The Tortured Saga of Turning a Parking Lot Into Affordable Housing

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19 STREET FIGHTS [13 Years, 3 Mayors, Countless Community Board Meetings, and Just One Building]( The tortured path to 112 affordable apartment units in Hell’s Kitchen. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Hudson Inc. On the corner of 54th Street and Ninth Avenue on Manhattan’s far West Side, a blue fence skirts a gray parking lot. Windowless slabs hug the lot from two sides: on 54th, the beige wall of a large building owned by the MTA, whose employees park their cars in the lot; on Ninth, the concrete side of a glass-sheathed apartment building. Behind, more shiny towers, more brick tenements. In many ways, the parking lot was a prize — “one of the few available pieces of dirt left,” as one city worker put it, in a [housing-scarcity emergency]( that has lasted five decades. The lot was on publicly owned land, among only a thousand or so sites that remain property of New York City, which meant that, unlike a private lot, the site did not have to make a profit. Since 2009, the city has wanted to turn the parking lot into apartments, the official plans for which were announced in 2021: 112 permanently affordable units, 59 of which were intended for formerly homeless long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS. The rest would go to low-income renters making $66,880 or less a year. There would be supportive housing on-site providing medical and mental-health care. [Continue reading »]( Want more on city life, real estate, and design? [Subscribe now]( for unlimited access to Curbed and everything New York. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [From the Archives: When Gentrification Hit the Lower East Side There goes the neighborhood.]( By Craig Unger [‘I Didn’t Pick This Height’ A review of the FAA’s extremely lively public-comment period on airplane-seat dimensions.]( By Zach Schiffman [Everywhere and Nowhere All at Once at BravoCon Thousands of fans descended on Manhattan for BravoCon, but they could have been anywhere else.]( By Bridget Read [New York City: What If We Put Trash Inside Cans? If you want to put out your trash before 8 p.m., we’ve got a bold idea.]( By Christopher Bonanos [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( Introducing Reread: Real Estate Mania, a newsletter resurfacing the wildest real-estate stories from the New York archives. Photo: New York Magazine [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe](param=curbed) | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2022, All rights reserved