When: February 18, 2016, 4:30pm – 6pm

Where: Gracie Mansion, 88th Street at East End Avenue, Manhattan

Contact: Sophie DeBenedetto, Phone:  (914)841-4379, Email: sophie.debenedetto@gmail.com || Mika Nagasaki , Phone: (917)359-9262,  Email: mika_nagasaki@yahoo.com

Details: In response to Mayor de Blasio’s attack on the people and his continued disregard of the homelessness crisis, people from across the city are joining in a grassroots alliance to stop Mayor de Blasio’s developer-led zoning plans, and demand a “People First” plan for our communities that will protect us against displacement.

In marked contrast to Mayor de Blasio’s so-called “fight against inequality”, his current “Affordable Housing Plan,” including ZQA and MIH, is a developer-backed scam. It promotes luxury development that is pushing out our local businesses and services, displacing people of color and working families in droves, and eliminating more affordable units than it claims to create. Community Boards across the city are overwhelmingly opposed to it. The people of NYC are opposed to it. It is obvious that Mayor de Blasio thinks he has the City Council in his pocket and that he does not need to listen to the people.

Hundreds of people recently confronted the Mayor’s representative about why Chinatown and the Lower East Side did not get the same height limit protections 7 years after the mostly white East Village did in 2008. The representative could not even respond. Not to mention, de Blasio is allowing the 80-story Extell luxury development on the former Pathmark site in the Lower East Side to be built. It is clear that Mayor de Blasio’s solution to end the Tale of Two Cities is to destroy neighborhoods of people of color to create One New York for the rich.

Hundreds will be at the Mayor’s front door this Thursday as part of  monthly demonstrations in front of Gracie Mansion to tell Mayor de Blasio: “If you displace us, we will displace you!”

This action is endorsed by the Citywide Alliance Against Displacement, including: The Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the LES, Harlem Tenants Council; Movement to Protect the People; Take Back NYC; Flushing Workers’ Center; Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE); Manhattan Green Party Local; Phil Depaolo, Housing Activist; Queens Neighborhoods United; West Harlem Coalition; Committee to Protect Rent Controlled Tenants; South Bronx Community Congress; Bronx is Not For Sale; Tom Angotti, Hunter College Center for Community Planning; Bronx Greens/Verdes del Bronx; Green EcoSocialist Movement; Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN); New Yorkers for a Human Scale City; Trinity Lutheran Church of Sunset Park; Sisa Pakari Centro Cultural and Laboral; Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, UPROSE; #SaveNYC; East Harlem Preservation; NYC Community Garden Coalition