.bridgetgillard reports on a Hell’s Kitchen saga that shows why it's so hard to turn a parking lot into an apartment building in the most crowded city in America
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Hudson Inc.On the corner of 54th Street and Ninth Avenue on Manhattan’s far West Side, a blue fence skirts a gray parking lot. Windowless slabs hug the lot from two sides: on 54th, the beige wall of a large building owned by the MTA, whose employees park their cars in the lot; on Ninth, the concrete side of a glass-sheathed apartment building. Behind, more shiny towers, more brick tenements.
For decades, this swath of Manhattan had been a white whale for New York politicians looking to make their mark on the skyline. Increasing office capacity was the prime motivator: Commercial office space pays some of the highest property taxes to city government, and mayors and governors have long tried to stretch the midtown Business District from river to river.
Over five years of board meetings and public hearings, CB4 complained, prodded, and pushed against Hudson Yards. Warring factions hurled Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte quotes at one another. “This was not our first rodeo,” Restuccia told me in June of this year. “The city realized they could not get approval unless they had an affordable-housing package.
announcing that HPD had chosen Hudson Companies to develop the lot. It would not be building a project that featured predominantly moderate-income housing, the press release said, but one for “very low and low-income households.” “It was based on an actual need we were seeing in New York City,” Johnson says, sounding annoyed, when I asked about these theories. “Anyone who says that this was political, or there was some sort of grander scheme, is fabricating what actually happened.” Vicki Been, the HPD commissioner from 2014 to 2017 and now the faculty director of NYU’s Furman Center, says that two changes occurred during the de Blasio administration that informed the city’s reversal.
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