Luxury Condo Developer to Build Bronx Homeless Shelter
As shelter crisis grows, NYC asks housing developers to give affordable lottery units to homeless.
Court Square Real Estate, a developer of luxury condo towers in NYC, including 5th On The Park and 240 Manhattan Ave., is planning to build a 15-story, 195-unit homeless shelter on property it owns on Inwood Avenue in the Bronx.
Court has filed plans with the NYC Department of Buildings to demolish a two-story brick building it owns at 1298 Inwood Ave. to make way for the 166K SF shelter tower.
The property sits in the Mount Eden neighborhood along the Jerome Avenue commercial corridor, an artery that runs through the heart of the Bronx.
A new entity known as 1298 Inwood Developers will complete the project, which will cost an estimated $35M. The ground floor of the property will become a community space.
News of the new shelter project offers a ray of hope in an unprecedented crisis in NYC’s shelter system, which has been stretched beyond capacity due to the influx of asylum seekers entering New York City—or, more correctly, been bused into the Big Apple by other jurisdictions.
According to a report this month in the Gothamist, there are more homeless adults living in NYC’s shelter system than at any time since 2013, with the record being broken on a daily basis.
On Sept. 23, shelters overseen by NYC’s Department of Homeless Services recorded a total occupancy of 39, 136 adults, eclipsing the previous record, set on Jan. 30 2019, of 38,838 adults.
The situation has gotten so precarious that Mayor Eric Adams has asked affordable housing developers in the city to voluntarily give up their designated affordable housing lottery units—units that are scheduled to rented in a lottery of income-eligible people—so they can be occupied by homeless people.
Adams said he wanted the lottery units “offered up for homeless placements” so the city can free up more shelter space for migrants.
NYC officials estimate that about 17,000 asylum seekers arrived in New York over the summer. The current shelter population exceeded 61,000 at the beginning of October.
Adolfo Carrión Jr., commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), sent a letter to affordable housing developers asking them to voluntarily give up the lottery units, according to a report in Crain’s.
“We are asking you to remove your affordable units from the housing lottery and offer them up for homeless placements,” Carrión said in the letter. “We ask you to make this new commitment on top of any homeless set-aside requirement, as a voluntary contribution to this humanitarian crisis.”
HPD has not announced a timeframe for the proposed changes to the housing lottery system. An HPD spokesperson told Crain’s that the department is treating the situation as an emergency