From the Daily News:Housing advocates call the Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s far West Side the land of bait-and-switch.
The City Council agreed back in 2005 to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to spend $3 billion extending the No. 7 subway to W. 34th St. and 11th Ave. as a way to spur development of a new business district. Officials said the 42-square-block Hudson Yards area would one day contain 16 new commercial skyscrapers and 20,000 new housing units.
The Council also extended a lucrative tax abatement (known as the 421a program) to lure builders to the far West Side. City Hall promised that at least 28% of all new housing would be affordable for ordinary New Yorkers.
Nearly eight years later, only 16% of the first 5,600 units that have opened for occupancy are affordable, according to a Daily News review of city records.
Many of those units are tiny studios and one-bedrooms of 400 to 600 square feet — often far smaller than similar market-rate units in the same buildings.
At one site, the twin 60-story Silver Towers on W. 42nd St. and 11th Ave., developer Larry Silverstein erected a separate 88-unit “affordable” building at the back of his complex.
The towers boast spacious and luxurious lobbies and the biggest indoor pool in the city. The affordable building has a dark, tiny lobby that faces the back of an MTA bus depot and the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
The Bloomberg administration approved the Silverstein project despite unanimous opposition from Manhattan Community Board 4, which several years ago blasted the “separate and unequal housing” that had “the look and feel [of] the maids’ quarters for the rest of the project.”
Then there are the Related Companies’ MIMA apartments at 42nd St. and Tenth Ave. The massive, $700 million block-square project includes a 600-room hotel, nearly 200 luxury condominiums, a theater, an underground garage, retail stores and more than 620 rental units — of which 163 are billed as “affordable.”
But more than half of those units are tiny studios of around 400 square feet. The affordable units averaged just 539 square feet.
Market-rate units in the same project are considerably bigger, averaging 807 square feet, and generally located on higher floors.
7 comments:
You get what you pay for, period.
what's the problem? people are living in manhattan rather than facing a 90 minute commute from public housing
so not only do leeches want housing below market cost, but they want it to be luxury units as well?
Fuck em.
Project dwellers cannot afford this affordable housing, so I am not sure what you mean about 90-minute commutes.
All of this is just trying to compensate for the damage done to our rent regulations by the ALbany republicans in 1997.
Over 300K -truly- affordable apts lost since then.
Those same units now often 5-6+ in a two bdrm.
Working class New Yorkers now live like the Mexicans and "coolies" people often ridicule.
All to sate the greed of some leech.
I've said it before, I'll say it again; when you agree to a deal with the city that promises "new jobs", and/or "affordable housing", you've been suckered!
Note the leeches are the blood sucking developers who sucked the city dry for tax abatements and then build sub-standard housing for normal working stiffs.
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