Three Bold Ideas for New York City Housing Development

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In a recent edition of Daily Dirt, I asked readers to submit bold ideas for large-scale housing development in New York City.

The most plausible one came from Ken Fisher, a land-use lawyer at Cozen O’Connor, who recently unveiled it in an op-ed. His idea expands on a rezoning proposal by the New York Building Congress to allow housing along the route of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Interborough Express.

Fisher, a former City Council member, called for the state agency Empire State Development to use a general project plan instead of separate rezonings. “In addition to being comprehensive and faster, a GPP could allow revenue sharing with the MTA, which zoning can’t,” Fisher noted.

Housing along the IBX route will be the subject of a panel discussion Oct. 29.

Some places fund mass transit from private development along train routes, which is what the MTA should have done with the Second Avenue subway. The gist: Transit projects boost property values, so why not capture some of that gain to fund the projects? The Bloomberg administration basically did that when it extended the 7 train to Hudson Yards. (H/T Dan Doctoroff.)

Another idea came from commercial debt collection attorney Bernard D’Orazio, who suggested, “Extend the 7 train to the Meadowlands and build a big neighborhood in and around the parking lots. People don’t need to live in the city, just close to the city. Ditch the new Port Authority Bus Terminal [plan] and build it in New Jersey on the new subway line.”

This is a new take on a Bloomberg administration proposal from 2011. A study commissioned by the city found trains could go from Secaucus to Grand Central in 16 minutes. But the MTA didn’t want to do it.

Several readers responded that New York state should change the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act to allow more mothballed rent-stabilized units to be renovated and re-rented. That is surely the most cost-effective way to add housing, as I wrote about here and here, but in this case I was seeking ideas for large-scale development.

None of the responses I received was more imaginative — or impossible — than this one for southern Brooklyn, from a former New Yorker who moved to California 33 years ago:

In the UAE, the government built floating islands. Why not do that off Canarsie Pier? Also, there’s an actual island out there that looks uninhabited. Perhaps build a tunnel under the water, build a subway line through the tunnel, and build a bunch of high-rises on the island with no parking spots. You would need to have a heli-pad on the island for emergencies and a clinic or small hospital on the island for urgent medical care.

The reader included this screenshot:

I try to reply to all readers’ messages, no matter how outlandish, so I sent a polite, six-paragraph response:

That is certainly a bold idea, but not a practical one.

New York City did have a floating jail in the Bronx, but it has been closed and sold as scrap metal. Building floating housing would be expensive, especially because we cannot import foreign laborers and exploit them the way Abu Dhabi allegedly did. What is possible is extending a land mass by using fill.

As for that island off Canarsie Pier, I believe that is Canarsie Pol. It’s part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, so it is off-limits to housing. It’s made of sand and fill from dredging — old maps show it was much smaller in 1910 — and thus would not be conducive to building towers, which need a more solid subsurface for their pilings to be secure.

Building a subway to the island would be extraordinarily expensive — at least $10 billion and probably more, which would make the housing uneconomical. The closest subway is the L train, which terminates at Rockaway Parkway, 1.5 miles from Canarsie Pier. It’s above ground. There is no right-of-way to extend it further.

Even with a subway, the trip to Manhattan would be too far for this land to have much value to commuters. If not for its status as a federal recreation area, you might be able to put summer cottages there, accessible by boat.

A better island for housing would be Governors Island off Lower Manhattan, but there are restrictions stemming from the island’s transfer from the federal government to the city. So the development plan for Governors Island only includes student and faculty housing.