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“The community-led Morningside Heights Rezoning Plan will promote the construction of over 1,000 new apartments, with around 300 affordable units, and include a commercial overlay to encourage small businesses. The plan should be allowed to move forward.”
A City Limits article recently covered a report stating that the vast majority of neighborhoods, including Morningside Heights, are severely behind in contributing to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s city-wide goal of developing 200,000 units within 10 years.
Additionally, commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Dina Levy, stated that “to overcome our housing crisis, we need every neighborhood in every borough to do its part.” The Morningside Heights community is “doing its part.”
The community-led Morningside Heights Rezoning Plan—accessible on the City Council website—will promote the construction of over 1,000 new apartments, with around 300 affordable units, and include a commercial overlay to encourage small businesses. The plan should be allowed to move forward through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) toward approval by the City Council and be quickly implemented to promote the affordable housing that Morningside Heights residents desperately need.
The plan was developed by the Morningside Heights Community Coalition and City Council Planning and Land Use Group. Its co-applicants included former Councilmember Mark Levine (now comptroller), former Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer (now councilmember), Community Board 9, and the City Council itself. It has recently been reviewed by the urban planning staffs of our current Councilmember Shaun Abreu and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.
The plan is supported by the Municipal Art Society, and is included in former Borough President Levine’s report, “Housing Manhattanites.” It triggers Mandatory Inclusionary Housing by “upzoning” specific sites along Broadway near transit station locations, and height caps of approximately 22 stories. In addition, it imposes height caps on sites in the mid-blocks at roughly the current zoning levels encouraging the preservation of many existing affordable and rent-stabilized units.
The City Planning Department, claiming that rezoning Morningside Heights would produce an insufficient number of units, among some other objections, rejected the community’s request to consider the plan. In response, the Morningside Heights community, led by the Coalition, worked with our elected officials, Community Board 9, and the City Council to propose its own plan.
The plan—an unprecedented, democratic “grass roots” initiative whose goals and design emerged through small and large meetings, some with up to 150 participants—captures the aspirations of neighbors in the Heights for preserving and improving its way of life. You can read more about it in the report, “Morningside Speaks!”
Long-time community residents voiced their heartfelt hopes for a neighborhood that preserves “mom and pop” stores, limits tall all-luxury towers, and provides housing where their children can afford to live. Additionally, over 1,000 residents on the streets of Morningside Heights signed a petition calling for contextual rezoning to limit luxury overdevelopment and support affordable housing. Surveys at the time revealed that affordable housing was the number one issue in the Heights.
Campaigning for affordable units in new buildings in the Heights has been intensely challenging. Densely populated Morningside Heights real estate is dominated by our world famous local institutions: Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, St. John the Divine, and St. Luke’s Hospital (now Mt. Sinai Morningside). All of them have entered into deals, selling their land and/or “air rights” to the highest bidders, mostly for well over $100 million each, resulting in 30 and 40-story all-luxury towers with multi-million dollar condo prices, and some rents exceeding $10,000 per month. Columbia University, by far the neighborhood’s largest land owner, built a 34-story tower restricted to graduate students and affiliates of the University. Of the roughly 1100 total units already completed in the Heights, not a single one is affordable.
The City Planning Department still has reservations about the plan. Nevertheless, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration are calling upon each community to deliver desperately needed affordable housing that is transit accessible, with good schools, nearby parks, and abundant markets.
The Rezoning Plan for Morningside Heights, which satisfies all of these criteria, will “do its part” to help meet the New York City affordable housing crisis.
Robert F. Stern is a board member of the Morningside Heights Community Coalition and president of the Morningside Heights Historic District Committee.