It’s affordable
Blaz housing bid to make up for botched deal
MAYOR DE BLASIO quietly unveiled Tuesday new plans for affordable senior housing and nursing home beds on the Lower East Side, in a bid to make up for letting Rivington House slip away to condo developers.
The city will include 88 affordable housing units for seniors in the neighborhood as part of a mixed-income development adjacent to 50 Norfolk St., and will fund two new units with 60 skilled nursing beds at city Health and Hospitals’ Gouverneur facility, City Hall announced.
Those units replace earlier plans for senior housing and nursing beds at 30 Pike St., which the city has scuttled.
The development comes in response to the city’s botched handling of the sale of Rivington House, a former AIDS hospice in the neighborhood that is now on track to be developed into condos after the city removed deed restrictions that required it to be run as a health care facility.
Rivington had 219 beds, but had been about half-full in its later years of operation, with advancements in treatment for HIV and AIDS.
“This plan is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to the Lower East Side, the seniors who built this amazing and diverse community, and the immediacy of their needs,” de Blasio said in a statement. “This neighborhood must be made whole for a broken city process that resulted in the sale of a critical health care facility.”
The new skilled nursing beds will be part of two units at the Health and Hospitals facility at 227 Madison St., the city said, which will be built in previously unused space, and for which the city has already begun hiring health care professionals.
The new affordable facilities are part of a public-private partnership among the city, the Chinese-American Planning Council and the Gotham Organization to build a 400-unit mixeduse project in what is now a parking lot.
The units announced Tuesday are in addition to 100 permanently affordable homes being created through the project under the mandatory inclusionary zoning program.
The development is subject to the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.