A proposed rezoning of Chelsea’s public housing sites—Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea Houses—could transform much of the neighborhood to midtown-like density. It would introduce towers of up to 39 stories a stone’s throw from early-19th-century Greek Revival rowhouses. This New York City Housing Authority rendering shows new buildings it would construct under the rezoning in gold, viewed from the southeast. The darker-shaded buildings would replace the existing NYCHA ones and their 2,056 dwelling units. The lighter-shaded buildings include about 3,500 new rental-housing units. Up to 30% of these, perhaps 1,000 apartments, would be affordable and the rest market rate, which amounts to luxury in this part of Chelsea. That means luxury apartments would outnumber public-housing units on public land originally set aside for low-income New Yorkers.
An earlier plan would have renovated all of the NYCHA buildings and allowed a small amount of new mixed-income housing to be built if needed to fill any funding gaps. The mixed-income portion exploded in size as the plan was revised to replace the buildings on unfounded claims that their renovation would cost just as much.
Late last year, NYCHA made the bombshell disclosure that the vast mixed-income rental revenue—possibly all of it—would go into its coffers for use throughout the city. It is to this end that the existing buildings would be demolished and much of Chelsea’s character sacrificed. Few in the community are aware of the proposal but among those who are there is well-founded fear for the neighborhood’s character.
NYCHA recently released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, detailing the project and its impacts. Comments on the DEIS will be received until May 19th. NYCHA is required by law to respond in the Final Environmental Impact Statement to substantive comments from anyone. Failure to meaningfully do so could result in legal challenges, media scrutiny, or political fallout.
Chelsea’s Robert Fulton Houses and the Elliott-Chelsea Houses, together known as FEC, are viewed from the southeast in this NYCHA rendering. Like other public-housing developments across the country, they have suffered from decades of government disinvestment. In response to this funding deficit, NYCHA launched an initiative called Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, or PACT, in 2015. The program allows NYCHA to partner with private developers who manage renovations and operations. The developers have access to Low Income Housing Tax Credits, loans, and bonds to fund renovations—financial resources unavailable to NYCHA. They typically enter into 99-year leases on the land, of which NYCHA retains ownership. Residents continue to pay 30% of their income as rent, but the developers take over as landlords. They earn fair-market rents as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with federal subsidies making up the difference between these and what the residents pay. This happens through a controversial transition from a publicly managed program called Section 9 to a privately managed one called Section 8, which some see as riskier for tenants—especially in light of its dependence on federal funding under the Trump administration. The transition to Section 8 is allowed by a 2011 HUD program called Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, which underpins PACT. NYCHA recently reported that 146 of its 335 developments had undergone PACT renovation or were at some stage of it.
In 2019, NYCHA proposed a PACT renovation with a difference for Fulton Houses. A new NYCHA building would be constructed on open space at the west end of the complex, outlined in orange above. Residents would move into it from the two buildings at the north and south ends of the complex on sites outlined in blue. These 7-story, 36-unit buildings would then be demolished and replaced with mixed-income apartment towers of up to 35-stories. They would contain about 630 mixed-income apartments. 20-30% of their floor areas would be dedicated to affordable units following the city’s rules for Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, with the balance market rate. This would be a demonstration project for Build to Preserve, a recently minted NYCHA policy. According to NYCHA’s project description:
Build to Preserve is a new construction program to develop mixed-income buildings at select NYCHA developments. The program’s proceeds generate additional revenue to fund repairs. One hundred percent of the funds generated by new construction will first be used to renovate the host development, and any remaining proceeds will go towards repairs at other developments in the same neighborhood.
Why would “additional revenue to fund repairs” be needed when similar developments across the city were being renovated with just the financial toolkit of the PACT program? And what made FEC a “select” development? In retrospect, it appears that NYCHA was targeting the high-rent neighborhood’s exceptional income potential and may not have been sincere about keeping the proceeds in the community. It now looks like the agency was putting its foot in the door of a new financial model—one to be replicated in other thriving neighborhoods—that would mark a radical departure from its history.
Not only might it seem heretical to propose market-rate apartments on public land set aside to house the underprivileged, but NYCHA had a proud history of not destroying its buildings. Half a century after St. Louis famously imploded Pruitt Igoe, New York could boast of by far the nation’s largest public-housing program. The 2016 book Affordable Housing in New York reported that “with 178,000 apartments and an official population of 403,000, NYCHA would be the twenty-seventh largest city in the United States as an independent entity.” After recounting how other American cities have thrown in the towel on large-scale public housing, it continues:
So far, New Yorkers have resisted many calls, and great federal pressure, to do the same. NYCHA has replaced just two projects: four comparatively small towers at Prospect Plaza in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, originally built by a private developer in 1974 and now slowly undergoing redevelopment; and Edwin Markham Gardens (1943), a 360-unit, two-story garden apartment complex in Staten Island built as temporary housing for shipyard workers during World War II. Markham’s wood-frame and stucco buildings, which were beyond repair, were replaced with 370 new low- and middle-income units between 2008 and 2012.
