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Two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, the last re-building block of the World Trade Center is coming together.
A proposal for a 900-foot residential skyscraper on “Site 5”, formerly home to the Deutsche Bank Building, is in the works. It will include 1,325 apartments, a quarter of which will be so-called affordable, or rented below market rate.
But as the 20th anniversary of the attacks arrives, some locals are pushing for something different: Why not make the building a place where survivors and their families can live, with all of the units set at income-adjusted, affordable rents?
To Mariama James, a longtime downtown resident who said she struggles with 9/11-related health issues and lost her father to a related cancer, taking that course is the right thing to do.
It would represent a recognition of the residents who made Lower Manhattan a “phenomenal” place to live after the attacks, she said.
“It’s the people who were asked to stay here, not to leave, and to live, basically, through a war zone — to move here in the aftermath of that, or to return to their homes that had been destroyed, and rebuild them. We did it. You asked, and we did it,” she said. “And there’s been no compensation for that. There’s been no thanks.”
James is a co-founder of a new coalition of Lower Manhattan residents and housing advocates rallying to push multiple public agencies and two mega-developers, Brookfield Properties and Silverstein Properties, to change course on the Site 5 plan.
The building is set to be the first residential property within the downtown complex, and the last major site to be redeveloped there since the 2001 attacks.
The current plan for the site calls for about 995 market-rate apartments and 330 affordable-housing units, also known as income-restricted apartments because they are rented to families within specific household earning categories.
The affordable units will be reserved for families making up to 50% of the area median income. With a local AMI of $107,400, a three-person family making only about $53,000 annually could secure a spot in the tower.
1 comment:
Oh another apartment building where they will split the building up and create two different addresses just so they can get around the "poor door" rule. Then the rich in the building can use all the amenities while the "lower income residents" get denied access to them.
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