ displacement aligned w ppl who are *not* to form a political coalition #3 - let's start there, then. let's talk about what we can do to rebuild trust in the public sector. i'm really into that.

#4 - who is the community? deciding that is really messy. how are you going to decide whose voice "counts"? we need to think seriously about that and i haven't observed that anywhere. i don't see how your vision doesn't prioritize those who currently have economic power

Is it? Isn’t it just about talking to directly impacted people? I feel like this is taking the perspective of the city w/different constituencies coming to them, not the perspective of an organizer or someone directly impacted.

I’ve collected feedback on housing development & transit projects, & it wasn’t particularly messy. It was just about going into communities and talking to people- tabling, door-knocking, having conversations at bus stops, meeting people where they’re at.

If you want the policy/statistics pov, it’s just talking to a representative sample of directly impacted people. On most issues, there was more or less consensus once I talked to a couple people. It wasn’t that hard to gauge.