East Village Is Looking To Protect Itself

While crime has dropped significantly throughout the city and even the "scary" Alphabet City is no longer a place where you must be loaded to walk past Avenue B, there is a huge problem in the neighborhood. It doesn't have anything to do with violence, but everything with having to preserve the character of the area. As anyone who has gone to Astor Place knows, there are two Starbucks within a few hundred feet of each other and a third that lurks nearby. Starbucks and other corporations (especially banks) are trying to take over the East Village as much as they have across the rest of the city. Well now the community is trying to do something to stop it.

From The Villager:

To address the encroachment of chain stores, some members of the East Village Community Coalition have taken the first steps toward what they hope will be a “formula retail” zoning plan for the neighborhood that could limit or change the character of chain stores opening in the area.

The concept — initiated by Michael Rosen, E.V.C.C.’s co-founder and a 19-year East Village resident — seeks to eventually implement changes to the city’s Zoning Resolution that would prevent so-called formula chain establishments such as Starbucks from displacing local businesses or appearing out of context with the neighborhood.

The organization has only just begun to investigate the idea, after publishing its second annual pocket guidebook featuring hundreds of independently owned shops in the East Village to encourage locally based commerce. E.V.C.C. also recently enlisted the help of the Pratt Center for Community Development to research possible solutions in the increasingly gentrified area, which Rosen worries could become like “your basic strip mall” if preventive action is not taken.

Strip malls may be the fixture of suburbia, but they have no place in communities such as the East Village. Thankfully they, the community, is fighting back against the corporatization of America. If we can't save (some) of the character of New York, what chance does the rest of the country have?