Casa Celina now rises cheerfully, a grayish-white, 16-story beacon, above an asphalt parking lot in the Soundview section of the Bronx.
Designed by Magnusson Architecture and Planning, it’s a handsome new home for low-income seniors, several dozen of them formerly homeless. The Bronx has the highest senior poverty rate in New York. More than 50,000 people entered the lottery for Casa Celina’s 204 apartments.
The building is an infill project: It takes over half of the parking lot at a corner of the sprawling campus for Sotomayor Houses, a 1950s-era New York City Housing Authority development. The houses were renamed some years ago for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up there. During the last couple of years, other low-income senior housing projects have filled in similar parcels of open space on NYCHA properties.
For decades, infill on NYCHA land was pretty much a no-no. Campuses were designed to be low-density with open space, the midcentury urban planning solution to overcrowded tenement conditions of the early 20th century. But tower-in-the-park-style housing created its own problems. Attitudes have changed.
New York City has lately come around to the virtues of adding subsidized housing to architecturally remodeled public library branch sites. NYCHA is a vastly larger owner of public land than the library system. It retains some 80 million square feet of unused development rights across the city. Even a fraction of that could accommodate thousands of new apartments.
One such project to upgrade and build several thousand new units is now wending its way through the city bureaucracy. It could be a game changer.
At an estimated cost of $1.5 billion, it would demolish some dilapidated midcentury NYCHA developments in Manhattan’s wealthy Chelsea neighborhood, called the Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. The developments house some 5,000 residents in 2,055 apartments. This project would move most of them straight from their current homes into new, larger reconfigured buildings on the same campuses that will also include nearly 1,000 more subsidized units and 2,400 market-rate apartments.
Not all NYCHA properties are in neighborhoods with such sky-high real estate values that mixed-income redevelopment would make financial sense. But New York is never going to fix its affordable housing and homelessness crises without fixing NYCHA, the largest public housing provider in the nation.
Its 177,569 apartments in 335 developments across the city unofficially house more than half a million low-income New Yorkers — larger than the population of Miami. NYCHA is now facing $78 billion worth of repairs and renovations it needs to make, according to the most recent assessment, in 2023. In 2020, that number was $40 billion. The figure has been ballooning so rapidly that it has no doubt already passed $78 billion.
Let me pause on this figure. It doesn’t even include the cost of managing NYCHA buildings, hundreds of which need replacing, not repair. That is the argument that NYCHA officials, in particular Jonathan Gouveia, the authority’s executive vice president for real estate development, are now making with the Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton Houses, where ceilings have been caving in, lead and asbestos need to be removed, and buildings don’t comply with the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Simply fixing leaky pipes and swapping out old kitchens, Gouveia and his colleagues argue, would ultimately squander hundreds of millions of dollars on buildings beyond repair.
So where will money come from to construct new ones? And given that NYCHA has been so dysfunctional for so many years, what is the point of building new properties for it to mismanage?
This is where things get interesting, and a little complicated.
In 2021, President Biden urged Congress to earmark $40 billion for public housing upgrades across the country. That would have barely have covered NYCHA’s capital deficit. But the proposal never had a chance of winning Congressional approval. Public housing hasn’t had meaningful bipartisan support in Washington since the Johnson administration. Banking on the federal government to rally behind public housing remains a pipe dream that has kept generations of residents in deteriorating conditions.
Instead, for decades, Washington’s approach to housing low-income Americans has been to offer private developers tax breaks and other financial inducements. During the 1990s, a federal program called Hope VI underwrote the demolition of tens of thousands of public housing units and their replacement by new mixed-income developments. The program teamed private investors with public authorities. But in cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago and New York, Hope VI projects ended up evicting and displacing thousands of residents.
So in 2011 the Obama administration took another stab at the problem, establishing Rental Assistance Demonstration, which, as New York has interpreted the program, allows NYCHA to work with private developers and operators, but now with protections for tenants. The private developers have access to loans and other financial streams not available to any public housing authority. They manage the sites.
