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UPDATE December 17, 2022 – 11:17 am
A member of the Harlem City Council arrived in a truck with the developer.
Seven months after Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan canceled a planned 50% apartment allocation for West 145th Street and Lenox Avenue, developer Bruce Teitelbaum will open a truck depot at the site on Monday.
Site fixes were underway Thursday, when Teitelbaum planned to put up a “Park Your Fleet” sign, a permitted use of the commercially zoned parcel.
This spring, he had asked for a rezoning to build a two-tower complex dubbed “One47” with 917 apartments, part of which are affordable. Around 40% of apartments would have been reserved for tenants earning 50% of the median income source. of the region or less.
But Jordan said the task probably wouldn’t be affordable in Harlem, where he said some families earn 30 percent or less of the area’s median income. She sought to make all sets affordable for them, which made the task unprofitable and forced Teitelbaum to retire. its rezoning request in May.
Dan Garodnick, the city’s lead planning officer, later called it a “missed opportunity” to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
Teitelbaum said he wasn’t bringing trucks out of spite, but because Richardson Jordan left him no choice.
“Since stopping the assignment more than 8 months ago, we have not heard any whispers about how we can move forward, despite the significant network for our plan,” he said in a statement. “Now we don’t have a viable option yet to repurpose the site and look for other uses that will come with parking and a truck depot. It’s a bad result for us, but especially for Harlem.
Sometimes private developers can only create affordable sets by adding market-rate apartments into their projects to subsidize them. In the council’s culture of deference to members, a rezoning request almost fails without the help of your local council member.
One45’s rejection prompted City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Mayor Eric Adams to interfere in upcoming rezonings at Throggs Neck and Astoria when local council members threatened to block them, but it was too late for the Teitelbaum project. New Year, he began responding to requests for permitted uses under existing zoning, as he had warned Richardson Jordan he would.
It turns out he wasn’t lying. According to Teitelbaum, the truck depot will be operational on Monday.
The Astoria rezoning will enable Innovation QNS, a $2 billion allocation from Silverstein Properties, BedRock Real Estate Partners and Kaufman Astoria Studios. It turned out that if Councilwoman Julie Won continued to insist that 55% of her housing be affordable, her colleagues would have supplanted her.
The speaker’s pressure is not mandatory to get Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán approval in September of Hallets North, in part because Cabán stated that the developer could have built warehouses that generated a steady flow of truck traffic. That now seems to be the destination of Project Harlem’s site, which also has small-scale retail stores, adding a KFC.
Given the city’s evolving housing policy and strong demand for housing, it’s conceivable, if not likely, that Teitelbaum and his investors will try to rezone the back, especially if Richardson Jordan loses his re-election next year. They will face contenders in the Democratic number one election in June.
This article has been updated with one by Bruce Teitelbaum.
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