We had a few posts last year about the infill option for the open land around the public housing towers and DNAinfo has reported that this reality has now been up for review uptown:
LINK. The top photo shows the Columbus Square development in the lower 100's of the Upper West Side that have recently used this concept to incorporate unused land back into the Manhattan street grid. Apparently up to 14.1 million square foot is available between Central and East Harlem so now it appears that the city has started to review selling this open land to developers. East Harlem has roughly two thirds of the undeveloped property in question and there will likely be a lot of controversy with any major construction that comes along.
Harlem Children's Zone new building arriving at the St. Nicholas Houses was in the news last year and now it seems new affordable housing might be planned for part of the land in that particular low-income residential super block:
LINK. This type of development appears to be the last area to really take off since much of the large lots uptown were heavily constructed on in the past ten years. As far as land goes, there's not much left in Manhattan so this infill concept could change the face of the city in the same way the Urban Renewal towers altered many neighborhoods in the mid 20th century.
If deployed in a big way across NYCHA's properties in Manhattan, this approach could go a long way toward addressing the budgetary and physical capital maintenance shortfalls that are already at crisis levels.
ReplyDeleteIt could also help to restore some of the urban fabric that was lost to the "tower in the park" design (the street wall, at least, if not the grid).
I fear the notoriously anti-progressive CB11 is going to do their best to derail this process, just like they tried with the East Harlem MEC Center. I hope they fail once again.
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