Op-Ed
By Howard Husock
City Journal
March 28, 2025
The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea Houses projects suffered more than 200 elevator failures, and the Elliott-Chelsea portion lost heat and hot water in the middle of January. On a tour of the campus, the leaders of the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea tenants’ associations point out rat holes and show me photos of the homeless people who sleep on the roof—testament to the ease with which a nonresident can walk through the building’s unlocked front doors. The buildings’ conditions are an insult to the legacy of their namesakes: Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat; and John Lovejoy Elliott, a Progressive-era reformer and founder of the Hudson Guild settlement house, which aimed to improve the lives of the immigrant poor.
Yet the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea Houses differ from the city’s 333 other public housing sites in one critical way: these towers are slated for demolition. For the first time since Robert Moses introduced the controversial “superblock” concept to American urban planning, a New York public housing project will not only be replaced but reimagined as an entirely new neighborhood.
The new development will combine rich and poor residents, pocket parks, and storefronts. Planners envision a dynamic streetscape with apartments, bisecting streets, and shops reminiscent of the vibrant Chelsea Market nearby. And the buildings will be managed not by the city’s Housing Authority but by a private entity, with a management team that includes Related Companies, one of New York’s most experienced real-estate firms.
Miguel Acevedo, president of the Fulton Houses Tenant Association and a resident of the complex for 60 years, looks forward to the end of the isolation that he says project residents experience. He notices the apprehension of the artists and upscale residents of the gleaming new condos in Chelsea when they approach the boundaries of the projects. “You can see that they avoid it. They say, ‘Oh, that’s the projects.’ ” Fulton resident (and former Elliott-Chelsea resident) Hector Vasquez adds: “A lot of new buildings went up, and we were kind of isolated. Basically, nobody wanted to go to our neighborhood. We were like, off-limits kind of thing, like the bad zone.”
The planned new development still faces bureaucratic hurdles, including an environmental review. But as Acevedo puts it, “They can’t start soon enough.” The project has already cleared its toughest political challenge: securing the approval of residents, who are treated in New York politics much like property owners. After years of participating in a “working group,” residents ultimately endorsed the demolition of their current homes. “At first, there was fear: Where would residents go while the buildings came down?” Acevedo acknowledges. But the idea of rehabilitation lost appeal as tenants assessed the dire state of their buildings. Jonathan Gouveia, the New York City Housing Authority’s executive vice president for real-estate development, explains: “They saw that things were far worse than expected. Water and heating lines were so degraded you could squeeze them, and they’d crumble. Replacing them meant dealing with asbestos and relocating residents.” It became clear that replacing Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea would cost less than repairing them—a reality likely true for many of New York City’s public housing projects.
The New York City Housing Authority refers to the $1.5 billion plan as “replacement” housing, but that’s just semantics: it will mean the demolition of Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea and the phased relocation of more than 5,000 tenants, who will also gain the right, if they choose, to switch to another NYCHA property or to leave public housing altogether and still retain government support, via housing vouchers.
More is at stake here than just the fate of the site itself. Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea Houses have established a new development model for New York’s public housing sites. The land would become, with certain conditions, part of the city’s private residential and commercial real-estate market. Businesses, once barred from the projects, will have opportunities to take root; streetscapes currently bereft of storefronts will be filled in by 12,000 square feet of commercial space. Nonsubsidized tenants will move in and move out, in sharp contrast with residents in the city’s public housing units, who stay, on average, for 20 years.
For the first time since its creation in the 1930s, in other words, New York’s vast public housing system, by far the nation’s largest, has the prospect of being “unfrozen”—put to a use other than public housing.
NYCHA has finally realized that, though it is chronically short of the resources needed to renovate its buildings, many dating back to the authority’s early days, it is rich in valuable land that can be developed for other purposes in ways that both benefit tenants and help satisfy New York’s demand for new housing.
From the Brooklyn waterfront to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, from the Lower East Side to the mid-Bronx, NYCHA, like many American public housing authorities, owns valuable real-estate sites on which it can invite new construction, and even permit new streets to break up the isolated superblock model it inherited from the antiurban theories of Swiss modernist Le Corbusier, who dreamed of a “city without streets.” The Elliott-Chelsea Houses, as it happens, were designed by William Lescaze, himself a Corbusier protégé. The Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea projects, though not themselves a pure superblock (they retain some bisecting streets between them), set an example for repurposing the vast open spaces of the so-called public housing campuses across the city—and, indeed, across the country.
This is central to NYCHA executive Gouveia’s vision: transforming Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea from an isolated “eyesore”—so typical of classic public housing projects—into an integrated part of the community, where the presence of traffic, pedestrians, and shoppers will reduce the opportunity that isolation provides for crime. Across New York’s hundreds of public housing sites, home to some 500,000 residents, crime and gang violence have often been major problems. By bringing public housing land into the broader real-estate market, the transformation promises more than a physical upgrade; it marks a cultural and economic shift.