The 2019 Fulton Houses plan was abandoned in the face of vigorous resident opposition to the required demolition of the two NYCHA buildings. A new renovation plan barring demolition was developed to include both the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses by the same Chelsea-NYCHA Working Group behind the earlier proposal. It was made up of resident representatives, Manhattan Community Board 4 members, housing and legal advocates, elected officials, members of the mayor’s office, and NYCHA officials. This proposal fared better and in April of 2021 NYCHA issued a Request for Proposals from private developers to renovate and manage both the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses under the PACT program. While the scope of work described in the RFP included no demolition, it allowed construction of mixed-income “infill” buildings on the two campuses’ open spaces.
The RFP included these site plans showing potential infill-building locations in purple at Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton. It stated:
Applicants should regard these opportunities as a secondary source of financing to fund any gaps in the Project sources. . . . Applicants are not required to propose new construction at any or all locations. Applicants are expected to consider how any new construction would contribute funding to the PACT Component, create a financially feasible development scenario(s), and create an enhanced built environment with additional amenities for NYCHA residents and their neighbors.
A month before issuing the RFP, NYCHA presented this slide suggesting that 696 new units of mixed-income housing, half affordable and half market rate, could raise $81 million toward renovating the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea buildings. It graphically emphasizes the Build to Preserve policy of directing mixed-income revenue directly into adjacent NYCHA buildings.
In December of 2021, the team of Related Companies and Essence Development was selected as the RFP winner with the participation of FEC residents on the Chelsea-NYCHA Working Group. Related is one of the nation’s foremost affordable-housing landlords and the developer of Hudson Yards, the largest private real estate development in American history. Essence is a small, minority-owned “social impact firm” that aims “to combine government programs with private sector resources to build and preserve communities and unlock tremendous value.” Its founder left a position as a Related vice president to start the company. Many see it as window dressing created by Related.
When Related and Essence were awarded the project, NYCHA’s estimated cost for the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea renovations was $487 million, or $236,000 per apartment. This inflation-adjusted estimate was based on a 2017 Physical Needs Assessment, or PNA, of the kind NYCHA routinely conducts for its properties. Once Related was on board, it performed its own investigation and found that renovation would cost $1.144 billion, or $556,000 per unit—two-and-a-third times NYCHA’s estimate. According to NYCHA and Related, this made renovation about as expensive as replacement with new buildings. Implausible, unsubstantiated, and potentially self-serving as this claim was, it was accepted by Chelsea’s elected officials. They reasoned that if the costs of renovation and replacement were a toss-up, the residents should be asked which option they preferred. At their suggestion, the residents were surveyed. The results showed they preferred not just new buildings but ones built according to a more development-friendly rezoning. NYCHA accordingly changed its plan. In a dramatic turnaround, all of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea buildings would be demolished and replaced. They would be joined by far more mixed-income construction than previously envisioned, presumably to cover the cost of rebuilding all of the NYCHA structures.
There are a several red flags here.
First, Related was trusted to accurately prepare a new renovation estimate despite what should have been a disqualifying financial stake in its findings. The estimate in fact led to a supersized and potentially far more lucrative project for the developer.
Second, the vast change in the project’s scope and nature did not trigger a new RFP, leaving Related to set its own terms free of a competitive process that would yield the best deal for the public. The fundamentally different and vastly enlarged project was effectively awarded without a bidding process.
Third, NYCHA buildings are typically renovated by PACT developers for less than NYCHA’s PNA estimates, not two-and-a-third times their amount. A report published by The City in September of 2023, “NYCHA Says It Needs $485K to Repair Each Apartment—But Actual Costs Come In Much Lower,” found that renovation costs consistently come in lower—and usually much lower—than NYCHA’s estimates when comprehensive rehabilitation is done by private-sector PACT developers. This coverage reported that the unit cost of renovating an apartment under the program that year ranged from $124,000 to $384,000—well below the average of $485,000 that NYCHA estimated for apartments across its system based on its PNAs. This was found to be true for all nine such projects to date in 2023. The article attributed this discrepancy to the failure of NYCHA’s estimates to account for economy of scale in renovating all the apartments in a building versus just one. PACT developers also have greater skill in negotiating material costs and a more efficient workforce, which further lowers costs.