But NYCHA maintains ownership of the properties and can replace developers and operators if they don’t do a good job. Crucially, no apartments can be converted to market rate rentals, and residents who stick to the lease agreements continue paying no more than 30 percent of household income for their apartments.
The city’s first RAD conversion, in 2017, involved a NYCHA development called Ocean Bay in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Ocean Bay flooded in 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, causing some tenants to abandon their homes. When the private developers arrived, improvements were made to the property.
But some 50 households ended up being evicted, among them squatters who had illegally moved into abandoned units. After decades of broken promises by city officials, NYCHA residents assumed the worst, fueling rumors that RAD was simply a new ruse to throw tenants out.
In fact, since 2017, 23,312 NYCHA apartments have been converted via RAD, with another 14,000 currently in the pipeline, NYCHA officials say. During this time, there hasn’t been an exceptional number of evictions and NYCHA residents have seen successful RAD conversions at sites like Baychester in the Bronx, where residents stayed in place and private developers repaired leaky roofs, brought light into formerly carceral lobbies and refurbished apartments, playgrounds and plantings.
The transformation wasn’t architecturally fancy, but it was remarkable.
Neighbors living across the street in a larger NYCHA development called Edenwald petitioned for a similar makeover. In the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, at a RAD rehab of a 1930s landmark development, thousands of residents were temporarily relocated on site while lead was removed from their buildings; they have now returned to gut-renovated apartments. There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the housing project on Tuesday.
Neither Baychester nor Williamsburg increased the number of subsidized units — which is where infill projects like Casa Celina, on the Sotomayor campus, come in. Sotomayor Houses is a tower-in-the-park development with 28 X-shaped apartment blocks scattered across 30 acres, and it suffers from many of the usual tower-in-the-park failings. Casa Celina, a striking architectural upgrade, now adds eyes on the street, integrating the development with the street grid and neighborhood.
Which brings us back to Chelsea, where a team of architects from COOKFOX, PAU and ILA, three New York firms, have devised a site and massing scheme for the first phase of the project. The scheme trades open space for a configuration of new, taller buildings that conform more to street walls and sidewalks. The proposal imagines retail on ground floors, new parks and community centers for residents.
Demolition would start with a couple of smaller buildings, one at Fulton Houses, the other at Elliott-Chelsea Houses. Displaced tenants will move temporarily into empty apartments on the two campuses, so they don’t have to leave the neighborhood until their new homes are built.
After that, picture one of those sliding block puzzles: Development hopscotches around the campuses until each resident is relocated in a new building. Only at the end, NYCHA officials promise, will construction of additional mixed-income apartments begin.
The developers are Related Companies — the firm behind Hudson Yards — and Essence, an affordable housing developer founded by a former Related executive. Related has been shopping a new proposal for the second phase of Hudson Yards that reneges on promises it made to the city and the neighboring High Line years ago. It now wants to build a giant resort and casino.
Skeptics of NYCHA’s plans in Chelsea staged a protest outside City Hall the other day, voicing understandable concerns about whether the developers can be trusted, especially if the real estate market goes south during what is sure to be a long, financially risky project.
There are of course many reasons to worry about public-private partnerships. But there are also recent examples — Brooklyn Bridge Park, the reborn LaGuardia Airport, Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station and RAD projects like Baychester — that have turned out to be boons for the city. As for Chelsea, we need to see architectural renderings and the terms of the contract with the developers. NYCHA officials stress that a majority of tenants who responded to a survey have endorsed the project. Miguel Acevedo, tenant association president at Fulton Houses, recently told Gothamist that if the buildings aren’t replaced they “are going to end up getting condemned.”
“So the sooner we get this done and over with,” he said, “people are going to have brand-new lives, brand-new buildings to live in.”
With the housing crisis in general, that is the bottom line.
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