On Friday, Mayor Adams announced the City issued its Request for Proposals (RFP) to developers for a quarter-million-square-foot structure containing income- and price-restricted housing and a public recreation center at 388 Hudson Street at Clarkson Street. While the RFP included a few elements we and the public had called for, the Mayor’s plan still called for a vastly oversized structure, unnecessarily inflated in size with a four-story recreation center at its base.

Village Preservation and our members had called for the RFP to require that:

• The housing is guaranteed to remain 100% permanently affordable.
• The building rises no higher at its base than the adjacent City-As-School, setting back from there, away from JJ Walker Park and the Greenwich Village Historic District across Clarkson Street, to an ultimate height commensurate with the surrounding large loft buildings. 
• The recreation center only occupies space in the building that could not be used for housing (the basement and parts of the ground floor), since doing otherwise would make the building unnecessarily taller or eliminate affordable housing from the project, or both. 

However, in the Mayor’s RFP:

• Mechanisms for ensuring the permanence of the affordable housing are still murky at best, and don’t offer clear guarantees. 
• The income and price requirements for the housing have not yet been determined.
• There has been some movement away from the originally proposed tall tower on a base, asking developers to move the mass of the building away from the park and historic district to the south side of the site as we called for. 
• The public recreation center will take up the first, second, and third floors of the building, as well as the basement and other below-ground space. 
• The new building can have a base of between 60 and 155 feet high, as compared to the 85-foot height of City as School. 
• The ultimate height of the building is likely to be 300-350 feet based upon the required parameters of the project, as opposed to the surrounding large loft buildings, which are roughly half that height.

Why is the building SO large?

• Unnecessarily adding the three above-ground full floors of the public recreation center at the wider base means it will likely be about five stories taller than it needs to be. If the existing Tony Dapolito Recreation Center were restored as we are fighting for, less space would be needed here for the center and it could remain in below-ground and other areas where housing can’t be located and wouldn’t increase the size of the building. But the City is REQUIRING developers include at least four stories for a recreation center. 
• This was originally supposed to include 100 units of housing, which would have roughly fit in a building rising to the height of the adjacent City-As-School. Community Board 2, city agencies, Councilmember Erik Bottcher, and Borough President Mark Levine called for or supported making the building larger — well in excess of what could be considered a contextual building. A building of the height we called for (a base the height of City-as-School, set backs up to the height of other surrounding buildings) would have allowed approx. 50-100% more housing than the originally proposed 100 units. While the actual number of units the new building will contain is to be determined, this structure appears to be roughly three times the size of the one originally proposed, with the large (and potentially in many ways duplicative) recreation center space added in. 

Developers will now respond to the RFP, and one will be selected by the City. The chosen plan will have to go through the ULURP (rezoning) process, including multiple public hearings and votes by the Community Board, Borough President, City Planning Commission, and most importantly the City Council, where local member Erik Bottcher’s decision will be key.

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