Fourth, even if renovation somehow did approach the cost of replacement, environmental concerns would decisively tip the balance—not just the expected sixteen years of local air-quality and noise impacts from demolition and new construction, but increasingly critical climate impacts. Replacing the NYCHA buildings would entail vast embodied carbon—the total carbon-dioxide emissions from raw-material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and installation, not to mention demolition and disposal of the existing buildings. The Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice is committed to reducing construction-related embodied carbon by 50%. It also has the goal of increasing the city’s tree canopy coverage to 30% from the current 22%, a goal shared by the Urban Forest Master Plan sponsored by Chelsea’s City Council Member, Erik Bottcher. NYCHA’s plan would remove 370 mature trees on the FEC campuses. The loss of planted and permeable surfacing would reduce the natural climate resiliency of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea sites, both of which lie partly in flood plains. It would also worsen air quality and urban-heat-island effect—a particular concern for the developments’ largely elderly population.
Fifth, the tenant survey was designed to steer residents toward the choice that would most enrich NYCHA and Related, not necessarily their own best interests.
NYCHA used this form to survey the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea residents on their preferences in the summer of 2023. It even asked residents whether they’d prefer to live in a new building under existing zoning or a new one built under a zoning change, an option which had been presented as including more amenities. The survey indicated that the rezoning option could place residents in new homes in five years versus six-to-eight years under existing zoning. No timeframe was given for renovation, but NYCHA recently conceded that it could take as little as two years—information that might well have swayed the survey result to rehabilitation. Given the survey’s framing, it’s unsurprising that 80% of respondents who selected new construction chose the rezoning option. Only 29% of residents responded at all, of which 60% chose new buildings. This means that among the total resident population, only 16.5% chose new construction versus 12.5% who chose rehabilitation, a difference of only 4%. Those who selected the rezoning option could not have known that it would provide less than the standard minimum of light, air, and open space; that was only later stated in the NYCHA’s Draft Scope of Work for the project, which would allow “location of buildings without regard for [current zoning’s] applicable yard, court, distance-between-buildings or height and setback regulations.” That’s a bit like offering to rebuild someone’s house without telling them there would be other people’s new houses in their front and back yards. The survey’s 29% response rate has been touted as comparing favorably to a political election’s participation rate, but it casts serious doubt on the outreach effort. It’s hard to believe that a vote on something as immediately impactful as where to live would have such a low turnout. This may owe to the survey’s never having been presented as a binding vote at all. It has only been treated as one after the fact.
The survey distracted from Related’s sketchy renovation estimate, made NYCHA’s will appear to be that of the residents, and pitted members of the community against each other. Calling the plan “tenant led” made it hard for other Chelsea residents to object without looking like privileged outside meddlers.
Many see more of a led-tenant than tenant-led initiative. Residents had been told new-construction apartments would have washer-dryers, on-site supermarkets, and other amenities that would enhance any New York apartment’s sale price. It’s unclear how well they were informed of new construction’s cost in light, air, open space, long views, and greenery that their current buildings were designed to maximize as an antidote to slum conditions—likewise coveted features affecting value. The survey didn’t actually include the word “demolition.”
A better picture of the residents’ preference emerged last year as over 900 of them signed a petition against demolition—almost twice the number who opted for new construction on the 2023 survey. Running on an anti-demolition platform, Renee Keitt was elected president of the Elliott-Chelsea Tenants Association in January.
In June of 2023, The New York Times covered the FEC plan under the headline, “To Improve Public Housing, New York City Moves to Tear it Down.” Large print under the headline asserted the “tenant-led” narrative: “After surveying residents at two developments in Manhattan, [NYCHA] is moving forward with a $1.5 billion plan to demolish and replace the buildings.” The Times reported that NYCHA was taking this action “after it became clear that replacing the deteriorating buildings would cost about as much as rehabilitating them,” and noted that “the plan also calls for the construction of new retail and commercial spaces and 3,500 mixed-income apartments, with around 1,000 restricted to people earning lower incomes and the rest renting at market rates.” This came as a shock to Community Board 4 members who had served on the Chelsea-NYCHA Working Group from 2019-21, hammering out the terms of the no-demolition RFP won by Related and Essence. They were not consulted as the new plan was advanced by other working-group members including NYCHA, tenant leaders, and elected officials. Nowhere in the Times report did it say that the new construction would fund rebuilding the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea buildings. The focus of new construction had shifted to creation of new mixed-income housing.
