On Wednesday night, City officials confirmed worst fears about their plans for a publicly owned site in the Meatpacking District. In addition to an expansion of the neighboring Whitney Museum and space for Friends of the High Line, they will seek to build an approximately 600-ft.-tall apartment tower on Little West 12th Street between Washington and West Streets containing 600 apartments, the majority of which would be super-luxury. They are seeking to move as quickly as possible to find a developer for the project, saying they will issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) in January — with virtually no time for public feedback.

Village Preservation, and virtually every other member of the public allowed to speak, expressed outrage at the 3½-hour public hearing (video here).

In spite of the City’s determination to rush ahead with plans to build this oversized, ultra-expensive apartment tower in a state and nationally recognized historic district, they can’t without approval from the City Council, which will traditionally defer to the local Councilmember for the area, currently Erik Bottcher (it may take years before the plan comes to the Council, when a different representative could hold the position). So the battle is far from over.

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The City will only commit to 25% of the apartments in the planned tower being “affordable” (in this case affordable to those with an average income of 60% of “Area Median Income,” which means roughly 90% of the median income for NYC). Officials say they will “aspire” to find a developer willing to make up to 50% of the apartments affordable, potentially at different levels of affordability (i.e., they could make the required 25% of apartments more affordable, and the other up to 25% of apartments could be any level of below-market affordability), but this is not required. They have yet to say how they would ensure that the affordable units remain permanently affordable, rather than being allowed to revert to market rate at some point in the future, as often happens with such projects. 

The City says it wants so many expensive units and such a tall building because:

• They want the expensive ones to pay for the affordable ones, and the City is currently refusing to pay for the affordable apartments, saying in neighborhoods like ours the community should pay for affordable housing with extra-dense, extra-tall luxury housing developments to subsidize them. 
• The taller the building, the more expensive the luxury apartments will be.

Outrageously, the City is only scheduling two more public listening sessions about the project, one of which is at the same time as the full Community Board 2 meeting, the other on January 7. See here for more information or to attend.

After that, by late January, the City says it plans to issue an RFP from developers that conforms to what it has described — a virtually negligible window for public participation or consultation given the holidays. While such a plan can’t be approved without a later, more robust full rezoning and City Council public hearing process, the RFP will lock certain aspects of the plan in place. That will offer the Council the option of accepting the plan within limited parameters or to reject it entirely, thus seeking to limit options for the public to have a say.

That’s why it’s critical that we tell all decision-makers not only that the current plan is unacceptable, but that they slow down the process to allow true public consultation. 

The proposed tower would be roughly twice the height of the tallest building currently in Greenwich Village, and about two-and-a-half times the height of the adjacent Standard Hotel. The very large full-block, 13-building Westbeth complex nearby contains just over 300 apartments compared to the 600 proposed here — on a lot 10 times larger! One of the largest apartment buildings in NYC, 2 Fifth Avenue, also contains just over 300 apartments. The nearby West Village Houses contains only two-thirds as many apartments as proposed here, but spread over 42 buildings on six city blocks.

We will keep you posted on this developing issue.

Battles like these require real resources. 

Help ensure we can wage and win this fight!