In the quick-evolving world of cutting-edge office layout, the conventional idea of cubicles and high-rise partitions is being redefined. Companies are increasingly adopting flexible, collaborative, and aesthetically appealing office layouts that inspire creativity, verbal exchange, and a feel of community. The consciousness has shifted from simply dividing area to creating environments that sell productiveness and…
As climate action on a federal level is now all but impossible and New York City recovers once again from being cloaked by wildfire smoke, New Yorkers will call on Governor Kathy Hochul to lead the way and build 15 gigawatts(GW) of renewable energy. New Yorkers will rally directly before a public hearing being held…
BRICK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey’s governor declared a drought warning. Black Hawk helicopters scooped water from a lake to dump on a burning forest in New York state. A park in Manhattan caught fire. And authorities in two states revealed criminal charges Wednesday against people accused of setting some of the wildfires that have plagued the northeast U.S. in recent weeks.
The actions came as conditions in some northeast states are the driest they’ve been in nearly 120 years as numerous wildfires continue to burn in places that haven’t seen significant rain since August. Meanwhile, dry conditions from coast to coast were contributing to the spread of wildfires, particularly in Southern California.
The drought declaration by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy asked people to take voluntary conservation steps, like shorter showers, turning the faucet off while brushing teeth, and waiting until the dishwasher is full to run it. But it stopped short of mandatory water usage restrictions, which would be included in the event of a drought emergency, the highest alert the government can impose.
New Jersey is not yet at the point where communities are in danger of running out of water for drinking or fighting fires. And the state wants to prevent things from reaching that point.
“Please take this seriously,” Murphy said. “We have a very dry winter ahead of us.”
The dry weather has brought a spate of brush and woodland fires to a part of the country that rarely has to deal with them on this level.
Firefighting crews continued efforts to contain a wildfire in a woodland on the New Jersey-New York border that has burned around 5,000 acres (7.8 square miles) in the two states.
No homes have been damaged, but Greg McLaughlin, an administrator with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, said rugged hill terrain, coupled with few road access points, were making it difficult to fight the blaze from the ground. Water-dropping helicopters were being used in both states. And firefighters in New York took advantage of changing wind directions Wednesday by starting a controlled line of fires to burn away underbrush and leaves that could serve as fuel.
Around 30 miles (50 kilometers) away in New York City, a brush fire broke out in a park on the northern tip of Manhattan, sending smoke billowing across the Big Apple. The city’s fire department has responded to a record number of brush fires over the past two weeks.
“Due to a significant lack of rainfall, the threat of fast spreading brush fires fueled by dry vegetation and windy conditions pose a real threat to our members and our city,” Fire Commissioner Robert S. Tucker said in a statement.
Late Wednesday, police in the Philadelphia suburb of Evesham Township said they had charged a juvenile with deliberately setting an Oct. 30 fire that burned less than a tenth of a square mile. The youth, whose age was not released, was arrested Nov. 7 and taken to a juvenile detention center.
On New York’s Long Island, a 20-year-old volunteer firefighter was charged with intentionally setting a brush fire Tuesday that wound up damaging a parked car, the Suffolk County Police Department said in a news release.
Dry conditions from coast to coast were contributing to the spread of wildfires.
Across the country, California made good progress against a major wildfire in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, that broke out a week ago and quickly exploded in size because of dry Santa Ana winds. The Mountain fire was 60% contained on Wednesday.
The 32-square-mile (83-square-kilometer) fire forced thousands of residents to flee and has destroyed more than 215 structures, most of them houses, and damaged at least 210.
The fires in the Northeast haven’t caused major evacuations, but a Connecticut firefighter died battling a wildfire last month and the blaze on the New York-New Jersey border claimed the life of an 18-year-old New York state parks employee who was assisting firefighters last weekend.
Dry conditions in the northeast U.S. are a growing concern, not only for firefighting efforts but for the continued availability of drinking water.
