One sunny afternoon, from the roof of a building in Dumbo, I snapped a photo of my current least-favorite New York City building and tweeted it.

In the tweet, I blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s cluelessness for the existence of the hugely undistinguished 72-story slab of glass known as One Manhattan Square that, from certain angles, appears to be wedged up against the western tower of the Manhattan Bridge. (It’s actually west of the tower and separated from the bridge by Pike Street.) This got a big reaction from fellow New Yorkers who loathe the thing as much as I do, as well as those on the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) side of the fence, who thought it was wrongheaded for me to criticize a building in Manhattan for being tall.

But my issue isn’t that the building is tall; it’s that it’s conspicuously misplaced. Had I responded to the YIMBYs, I would have shouted: THIS IS WHY WE HAVE ZONING! A tall tower looming over a landmark bridge in an otherwise mid-rise district is exactly what zoning exists to prevent. It’s the sort of thing that happens in games like Minecraft, dystopian movies, and development-crazy cities like Shanghai—but not here, not in our enlightened city.

Of course, if I’d said any of that, I would have been wrong. For starters, the Manhattan Bridge is not technically a landmark; at least, it’s never been designated by the city. Those of us who cherish the Manhattan Bridge are a distinct minority. By contrast, when views of the universally beloved Brooklyn Bridge are threatened, even a tiny bit, neighborhood activists and civic groups mobilize immediately.

Moreover, as counterintuitive as it seems, the tower—all 800 feet of it—is allowed under the existing zoning. It was built, in development speak, “as of right.” And if it looks out of place in its low-rise environment, well, four more towers are about to lend it some context.

Last December, the City Planning Commission (CPC) voted to allow three additional projects (comprising those four towers, ranging in size from 62 to 77 stories tall), which would generate nearly 2,775 new units of housing, primarily market rate. The CPC signed off on the idea that these massive towers represented a “minor modification” to the area’s Large Scale Residential Development (LSRD) plan, a template that has governed development there since 1972. The vote meant that there would be no Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), an in-depth public study generally used to assess the impacts of any change or variance in zoning that’s intended to give all affected parties a chance to weigh in.

This decision to bypass the public review process for a set of buildings that, any way you look at it, would utterly transform the character of the neighborhood is hard to fathom. “We had just spent two years working on East Harlem and two years working on Inwood,” says Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. “Those are major rezonings.” Each of those rezonings, Brewer says, involved adding roughly 3,000 to 3,500 apartments to the areas in question. In the case of Two Bridges, nearly 3,000 apartments will be added to a much smaller area of about two square blocks. “And,” notes Brewer, “no rezoning, no ULURP, no two years of discussion.”

“The biggest question everybody was asking is why these three humongous projects don’t have to go through the full public review process,” says Margaret Chin, the City Council member who represents the neighborhood.

Brewer and the New York City Council filed a lawsuit against the developers, as well as the City Planning Commission. The goal of the suit is not to stop the project, but to slow it down and force the plans to be vetted by ULURP. On August 2, Judge Arthur F. Engoron issued a ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor, in which he observed that the idea that 2.5 million square feet of development could constitute a minor modification in an existing plan was “Orwellian.” He agreed that the developers needed a “special permit” to build their proposed towers, and that would require ULURP.

But Engoron’s ruling didn’t answer the obvious question: Why would the City Planning Commission so readily sign off on something so perverse? The only answer I could find was in a statement CPC chairperson Marisa Lago issued ahead of the 2018 vote: “While the proposed developments are not minor in scale, they are considered minor modifications to the existing large-scale development, since the buildings would comply with the underlying zoning district.…” Clearly Lago believes the zoning should prevail—the city has reserved the right to appeal—while Brewer and the city council think the LSRD takes precedence. It’s a narrow, legalistic dispute.

However, Lago’s statement suggests another question, one that is more ethical than technical: What if that underlying zoning put in place for a particular purpose decades ago is now being co-opted for a very different purpose?

This exceptionally byzantine (even by NYC development standards) saga centers on a sleepy enclave that has been dedicated to low- and moderate-income housing since the urban renewal era of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1961, when the city’s current zoning resolution was implemented—replacing a previous one from 1916—the area in question was labeled, in zoning-speak, C6-4. According to the Zoning Handbook issued by the Department of City Planning, “C6 districts permit a wide range of high-bulk commercial uses requiring a central location.” Typically, the handbook says, these are found in central business districts like Midtown Manhattan, not in obscure slivers of the Lower East Side.

In June of 1961, the area was also designated by the CPC as the Two Bridges Urban Renewal Area, and it remained an official urban renewal site until the designation expired in 2007.

In 1972, the blocks became part of a Large Scale Residential Development (LSRD) delineated by the city’s Housing and Development Administration, a precursor to today’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. This was a more nuanced way of saying that existing structures could be demolished to make way for a careful arrangement of low- and moderate-income housing, together with playgrounds, open space, and other community assets. The LSRD, which still governs the area today, was intended as an escape hatch from the urban grid, a way to create the Corbusian master-planned schemes that were then in fashion. For instance, the Rutgers Houses, a 1960s NYCHA complex across Cherry Street from the blocks in question, features a surprisingly lush, leafy mid-block allée.

If you visit the neighborhood today, you’ll find a not particularly distinguished cluster of low- to mid-rise buildings—the tallest is 27 stories—occupied by working-class families and senior citizens. The dominant style is brick and unadorned, except for white stripes that are actually the exposed edges of the concrete floor plates. Several of the existing buildings have changed hands in recent years, and at least one is now charging market-rate rents for some apartments. But in general, the area is what planners intended it to be back in the 1960s: a pretty good place for less affluent New Yorkers to live.

