There is really quite a fight over the housing on 27th & 10th

There is currently quite the fight over the Elliott Houses on 27th & 10th. Comprised of approximately 4,500 residents living in 17 buildings, NYC’s government wants to knock the buildings down and replace them with 6 high rises that current residents would move into and keep the same rent. The politically difficult kicker of sorts is that the city also wants to build 9 “mixed income” towers—meaning they would include both 1k “affordable” units and 2.4k “luxury” units. And the $1m question of course is: what happens to the current residents while all this is being built? Suing to block the development, which was supposed to start last December, are about 20 senior citizens living in the houses, and the seniors just won a TRO to hold off development while an appeals court hears the case. You can see the NYT write-up here.

The city and developer (which is called “Related” and which built Hudson Yards and the Zaha Hadid building) do have answers to that million-dollar question, which is that 94% of residents will be able to remain in their homes while the new towers go up (I do have some obvious questions about that). The remaining 6% will be temporarily relocated to “refreshed” apartments during construction. The development would be complete at earliest in 2041.

We’re going to try to stay as apolitical as possible around here (there is no angle after all), though if it matters to you what other people think (it shouldn’t), Mamdani supports the initiative, Erik Bottcher (the NYS senator representing our neighborhood) supports, and Kennedy kid who I’m sure has spent a lot of time in public housing is against. What I can say though is that I’ve been in the buildings and somebody needs to do something (and certainly neither you nor I have); NYC has an housing problem and the Occam’s razor solution is to build more housing; and 20/4500 is about 0.4%.

If you’d like to write in with a perspective, please do so.