About

The O.U.R. Waterfront Coalition came together in the summer of 2007 in order to ensure that the City’s plan for the redevelopment of the East River Waterfront meets the needs of the local community, which is overwhelmingly made up of working-class people of color and immigrants. The Coalition is composed of community organizations in the Lower East Side and Chinatown that are concerned about barriers to meaningful participation in development and planning processes as well as about how private development has increased pressures of gentrification in the two neighborhoods, resulting in loss of affordable housing, increased harassment of low income residents, threats to affordable services (with one example being the possible sale of Pathmark to a luxury developer), and a lack of open community space for youth and families free of over-policing and harassment.

In the summer of 2008, the Coalition began a community visioning process for the waterfront and surveyed more than 800 residents asking them what type of development they would want to see on the waterfront, and held three visioning workshops in March and April of 2009 that drew more than 150 residents. The purpose of the visioning was to develop an alternative plan for the waterfront development, the People’s Plan, which represents local residents’ vision of what a community-oriented, community-driven development of the East River waterfront would look like.

Groups include: the 267/275 Cherry Street Tenants Association, the Chinatown Tenants Union of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, Good Old Lower East Side, Hester Street Collaborative, Lands End 1 Tenants Association, Lower East Side Ecology Center, Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side, Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, University Settlement, and the Urban Justice Center.