‘Fight to Make It Right’

Outgoing CB1 Chair Reflects on Six-Year Tenure

Tammy Meltzer, who has served as chair of Community Board 1 (CB1) since June 2020, is stepping down. Barred by term limits from continuing as chair, she will remain a member of CB1, and has been elected to serve as the Board’s treasurer.

“Lower Manhattan has always been a place that was fought over, and worth fighting for,” she reflects. “This community had to fight to survive and redefine itself after September 11, 2001. But that’s only one example among many, going back as far as the American Revolution. There were huge political battles around the creation of the World Trade Center, and then about what kind of community Battery Park City should be.”

Battery Park City, she says, “was originally envisioned as one-third for people living below the poverty line, one-third middle income, and one-third market rate. They later dialed back that commitment, which was unfortunate, because socio-economic diversity is what builds community. We’ve seen a lot of planning that equates homogenization with progress, which is partly why Lower Manhattan has lost more affordable housing in recent years than any other community in New York State.”

Decades later, “after September 11, a lot of thought and a lot of compromise went into the recovery plan, which focused on the greater good, instead of just greater profit,” she says. “This shows that when you look at the bigger picture, you can create amazing results. But the problem we see again and again in Lower Manhattan is that economic development officials and agencies think in silos—focusing only on one project at a time, without an overall urban plan that considers larger impacts and root causes. That’s what we’re seeing now along the East River, which is being treated like a jigsaw puzzle of isolated plans, and it feels like most of the pieces come from different puzzles. We desperately need holistic vision and planning.”

Ms. Meltzer moved to Lower Manhattan in the late 1990s. Taking a job at Windows on the World, atop One World Trade Center, she began to volunteer her time with community organizations, starting with the Gateway Plaza Tenants Association. After 9/11, she worked with the advisory panel of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the September 11 United Charities, and she helped form the World Trade Center Residents Coalition. “After the intensity of those years, I took a break for my career and family,” she recalls. “Then, when I realized we didn’t have enough schools seats for all the kids in this neighborhood, including mine, I began showing up at meetings of the School Overcrowding Task Force.”

Her children were among the first to attend P.S./I.S. 276 when it opened in 2009. Ms. Meltzer chaired the School Leadership Team, and was elected president of its Parent-Teacher Association. She was appointed to CB1 in 2012.

“One thing that serving on CB1 has taught me,” she says, “is that ‘crazy’ ideas usually aren’t crazy. They just sound crazy, because they are ahead of their time, or so novel that nobody can see how much common sense they make.”

“But part of the dilemma,” she continues, “is that senior decision makers have less and less patience for listening when communities speak. In the name of efficiency and streamlining, they tend to view local voices as a hindrance and an obstacle, rather than as a collaboration that adds value.”

Looking to the future, Ms. Meltzer sees both challenges and opportunities for the community she has helped lead. “Lower Manhattan’s biggest struggle is the lack of social and economic diversity,” she says. “All these new projects include only 20 or 25 percent affordable housing, and 90 percent of that is studios and one-bedroom units. It’s like we’re telling families there is no place for them here. Forcing people out in this way has consequences. It cuts the connective tissue, diminishes opportunities to develop leaders, and deprives the next generation of role models and training.”

Another concern is environmental and economic justice. “Compare the East River waterfront between the Battery Maritime Building and Pier 36 to the west side,” she says. “On the Hudson, everything was built back better after September 11 and again after Hurricane Sandy. We have a chance to get it right on the East River in the same way, but that hasn’t happened yet. One part of our community has greenery and waterfront access, and the other has unfulfilled promises.”

Concerning resiliency, she notes that CB1 has presided over more than 1,000 hours of meetings during the last decade about various projects to mitigate rising sea levels, extreme-weather events, and climate change. “The emphasis has been on building walls to manage foreseeable risks, but we haven’t paid enough attention to broken infrastructure, such as the capacity to drain or absorb water that will be trapped by those walls. In the meantime, we’re looking at flooding in our streets and subways with every major rainstorm, along with sewage spills. The built environment needs green infrastructure to deal with this water, and that should be the first priority. But this has been mostly ignored.”

About the local environment, Ms. Meltzer says, “the Blue Highways plan for getting trucks off our streets by putting freight onto boats is a great start, but those ferries need to be fully electric. Otherwise, we are just moving pollution from roads to waterways. And we need to work harder at preserving and restoring habitats in the water. The Billion Oyster Project is a step in the right direction, and the Hudson River Park Trust recently spotted a beaver at Gansevoort Peninsula. That seems like a miracle, but it should be the norm. Why aren’t we doing more to make it less of an outlier?”

Regarding the local economy, she cites Lower Manhattan’s retail vacancy rate (the highest anywhere in New York City) and says, “we should have something like a ‘small business improvement zone’ to incubate mom-and-pop shops. They are essential components of communities, in a way that corporate chain stores can never be.”

Ms. Meltzer says her next major project will be helping to build the Battery to Bridges Coalition, a nonprofit that works to fulfill the potential of the East River waterfront. “There are ways to fix all of the problems we face,” the outgoing chair of CB1 reflects, “but it takes a desire to fix it—you need commitment and creativity, resources and willingness. You need to fight to make it right.”