A committee of Community Board 3 voted unanimously last night to recommend to the full board that it inform the City Planning Commission that it believes ¿it is appropriate¿ to rezone much of the Lower East Side ¿contextually,¿ and that at least First and Second Avenues and Avenue A and Delancey and Houston Streets should be considered for inclusionary zoning for affordable housing.

The goals of the proposed rezoning are to ¿preserve the residential character of the neighborhood,¿ its current scale and mid-rise character, to preserve the ¿mixed-income character through ¿inclusionary zoning,¿ eliminate ¿community facility¿ overdevelopment ¿allowed under the current zoning¿ that has resulted in some large educational housing facilities in the area, and to ¿establish a district more in keeping with current planning principles of contextual design.¿

Specifically, the committee recommended that much of the neighborhood be shifted from R72, C61 and C62 zones to R7A and R7B zones and that Houston and Delancey Streets be considered for R8A zones.

The boundaries of the proposed rezoning now being studied are the north side of East 13th Street, the west side of Avenue D, the north side of Houston Street, the west side of Pitt Street, the north side of Delancey Street, the east side of Essex Street, the north side of Grand Street, the east side of Bowery, and the west side of Third Avenue.

The committee indicated that the board might consider ¿upzoning for Christie and Forsythe Streets¿ and also indicated that it wanted to consider Third Avenue in a rezoning as well as Fourth Avenue, but noted that since Fourth Avenue is split between it and Community Board 2, it would want to consider expanding the rezoning to within 100 feet east of Fourth Avenue, and also suggested that the commission might want to convene both boards to help analyze a rezoning that includes both sides of Fourth Avenue.

It also voted to request further information from the commission about ¿soft-sites¿ in the area and to request that any rezoning include ¿anti-harrassment¿ provisions.

David McWater, the chairman of board and also of its 197A committee, said that he understood from discussions with the commission that a rezoning could be ¿certified¿ into the city¿s Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) within as short a time as several months and he and other members of the committee voiced concerns about the rapid pace of redevelopment in the area and the ¿urgency¿ to enact the first rezoning of the area since the early 1960s.

One speaker at the meeting at the board¿s headquarters at 59 East 4th Street said that ¿there is a free-for-all land-grab¿ in the district, and another said that recent increased real estate development activity was only ¿the tip of the iceberg.¿

A separate committee of the board is studying a proposal to create a historic district on the Lower East Side that would encompass several hundred buildings. The historic district, shown at the right, would be much smaller in area than the proposed rezoning.

¿To prevent the potential loss of all traces of this historic immigrant portal,¿ a recent statement by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum declared, it ¿has joined Lower East Side community groups, property owners, residents and shopkeepers to plan for neighborhood stabilization and preservation¿..Conversations have¿begun concerning the impact of City landmark designation for a portion of the neighborhood (an area within the following boundaries: Allen ¿ Essex; Houston Street ¿ Division with an extension including Eldridge Street below Canal Street).¿

The East Village Coalition commissioned a study last year of rezoning the area from BFJ Planning and many of its recommendations have been endorsed by Community Board 3.