New York City needs more housing. Everyone, from left to right, agrees. So a Harlem Community Board voting down a proposed development at 145th St. and Lenox Ave. with nearly 1,000 new apartments was so totally wrong. We are glad that Community Boards are only advisory on zoning matters and this very bad advice must be ignored and the project approved and built.
Called One45, the plan has been kicking around since it was first floated in mid-2021, but then was torpedoed by the local member of the City Council, who is now thankfully gone from public office. The current version has 986 units, with exactly 30%, or 291, to be income-restricted, plus a community center and other public amenities. Community Board 10 said no on Wednesday.
Many of the no votes seem to be operating under a common misconception, perhaps best exemplified by Board Secretary Brianna McClure, who was quoted in the The City asking how the community benefits from things like youth programs “if in the future, parents can’t afford to live here and, therefore, the children can’t live here?” Yes, housing prices are too high, but that’s because there isn’t enough housing.
The fear of McClure and other opponents — that a development like this will gentrify the neighborhood and drive prices up and families out — is exactly wrong. More housing is what is needed to keep neighborhoods vital and thriving. Even critics like these have to agree, and the research plainly shows that we just don’t have enough apartments to meet the demand.
There are two ways for prices to come down: you reduce demand — which is really not something we want to try to do if we want our city to remain economically and socially vibrant — or we increase supply. What happens if we add almost a 1,000 units of housing in Central Harlem? People who already live there will have another option to move to if they are seeking a change and people moving into the neighborhood won’t have to compete for the dwindling available stock.
This doesn’t mean that every community has to accept every proposed development, but this isn’t some mega-project that came out of nowhere. The proposal as it exists now is the endpoint of years of community push-and-pull, including the recalcitrance of former Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan, whose absolute opposition and resulting backlash likely contributed to her decision not to run again in 2023. A lot of people have pushed hard for additional concessions on community space, affordability and other considerations, and have gotten them.
At some point, though, you have to let the project go through. The alternative is not going to be some fantastical development with 100% deeply affordable units set aside in perpetuity for community members, a project that no one would finance or develop. The alternative is the existing smelly truck depot, which we can assure the Community Board is a worse deal for it and much less likely to actually achieve any goals of community preservation and affordability.
As we said, the good news is that the Community Board’s say here is advisory. It will be up to the City Council to provide a final sign-off, with current Harlem Councilmember Yusef Salaam likely holding sway. They should give the OK.