It is terrible that it’s taken nine years for a proposed new apartment building at 145th St. in Harlem to get its first approval from the City Council, which helps explain one of the causes of the city’s housing crisis.
But the good news is that last Thursday the One45 mixed-use development, with about a thousand units of housing, including 340 apartments designated affordable at different income bands as well as a set-aside for seniors, won unanimous support from a Council committee.
Soon enough the plan will head to a full Council vote, which should be a cruise path. We must commend local Councilmember Yusuf Salaam for his support of the project, unlike the nonsensical opposition that helped topple his predecessor. While we certainly don’t support local members having the final say on rezonings in their districts, it helps to have an elected official that can see past the loud NIMBY voices and throw their support behind a worthwhile development.
We understand and can even sympathize with a certain fear of change, particularly for folks who have lived in a neighborhood for sometimes their entire lives and have watched it shift in ways that they don’t always love. The fear of gentrification is real, but the thing is, attempting to hold back development and block the construction of new housing does not prevent gentrification, it exacerbates it.
People are going to want to move to the neighborhood whether or not there’s housing to accommodate them, and every city that has been serious about removing barriers to housing construction has found the pressure eased on its housing market.
There are overlapping political, social, cultural and other considerations that all seem to kind of subsume what is the main underlying consideration: does the community and the larger city benefit more from this particular lot being a truck depot, as it currently is, or housing for nearly 1,000 families, with community space and amenities?
You can quibble around the edges of exactly how much housing, exactly how affordable, which amenities, and so on and so forth, and people including local elected officials, Community Boards and local civic organizations certainly have, for years.
It is precisely this zealous advocacy that got so much affordable housing and public space into the proposal in the first place. But at some point you have to say yes to a good thing, because additional demands become a “no,” as was the case with former Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan’s intransigence.
The correct answer is that more housing is better, which is vastly more beneficial than an empty lot or truck depot and there is no defensible excuse to block that housing.
There’s a misconception that YIMBYism is all about housing everywhere in any way with no constraints or regard for the community. That’s simply not true; it is a recognition that almost every community in the city could not only absorb but benefit from additional housing and population that will not only ease the strain on the existing housing stock but would bring benefits like additional economic activity.
As for One45 the too-long process has now nearly run its course and we’ve got a plan that will deliver real results for the community, better late than never, after all. Let’s break ground.
