Volume One, Issue 17, January 19 - 25, 2007
The Buzz
HOME SWEET AFFORDABLE HOME:
The General Theological Seminary may have plenty of skeptics when it comes to making good on its latest proposal to build affordable housing in Chelsea with the 50,000 to 60,000 square feet of unused development rights left over from its hotly debated Ninth Ave. tower proposal. But that isn’t stopping G.T.S. officials from plowing ahead in their search for a viable site. Fresh from the civil but contentious Community Board 4 public forum on Monday night, G.T.S.’s community outreach program coordinator, Chris Ballard, says that the seminary will be meeting with officials from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development on Feb. 5 to discuss possible sites. Maureen Burnley, G.T.S.’s executive vice president for finance and operations, said early this month that the seminary had identified three possible sites on which to try to develop affordable housing, the most promising being a New York City Housing Authority-owned parking lot on W. 19th St. between Ninth and Tenth Aves., right behind G.T.S.’s building at 422 W. 20th St. But Ballard would not confirm whether the upcoming meeting with H.P.D. would focus on that location. He did say that the seminary hopes to “have an announcement of substance” for C.B. 4’s full board meeting on Feb. 7, when members will vote on recommendations on the project put forth by the board’s Landmarks Task Force and Chelsea Preservation & Planning Committee. “If we get something together with H.P.D., we can at least have some folks from the agency with us at the meeting to testify that our efforts to build affordable housing are happening and we’re following through on our commitment,” said Ballard.
OH, RATS!:
It seems that residents of the Elliot-Chelsea Houses and the Haywood condominiums on 26th St. and Ninth Ave. can’t get a break. For some time, the central trash dumpster serving the public housing complex has been situated on the lot line between the two properties, “right next to our building,” said Haywood resident Jane Halsey. “Trash is ferried around in carts and John Deere mini-tractors to this one dumpster area, and trash is overflowing there, which caused a massive rat problem that we had to hire a private exterminator to get under control, back in August,” she said. Halsey and other Haywood residents worked with Phyllis Gonzalez, president of the Elliot-Chelsea Tenants Association, to get NYCHA and the H.P.D. to take responsibility for the issue, which they did starting in October. “But we have had to stay on top of it,” said Halsey. Meanwhile, a new challenge lies around the corner. As part of the West Chelsea Plan passed in June 2005, which encourages the development of affordable housing in the neighborhood, NYCHA is taking requests for proposals for the construction of new low-income housing projects on public housing parking lots, including at the Elliot-Chelsea Houses. But NYCHA and H.P.D. now want to move the central dumpster behind the Haywood, again between the two complexes, to make way for the construction. “Neither us nor the Elliot-Chelsea folks are in favor of this,” said Halsey. “It’s very narrow back there. The dumpsters are very large. And you have large Department of Sanitation trucks backing in to take away the garbage in this narrow space and making loud noise right next to P.S. 33, which is completely unreasonable. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Halsey and her condo-owning colleagues are lobbying NYCHA to revamp “the entire antiquated garbage-disposal system” so that when the new building goes up, “we don’t create a whole host of new problems.” Joe Restuccia, chairperson of C.B.4’s Affordable Housing Task Force, sympathizes with Halsey and Gonzalez’s plight and wants the task force to draft a recommendation letter soon. He said that by the time developers submit their R.F.P.’s and start working on the site, “we want to have this issue to be front and center.” But he cautioned that “if anyone’s going to deal with this, it’s the developer, not NYCHA. Their bureaucracy is just too Byzantine.”
