By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
EAST VILLAGE — An organization supporting small business on the Lower East Side wants to expand its boundaries to include parts of Chinatown, despite the neighborhood's opposition to existing efforts to create a similar group of their own.
The Lower East Side Business Improvement District currently covers a smattering of blocks along Allen and Orchard streets between Houston and Canal streets, as well as businesses along Delancey, Broome and Grand streets.
The BID provides neighborhood sanitation services like trash pickup and graffiti cleaning, and offers various local programs in exchange for a fee charged to property owners within the district’s boundaries.
Now, the LES BID wants to broaden its borders by extending west to the Bowery, east to Clinton and Attorney streets, north to Houston Street and south to Division Street, a representative for the organization told Community Board 3 Tuesday.
But the LES BID’s proposed new boundaries overlap with some blocks already in a would-be Chinatown Business Improvement District, a fledgling effort that has already drawn fire from some area merchants who do not want to see the BID take shape in their neighborhood.
“The thing about a BID is it is not a tax,” said George Glatter, a neighborhood advocate who spoke in support of the LES BID at a meeting of Board 3’s Economic Development Committee. The money from the BID's fees, he said, can be spent as property owners see fit.
Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership, a prominent supporter of the proposed Chinatown BID, also attended the meeting and said his organization has been in conversation with the LES BID regarding its plan.
But some committee members worried about encroachment into Chinatown and how storeowners there would react given their previous opposition to the idea of a Chinatown BID.
For example, businesses on lower Orchard Street and near the Confucius Plaza housing development on Division Street have been battling just to keep their stores open.
“We’re really trying to stabilize the existing businesses that are struggling down there,” Chen said, noting that, in some cases, third-generation family-owned businesses are going under because their children don’t want to continue in that line of work.
Glatter said that the LES BID is currently soliciting feedback to the proposal and that any expansion would have to earn the approval of a majority of property owners in the area, as well as the city.
"There's a real sense the BID is doing good for them," he said.
