At last night’s Community Board 2 meeting, City officials, the developer, and their architect presented more detailed plans for the development of the city-owned vacant lot at 388 Hudson Street at Clarkson Street. The presentation showed the plan unchanged from that released by the Adams Administration in its final days, which made little or no attempt to respond to community concerns about height, design, or contextuality, or preserving the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center. However, some new details have emerged:

• It appears the planned building will be at least 400 feet tall, with a 31 story residential tower resembling a cheese grater atop an approximately 80 ft. high base. The tallest building in Greenwich Village currently is about 324 feet tall. 
• The affordable units will be for people with incomes ranging from 40% or 100% of “Area Median Income,” or AMI. 100% of AMI is about 60% higher than the median income in New York City, so many of the “affordable” units would be reserved for a relatively small fraction of wealthier-than-average New Yorkers. 
• The City continues to claim the affordable housing will be “permanently affordable” based upon a “regulatory agreement” with the developer, but provided no details on what that regulatory agreement would contain and how it would guarantee permanent affordability. This is little changed from past statements from the City that claimed to offer guarantees without backing them up. Other developments the City has claimed would be permanently affordable were able to eliminate such requirements.
• The developer chosen to build and operate the project, including its affordable housing, Camber Property Group, led by Rick Gropper, was named as No. 17 on the Public Advocate’s list of the “100 Worst Landlords in NYC,” citing 1,079 open HPD violations and 28 evictions over the past two years, among other offenses (neither City agencies nor the Community Board responded to this issue when raised at the meeting). 
• The plan still contains a new full recreation center in the base of the building (increasing the building’s height substantially), replete with facilities that are currently housed in the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center and those which could be housed there. The City refused to answer questions about whether it was continuing with Mayor Adams’ plans to seek demolition of the landmarked Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, or if Mayor Mamdani would keep his campaign promise to repair and reopen it. 

The City said it intends to begin a “public engagement” process around the plan before submitting it to the more formal land use review and approval process which will include the City Council and the Borough President. We’ll keep you posted about next dates and steps. 

TO HELP: