At the same Wednesday Community Board meeting, the city provided some telling good news and lots of bad news regarding their plans for developing a tower of up to 355 ft. tall — the tallest ever built in Greenwich Village — at 388 Hudson Street across from JJ Walker Park.

First the good news:

• In spite of repeatedly claiming to us and hundreds of neighbors that it was impossible to do so, the city has now said they can and will make the proposed tower at 388 Hudson Street fatter with fewer unnecessary setbacks. We have long called for such a change to make the building shorter and maximize housing while minimizing height, and fit the surrounding context better.

Now, the bad news:

• In spite of this, the city has not said that the height of the tower has come down at all, which means we may have a fatter but equally tall building.
• The proposal to move the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center into 388 Hudson Street’s lower three floors means that by necessity either there will be less affordable housing in the development or the building will be even taller (three floors in the wider lower floors would equal at least four more floors added to the slightly narrower tower on top). Both possibilities move this development farther away from what we believe should be two of its main goals: maximizing affordable housing while minimizing the height and bulk of the building to make it as contextual as possible. 
• The city has still not agreed to require gradual setbacks from JJ Walker Park across the street — the one place where setbacks are truly needed — to minimize shadows on the park, as we and thousands of others have called for.
• The city still has not agreed to require permanent affordability for the housing in the entire project, as we and thousands have called for as essential for any giveaway of this public land originally earmarked to be a park. 

The city says that a request for proposals to developers to build the project will be issued “as soon as possible.” They will give developers three months to respond, then it’s another eight to nine months to select a developer, followed by the rezoning public approval process begins, which should take no less than a year. For this to meet the city’s projected time frame of five years for this development to open, they would have to hit all these marks and the huge tower would have to be open within three years of approval. It’s a highly questionable time frame and one unlikely to be met, which is why we are skeptical that repairing the Tony Dapolito Rec Center is a less efficient choice than building a new center into this building. It should also be noted that this process is already more than a year behind schedule, speaking to how projects like this typically require much more time and money than projected.

Any plan for this site will have to go through a zoning public hearing and approval process, with multiple public hearings. It’s critical that the issues we are raising be fixed NOW, or once it goes through that process, the city will say “either this is approved or we have to start over, and both the recreation center and the affordable housing will be delayed or jeopardized.”

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