In January of 2024, NYCHA began the environmental review process required by NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, issuing a Draft Scope of Work to Prepare a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for two different demolition-based plans. (Demolition itself requires NEPA approval.) These corresponded to the two new-construction choices on the tenant survey. One would add market-rate housing in conformance with current zoning. The other, with roughly 3,500 mixed-income units, would require a rezoning approval through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, better known as ULURP. The recently issued Draft Environmental Impact Statement adds a second rezoning-based alternative for Fulton Houses with the same amount of bulk, but more of it shifted to the midblock.
It’s disturbing that such a transformative change to a neighborhood would be entirely based on the lie that it would cost as much to renovate FEC’s buildings as to replace them. Only serious structural problems could account for this and none has ever been documented or even cited. The buildings are subject to regular Local law 11 façade inspections and repairs which protect underlying structural systems and ensure longevity. The mottled effect of brick replacement on NYCHA buildings is a sign of upkeep, not neglect. A recent letter from Community Board 4 to NYCHA asked whether any of the Fulton or Elliott-Chelsea buildings have structural defects. The agency responded that none are known of. The letter asked NYCHA to release a detailed building-condition survey and cost breakdown to better explain why FEC couldn’t be renovated at comparable costs to similar NYCHA developments. The agency refused.
The FEC campuses were built as four developments designed by separate architects and completed over two decades: Elliott Houses in 1947; Chelsea Houses in 1964; the entire Fulton Houses campus in 1965; and the Chelsea Houses Addition building in 1968. It would be extraordinarily bad luck if all of them had fatal flaws causing egregious renovation costs. NYCHA often cites the presence of lead paint in FEC as an argument for demolition, but only the Elliott Houses were completed before New York banned lead paint in 1960. The presence of asbestos is also cited, but it would need to be fully abated even for demolition.
A visit to the FEC-building blueprints at the Municipal Archives finds consistency among them that speaks of adherence to NYCHA building standards. All have structural frames of reinforced-concrete columns and floor slabs, and ten-inch cavity walls—tried-and-true technology that would spare NYCHA headaches and stand indefinitely.
William Lescaze, an architect of the Elliott Houses, is most renowned for his groundbreaking 1932 PSFS tower in Philadelphia, the nation’s first International Style skyscraper and a staple of books on twentieth-century architecture. He was also an architect of NYCHA’s second ground-up development, the Williamsburg Houses, completed in 1938 and now both a national and New York City landmark. This side of his practice is a reminder of the social mission by which modernist architects distinguished themselves from their predecessors who largely served the aristocracy. “Worker housing” was a byword. Lescaze’s involvement contributes to the status of the Elliott-Chelsea campus as eligible for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. PACT renovation of his 1,600-unit Williamsburg Houses was completed last fall at a cost of $304,133 per unit, one-third the rate for NYCHA’s estimated replacement of FEC—and this for a heavily lead-paint contaminated development subject to the demanding renovation standards of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Elliott Houses’ structural engineer, Fred Severud, is no less renowned. His firm engineered the Gateway Arch, the Seagram Building, and Madison Square Garden. Severud Associates lives on as one of the world’s premier structural consultants, with commissions from One Vanderbilt to the Sphere in Las Vegas. NYCHA wouldn’t have hired such firms for the pyrotechnics they were capable of, but for their competence.
Last fall, NYCHA dropped more bombshells. Revenue from the mixed-income component might not be needed even to replace the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea buildings thanks to low-income housing tax credits and government bonds available for new construction of affordable housing. This was said to be true even though, as revealed in another shocking disclosure, the cost of replacement had ballooned to $1.9 billion.
How does that compare to the cost of renovation? It would be folly to trust NYCHA for an accurate estimate, but the most expensive PACT renovation to date is the ongoing one of the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx, at $783 million. Edenwald has 99% of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea’s number of apartments. It was completed in 1953, making it on average well older than FEC and built entirely in the lead-paint era. It has similar construction to FEC, with a dozen 14-story towers among its 40 buildings. If Edenwald is a fair comparable, renovating the FEC buildings would cost well under half as much as rebuilding them, and over a billion dollars less than replacing them. This gap is poised to widen with expected tariffs on steel and aluminum that will have far more impact on new construction than renovation.
NYCHA says the replacement estimate shot up because it now includes the cost of existing-building demolition, and design fees, insurance, and filing fees that are exponentially higher for new construction than renovation. These costs were always going to come due, but were conveniently not counted when the agency said replacement would cost about as much as renovation—the claimed toss-up the tenants were allowed to decide. They would never have been allowed to choose new buildings at the expense of over a billion dollars in affordable-housing tax credits and government bonds that are effectively public funding. These financial resources were meant to spur construction of new affordable housing, not subsidize demolition and needless replacement of structurally sound NYCHA buildings. It could be argued that applying them to demolition would indirectly create affordable housing by clearing land for it on the FEC campuses, but this would be a woefully inefficient use of funds, and there is every reason to believe existing public-housing capacity would perversely be lost in the bargain.
