While Mayor Bloomberg continues to fight sugary drink legislation and stop-and-frisk rulings in court, one of the administration's controversial programs has been left to wither on the vine. A plan to turn chunks of City-owned land over to developers and add thousands of luxury apartments in eight different NYCHA developments has essentially been kicked to the next mayor. “This isn’t quite a white flag of surrender, but it’s pretty close,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn told the Times.
In March NYCHA asked developers for RFPs, but on Friday the mayor announced that instead of RFPs, the City is now looking for "suggestions" to be tendered by mid-November, with RFPs to follow.
The plan, which would add more than 4,000 new apartments on NYCHA land, 80% of them market rate, is supposed to raise $50 million annually. Meanwhile the current amount of NYCHA's unfunded capital improvements: $6 billion—and that's slated to go up to $13.4 billion over the next five years [PDF].
Despite the indefinite delay, Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh warns that the plan's basic troubling premise remains: “building thousands of new residential units in the middle of densely populated neighborhoods.”
“Today’s announcement may be a welcomed slowdown in the process, but it doesn’t change that basic fact," he said.
