Appeals Court Halts Chelsea NYCHA Demolition Plans, For Now

An appeals court has issued a temporary restraining order halting the demolition of the Fulton & Chelsea-Elliot Houses, in a victory for local tenant activists and their allies.

NYCHA is seeking to partner with Related Co., the private development behemoth, to consolidate the technically-separate public housing campuses—which span 18 buildings—into a new mixed-use development, which will contain 2,500 new market-rate units.

The developers have said that current NYCHA residents would be promised housing in additional fresh units on a “one-to-one basis,” at the same rent-capped rate, in any new complex; they’d be displaced during construction, which would involve demolishing their existing apartments to make way for much larger towers.

A group of tenant advocates, with the help of former local State Senator Tom Duane, sued to shut down the entire overhaul late last year. A district judge declined to grant them a stay last month. Now, Judge Margaret Chen of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division has now done so, giving the lawsuit new life.

In her order instituting the temporary stay, Judge Chan simply wrote that the matter should be expedited to a larger panel of judges for further consideration, meaning that relief for the tenant advocates is still technically on uncertain ground.

Nonetheless, those opposed to the demolition project expressed relief at the favorable legal development.

“I am gratified that the judge ruled that moving forward would be in violation of that state law. This is a huge victory for Chelsea Houses tenants, and we look forward to educating people further on why this plan is unworkable,” Duane said in a statement.

The community activist Layla Law-Gisiko, who is running for an open City Council seat in the district—and who kicked off her campaign in front of the NYCHA complex last month, to signal her strident opposition to its demolition—chimed in with a statement of her own.

“The Appellate Division has stopped NYCHA in its tracks. The Temporary Restraining Order makes clear that NYCHA cannot rush irreversible decisions,” she said. “This ruling stops the rush to tear down public housing. We will continue to fight—in court, in public, and in City Hall—to preserve public housing and protect our community.”

Duane’s lawsuit specifically argues that the proposed demolition-and-overhaul project violates a state law he helped pass in 2010, which he believes bans developers from erecting any market-rate units on the site. Advocates are also contending that the overhaul improperly bypassed a ULURP (Uniform Land Use Procedure) review.

In addition to the aforementioned 2,500 market-rate units, NYCHA and Related Co.’s proposed overhaul would include the construction of an additional 1,000 units labeled as “affordable,” which is calculated based on a metric known as median area income.

If all of the current NYCHA residents who end up displaced during construction accept a unit in the new development, that necessitates the build-out of a further 2,000 apartments; in total, more than 5,000 new apartments units will be built.

The project is slated to be completed by the end of the decade, meaning that current NYCHA residents will be displaced for quite some time if it moves forward.

Another point of contention between tenant advocates and development proponents is the cost, which NYCHA and Related estimate will cost $2 billion, roughly the same as the cost to repair the weathered existing housing stock.

However, advocates like Law-Gisiko have claimed that independent estimates have put the true cost of the overhaul at $2.4 billion, while repairs will cost less than the $2 billion projected by NYCHA.