The plan echoes Jane Jacobs’s 1961 proposal in The Death and Life of Great American Cities for “salvaging projects.” She urged cities to reweave isolated housing developments into the urban fabric, strengthening neighborhoods in the process. Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea’s redevelopment represents a win for Jacobs’s vision of cities over that of her nemesis, Robert Moses, whose slum clearance and highway projects displaced 200,000 New Yorkers.
The demolition of the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea towers also reflects an underappreciated accomplishment of New York mayor Eric Adams, who overcame opposition from left-liberal groups like the Legal Aid Society, which pushed to renovate the complex as traditional public housing. Legal Aid attorney Lucy Newman criticized the initiative as “not resident-led” and claimed that it would “uproot thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers.” Such views often prevail in city politics—but not this time. “These buildings are not worth saving,” says Gouveia, citing issues like mold, asbestos, and lead paint, problems endemic to much of the city’s public housing. Acknowledging this hard truth signals a new willingness to adopt imaginative solutions for what has long been known as “NYCHA Land”—a vast, stagnant city within the city.
One reason the Legal Aid Society failed to block the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea redevelopment is the persuasive influence of Jamar Adams, founder of Essence Development, which NYCHA selected to handle the replacement housing in partnership with Related Companies, his former employer. A former pro football player for Seattle and Philadelphia, Adams grew up in public housing in Charlotte. “Talking to the residents is like talking to my aunts or cousins,” he says, describing the redevelopment as the only practical solution for immediate improvements. With a touch of irony, he adds that he’d respect the opposition’s insistence on rehabbing the current buildings—if they’d agree to “switch houses with a Fulton tenant and wait for improvements while lobbying Congress and the White House for rehab money.” Elderly tenants, he notes, understand that they’d likely die before such funding materialized.
Per Adams, if capitalizing on the value of public housing real estate makes obvious sense anywhere, it’s at Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea. Surrounded by the art galleries, upscale home-furnishing stores, high-end condos, and trendy eateries of Chelsea, the site is in a neighborhood that followed the classic urban-regeneration cycle after artists began reclaiming its old factories decades ago. Andy Warhol once lived in the Chelsea Hotel, just blocks away on 23rd Street. The High Line, west of Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea, is now a tourist magnet and neighborhood amenity, while the nearby Meatpacking District—once notorious for prostitution—now offers an array of high-end restaurants, including Japanese, Mexican, German, and Italian.
Chelsea’s gentrification makes demolishing and replacing Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea not only feasible but also financially viable. Building on public land does come with challenges. Adams notes that developers must pay higher, union-scale “prevailing wages” and navigate lengthy processes like ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure). This environmental review is essential to gain approval for taller, denser buildings that would otherwise violate skyline-view regulations—even as private high-rises proliferate nearby. But the site offers a rare commodity in Manhattan: a large, already-assembled parcel under a single owner—the housing authority. Had developers needed to purchase the land, the project would likely have been unaffordable, given the city’s valuation of the site at $265 million. And the new development will include 3,500 market-rate apartments, allowing Essence and Related to charge rents that reflect the area’s high demand. Chelsea market rents aren’t modest: one listing advertises studio to two-bedroom units starting at $5,850 a month, a range that Adams confirms is realistic for the planned units. Many nearby apartments, listed at $12,000 a month on Zillow, illustrate the potential for high returns.
These premium rents will make it possible to cross-subsidize 850 “permanently affordable” units, as New York requires, without relying on the nearly $300,000-per-unit subsidy that the city typically allocates for such housing. Even the affordable units will generate significant revenue. They’re designated for households earning up to 80 percent of Manhattan’s area median income, which the census reports as $95,866. That translates to monthly rents of up to $2,500.
Unfreezing public housing real estate should work elsewhere in Gotham, too, especially in the city’s many superblock projects where developable land is available. The site of Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side, for example, is valued by the city at $111 million, and that of the Vladeck Houses, another lower Manhattan project, is valued at $61 million. Public housing sites abound in other neighborhoods where private apartments attract high rents. In Brooklyn, Ingersoll and Farragut Houses are near the Brooklyn waterfront and high-end brownstone neighborhoods; Wyckoff Gardens is in fashionable Park Slope; the Pelham Parkway Houses are in the middle-class mid-Bronx; and the Amsterdam Houses are located on the wealthy Upper West Side, not far from Central Park. Just eliminating ubiquitous NYCHA parking lots would make large tracts available for development.
Only the most isolated projects in the poorest zip codes, such as Brownsville, would be unlikely to benefit from unfreezing, and even these could be physically improved, since developers, such as those at Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea, must lease their land from NYCHA—and make annual payments to do so. NYCHA has not specified the dollar amount of that payment, but it could be enough, at least in theory, to cross-subsidize upgrades or replacement buildings at projects in less affluent areas.