All of this urban renewal-style housing exists in this location because, until recently, moneyed New Yorkers had no interest in this stretch of the East River, which for a century or two was more like an open sewer than a scenic amenity. As a result, the neighborhood was, for decades, the chosen site for every form of subsidized housing ever invented, including scads of public housing and privately developed (but federally funded) middle-income complexes like Knickerbocker Village. At the eastern edge of Two Bridges, the properties nearest the river are parking lots.

But this quiet precinct of working-class New Yorkers morphed into a prime development site precisely because it hasn’t gotten the attention from city planners or civic leaders that’s been lavished on more obviously desirable parts of the city. Developers, however, knew it was there and have quietly been buying up land, piece by piece, over the past decade. Three of the four proposed towers would be built on these underused sites, which would be practical if the developers were not so determined to transplant the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side.

The tower beside the Manhattan Bridge, One Manhattan Square, where prices start at $1.2 million, calls itself a “vertical village” entered by way of a “private motor court” where “a uniformed doorman welcomes you into this extraordinary estate, the most exclusive club in all of the city.” Not very neighborly.

The developers are determined to transplant the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side.

The proposals for the other towers, market-rate buildings in which, the developers promise, 25 percent of the units will be affordable, make more of an effort to sound community-spirited. The firm SHoP Architects, working with the JDS Development Group, shows a daredevil 77-story building that tries to minimize its impact at street level by balancing on a narrow leg, widening when it gets above the roof of its 10-story neighbor, a senior housing complex. It’s a slick move, a sleight of hand, but Chin doesn’t think the neighborhood sees it that way. “One project was they were going to cantilever over a senior building,” she says. “That was the first time I’d heard of that term.… People here, especially seniors, are concerned. How are you going to build that?”

A second project, 260 South Street by Handel Architects for Two Bridges Associates, L.P., will consist of two towers—one 69 stories and the other 62 stories—erected in parking lots on the river side of two low- and middle-income buildings. The towers would be linked by a glass lobby, the idea being that the configuration would preserve the existing neighborhood’s views of the water. Broadly speaking, that may be true, but as Chin explains, “you’re going to have two towers 60 stories high smack up against this building.”

And 259 Clinton, by Perkins Eastman for Starrett, is a glassy, relatively anodyne 62-story building at the corner of South Street that will have retail space—renderings show a cafe—on South Street, and a lobby facing Clinton Street.

Each of the presentations dangles incentives—a new facility for seniors, flood-resistant landscaping, publicly accessible greenery—but taken together, they promise to utterly transform this mid-rise district. While there have been wholesale changes in the makeup of New York City neighborhoods in recent years (Williamsburg and West Chelsea come to mind), those shifts were usually preceded by an extensive and, in theory, rigorous rezoning process. The results are never perfect, and neither is ULURP. But, as Chin puts it, “At least it will bring everybody to the table. Everyone will have a voice.”

Of course, none of this would be happening if these modest blocks hadn’t been zoned at Midtown Manhattan density back in 1961. The “underlying zoning,” as it’s referred to by CPC chair Lago and the developers, exists for a reason. In the 1960s, the blocks in question were the site of an ambitious urban renewal scheme, one with apartments for 10,000 residents, schools, parking, recreation, and a dock for ocean-going freighters. A 1962 architectural rendering for the site by Mayer, Whittlesey & Conklin shows a mix of boxy five-story buildings and gracefully sloped 22-story towers surrounding a large plaza. Footbridges were intended to connect the residential portion of the plan to a landfill site in the East River, where a commercial shipping facility was planned. The project—housing tied to a working waterfront—looks very much like one intended specifically for blue-collar families. Indeed, a description of this plan from a 1967 CPC report clearly states, “The housing is to be for families of low and moderate income.”

Eventually, a less cohesive group of affordable apartments was built sans wharf and swoopy facades. But there’s no doubt that the underlying zoning represents a 20th-century attempt to create a modern, impeccably planned setting for working-class New Yorkers. Predictably, that same zoning has begotten a gaping 21st-century loophole for developers of luxury housing.

The backdrop for this story, of course, is that the de Blasio administration is eager to reach its goal of 200,000 affordable units—preserving the city’s existing stock and carving out new units—by 2024. (It has created or preserved 122,000 affordable units as of the beginning of 2019.) The strongest argument for building these towers is that they will get the mayor 684 units closer to his goal.

Recent comments by Deputy Mayor Vicki Been indicate that the administration sees going through ULURP as an unnecessary and potentially costly delay. But the buildings—which are, as Been made clear in her remarks, subsidized by the public through tax breaks to private developers—will also completely transform their surroundings, making it likely that, one way or another, residents of existing affordable units will be squeezed out. “Yes, we need affordable housing,” says Chin, “but don’t use that as an excuse to destroy a neighborhood.”

This story doesn’t end with Engoron’s decision. The developers have appealed; the city might, too. And if ULURP plays out, it may allow these towers, or some version of them, to be built. But right now, during this break in the action, it might be worth contemplating the original intention of the underlying zoning. Shouldn’t a neighborhood that was set aside for what we now call “workforce housing” remain a place where less affluent New Yorkers can find a home? Does the fact that Extell has only managed to sell 20 percent of One Manhattan Square’s units mean that the marketplace agrees? And if what we really want is 700 more units of affordable housing in Two Bridges, shouldn’t we find a way to build exactly that?

Admittedly, it will be a challenge because the most reliable funder of affordable housing, the federal government, is no longer so reliable. Consider it a creative challenge, one that an ambitious mayor who craves national stature should readily embrace.