City Ditches Plan To Develop Hell's Kitchen Parking Lot: Report

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — The New York City Housing Authority has abandoned plans to construct an affordable housing building near a Hell's Kitchen public housing development, according to reports.

NYCHA will no longer redevelop of the parking lot adjacent to the Harborview Terrace complex on West 55th Street site between 10th and 11th avenues, THE CITY first reported. The development would have brought below-market housing to the area and was going to raise money for repairs at Harborview, according to the report.

The decision to drop the project took local officials and Harborview tenants by surprise, THE CITY reported. Borough President Gale Brewer, State Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal and Community Board 4 all told THE CITY that NYCHA had not informed them ahead of the decision.

The leader of Harborview Terrace's tenants association told the publication that residents had finally come to accept the city's proposals after years of new plans and legal fights. Like other NextGeneration NYCHA projects around the city, the Harborview Terrace development would have raised funds for repairs at the NYCHA complex. The agency estimates that Harborview Terrace will require $85 million in repairs over the next 20 years, THE CITY reported.

"They said ‘We’ll come back to you when we look at all your comments.’ And they never came back," tenant association leader Maria Guzman told THE CITY.

NYCHA has considered the West 55th Street site for development since the 2005 rezoning of Hudson Yards. In 2017, NYCHA presented a plan to develop the parking lot into a building with 200 to 250 below-market apartments. At the time, NYCHA was pushing to secure the deepest levels of affordability, an agency spokesperson told Patch in 2017.

On year later the plans changed dramatically when Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration proposed adding 20 stories of market-rate apartments to the development. The new plan was supposed to raise up to $40 million for NYCHA.

Read the full THE CITY report here.