Essence Development’s Managing Principal included this slide in a 2023 presentation to Community Board 4. It shows the planned relocation of residents from four Fulton Houses buildings into just one new structure. Asked how they would all fit, he cited senior empty-nesters living in four- or five-bedroom apartments who would be “right-sized” into one-bedrooms. He quickly added that residents in too-small apartments would be moved into larger ones, but NYCHA’s aging population suggests this would be a decided minority of cases and NYCHA has recently stated that approximately 260 bedrooms will be lost to right-sizing. This amounts to about a 6% permanent reduction in FEC’s future-generation capacity.
Chelsea stands to lose more than its public-housing capacity.
The City Charter authorizes community boards to propose 197-a Plans for the development, growth, and improvement of their districts. Chelsea’s Community Board 4 began developing one in Collaboration with Columbia University in 1986. It was adopted by the city in 1996 and informed rezonings in 1999 and 2005. The Chelsea 197-a Plan sought:
to provide for orderly growth and change; to provide opportunities for new, economically-integrated housing; to preserve the existing low income housing stock; to prevent significant displacement of residents and businesses; to preserve ethnic and economic diversity; to protect residential areas from commercial intrusion; to preserve the character and visual unity of Chelsea; to preserve the traditional urban form and scale of the community; and to protect the [Chelsea] Historic District and other areas of historic character.
This view of the neighborhood from the northeast represents building areas allowed by zoning in a schematic, topographic fashion. The heights of the volumes correspond to the Floor Area Ratios, or FARs, for the land they cover. A site’s FAR is the square footage allowed to be built on it as a multiple of the lot area. Areas where a 1999 zoning change reduced FAR are shown in pink. These are home to the Chelsea Historic District and other stretches of nineteenth-century rowhouses and low-rise older structures that critically define the neighborhood’s character. East of Eighth Avenue, areas with a taller context simultaneously had their FARs increased. A 2005 rezoning that corresponded with the creation of the High Line increased FAR along its path west of Tenth Avenue, and allowed residential construction in formerly manufacturing districts. This balance of FAR reductions and increases and changes in permitted use have allowed Chelsea to retain its historic character without stifling growth. Under zoning crafted by Community Board 4, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen have produced more housing, including affordable housing, than any other Manhattan district. Volumes shown in gray above represent the Fulton Houses site, at left, and Elliott-Chelsea Houses site, at right. The darker gray at their base shows their currently built floor area, and the lighter gray above shows their total proposed FAR under NYCHA’s rezoning plan. Their FARs would increase from 6.02 for the most part to 8, or 12 within 100 feet of avenues. This would place incongruously great bulk near low-rise and historically sensitive areas.
This view up Sixth Avenue from 25th Street suggests what rough beast is slouching toward West Chelsea. The 36-story building in the right foreground reduces the historic buildings across the avenue to visual-field nonentities. NYCHA’s rezoning alternative will create a similar relationship looking down Ninth Avenue from 18th Street, where a 36-story tower on the Fulton Houses site will loom across the avenue from older low-rise residential buildings. Not just human-scale buildings are diminished by the enormity and indifference of thirty-odd-story housing towers—humans are too. That’s why residential streetscapes of such scale like Second or Third Avenue in the East Sixties are among the city’s most soulless.
This 1960s rendering of the Fulton Houses conveys the development’s simple but effective design concept. Its 25-story towers were then unprecedented in the neighborhood, but their impact was reduced by placing them at the centers of blocks, set back to give light and space to the streets. Seven-story perimeter buildings step down to the generically rendered low-rise context, which largely remains nearby. The success of this contextual strategy is clearly seen in the “No-Action Alternative” (existing-condition) images that follow.
These views from NYCHA’s DEIS show current and proposed-rezoning-alternative views down Ninth Avenue toward the Fulton Houses site. Even a scaled back version of the rezoning would result in a markedly different neighborhood.
These views of the same area from the DEIS show the current condition above the rezoning alternative that would place more bulk at mid-block. The overall effect of this rezoning alternative, including a Ninth Avenue street-wall of 25-story towers, would still profoundly change the feel of the community.
While the 2005 rezoning for the Special West Chelsea District increased FAR west of Tenth Avenue along the High Line, a height limit of 80 feet was imposed on it across the avenue from the Chelsea Historic District. That kept the new apartment building at right in harmony with the historic General Theological Seminary at left. Nothing could be further from NYCHA’s oblivious zoning threat.
