Community Board 1 Asks Lower Manhattan Residents to Share Priorities
The root level of government and the front lines of representation in New York City are the 59 community boards spread throughout the five boroughs. Lower Manhattan is served by Community Board 1 (CB1), a patchwork of neighborhoods encompassing 1.5 square miles bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
CB1 is inviting residents to share opinions on the community’s most pressing needs. The results will inform the Board’s annual list of of budget requests for the City’s next fiscal year. CB1’s formal compendium of priorities will be debated this autumn, and presented to City Hall by the end of this calendar year.
With a median household income of approximately $178,000 (according to the Department of City Planning), CB1 ranks among the City’s most affluent districts. But even high-income residents feel the pinch of soaring housing costs, with 28.4 percent of tenants suffering from “rent burden” (defined as spending more than 35 percent of income on rent), and 31.9 percent of condo and cooperative owners struggling with the equivalent issue of “cost burden” (defined as those who spend more than 30 percent of income on housing). In this context, housing affordability may rank high among the priorities cited by Lower Manhattan residents for the next fiscal year.
Climate change also looms large in the minds of residents. According to the Department of City Planning, 38 percent of all local buildings within the boundaries of CB1 (and more than 19,000 apartments) are situated in a flood plain with a one percent annual chance of damage from rising waters.
And local traffic has become a sufficiently chronic concern that the City’s Department of Transportation is considering the creation of a “regional slow zone” in Lower Manhattan, which will reduce speed limits to a little as ten miles per hour on all local streets.
To help rank Lower Manhattan’s most urgent priorities, go to https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/7333194/CD-Needs-Online-Survey.