City Seeks Proposals For Housing
Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Mathew M. Wambua announced the release of a request for proposals (RFP) for Phase II of the Hunters Point South development area on the Long Island City waterfront.
Phase II will encompass all of Parcel C, and will be a mixed-income development that may accommodate up to 1,000 new residential units, with 50 to 60 percent designated as permanently affordable to workingclass New Yorkers. The development will include retail space on Second street and Borden Avenue, and may also provide community facility space and residential parking on the site.
The second phase of the Hunters Point South development will be developed under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan (NHMP). The NHMP is a multi-billion dollar initiative to finance 165,000 units of affordable housing for half a million New Yorkers by the close of Fiscal Year 2014.
For every dollar invested by the city, the NHMP has leveraged $3.43 in private funding, amounting to a total commitment to date of more than $21 billion to fund the creation or preservation of over 144,700 units of affordable housing across the five boroughs to date.
A total of 14,487 units have been financed in Queens, with 1,093 of those units in Community District 2 where Phase II of the Hunters Point South development will be located.
“When we first announced plans for Hunters Point South there were those who said that creating a 5,000 unit mixed-income, mixed-use community couldn’t be done; especially in the economic climate coming out of the financial and housing crisis. The RFP for Phase II is proof positive that we have been able to continue to build on our commitment to create a haven of affordability in the Hunters Point neighborhood for New York’s hard working families,” said Wambua. “With Phase II of the development we are building on our success by bringing another 1,000 units of housing and new retail space to the Queens waterfront. More important, this represents an opportunity for working-class New Yorkers to put down roots, and to help define the character of this growing community.”
The Hunters Point South Phase II RFP calls for the development of Parcel C (Block 6/Lot 60) bordered by Center Boulevard, Borden Avenue, Second Street and 54th Avenue. Consisting of roughly 110,000 square feet, development of Parcel C is projected to create roughly 1,000 units of housing, of which 50 to 60 percent of the units will be permanently af- fordable to families earning between 80 percent area median income (AMI) and 165 percent AMI, or a combined household income of between $68,700 and up to $141,735 for a family of four.
Proposals that address the needs of households earning a broad range of incomes within that AMI segment are encouraged.
In addition to the primary residential component, plans for the site call for approximately 28,000 square feet of new retail space on the ground floor along Second Street and Borden Avenue, and residential parking. Applicants are asked to suggest storm resiliency measures that would be appropriate for the site, and proposals must comply with flood regulations and consider the Advisory Base Flood elevations recently released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The RFP submission period runs through July 26. For more information and to obtain a copy of the RFP, visit HPD’s website at www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/developers/ rfp.shtml.
In early March 2013, Bloomberg, Wambua and others broke ground on Phase I (Parcels A & B) of Hunters Point South development which is currently under construction. The first phase includes the first two residential buildings with 925 permanently affordable apartments and roughly 17,000 square feet of new retail space, key infrastructure installations, a new five-acre waterfront park, and a new 1,100-seat Intermediate/ High School, 404-Q, which is slated to open in September for the 2013-2014 school year.
Phase II of Hunters Point South is the next step in the multi-phase project of what will become the largest affordable housing development built in New York City since the early 1970s when Co-op City and Starrett City were completed. When all phases are done, the development will accommodate approximately 5,000 new units of housing, with a minimum of 60 percent or 3,000 units reserved as permanently affordable.
The entire project will also include more than 11 acres of landscaped waterfront parkland, new retail shops, community facility space and the new school.
The Hunters Point South plan completed the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure in November 2008. In 2009, the city acquired the entire 30-acre Hunters Point South site from the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (Port Authority) for $100 million dollars.
In the late 1980s, the Hunters Point South site was slated to become the third and fourth phase of New York State’s Queens West Development which called for 2,200 apartments and more than two million square feet of office space. Later the site was envisioned as the location for the Olympic Village as part of the City’s 2012 Olympic bid.
On the heels of the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in 2006, Bloomberg announced the city’s intention to acquire the site from ESDC and the Port Authority to create the city’s first large-scale working-class housing development in decades.
