Hell's Kitchen Supportive Housing Plan Breaks Promise, Board Says

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — A Hell's Kitchen community board attacked the city's plan to build supportive housing on an MTA-owned parking lot this week, saying it betrayed a years-old pledge to create homes for middle-income households.

For about 20 years, the community has been in talks with the city about redeveloping the site, which sits on the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 54th Street. Drawn-out negotiations that stemmed from the 2005 Hudson Yards rezoning finally produced a 2009 deal requiring affordable housing to be built on the site for households making up to 165 percent of the area median income — or about $137,940 for a single person.

In 2019, however, the community board learned that the city had changed its plans: the new building would serve instead as supportive housing for formerly homeless people, contrary to the original deal. Now, the project is set to include 67 apartments for formerly homeless people, including 59 for long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS. Another 44 affordable units will be included, but they will serve lower-income households, making up to 80 percent AMI.

On Thursday, the city's presentation to Community Board 4 went over poorly with members who praised its goals but harshly criticized the reverse-course, saying it left behind middle-class families being priced out of Hell's Kitchen.

"It’s actually a wonderful project," board member Delores Rubin said. "It’s just not appropriate for this community."

Members brought up the recurring complaint that Hell's Kitchen bears a disproportionate burden of supportive housing, with over 3,000 beds combined in shelters and supportive housing developments within the community district.

"We cannot take on any more supportive housing, formerly homeless housing, whatever it is," board chair Lowell Kern said. "There’s too much already, and it’s burying this neighborhood."

The dispute mirrors another fight playing out over the so-called "DEP site" on 10th Avenue, which is also being redeveloped following the Hudson Yards rezoning. There, the city also revised plans for middle-income housing down to serve lower income brackets, much to the displeasure of the community board.

"Still more to talk about"

The city did not deny going back on the 2009 agreement. Ahmed Tigani, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told the board that the reversal came amid a desperate citywide search for sites that could help alleviate New York's shortage of affordable and supportive housing.

"We think that there's still more to talk about with this project, with this board and with this community," Tigani said.

Meanwhile, the developers behind the project extolled its benefits. Built in partnership with Hudson Companies and Housing Works, the nine-story building would serve a Hell's Kitchen neighborhood that has the city's highest concentration of residents with HIV/AIDS.

It will be known as The Lirio, inspired by the city's oldest living tree: a Liriodendron that has survived for well over 300 years.

"This seemed like a perfect alignment with the long-term survivor population, who has survived and persisted against the odds," Sarah Pizer, a representative for Hudson Companies, said Thursday.

The non-supportive units would be available for people making as little as 40 percent AMI, with rents ranging between $777 for studios and $2,273 for some three-bedroom apartments. Some of the building would be devoted to MTA office space, while the ground floor may hold a Housing Works thrift store or a grocery store, in response to neighborhood demands for more food markets.

Because it requires multiple zoning changes to be built, the project will need to move through the city's monthslong ULURP process, which developers hope to begin sometime this fall. Once construction starts, it will last about two years.

Among the few speakers who defended the project on Thursday was Eric Sawyer, a long-term survivor of advanced HIV symptoms who pointed out that over half of New Yorkers who live with HIV are over 50 years old.

"Part of the rationale behind the city modifying this proposal ... is because there's so many people living with HIV, long-term survivors, in the neighborhood who need these levels of advanced services," he said. "And there are just none available at an affordable level in that neighborhood."

But neighbors appeared unmoved. Another critic of the project was Christine Gorman, a longtime Hell's Kitchen resident and former journalist who said she was among the first reporters to write about HIV/AIDS, and lost "a number of good friends" to the disease.

"My work helped to reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS across the country," she said.

Nonetheless, she said, the need to help middle-income families being priced out of Hell's Kitchen outweighed the need for more supportive housing.

"We know that there's a homelessness crisis," she said. "There is also a crisis for working-class and middle-class folks."

Related coverage: Hell's Kitchen Board Says City Betrayed Affordable Housing Pledge

Have a Hell's Kitchen news tip? Contact reporter Nick Garber at nick.garber@patch.com.