Gouveia emphasizes that the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea approach will not be “copy and paste” for sites around the city. “Each site is different,” he notes. One unusual aspect of Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea, for example, is the fact that it includes two small mid-rise buildings: one with just 36 units; and the other with 85 occupied apartments. These will be demolished first, as the task of relocating their current tenants in vacant apartments elsewhere in the complex is manageable. The demolition will occur in phases, as tenants are relocated, new buildings erected, and tenants moved into the new apartments that become available. The experienced private developers will be responsible for interim repairs on the old, leaky buildings still standing. NYCHA itself has proved both ineffective and corrupt in managing these tasks.
The overall replacement and demolition task will be harder in complexes that include only larger buildings. But even though public housing’s hundreds of sites differ, a shared goal can be identified for most of them: breaking up the antiurban superblocks and reknitting the neighborhoods that the projects ripped apart. Such “re-streeting” can mean new storefronts, small private homes, and pedestrian traffic that would help spawn viable neighborhoods more like those torn down long ago to make way for the projects. Again, the hope is that less isolation—and accompanying Jacobs-style “eyes on the street”—might help deter crime and disorder.
The goal of combining physical improvement with connecting the projects to their surrounding neighborhoods could be extended to public housing across the country. At least one other big-city housing authority is doing something similar. The Philadelphia Housing Authority has destroyed the two 18-story towers of the Norman Blumberg project and is in the process of replacing them with a mix of buildings and storefronts, similar to those planned for Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea. More commonly, however, dangerous and decrepit public housing towers—such as the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s lakefront—have simply been demolished. In many cases, only vacant land remains, as in the so-called State Street Corridor in Chicago. “How is it that in the center of one of the nation’s largest cities there are empty fields that stretch for miles, isolated houses surrounded by vacant lots that have gone untouched for a decade or more?” South Side Weekly asked in 2017. “Why would a government agency whose mission is to provide housing for vulnerable citizens retain all this vacant land when it has plenty of surplus funding with which to build homes? Moreover, why would it do so at a time when the demand for housing among the city’s poor people is so great?”
True, there is no guarantee that the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea approach will succeed. After all, public housing towers, now despised, were celebrated when the ribbons were cut. Past efforts to fix public housing have often gone disastrously wrong, such as the 1980s push for low-rise developments with front stoops designed to create “defensible space” and deter crime. The signature example, Brooklyn’s Marcus Garvey Houses, became infamous for gang violence. Could Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea face a similar fate?
There’s also no assurance that the market-rate apartments, critical to the project’s financial viability, will continue to attract high-paying tenants willing to live alongside low-income neighbors. Mixed-income developments in other countries, too, confront challenges: in downtown Johannesburg, for instance, luxury apartments were subdivided for poorer residents, including migrants, after high-income tenants moved out. Walking past such buildings, I quickly crossed the street to avoid gangs loitering out front. Historically, residents of sharply different income levels have tended to choose separate neighborhoods.
Moreover, Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea’s strategy of “unfreezing” NYCHA real estate is unlikely to be that widely replicated. Of NYCHA’s 335 sites, only 62 have been approved for conversion to federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD)–style projects. Most properties are slated for rehabilitation, not replacement, under New York State’s Housing Preservation Trust. Here, NYCHA’s historically dysfunctional, unionized, and often corrupt management is likely to persist. Residents are entitled to vote on whether management remains public or becomes private, an option resisted by many NYCHA employees who are also tenants. One example: the Nostrand Houses in Brooklyn recently voted to keep NYCHA as its manager, despite NYCHA records showing that the project lost heat and hot water last December and that elevator outages are routine.
One must hope that Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea is a first nontraditional step not only toward physical changes but a range of policy improvements to a system in which 56 percent of tenants stay for more than 20 years, including 20 percent at more than 40 years, with a waiting list numbering some 267,000 people; where rent rules discourage residents from marrying or boosting their earnings because doing so would raise their rent; and where nearly 30 percent of tenants are “overhoused” and have more bedrooms than they need, even as the city’s perennial housing crisis continues.
Developer Adams, who characterizes his firm as seeking “social impact,” is keen on a culture change as well as physical upgrades for the projects. Except for the elderly and disabled, he embraces the idea of a time limit for new tenants, for whom public housing would be a support but not a terminus—as it was for him and his own family. He’s eager to tell the story of his less affluent relations who’ve moved up from the projects to owning single-family Habitat for Humanity Houses in Rock Hill, North Carolina. He hopes that NYCHA might adopt a rent policy that combines a fixed payment that doesn’t increase with income with a savings plan to help tenants prepare to own a home upon exiting the projects. To make that exit successful, Essence and Related plan to promote better nutrition and health care through a clinic that it will include in the new development.
Make no mistake: this is a radically different vision from that of the original public housing champions like Robert Moses and Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw government as the long-term, public utility–style provider of housing for most of the population. One can make a good case that public housing is the leading example of Progressive-era overreach—and failure. But meantime, NYCHA is New York’s largest landlord: something must be done to improve its residents’ lives and put an end to their quasi-institutional isolation. Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea is only a start, but it’s an important one.