Two major reservoirs in New Jersey were at 51% and 45% of capacity on Wednesday, enough to keep the taps flowing, but low enough to cause concern for what might happen with additional weeks or months of low rainfall. One river that is a supplemental source of drinking water was at 14% of normal.
September and October were the driest two-month period ever recorded in New Jersey. Since August, the state has received 2 inches (5 cm) of rain when it should have gotten a foot (0.3 meters). No significant rainfall was in the foreseeable forecast, officials said.
New York City issued a drought watch last week. Mayor Eric Adams mayor urged residents to take shorter showers, fix dripping faucets and otherwise conserve water.
Just 0.01 inches (0.02 centimeters) of rain fell last month on the city’s Central Park, where October normally brings about 4.4 inches (11.2 centimeters) of precipitation. New York says it was the driest October in over 150 years.
Massachusetts declared a drought Tuesday after more than a month of decreased rainfall.
The ground is also bone-dry, McLaughlin added. This makes wildfires even more dangerous in that they can burn downward through dry soil and root systems, and endure for months.
On a ground dryness scale in which 800 is the highest possible score, New Jersey is at 748, meaning that the soil is dry almost 8 inches (20 centimeters) below the surface. That level had never before been reached, McLaughlin said.
A wildfire that broke out July 4 in New Jersey’s Wharton State Forest by someone using illegal fireworks has long been considered contained. But it has been smoldering underground for four months and could reignite above ground, McLaughlin said.
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Associated Press writers Christopher Weber in Los Angeles and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire contributed to this report.
In several races that were still too close to call a week out, Republicans were projected to keep majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives and did this Wednesday.
As of Wed., Nov. 13, House Democrats had 207 seats and House Republicans maintained 217 seats. A party needs 218 seats to determine which one wins control of the House for the next four years of Trump’s term. Most estimates were leaning in favor of Republicans by Wednesday afternoon.
“In an adverse electoral climate, House Democrats overperformed the national political environment, re-electing at least 27 of our 31 Frontline incumbents, with one race too close to call, holding four competitive open districts and flipping at least eight Republican-held seats this year,” said Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black person to hold that position, in a statement.
Jeffries clinched his re-election in New York’s 8th Congressional District with no real opposition. He scored 74.61% of the votes while his Republican opponent, John J. Delaney, got 22.05%, according to the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) unofficial Election Night results.
With Jeffries’s victory secured, all eyes turned to a cluster of House races in various states, including in California, Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon, and Iowa. Republicans were defending their narrowest House majority in decades, and Democrats only needed to flip four seats to take back control of the chamber.
“House Democrats gave it our all, running aggressive, forward-looking and people-centered campaigns,” said Jeffries. “While we will not regain control of the Congress in January, falling just a few seats short, House Democrats will hold Republicans to a razor-thin majority. That is unprecedented in a so-called presidential wave election.”
Jeffries said he was especially proud of the effort fellow New York Democrats put into flipping three House seats, two of which had been lost to Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections. Those races include the 22nd Congressional District up in Syracuse, where John Mannion beat incumbent Brandon Williams; the 19th Congressional District in the Hudson Valley, where Josh Riley beat out Mark Molinaro; and out in Long Island’s 4th congressional district, where Laura Gillen won over Anthony D’Esposito.
“My deepest gratitude to DCCC Chairwoman Suzan DelBene, DCCC Executive Director Julie Merz, campaign staff across the country, our grassroots supporters, incredible donors and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who knocked doors, made phone calls and signed postcards,” said Jeffries.
Regardless of the state wins, Jeffries said that it cannot be ignored that President-elect Donald Trump did better than “almost any other Republican presidential candidate in modern political history” in New York State.
Republicans had already usurped control of the U.S Senate, with 53 seats to Democrats’ 47. They needed 50 in total.
Jeffries had concluded that electeds have to focus on the issues that Americans, especially Black and Brown people, have said they care about throughout this election: inflation and affordability, the broken immigration system, securing the border, and the economy.
