Residents of Chelsea’s Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses (FEC) protested NYCHA’s planned demolition of their buildings with a march and rally on November 8th. The lack of tenant buy-in for the plan is increasingly an issue. The high-profile architecture firm PAU (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism) recently withdrew from the project to demolish and replace the buildings alongside new housing, citing concerns about resident engagement. In an October 30th lecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, PAU Principal Ruchika Modi presented a slide of her firm’s mission statement: “PAU is an architecture and urban design studio dedicated to building ecological, equitable, and joyous communities.” Challenged by an audience member on the firm’s seemingly contradictory involvement in the NYCHA plan, Modi announced that PAU had bowed out of it after gathering that no proper resident engagement was carried out.
NYCHA’s plan would demolish FEC’s 18 apartment buildings and reconstruct their 2,056 apartments, minus 260 bedrooms, in three very large buildings on each development’s campus. These would be sited on about a third of the current campus grounds to make way for 3,500 new mixed-income units in buildings up to a contextually incongruous 39-stories tall. About 1,000 of the new units would be affordable—mainly to middle-income New Yorkers—and the rest market rate. In this part of Chelsea, market rate means luxury.
News of PAU’s withdrawal comes as resident engagement has entered its ugliest phase yet, with seniors traumatized by threats of eviction and worse if they don’t surrender their homes and agree to transition from Section 9 status, as tenants of the government, to less secure Section 8 status, as tenants of the Related Companies. (Related is NYCHA’s private development partner for the plan under its PACT program and the giant developer of Hudson Yards.)…