NYCHA to sell unused air rights to raise $3 billion

December 13, 2018 By Raanan Geberer Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Mayor Bill de Blasio listens to residents and tells them that help is coming for the NYCHA issue. Eagle photo by Todd Maisel

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Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday that NYCHA plans to sell unused air rights to developers for the first time as part of an effort to raise money to repair crumbling NYCHA buildings.

The air rights sale is part of de Blasio’s NYCHA 2.0 plan, which also calls for developing predominately market-rate housing on underused public housing land such as parking lots, according to Crain’s.

While the buildings that developers would construct using the air rights would be mostly market-rate, they would be subject to the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy, which requires at least a quarter of the units to be affordable, Crain’s said.

The sale of air rights plus the building of market-rate housing is expected to raise $3 billion that could go toward housing-project repairs.

However, many people still oppose the idea of market-rate housing on NYCHA land. Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-Upper East Side-East Harlem) said he supports new buildings on NYCHA land only if they are 100 percent affordable.

A similar project was launched during the Michael Bloomberg administration, but it concentrated mainly on housing projects in high-demand areas of Manhattan. For example, around 2010, a new private apartment building was constructed on land that was formerly a parking lot in Chelsea.