NEW YORK CITY-In the third major groundbreaking on Manhattan’s Far West Side within the past seven days, developer the Gotham Organization broke ground with city and state officials on Gotham West, a mixed-use 1,200-unit multifamily community spanning West 44^th to West 45^th Streets from 10^th to 11^th Avenue on Monday afternoon. Anchoring the $550 million development will be a 31-story tower located on the corner of 45^th St. and 11^th Ave., which will include approximately 550 luxury apartments. Surrounding the tower will be three- low-rise properties with some 700 affordable units, a 10,000-square-foot interior courtyard and a new public school.

Against the background of the active construction site, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the property was once underutilized, city-controlled land that was slated for redevelopment back in 1975. Four decades later, it will be used to provide new homes for some 2,500 New Yorkers. “We always believed that the Far West Side of Manhattan had the potential for providing what our growing city needs, and that’s more jobs for New Yorkers and more affordable housing for them to live in,” Bloomberg said at the press conference.

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The development, which is scheduled for completion by the end of 2014, is the largest new construction project in Manhattan under the administration’s New Housing Marketplace Plan. The $550 million project will create over 1,200 new apartments including 700 affordable units, of which, 600 are permanently affordable. It will be financed with primarily tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York State Housing Finance Agency that are credit enhanced by a syndicate of lenders led by Wells Fargo.