Staten Island will become New York City’s new showcase for mass timber construction under a new plan pushed by city officials.
The plan will see New York developers build two 50-foot timber mega towers on city-owned land along the Stapleton waterfront, within walking distance of the Staten Island ferry terminal. It is the latest in what Eric Adams, the New York City Mayor, dubbed a “public-private partnership.”
“This is the biggest opportunity to use mass timber at scale in the city,” according to Melissa Román Burch, the Chief Operating Officer for New York’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), who said the new towers (which come with sizable tax breaks) will eventually home 500 rent-controlled apartments.
The winning developer will pay the city instead of taxes, or PILOTs, for the rights to build the projects, which will be “fully capitalised privately,” according to Ms Roman Burch, who added that 25% of the apartments will be reserved for households earning 40% and 80% of the median income.
EDC’s President and CEO Andrew Kimball said the projects are “the next step forward in delivering on the Adams administration’s North Shore Action Plan.” They are part of a plan that will eventually include 2,100 new apartments on the North Shore.
The call for the apartments follows the city’s US $400 million commitment to beautify the Stapleton waterfront in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, with local residents complaining that parts of the Island’s waterfront, with views of southern Manhattan and the Verrazzano Bridge, have remained inaccessible to pedestrians.
It is part of a long-term goal to revitalise Staten Island’s image, which has seen more than 15 million people ride to the Island via ferry to explore the city’s “forgotten borough” and comes after the EDC last week vowed to bring mass timber to the masses in New York.
As part of the city’s “Mass Timber Studio,” the EDC is now providing technical assistance to local developers and architects “supporting active mass timber development projects in the early phases of project planning and design.”
“For a developer or design team to put themselves through a nine-month studio with us, we expect that all of them will be able to go to the finish line,” according to Cecilia Kushner, the EDC’s chief strategy officer, who added that “we already know that these projects can be permitted, so they will not have any issue on that front.”
Last week, Wood Central reported that mass timber is on the rise across the city, with the Evergreen Charter School in Hempstead, Long Island, the High Line’s Moynihan Connector, and the New York Climate Exchange, a mass timber structure designed on Governors Island part of a growing number of timber buildings.
“It’s just making sure that more New Yorkers in the building construction trade have firsthand experience with it,” Mr Kushner said. “It’s a game of numbers and scale.”
- For more information about the challenges of mass timber adoption, read Wood Central’s special feature.