Even NYCHA’s apparently sacrificial non-rezoning alternative—the agency didn’t even bother to present it in the public hearing on the Master Development Agreement with Related—would be out of scale with neighborhood context. This owes to the NYCHA sites having been left out of the 1999 rezoning based on the Chelsea 197-a Plan that lowered surrounding FARs. The Elliott-Chelsea campus is already built to about 80% of its allowed FAR, while the Fulton campus is built to about 50% of its FAR. It’s clear that NYCHA’s non-rezoning alternative exists only to fast-track the first two FEC replacement buildings within current zoning, without having to wait for ULURP approval, and establish facts on the ground to make the rezoning alternative more inevitable. There is no reason the first Elliott-Chelsea replacement building would ever be the proposed, expensive-to-build 39-stories tall except in anticipation of a rezoning allowing compatibly tall neighbors. If the rest of the campus were only built according to the non-rezoning scheme, the next-tallest building would be 22 stories tall, just over half its height, as seen above. The non-rezoning alternative also expects us to believe it would make sense to demolish all of the Elliott-Chelsea buildings just to replace their square footage with the mere 20% more allowed by current zoning. It says something that NYCHA’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement doesn’t rule out the non-rezoning alternative as financially infeasible, as it did for a non-demolition alternative that had been requested by CB4—NYCHA checked that box by merely recycling the infill scheme from Related’s RFP response which it had long since rejected as inadequate. That’s effectively an admission that no rezoning is needed, even according to NYCHA’s self-serving accounting. (Forget that the agency has said no market-rate component may be needed at all to cover the cost of the NYCHA replacement buildings).
These NYCHA presentation images show the existing Elliott-Chelsea buildings (top left) and Fulton buildings (lower left) in gray. The buildings that will replace them as public housing are to their right in yellow, with new mixed-income buildings in green. FEC’s residents would be condensed and segregated onto roughly a third of their current grounds. The case for demolition was never about the condition of the existing NYCHA buildings. What they have in common isn’t worse deterioration than other NYCHA developments, but being in Chelsea. Demolition was always about clearing land for new, primarily luxury development of the sort Chelsea can singularly support—upscale buildings from which the NYCHA residents would be excluded, consuming the open space that once lent value to their homes.
The 2019 building at left is on a Fulton Houses block. (One of the Fulton buildings can be seen at the end of the street in the photo.) It illustrates the FEC sites’ staggering revenue potential for Related and NYCHA. The building has ten apartments on twelve floors, which have sold for up to $20 million. Most are now income properties, renting for $10,000 to $47,000 per month.
This luxury building designed by Bjarke Ingels, One High Line, stands on a block immediately west of a Fulton Houses block. Its site sold in 2014 for $870,000—upwards of a billion dollars. The land cost for such projects in prime Manhattan neighborhoods can exceed the cost of construction. Related will take control of FEC parcels that add up to three-and-a-quarter city blocks without having to buy land at all. While the company will enter into a negotiated ground lease with NYCHA, it will have no competitors. This led to the scheme being called a land grab by Related. At first, NYCHA was viewed as merely a hapless negotiator at the company’s mercy. That changed when the agency’s own intention to exploit Chelsea emerged.
NYCHA’s FEC plan has something as well for Chelsea’s elected officials who subscribe to the supply-side theory of market-rate housing. When NYCHA released the FEC proposal’s Draft Scope of Work last year, it expanded not only the RFP’s scale but added the goal of creating both “affordable and market-rate housing units to address the critical shortage of affordable housing and housing in general in New York City,” and noted that “the new market-rate units would indirectly address the shortage by increasing the overall supply of housing in New York City.” It’s very doubtful that the new market-rate apartments would do anything but worsen the city’s affordable-housing crisis. In cities like New York where land values have been bid up to astronomical levels, each new successful market-rate development further enhances them and increases housing costs. As Patrick Condon has observed in Broken City, that’s why it’s impossible for such cities to build their way out of a housing crisis: “The theory of supply and demand has been undercut by the observed empirical reality in many parts of the world—namely that no matter how many new housing units a metropolitan area adds, housing prices continue to rise.” This is borne out by extensive data Andrew Berman of Village Preservation has ammassed showing that housing costs have consistently risen in New York neighborhoods where the most new housing has been built. Broken City sees a solution in Vienna, where affordable social housing is plentiful on publicly owned land like NYCHA’s—land which is immune to private speculation. That’s why it’s critical to reserve such land exclusively for affordable housing. Trickle-down housing theorists should be reminded that much of today’s housing affordability problem is a function of the wealth disparity bred by trickle-down economics, which likewise pandered to wealthy private interests.
