Morning Reads: Mayor Touts Big Buildings, Gentrification GIFs, Bowery Diner Closing

In an appearance before the Real Estate Board of New York, the mayor says he’s “deadly serious” about 200,000 units of affordable housing and he’s willing to approve taller, bigger buildings to make it happen (Daily News).

Long Read: There are no easy answers in plotting the road ahead for affordable housing in NYC.  Is the LES’s Essex Crossing a potential model? (Observer).

Watch gentrification happen before your eyes (Gothamist).

Friends, loved ones attend the wake for William Pena, the city bus driver who was killed last week. Pena grew up on Stanton Street (NY1).

The Bowery Diner is closing; it’ll be a pop-up for awhile and then be revamped in some sort of TBA fashion (Eater).

On the market for $25 million: the East 6th Street home and studio of artist Walter De Maria (EV Grieve).

Have a look at architect Koray Duman’s gut-renovated LES apartment (Post).

Jolie Kerr, a goddess of clean for a post-Martha Stewart era, lives in a tiny (but spotless) apartment on the Lower East Side (NYT).

Performance artist Tyler Ashley will be doing a ‘“very rigorous, boot camp”-style nude performance using sculptures he created with power tools’ at Strange loop Gallery on Orchard Street (Bedford & Bowery).