“At a base level, the next mayor has to use the city’s leverage in transactions involving public resources—especially land—to maximize public benefit, including deep and permanent housing affordability.”
NYC EDC
The current building at 100 Gold St.
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A rendering of a residential tower at the southernmost edge of Manhattan promises sweeping views of the New York Harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the mornings, the building will cast a long shadow over New York City Hall, an early 19th century building that appears squat and inconsequential compared to a growing number of expensive high-rises nearby.
The new addition to the Financial District’s skyline will replace a mid-century office building at 100 Gold Street, which currently houses the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), auxiliary offices for seven other city agencies, and Hamilton Madison House, a storied older adult center serving downtown’s Chinese American seniors. Mayor Eric Adams announced the plan to sell HPD’s headquarters—which the city has owned since 1993—as part of a broader vision to bring Manhattan’s housing unit count to 1 million.
Despite a heavy rhetorical focus on affordability, the site’s redevelopment will be managed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), an opaque, semi-public entity that is charged with generating economic activity in the city, not financing affordable housing. Rather than harnessing the city’s leverage to build new social housing on centrally located city-owned land, EDC is defaulting to the status quo: the developer is expected to use the state’s 485-x tax exemption, which requires them to set aside a quarter of the project as affordable housing; if they get a rezoning, that requirement could rise to 30 percent.
Despite the massive and rare opportunity presented by a large, public parcel in lower Manhattan, EDC expects nothing more from developers than what these programs already require on private sites. This is exactly the same approach as EDC’s state corollary, the Empire State Development Corporation, is taking at another prime location on publicly-owned land in Midtown Manhattan.
The actual depth, breadth, and length of affordability on the site are highly contingent on the vagaries of the market: there will only be funding for affordable housing and any other public benefits after relocation costs for the older adult center, HPD and the seven other displaced agencies are covered. After the sale, some public employees working out of 100 Gold Street will be shuffled into other public buildings across the five boroughs.
In the meantime, the city will lease back 100 Gold Street from its new owner, while shopping for office space for HPD and commercial space for Hamilton Madison. Agency relocations have been common in recent years, and this administration has come under scrutiny for relocating the Department for the Aging, the agency that runs Hamilton Madison, to an office building owned by a prominent Adams donor. Coincidentally, landlords have been fueling Adams’ re-election bid, helping to keep the campaign afloat as it continues to implode, while also donating prolifically to other candidates in order to ensure their place in the next administration’s priorities.
While there is no sign of impropriety in the 100 Gold Street deal, it is a blatant developer giveaway. Its public benefits are an illusion projected by an administration that expended all its credibility long ago. The sale is justified by an arbitrary goal written into a press release that will be forgotten as soon as the current mayor leaves office. The end result of the transaction will be that a lucky developer will get to build a luxury high-rise on some of the most expensive land in the U.S., while hundreds of civil servants and thousands of HPD clients will likely have longer commutes. A popular senior center will have to look for a new home, and the public will get a pinky-swear promise that their rents will decrease, one day, once the city helps build enough luxury rental units (a submarket that is quietly experiencing an over-supply crisis).
Mayor Adams is just the latest in a long line of New York City mayors who have given away public land to private developers. In 2018, a vacant land advocacy group identified over 200 lots that were sold to developers for $1 or less under the de Blasio administration. Under former mayor Bloomberg’s three terms, mind-boggling public resources went into transformational mega projects—Hudson Yards, Barclay’s Center—while our public institutions, including public housing, languished. And long before Giuliani was peddling election denialism, he presided over a civic fire-sale as former mayor of New York, giving away thousands of city-managed buildings for next to nothing and privatizing the city’s tax foreclosure system.
With affordability at the center of political debates and a New York real estate heir in the White House (again), the 2025 mayoral primary presents an opportunity to change course. At a base level, the next mayor has to use the city’s leverage in transactions involving public resources—especially land—to maximize public benefit, including deep and permanent housing affordability. As for 100 Gold Street, the city should use the site for an emblematic high-rise with comfortable offices for HPD workers and clients, a state-of-the-art senior center, and hundreds of permanently affordable, social housing apartments.
More broadly, the future administration must stop hiding behind the myth of a hapless and unsophisticated public sector playing second fiddle to private investors. We are a wealthy city with enough resources to house all New Yorkers. Our next mayor needs to acknowledge that and plan accordingly.
Mironova, Stein and Thompson are senior housing policy analysts at the Community Service Society of New York.*
*Editor’s note: CSS is among City Limits’ funders.
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