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A group of Upper East Side residents, landlords and elected officials is asking property owners along one of the neighborhood’s busiest shopping strips to sign off on a new special district that would put uniformed cleaning crews and safety patrols on the sidewalks seven days a week. It’d be funded by a new annual charge on the buildings inside its borders, and it can’t move forward unless enough of those owners say yes.
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The proposal is the Yorkville Alliance Business Improvement District, centered on East 86th Street from just west of Lexington Avenue to the west side of First Avenue, plus stretches of Lexington, Third, Second and First avenues north and south of 86th. The district is drawn parcel by parcel rather than block by block, so two neighboring buildings can land on opposite sides of the line. The full address list, posted on yorkvillebid.org, runs from East 83rd to East 88th streets, and owners can check there whether they’re included.
The Yorkville Alliance Steering Committee says it has spent the past three years working with the city’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS) to develop the plan, starting with a neighborhood needs survey in 2024. The committee is co-chaired by Michael Feldman and Susan Gottridge, and its roster includes Council Speaker Julie Menin, Council Member Virginia Maloney, Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Comptroller Mark Levine and Assembly Member Alex Bores, along with representatives from Extell, Feil, Muss, Kibel, Empire State Realty Trust, FirstService Residential, Mount Sinai Health System and Shake Shack. Carnegie Hill Neighbors, the civic group, is a partner in the effort and emailed out a map of the district, asking locals to check whether their home or workplace falls inside the boundaries and, if so, to vote.
A BID is a nonprofit run by a local board that collects a special assessment from property owners and spends it on services on top of what the city already provides. By law, the city can’t cut existing services like sanitation or policing because a BID exists. New York has 78 of them.
The Yorkville plan calls for a sanitation team of three to seven workers a day, seven days a week, handling litter, overflowing city trash cans, power-washing and snow removal at busy corners like the subway entrances at Lexington and 86th and Second and 86th. A separate team of uniformed “public safety ambassadors” would patrol, report problems to 311 and 911 and hand out safety information. The BID would also maintain roughly 200 tree pits, install up to 60 sidewalk planters, handle graffiti and sticker removal, add lighting, run holiday lights and neighborhood events, and hire a full-time executive director to lobby city agencies on the district’s behalf.
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Per the ballot, the budget would start at $1.7 million in year one and could rise to a cap of just over $2 million with board approval. Property owners would be assessed at roughly $0.001444 per dollar of assessed value, or about $1,444 for every $1 million in assessed value. The site notes that co-op boards would pay as a building and pass the cost through to shareholders based on their shares, while condo and commercial owners would be billed individually. Landlords can pass the charge along to commercial tenants depending on the lease, but residential renters can’t be charged.SBS needs “yes” ballots from property owners representing at least 51% of the district’s total assessed value before the proposal moves to the City Council for a vote. Anyone can submit a ballot, though the committee says signatures from inside the boundaries carry the most weight. Ballots can be submitted online through the Yorkville Alliance site, emailed to BIDballots@sbs.nyc.gov, or mailed to SBS at 1 Liberty Plaza. The committee also says it’ll hold two public meetings on the scope, boundaries and budget, though dates haven’t been posted. Questions can be sent to info@yorkvillebid.org.
We’ve reached out to the Yorkville Alliance to inquire about the ballot deadline and public meeting dates.
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