Public Engagement Amid Leadership Absences in Chelsea Hearings for Public Housing
The environmental review is out as part of the $1.5 billion plan by the Adams administration to tear down the run-down public housing complexes in Chelsea and replace them with 15 towers to be built on the seven-acre plot by real estate developer Related.
| 02 May 2025 | 02:00
Looking east down 26th Street through the Chelsea-Elliot Houses that the city would like to tear down and have rebuilt by private real estate developer Related because, the city says, the repair costs of $1.5 billion equal the cost of rebuilding new. (
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The Chelsea Neighbors Coalition opposes the plan to allow a private developer, Related, erect new towers containing both NYCHA and non-NYCHA homes in the seven-acre complex that now contains only NYCHA apartments. (
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The city would like to replace all 15 of the badly run down buildings in the Fulton and Elliott Housing complex spread over seven acres in Chelsea. (
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NYCHA residents would be allowed to move back into new apartments houses at the Fulton and Elliott Houses in Chelsea and the city says it would not have to displace most of them from their old apartments while the massive reconstruction project is underway. Some tenants are skeptical and oppose the plan. (
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This week was a beast—an all-out push to deliver insights, feedback, and comments on the proposed demolition and land disposition of public housing at the heart of Chelsea. NYCHA is proposing to get rid of 24 buildings that house public housing tenants in Chelsea. A private developer, Related, would rebuild in its place 15 towers some of them supertall.
Public housing tenants would have the right to return. The project has been ongoing for years and has been shrouded in controversy, misinformation and scare tactics. After over one year of delays, NYCHA published their environmental review in March of this year, and this week, they lassoed us into a marathon of public hearings. The environmental review document is a chubby 1000+ pages and not cute at all. An ugly baby that spells out what impact this project would have on its environment.
To kick off the hearing series, the evening began, as such evenings often do, with a press conference from advocates opposing the project. Under the still-long April light, under the tender cherry blossoms (there are 370 mature trees on campus, all slated for the matchstick factory), tenant leaders, activists, and Chelsea stalwarts assembled outside the Fulton Houses, standing shoulder to shoulder like citizens called to a common alarm.Marquis Jenkins, a tenant advocate, moderated the event and reminded everyone why it is so important to fight this plan: a land grab, with much less tenant protection. Dr. Fields, a doctor with a family practice in Harlem, lent the moment its medical ballast. She brought to light the health impact of this demo project, the harm to young children, the alarming air quality issue, the risks to the displaced elderly. Jackie Lara, Renee Keitt and Celines Miranda, the tenant leaders who have spent years defending this corner of New York added their voices, too. CBS News caught the scene, as well as the tension that mounted in the hearing room. Inside, the official hearing commenced. NYCHA and HPD presided. They offered a presentation that, one imagines, some planner in a distant office thought would suffice: a thousand-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) compressed into five minutes of monotonous explainer, technical lingo, punctuated by floor plans displayed for so fleeting a moment that even trained architects might have blinked and missed them. There were no renderings, no images of what might rise in the place of what would fall, and no plain language to help tenant understand what is about to happen to them. The room, packed with over a hundred residents, ground into a steady procession of opposition. One by one, tenants and neighbors spoke out. Renee Keitt, President of the tenant association reminded in a moving speech that the condition of the buildings was the result of decades of disinvestment and was not the fault of the tenants. Pamela Wolff, a long-time resident of Chelsea, rose to ask with her unmistakably soft yet firm voice: “where are our elected officials”, and wondered why they ignore the voices of their constituents.Roberta Gelb, a former president of the local democratic club and a housing advocate who fought Barney’s plan to raze rental buildings some 30 odd years ago let her perennial rage rise to ebullition. “This plan smells. A $1.9 Billion, with a “B”, no-bid contract? How is that even legal?”. Tenants spoke of their fears for displacement, their attachment to their homes.Environmental impacts took center stage. Pollutants, lead, mercury, barium all in excess of acceptable norms, asbestos, noise that can’t be abated, the 16-year construction timeframe. Lenny Rosado, a Fulton tenant rep, asked with a mix of sarcasm and disbelief, “This project will end in 2041? Please tell me this is a typo!!!”I spoke too, and reminded the audience that the very health hazard invoked to raze these buildings, mold, the villain of every NYCHA press release, mold, the phantom menace blamed for all ills is MIA, found only in minute traces in the cellar of one building. The following evening at Hudson Guild, the crowd swelled even larger. Tenants, parents from PS 33, the local elementary school, neighbors from the residential co-op Penn South — many of whom had learned of the plan only the day before — crowded into the second-floor community room. The sense of abuse hung thick. The emotion was very palpable. There, tenants spoke of their heartache, “I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack” said one woman. Of their anguish, and their sense of betrayal. One woman cried and waled and screamed. “How can you do that to us?” Tenants bravely overcame their fear of public speaking. One of them froze half way through and a participant kindly stood and helped her finish reading her testimony. Each three-minute comment was greeted with applause, and cries and whispers of anger. Joe Restuccia, the well-respected and charismatic housing leader of the Community Board 4 spoke of the misinformation surrounding this plan and reminded everyone that it is not a done deal. Again, that evening, not one elected official deigned attending the hearing. Speakers denounced the project as a land grab, a civic dispossession dressed up in the sterile language of development. Parents worried about the impact on their children’s already crowded classrooms, and unhealthy noise levels. Neighbors wondered aloud how the sewer system, strained even now, would survive a sudden and massive influx of apartments.NYCHA’s leadership team made a token appearance at the first hearing but skipped the second entirely. Related’s leadership didn’t bother to show up at all.
If NYCHA and its partners had hoped for a passive acquiescence to their plan, what they got instead was a reminder of something more powerful than bureaucratic momentum: a community that knows what is at stake, and refuses to let its home — or its history — be erased. After the hearing concluded, the crowd dispersed in small groups. As The NYCHA team exited the building, I asked them: “I hope this has opened up humanity in your hearts.” One of the young staffers looked at me with a raised eyebrow, as if to say, “Don’t you know that humanity is not part of the environmental assessment manual?”