The New York City Council unanimously approved a plan that would radically transform a section of the Bronx, replacing low-slung industrial buildings with thousands of new apartments as the city contends with its worst housing shortage since the late 1960s.
The rezoning plan will remake a 46-block corridor around the Morris Park, Van Nest and Parkchester areas, adding about 7,000 housing units near four new commuter rail stations, which are scheduled to be completed by 2027. In the years that follow a new neighborhood would emerge, made up primarily of mid- and high-rise residential towers.
The plan is the latest rezoning to take place in the Bronx, the poorest borough in the city, whose southern neighborhoods have been transformed in recent years by the march of new construction and high-rise rentals. This effort targets a slice of the East Bronx that now has very few residents — just 637 — and aligns with the Adams administration’s blueprint of encouraging new housing in pockets of New York City, including in areas currently filled with manufacturing sites.
Compared with the rest of the city, the Bronx has avoided the expansion of large-scale development that has overhauled Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Yet developers have been eager to push into what is considered the city’s last frontier.
“The Bronx is saying ‘yes’ to more housing in our backyards, communities and neighborhoods, and serving as a model to the rest of our city on how to lead from the front,” Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I am calling on our partners in the City Council to join us in this fight and deliver on the promise that working-class families are asking us to do: build more and make this city more affordable.”
The plan is the first neighborhood rezoning under Mayor Adams and is part of a broader rezoning plan that started in 2018 under Mayor Bill de Blasio but took shape under Mr. Adams.
The new units, though, will make only a small dent in Mayor Adams’s goal of building a half-million new residences citywide within the next decade. Around 100,000 housing units have been built in the city since 2020, but rent prices have continued to climb and are among the highest in the country.
The years it took to formulate the rezoning as well as everything it had to overcome — fights over the lack of parking, neighborhood opposition, concerns about infrastructure upgrades and the size of new buildings — illustrate the opportunities and challenges in a city desperate for new housing.
City officials are working on four other neighborhood rezoning plans, all of which are expected to go before the Council for approval before the end of 2025.
This rezoning will pave the way for developers to reshape roughly two miles alongside the Metro-North Railroad and coincides with the opening of four new stations at Hunts Point, Parkchester/Van Nest, Morris Park and Co-Op City. The stations and rail upgrades could reduce travel times by about 50 minutes between there and Midtown Manhattan, as well as offer train access to Connecticut.
Some developers bought properties near the proposed transit stations in the years before city officials started working on the rezoning plan. The developers include the real estate company Pinnacle Group, which bought several adjacent lots in the Parkchester neighborhood for $14.7 million in 2015. That site has been proposed as a 500-unit apartment building.
Of the new Bronx apartments, about 1,700 would be permanently offered at below-market rates. Some residents have voiced concerns that developers would not be required to build more affordable units and that the apartments would be too costly for local residents.
Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a nonprofit that supports more development, said she was heartened that the rezoning plan evolved to include more housing than what was initially proposed; the final version has about 1,000 more units.
“We need to be creating homes of all kinds across the region and next to transit stops,” Ms. Gray said. “We are facing a dire housing situation that is decades in the making.”
Like other rezoning efforts, the plan faced some opposition from residents and local elected officials, in this case Councilwoman Kristy Marmorato. The main sticking point was that earlier proposals did not require developers to build parking, which is part of the Adams administration’s broader effort to eliminate minimum parking mandates in new construction.
Such mandates drive up construction costs and rental prices, studies show, and discourage the use of public transit. More than 60 percent of Bronx residents do not have a car, according to the census.
“Our costly parking mandates come in direct conflict with our desire to create more housing units,” said Dan Garodnick, the director of the Department of City Planning.
After that pushback, the rezoning plan now requires some parking spaces at residential sites and also provides $2 million for a parking lot to be built near one of the transit stations. Ms. Marmorato said that many of her constituents had cars and needed more parking options.
“Whether it’s taking our kids to school, running errands, going to the grocery store, going to our jobs that are local, we still are kind of dependent on our motor vehicles,” Ms. Marmorato, a Republican, said in an interview before the City Council meeting on Thursday.
Ms. Marmorato voted in favor of the rezoning, as did 43 other members. No one voted against it. The new commuter stations, which are still on schedule despite the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget challenges, are expected to open years before the construction from the rezoning is finished.
The Parkchester Watch Group, which is made up of residents who live at the 129-acre planned community near where the Parkchester rail station will open, has also voiced concern about the size of the new buildings and the levels of affordable housing.
Peter Hamilton, a member of the group, said the area could not support thousands of new residents without infrastructure upgrades and new retail, especially supermarkets. He said that some of the proposed towers, which could reach 25 stories tall, would overshadow the neighborhood’s shorter properties.
In response, city officials modified the height of some buildings that could be built in the East Bronx, lowering their overall heights and the total number of units in them. That change reduced the number of new units from about 7,500 to 7,000.
“Our concerns,” Mr. Hamilton said, “are about the stresses this will have on the community that’s there right now.”
The post Plan to Build Thousands of Apartments Will Transform the East Bronx appeared first on New York Times.