At a 2024 pro-housing rally on the steps of City Hall, Chelsea’s City Council Member, Erik Bottcher, argued for building “enough market-rate housing to bring down the cost for everyone” and effectively framed the battle for affordable housing as perhaps necessarily against the will of the public. He defined leadership as getting “the right things done even when they’re tough, even when they’re hard, and even when they’re not popular right out of the gate with a lot of people because, if it was popular, it would have been done a long time ago.” He described the alternative to this medicine-taking in apocalyptic terms:
If we continue killing every effort to increase housing supply, not only are we going to continue the crisis that we have but the levels of homelessness we see now are going to seem quaint in a few years. The levels of crime, of mental illness, of poverty, of displacement, of gentrification, all of these things are going to continue to get worse, and that’s a dark future that I refuse to let happen. The alternative is that we build hundreds and thousands of homes and bring down rents for everyone.
The rally, hosted by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, focused on eliminating a floor-area cap on apartment buildings which for most of a century had preserved light and air in residential neighborhoods—a provision Bottcher dismissed as a “relic.” Housing supply-siders often paint zoning-bulk regulations and historic-preservation protections as outdated, fusty tools used by the privileged to selfishly maintain the exclusivity and dollar value of their own property—the source of the acronym NIMBY, for “not in my back yard.” Those who prioritize more housing have branded themselves YIMBY, for “yes in my back yard.” They see NIMBYs as the cause of New York’s and the nation’s housing affordability crisis. It follows that NIMBY’s and their prioritization of neighborhood character must be circumvented if housing costs are ever to be lowered. The appeal to politicians is irresistible: a concise, seemingly obvious pitch—”build more housing to lower prices”—together with support from big real estate and young, activist members of the YIMBY group Open New York. That organization’s executive director, Annemarie Gray, shared the podium with Bottcher at the City Hall Rally. In 2024, Open New York launched the Abundant New York Super PAC, spending $250,000 in state legislative races, with plans to invest at least $500,000 in the 2025 City Council elections. Open New York has endorsed Bottcher in his current City Council re-election campaign.
A month before Bottcher spoke at the City Hall rally, the New York Times published a article on elected officials banding together in support of new market-rate housing, “They’re Starting a New York ‘Housing League,’ NIMBYs Not Allowed.” Mark Levine provided a statement that the city “‘needs elected leaders who are committed to this fight to come together to support each other.” Erik Bottcher and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso were said to have formed “a new ‘league’ of officials like themselves who want to welcome development, including development of market-rate apartments.” Reynoso is quoted to suggest “issuing statements against politicians who are resisting new construction; working with colleagues concerned that development could cause gentrification; and standing with politicians who want to back controversial new housing projects.” Reynoso is also quoted as wanting to “have a show of force of people who are publicly supportive of housing development.” He has elsewhere said: “We have a housing crisis and the character of your neighborhood is not more important than putting people in homes.”
It’s as if elected officials decided to gang up on what they see as their irredeemably obstructionist constituents. This might explain their end-run around community participation in the FEC proposal. Along with Bottcher and Levine, Congressman Jerry Nadler, Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Assemblymember Tony Simone have uniformly supported the FEC plan from the start, abruptly parting ways with the Community Board members of the Chelsea-NYCHA working group. One could be forgiven for thinking they helped conceive the plan. Their housing-at-any-cost attitude would certainly have encouraged Related and NYCHA to go for broke. This could explain why glaringly questionable aspects of the FEC plan are unaccountably spared in their joint comments on NYCHA’s Draft Scope of Work. Nowhere are the unsubstantiated increase in the renovation estimate or the switch from a non-demolition RFP questioned, as they pointedly are in the Attorney General’s comments. Confronted by constituents with these lapses in the plan’s integrity, Erik Bottcher and Mark Levine refuse to meaningfully engage. They just pivot to the thousand units of affordable housing that would be created, as if that end justifies any means. They continue to cite the deplorable living conditions of the residents as if sparkling PACT renovations featured in NYCHA’s own reports weren’t addressing similar conditions across the city. They cling to the deeply suspect tenant survey that was their own idea and they point to the uniformity of their support for the plan as if that somehow justifies it.
Bottcher has voiced reservations, but supports the proposal nonetheless. He has said he wants none of the development’s excess revenue to leave Chelsea, but that the percentage of affordable units should be increased to eliminate any excess, citing a 50% goal instead of the currently proposed 20-30%. He hasn’t suggested scaling the project back now that NYCHA has said no new mixed-income development at all may be needed to pay for replacing the FEC buildings. Nor has he insisted, as many housing experts do, that public land should be exclusively reserved for affordable housing—a seeming possibility given the land’s free availability. As the Attorney General’s comments on the Draft Scope of Work noted, “The Proposed Action allows the development of market rate housing on public land without any explanation of why that is necessary.” Bottcher has also stated his opposition to the planned segregation of NYCHA residents in separate buildings, but this is required by the construction phasing around which the entire project is designed; all FEC replacement buildings would be completed before work starts on the mixed-income component.
