Dear Seward Park Board of Directors:

We are a group of shareholders in formation that we hope will reach an overwhelming majority, who are voicing concern over the expected construction adjacent to the former Bialystoker home, the site that the Ascend Group (Ascend Group had rebranded to Round Square Development) and Optimum Partners owns; without the purchase of Seward Park Housing Corporation’s air rights, as anticipated by us.

We were warned by the developer in all of their initial promotional material to us that that we would have to endure years of noise, loss of our views, shadows on our public space, parks and buildings, snarled traffic, trash and other matters related to major construction. Now, it will happen without the expected sale of our air rights to Ascend, paying us millions of dollars in consideration.

Ascend’s properties are the only receiving sites for Seward Park Housing Corporation’s Air Rights, unless we sell our own land in the park areas, the 465 Grand Office building or the existing retail spaces, which we do not want to do. We want to sell the developer our air rights because it is the last and only opportunity we will have to sell these air rights.

This is the last chance we have to gain millions of dollars from an air rights sale, and we demand that our Board uses every effort in its power immediately to demand that Ascend/Optimum work with us to buy our air rights, or we want to stop this development and enable a different developer to come in who will work with us to buy our air rights.

On January 29th, 2019, the Board of Directors took out a $40 million mortgage and raised our carrying charges because we did not choose to accept the $52 million dollars that Optimum was willing to pay. We cannot afford to continue making that mistake. The mortgage has no prepayment penalty, as they were anticipating this sale and paying down the debt.

We hereby petition our Board of Directors help us act to move this forward:

Thank you

Our committee in formation has already met and our names will be posted shortly.

Send this to your neighbors and fellow shareholders.