Jets Plan for West Side Manhattan Site Gathers Backing

Given the choice between building a new neighborhood and constructing several thousand apartments in an established district, real-estate experts generally would prefer the latter. Applying that reasoning to the West Side of Manhattan, those experts said the New York Jets’ bid for development rights at the MTA rail yards is superior to what Madison Square Garden outlined.The Jets’ bid, which calls for 4,400 apartments to be built north of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Hudson rail yards, would be more easily absorbed into the market and create less vexing infrastructure problems than the Cablevision subsidiary’s proposal, which would create 5,800 residential units on a platform atop the 13-acre rail yards used by the Long Island Rail Road, the experts said. The MTA board is expected to choose today between the bids, which each are valued at more than $700 million. A third, higher bid, submitted by TransGas Energy, is less specific on housing development and also is regarded as extremely unlikely to be chosen.“Cablevision’s plan is to put all of the residential bulk over the rail yards, which would bring at least 10,000 permanent residents and would create more infrastructure issues like traffic than a 75,000-seat stadium,” even when the stadium is accompanied by new apartments in the neighborhood, the director of the Center for New York City Law, Ross Sandler, said. Mr. Sandler is a former city commissioner of transportation.The Jets’ plan calls for six developers to buy the air rights for the land above the rail yards and transfer them offsite. According to the proposal, 4.4 million square feet would be purchased at $100 a square foot, for a total of $440 million. To make the deal work, the rail yards would have to be rezoned to residential from manufacturing, unless the state is willing to override the rezoning requirements – as it was planning to do with the Jets stadium.“The Jets’ proposal makes sense because it will not create density in a single area but will be dispersed throughout a neighborhood,” the head of development for the Douglas Elliman realty firm, Andrew Gerringer, said. Like Donald Trump’s Riverside South development along the West Side Highway, where six colossal apartment buildings have been built over a period of seven years, these apartment units would be phased in over time so as not to drown the market with supply, Mr. Gerringer said.“You cannot just throw up 6,000 units at once, not even in New York. Banks won’t lend to a non-viable project, and zoning won’t allow it,” Mr. Gerringer said.The Madison Square Garden bid laid out a 12-year period for its residential development, while the Jets’ bid said the stadium and platform would be built over a 45-month period but did not include a timetable for the residential component.“It has struck me that as a plan, the Jets’ proposal would be more readily absorbed because the development is more spread out,” the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, Jonathan Miller, said.The Jets’ bid also does not specify to which neighborhood the air rights would be transferred, although developers and industry insiders have said the obvious choice is the 59-block Hudson Yards neighborhood. The City Council approved a rezoning of the Hudson Yards in January to allow for 13,600 new apartments and 24 million square feet of additional office space.“This was an opportunity to buy the development rights and use them in the Hudson Yards,” a developer, Daniel Brodsky, told The New York Sun last week in discussing his rationale for joining the Jets’ bid. The Brodsky Organization, Glenwood Management, Rockrose Realty, Donald Zucker Company, the Related Companies, and Jack Resnick & Sons have a non-binding agreement with the Jets, which is contingent on the rezoning of the rail yards.A spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning, Rachaele Raynoff, said that she had not seen anything in the Jets’ bid that specified where the development rights would be transferred, and that it was too early to comment on any impact either plan would have on the surrounding neighborhoods.“The Jets’ and Cablevision proposals will need close environmental analyses,” she said.The Jets completed an environmental impact statement for their project, but it was only for a stadium over the rail yards and did not include the 4,400 residential units it has added to its proposal.It is unclear whether the housing would require a new environmental impact statement or could be done with a shorter environmental supplemental, Ms. Raynoff said. A supplemental study could shave several months off from the review process.The Jets also had a zoning override from the state for its original proposal, but “generally, a proposal to create air rights and transfer them would be subject to a zoning application,” Ms. Raynoff said, adding, “Will there still be an override? I don’t know.”“What the city has to decide is how much FAR they want to have on the stadium site, and where it could be transferred,” Mr. Sandler said, using the shorthand for floor-area-ratio, a measurement for the size of a building. “The zoning right now is such that there are a few areas with FAR as high as 33.” He said city officials should be “careful” not to allow excessive development of the Hudson Yards.[The chairman of the MTA, Peter Kalikow, reportedly supports the Jets’ offer, according to a story that appeared on the New York Times’s Web site last night. The chairman’s endorsement would virtually guarantee sale of the rail yards to the Jets, and the entire MTA board’s approval of the Jets’ bid is expected to be announced this morning. Mr. Kalikow deemed the $760 million bid put in by the Jets’ rivals, Cablevision, “not credible,” labeling it a ploy to keep the Jets out of the West Side, according to the Times story. ]A source familiar with the Jets’ plan said there were several areas within the Hudson Yards neighborhood – between West 30th and 42nd streets, from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River – where low-rise developments could be replaced with more density. Community leaders, who oppose overdevelopment in their neighborhood and also reject the notion of a domed stadium on the West Side, said the rail yards have no room for more tall buildings.“The Hudson Yards are already crowded,” the chairman of Community Board 4, Walter Mancoff, said this week.

Jets Plan for West Side Manhattan Site Gathers Backing

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