Before, this building at 160 Water Street was used for offices. Today a private company is working to convert the space into 588 apartments.
Mayor Eric Adams believes such projects will help address homelessness.
“The goal is to build low-income, mid-income, market-rate homes, and also insure for NYCHA. So it’s not a ‘one size fits all.’ The game is that we can use creativity to address the crisis of housing,” says the mayor.
To do this, Adams says that there must be a joint effort with the state, and make several changes in the regulations to stimulate the conversion of offices to residences.
Eric Adams, Mayor of New York
The city seeks to create 500,000 homes in the next decade, prioritizing low-income New Yorkers.
Some find the strategy of turning empty offices into apartments a good one, although they wonder about rental prices:
“It’s interesting because the city is running out of housing, the rents are insufferable and well… Either they make those decisions or people are going to have to leave Manhattan, well, people are leaving,” says Javier, a resident of the area.
For its part, Make the Road New York, comments that solutions like this take many years, and that they are generally not affordable housing.
They believe that there are faster actions and that is why they advocate the Eviction for Good Cause Bill:
“Right now there is an urgency for immediate solutions for many people who already have a place to live, but who are being displaced either by rent increases of more than 30%, sometimes they are being displaced, because perhaps due to the pandemic, they lost hours or lost jobs and still can’t get a steady job to pay their rent…
…So, that is something that is missing in the state plan, in the city plan: How do we give people more protections to stay if they already have a home?”, says Jennifer Hernández, Organizer Se Makes Camino NY.
Rent for a studio apartment in this building starts at $3,000 a month, which, for many New Yorkers, isn’t exactly affordable. On this, the mayor commented that due to the housing crisis it is about not only getting low-cost residences, but also more homes in the city in general.
