On January 17, 2011, Community Board 3 has drafted guidelines for the redevelopment of sites in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) on the Lower East Side.

The guidelines call for mixed-use, mixed-income development with local service and convenience retail uses predominated at street-level along Broome, Grand, Ludlow, Norfolk and Suffolk Streets with "mid-box" retail encouraged on the second floors of major streets such as Delancey and/or Essex Street.

They also said that "if the existing Essex Street Market is to be relocated, it should remain public and be moved to a superior site on a major street to accommodate a larger market with more goods and services and that every effort should be made to accommodate existing tenants.

The guidelines also maintain that "non-retail, commercial development - including office, hotel and/or a movie theater - should be provided," adding that "a movie theater is a priority; this use could be a component of a multi-purpose performance space, including one in connection with civic uses."

The guidelines also said that at least 800 and preferably more than 1,000 housing units must be provided of which about 50 percent should be market-rate, 10 percent for middle-income households, 10 percent for moderate-income households, 20 percent for low-income households and 10 percent for low-income seniors. In the mixed-income buildings, the guidelines said that non-market-rate units should be integrated and indistinguishable from the exterior in terms of material and design quality and at least 40 percent of all non-market-rate units should be two-bedrooms or larger and all non-market-rate units must remain affordable in perpetuity

Sufficient land and building capacity should be set aside for a public primary or secondary school, according to the board's guidelines.

An article by Lincoln Anderson in the December 20, 2010/January 5, 2011 edition of The Villager said that "C.B. 3 is also adding the Essex St. Market buildings, between Delancey and Rivington Sts., into the SPURA mix for possible redevelopment, though they weren't part of the original renewal area."

"Seeking to help break the decades-long deadlock that has gripped the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in an exasperating paralysis of parking lots, a new group of young Grand St. residents has emerged backing a novel idea - compromise. In that respect, the position of Sustainable Housing And Retail Expansion, or SHARE," the article said, "is very much in line with the thinking of Community Board 3's Land Use, Zoning, Public & Private Housing Committee."

As part of "slum clearance" renewal, old tenements on the SPURA site were razed in the late 1960's, displacing around 2,000 residents - many of them low-income - and a variety of small businesses.

Ironically, a stumbling block to SPURA's redevelopment has been opposition from some Grand St. co-op residents to low-income and affordable housing on the site who fear it would lower their property values.

Heshy Jacob, the manager of East River Housing and president of the Hatzolah volunteer ambulance service, "tallied the amount of affordable housing that, in fact, has been built on parts of the SPURA site since the 1960's...a total of 1,340 affordable units," according to the article. "If, under the C.B. 3 guidelines as now construed, a total of 1,000 units are added, with 300 of those being low-income, then, when all is said and done, SPURA will effectively be 70 percent low-income, Jacob calculated."

"The Seward Park stalemate began in 1967, when the city razed 14 blocks of tenements and ousted 2,000 residents to make way for new retail and residential sites. But subsequent proposals, including a plan by the Koch administration to have the developer Samuel J. Lefrak build on the site, were felled by community opposition," according to a December 16, 2010 article by Cara Buckley in The New York Times.