The following Guest Opinion by David Holowka is comprised of written and visual content that first appeared as part of  “NYCHA’s Chelsea Gold Mine”–published on April 23, 2025 on the blog ArchiTakes. To access the full piece, click here.

Above Image: A proposed rezoning of Chelsea’s public housing sites—Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea Houses—could transform much of the neighborhood to midtown-like density. It would introduce towers of up to 39 stories a stone’s throw from early-19th-century Greek Revival rowhouses. This New York City Housing Authority rendering shows new buildings it would construct under the rezoning in gold, viewed from the southeast. The darker-shaded buildings would replace the existing NYCHA ones and their 2,056 dwelling units. The lighter-shaded buildings include about 3,500 new rental-housing units. Up to 30% of these, perhaps 1,000 apartments, would be affordable and the rest market rate, which amounts to luxury in this part of Chelsea. That means luxury apartments would outnumber public-housing units on public land originally set aside for low-income New Yorkers.

An earlier plan would have renovated all of the NYCHA buildings and allowed a small amount of new mixed-income housing to be built if needed to fill any funding gaps. The mixed-income portion exploded in size as the plan was revised to replace the buildings on unfounded claims that their renovation would cost just as much.

Late last year, NYCHA made the bombshell disclosure that the vast mixed-income rental revenue—possibly all of it—would go into its coffers for use throughout the city. It is to this end that the existing buildings would be demolished and much of Chelsea’s character sacrificed. Few in the community are aware of the proposal but among those who are there is well-founded fear for the neighborhood’s character.

NYCHA recently released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, detailing the project and its impact. Comments on the DEIS will be received until May 19th. NYCHA is required by law to respond in the Final Environmental Impact Statement to substantive comments from anyone. Failure to meaningfully do so could result in legal challenges, media scrutiny, or political fallout.

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Below Images: These views from NYCHA’s DEIS show current and proposed-rezoning-alternative views down Ninth Avenue toward the Fulton Houses site. Even a scaled back version of the rezoning would result in a markedly different neighborhood.

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Below Image: These NYCHA presentation images show the existing Elliott-Chelsea buildings (top left) and Fulton buildings (lower left) in gray. The buildings that will replace them as public housing are to their right in yellow, with new mixed-income buildings in green. FEC’s residents would be condensed and segregated onto roughly a third of their current grounds. The case for demolition was never about the condition of the existing NYCHA buildings. What they have in common isn’t worse deterioration than other NYCHA developments, but being in Chelsea. Demolition was always about clearing land for new, primarily luxury development of the sort Chelsea can singularly support—upscale buildings from which the NYCHA residents would be excluded, consuming the open space that once lent value to their homes.

To access the full version of “NYCHA’s Chelsea Gold Mine” as it appears on the blog ArchiTakes, click here. Note: ArchiTakes is committed to taking discourse on architecture, in New York and beyond, to a higher level. It is authored by David Holowka, an architect and New Yorker.

Image 3 is comprsed of component images screen-captured from the YouTube recording of NYCHA’s January 30, 2024 Board Meeting, beginning at 1:07:04. To view the meeting, click here.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE DEIS

To access the DEIS, click here. From there, scroll down to, and click on, “March 2025 Update: Draft Environmental Impact Statement Information.” Under the notation “The DEIS can be viewed below'” are clickable options that will download the DEIS in your choice of five languages–as a folder containing 29 PDFs alongside an “Appendices” folder containing 14 PDFs.

NOTE: The views expressed by our Guest Opinion writers are not necessarily those of Chelsea Community News.

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