A Manhattan community board has proposed converting a city-owned parking lot in Hell’s Kitchen into a 322-unit affordable housing tower.
The parking lot, at 493 11th Avenue, between West 39th and 40th streets, should be the site of “a 100 percent permanently affordable building,” Community Board 4 wrote in a letter last week to the city’s Economic Development Corporation and Department of Housing Preservation & Development.
The community board pointed to “rising rents in the Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton neighborhood” and an increase in high-end market rate residential units that are “threatening the economic diversity of the district,” DNAinfo reported.
The letter suggests that the majority of apartments in any such project be two-bedroom and three-bedroom units available to a range of affordable incomes, with any residential tower topping out at a maximum of 45 floors.
Community Board 4 members last year planned to write a “letter of outrage” to state officials regarding development rights at The James Farley Post Office On Eighth Avenue near Penn Station. [DNAinfo] – Rey Mashayekhi