Thursday, March 24, 2011

☞ REVIVE: 467 West 143rd Street Townhouse


One of the three identical landmark townhouses just east of Amsterdam at 143rd Street always remained a mystery since it was never restored like the others.  We finally got around to doing some research on the building at No. 467 West 143rd Street and there evidently was a renovation planned for the single family home back in 1996.  The DOB paperwork has been sitting around for some time but nothing has been done to fix up this striking, HPD-owned building.

New York's Housing Preservation and Development department has been fixing up a lot of the multi-family tenements and prewars in the city but it would appear that the city could be better off just selling these townhouses to a serious home buyer.  There are not a lot of units in question and the cost to fix up the smaller homes apparently is beyond the current HPD budget so why wait 15 years or more to get anything done? Another factor to consider is the lost of tax revenue so everyone loses out at the end.

1 comment:

  1. I agree that it's a real shame in this case. City ownership and rehabilitation is important when there is no alternative, or in cases where existing tenants are stuck with sub-standard conditions (the TIL rebhab > HDFC program sequence has done a lot of great work in that area).

    But for a single-family home of this quality? It's hard to imagine there is no market for private ownership, and it's not at all clear who is being protected or helped by this.

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