He has steadfastly denied constituent requests to oppose the plan outright. Presumably, he could stop or reshape the rezoning alternative NYCHA is clearly banking on by making clear that he will not support it during ULURP, the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. City Council approval is required for any ULURP application to pass, and the other council members almost always defer to the one who represents the district where the project is located—so entrenched a practice as to have a name, “member deference.” It will be telling if he fails to identify any deal-breaker concerns before certification of ULURP. Certification starts the review procedure’s clock, but in practice, it almost always means that major decisions have already been agreed upon by the powers that be and significant changes are highly unlikely. The process is more about legitimatizing pre-determined plans than genuinely shaping them through community input. In a meeting with Community Board 4’s leadership, Chelsea’s elected officials stated that public concerns about the NYCHA proposal will be dealt with during ULURP. That should set off alarm bells.
In a NYCHA board meeting last fall, the agency’s Executive Vice President for Real Estate Development, Jonathan Gouveia, announced that design work was under way for the first NYCHA replacement buildings. Considerable funds are already being spent on a demolition-based project, placing Bottcher farther out on a limb every day he fails to voice opposition. Leadership may be about having the courage to make hard choices, but it’s also about doing the hard work of building consensus—something he hasn’t done for the FEC plan. In that area, he’s gone it alone and left his constituents behind, along with his role as their representative and advocate.
Chelsea’s residents are still remarkably unaware of NYCHA’s plan for their neighborhood, which has been poorly covered in the press. It cries out for an exposé. Last fall, the New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, reported on the plan in a piece titled, “Radical Plans for Public Housing Stir Up Hope and Doubt.” Despite the ambivalent headline, it mainly promoted NYCHA’s narrative, featuring unflattering photos of the existing FEC buildings, including cherry-picked shots of superficial deterioration. Kimmelman quoted NYCHA’s Jonathan Gouveia as saying, “simply fixing leaky pipes and swapping out old kitchens . . . would ultimately squander hundreds of millions of dollars on buildings beyond repair,” but didn’t challenge this claim, while in the same piece he described the “remarkable” results produced by the PACT renovation of the early-1960s Baychester development in the Bronx. His 2021 Times article, “A Rebirth in the Bronx,” glowingly described Baychester’s renovation alongside dazzling photos of a renovated apartment and transformed façades and grounds. In that piece, he praised “a plan by Brooklyn architecture firm, Peterson Rich Office, which knits new housing into existing projects and the surrounding streetscape”—an intriguing possibility for Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea. Kimmelman has also covered the French architects, Lacaton & Vassal, famed for their “never demolish” philosophy, who make a specialty of reclaiming and enlarging 1960s social housing towers for as little as a third the cost of replacement, with minimal disruption to residents. He called one such project “a case study in architectural ingenuity and civic rejuvenation” and “a challenge to urban innovators, too.” He wrote: “Instead of replacing the old tower with an entirely new building, the designers saw what was worthwhile about the existing architecture, and added to it.” In 2021, the firm won the profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, for its socially responsible and environmentally conscious work. In awarding the prize—effectively architecture’s Nobel—the jury certainly aimed to hold Lacaton & Vassal up as an example to the world. It’s one that makes NYCHA’s old-school, urban-renewal-wrecking-ball approach an embarrassment to New York. Kimmelman’s piece on FEC begins by citing the precedent of Casa Celina, a new all-affordable infill building on the grounds of NYCHA’s Sotomayer Houses in the Bronx, but he never asks why added housing in at FEC can’t be entirely affordable as well. It’s disappointing to see a critic so attuned to better options reduced to a mouthpiece for NYCHA and its indefensible plan. We could use the man whose critique of NYU’s overblown development plan helped focus public attention and shape the debate: “The plan threatens to alter the fragile character of a historic neighborhood for the sake of growth that NYU has not proved is necessary.”
If the FEC plan is a potentially game-changing new approach for NYCHA, as Kimmelman says, the agency has much at stake in the roll-out. If it’s mired in suspicion, mistrust, and opposition, that would make the new model a hard sell elsewhere. Just last week, residents of NYCHA’s Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side voted two-to-one to remain in Section 9 rather than convert their campus to Section 8 private management under PACT. More bad press at FEC wouldn’t be good news for NYCHA. Public outcry is the best hope for saving Chelsea’s character, to use a dirty word.