But the lot’s valiant fight against the physics of real estate and government finance is about to come to an end. The city Housing Authority is selling it to a developer for $4 million.
The sale is part of a sweeping citywide plan to shoehorn up to 6,000 homes affordable to low- and moderate-income families, along with some shops, into parcels of public housing property deemed “underutilized” — mostly open spaces and parking lots. Set in motion in 2006, the plan is now hitting its stride, with 3,500 units either finished or in the pipeline, including four projects completed and another eight under way.
The initiative is rooted in practical needs and grander hopes for the future of public housing. The new construction will help Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reach his goal of preserving or creating 165,000 affordable units by 2014. It will also generate money for the cash-poor Housing Authority.
With their parking lots, greenery and open space, the city’s housing complexes were often “under-built to what zoning would allow,” said Ilene Popkin, the authority’s assistant deputy general manager.
Ms. Popkin said her goal was “to identify where the opportunities are for affordable housing development that makes sense.”
Sold-off parking lots will be replaced with new lots nearby, Ms. Popkin said. “No one lost a parking spot as a result of what we did,” she said.
Still, there is, not surprisingly, some resentment.
Until recently, Duwain Boyce, 18, who lives at Stapleton Houses, on the north shore of Staten Island, had a million-dollar view: the stalagmites of Lower Manhattan rising across the harbor, dingily framed by his bedroom window. He now gazes upon a building for low-income older people, under construction on a former parking lot and set to be eight stories tall when it opens later this year.
“It makes me feel claustrophobic,” Mr. Boyce said.
His mother added wryly that bringing elderly people into public housing might make them obvious targets for criminals.
The prospect of losing public housing land, and to tenants paying higher rents in many cases, has fanned fears that the authority wants to edge out its residents.
At Elliott-Chelsea, the new units on the site of the current parking lot, at Ninth Avenue and West 25th Street, will be open to households with annual incomes of up to $150,000 for a family of four. Assurances that lost parking spaces would be offset by spaces in a garage beneath the new building have done little to temper existing tenants’ misgivings. Rumors flew — all false — that the new units would be million-dollar apartments built by Donald J. Trump.
“It’s going to be too crowded, and this project is falling down around us,” said Karen Hodges, 52, who has lived at Elliott-Chelsea for two decades. “Sweetheart, they took a lock off my door and told me I had to wait until August to get it fixed.”
But at Stapleton, the new building has also lit a sense of hope. Perhaps it will ease the stigma the development carries, some tenants said. Perhaps it will even tamp down crime.
“It’s a great idea,” said Steven Nelson, a 39-year-old welder. “Maybe with a lot of older people in the neighborhood, some of the younger loose cannons will slow down in their activities.”
Geraldine Parker, president of the Stapleton tenants association, said several tenants hoped to move into the new building — open to people 55 and older — “to get away from young people and blasting music.”
“I wish I was old enough to get in there,” added Mrs. Parker, who is in her 40s.
Ms. Popkin, the authority official, said the new developments, planned in concert with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, were expected to bring in $75 million — money that could be used to fix up existing buildings — through sales of the sites and long-term ground leases to private developers that construct and own the buildings.
The new construction also dovetails with the authority’s efforts to refashion its original blueprint, modeled on the Le Corbusier vision of “towers in the park,” or soaring residential fortresses set in vast moats of green. Underpinning that vision, said Nicholas D. Bloom, author of “Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century,” was the belief that “if you put people in sanitary good housing, with air and modern facilities, all the problems of the slums would end.”
But the towers instead isolated residents from the thrum of the city streets, and critics decried some open expanses as too vast.
Michael Kelly, the Housing Authority’s general manager, said that along with the new construction, the agency was looking to reopen streets to integrate developments into the “tapestry of the surrounding neighborhood.”
Mr. Bloom said the success of the new program hinged on how thoughtfully it was executed.
“It all comes down to design,” he said, “and if they’re able to add new housing without destroying the nice qualities — apartments that have light and air and nice views.”
At Soundview Houses in the Bronx, where the green spaces are as big as city blocks and sown with gracious trees, three new buildings are planned for a boomerang-shape plot stretching between the development and the Bronx River, with a fourth set for a patch of land that now has picnic tables and barbecues.
Mary McGee, the tenants association president there, said residents were worried about asthma aggravated by construction, and more overcrowding of buses, community centers and schools. “They have to consider the people who are living here,” Ms. McGee said. “These people are going to come in and start utilizing what we have, and we don’t have anything.”
At Elliott-Chelsea Houses, the parking lot brought in only $1,396 in parking fees last year. But residents described it as more than the sum of its 42 spaces.
It is a buffer in an increasingly alien neighborhood filling up with high-end galleries, club-land debauchery, and multimillion-dollar glass lofts. Which is why people like Phyllis Gonzalez, the tenants association president, say there is reason to fear the 168-unit tower planned for the site.
“We are blessed to be here; we know that,” Ms. Gonzalez said. “But it’s getting tighter and tighter, and we’re going to have a big building in our face.”
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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