Nestled next to the Harlem River at the tip of Manhattan, Inwood is on the brink of change.
Once a refuge from the rest of the borough’s unrelenting gentrification, a controversial city plan to reshape this enclave leaves locals wondering if they’ll be pushed out of the community they love.
“I wish it would stay hidden,” said Nayma Silver, a millennial who’s lived in Inwood since her family moved there more than 20 years ago.
Silver’s cherished memories include trick-or-treating at bodegas along Academy Street and Broadway, and volunteering to teach literacy at a McDonald’s on Dyckman Street.
“The rezoning would change the feeling of the neighborhood,” she said. “It wouldn’t feel like a home.”
The de Blasio administration is pushing to open new parts of leafy Inwood to residential construction, with the goal of encouraging 4,348 new housing units over the next 15 years. A portion of them would have to be “affordable.”
The City Council is expected to approve the rezoning in early August.
But locals like Silver say the plan would drive up rents, force mom-and-pop shops to close and push longtime residents out. Fifty-three percent of the roughly 42,676 current residents are Dominican, with another 22 percent identifying as Latino from other backgrounds.
“It’s an ethnic cleansing,” said Lena Melendez, 53, of Northern Manhattan is Not for Sale, an anti-rezoning group.
“We reject the notion that this is an ethnic cleansing,” said James Patchett, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. “I totally understand the concerns… But we can’t do nothing because we’re afraid.”
Manhattan’s Democratic Borough President Gale Brewer is among the plan’s opponents, saying it needs more short-term benefits to locals. Her office estimated the rezoning could push out more than 150 independent family businesses, many owned by immigrants.
“Small businesses are already being forced out because commercial landlords are not renewing their leases in anticipation of the rezoning going through,” said Karla Fisk of the Inwood Small Business Coalition. “It will result in mass displacement of people of color.”
The fate of the rezoning rests on the neighborhood’s Democratic councilman, Ydanis Rodriguez. When weighing land use issues, the City Council nearly always votes in line with the member repping the area affected.
Rodriguez told The Post that while he supports rezoning to revitalize Inwood and increase housing, “the plan definitely should go through some modification” before the vote. He’d like more of the community’s concerns addressed, including disputes over use of public space, schools and the infrastructure needed to accommodate new residents.
The Inwood proposal comes in the wake of similar rezoning plans in East New York, Brooklyn, and the Bronx’s Jerome Arenue Corridor, among other areas.
Silver wants the city to put a moratorium on all pending rezonings to see the long-term effects of plans already approved for other neighborhoods. She worries Spanish-speaking residents haven’t gotten enough input.
“I feel like I’m being lied to,” Silver said. “Let Inwood be Inwood.”