The mushrooming stink over the “two-door” policy at 40 Riverside Blvd. is noxious on every level. Contrary to howls that it’s tantamount to “apartheid,” separate entrances at Extell Development Co.’s planned new condo/rental project are well-precedented and logistically necessary.
Indeed, they’re not only legal, they’re legally required, as I’ll explain below.
But this is the Upper West Side, where 1950s fantasies of proletarian egalitarianism are not nostalgia, but a guiding light for wealth-distribution advocates.
When finished in 2015, 40 Riverside will have roughly 200 luxury condo units expected to fetch an average $2,000 per square foot, plus 55 “affordable” rental units to be offered by lottery at a likely bargain-basement $10-15 per square foot a year — about 20 to 25 percent of current market value.
Condo buyers will enter through a door on Riverside Boulevard; renters through one on West 62nd Street. “Separate entrances doesn’t sound good,” Extell’s president, Gary Barnett, acknowledges. In fact, demagogues can use the words to draw an insidious, and absurd, parallel to the racist old South.
Extell is including the rental units to get a tax abatement and also to tap a city-sponsored bonus which would allow it to construct a larger building than zoning allows. (In fact, Extell opted not to apply the floor-space bonus at 40 Riverside, but instead to it hold it in reserve for possible sale to another nearby site — as is perfectly legal).
Yes, the design necessitated having two entrances. Nothing new there: many buildings around town, commercial and residential, have separate entrances for different users.
In Williamsburg, high-profile apartment projects The Edge and Northside Piers “segregate” subsidized renters from condo owners not merely with separate entrances, but in entirely separate buildings. Yet nobody there’s whining that this relegates renters to “the status of second-class citizens,” as Manhattan Community Board 7 says of 40 Riverside.
In fact, its two-door setup is required under law for a building so designed. This is crucial to understand, little though it may interest grandstanding pols.
The city’s Housing Preservation and Development Department clearly allows all of a new building’s “inclusionary” apartments to be located within a particular segment of it — i.e., a building within a building.
But when a developer chooses to place the affordable units in such a “discrete” portion, zoning rules require a separate entrance for it — in part to make it easier for the units to be separately managed by a nonprofit in the future.
Empty as their argument is, critics of 40 Riverside aren’t satisfied merely to play the “racism” card. Council Speaker/mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, Councilman Robert Jackson and Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal are insisting that all residents of any future “inclusionary” building must enjoy exactly the same apartments, views and services, whether they pay peanuts or a fortune to live there.
Sorry: Such rules would mean no “affordable” units being built at all.
Land and construction costs in the city are so high, developers must maximize the return on their investments. Requiring luxury condos to share floors with subsidized rentals means a developer must swallow losses on subsidized units at prime locations within a building, which otherwise could be sold for market value.
Barnett points out, “If you say that in any project getting an inclusionary bonus zoning, the affordable units would have to take up some of our best views and units, nobody would build them.”
Some argue that the city’s entire historic approach to “affordable housing” is flawed, yielding such truly segregated monstrosities as East Harlem’s instant-ghetto “Project Wall” from First to Lenox (Sixth) Avenue and from 112th to 115th streets.
But rather than let pols or ideologues judge 40 Riverside Blvd., let the market decide. Will a separate entrance alienate New Yorkers of modest means who might otherwise want to live there?
Despite the mud-slinging, Barnett’s confident: “There will be thousands of applicants” for the subsidized rentals when the lottery starts late next year, and, “We’ll have 55 very happy sets of residents.”