“Thanks to the extraordinary work of our incumbents, candidates and supporters, the nationwide Trump surge did not materialize in the House,” said Jeffries. “Moving forward, House Democrats will engage in a clear-eyed, candid and comprehensive family conversation about how and where to build upon the foundation that has been laid and improve on our efforts. It is a discussion that we embrace.”
He added that in the new Congress, House Democrats will continue to seek bipartisan common ground on any issue, whenever and wherever possible, while pushing back against far right extremism whenever necessary.
Lastly, he congratulated House Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican Conference.deliver real results.”
Black women voters and elected officials poured their hearts and souls — and finances — into campaigning on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris for president for an emotionally turbulent three and a half months. Now that the 2024 presidential election is over, many are asking how her biggest supporters are faring and dealing with the stress of the process and the result.
Generally speaking, politics can cause a form of chronic stress that evokes negative emotions and feelings of distress, said Brett Ford, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Ford said conversations about race and gender discrimination alo can often “feel” political, and perhaps lead to chronic stress-like tension.
“The mental health impact of this election cannot be overstated, especially where it concerns women of color,” said Sen. Samra Brouk, who chairs the Senate Mental Health Committee. “As a Black mother and an elected official, I can relate to feeling stressed, frustrated, or fearful about our future. I will continue to fight to secure mental health resources, improve maternal health outcomes, and uplift our young people so we can ease community burdens and help our most vulnerable individuals.”
A final count of 89% of Black women voters cast their ballot for Harris in 2024, according to the Associated Press (AP) VoteCast, a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago; more than any other demographic, and an unsurprising number considering that Black women remain a major and loyal voting bloc for Democrats.
Nationally, Black women advocates and organizers treated Harris’s announcement of her presidential candidacy in July as a battle cry, raising more than $1.5 million in just a few hours on a Zoom call. They rejoiced wholeheartedly when Harris made history as the first woman of color to be named the Democratic presidential nominee. They strapped on their boots and picked up their canvassing armor, trekking into Republican districts and swing states by the thousands in hopes of swaying voters. In short, they showed up and showed out for Harris.
When it became clear on Election Night, and into the next day, that President-elect Donald Trump would win the electoral college and the popular vote, the news left many women devastated. For Black women in particular, there was a sense of bone-weariness at first — a collective sigh of “I’m tired” or too tired to process this.
“I think that’s so real. Anecdotally, in my group chat, among my sorority sisters and friends, there’s this feeling of ‘sis breathe’ — like you have to take care of yourself right now,” said Dr. Nadia E. Brown, a professor of government and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. That was largely the mood before Harris gave her concession speech on Wed., Nov. 6, which can only be seen as another rallying of the troops with a soft nudge of determination in the face of overwhelming defeat.
To cope with the loss, Black women organizers and electeds AmNews spoke with said they cried and laughed with their friends, reached out to women in their families to check-in, hugged their kids, got a massage, got their nails done, read inspirational posts, or took time off to contend with their mental and physical health.
Since the election was called for Trump, Brown said she has limited her news media diet and started listening to more historical and fashion podcasts to focus on some things that are “joyful” for her.
“I feel proud of us for that and being able to hold space for one another, for turning to one another to decompress, because I think that there were generations that didn’t prioritize self-care and just kept on going,” Brown said. “We know that internalized stress leads to a whole host of autoimmune disorders and cancers. It’s just not good.”
According to a long-term study conducted by Boston University, Black women are more likely to experience disproportionate health burdens and poor health outcomes due to myriad reasons, especially the environmental factors like racism, implicit bias in the healthcare system, and low-socioeconomic status neighborhoods that play a role in shortening Black women’s lives. The psychological trauma and stress of experiencing racial discrimination alone may increase cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, and lead to elevated blood pressure, memory problems, and other conditions, said the study.
Senator Lea Webb, who chairs the Women’s Issues Committee, won her re-election to office in Ithaca on Election Day and was instrumental in getting the state Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ballot measure passed. Even though she celebrated personal wins this month, she’s still grappling with the implications and impact of the presidential election on issues she cares deeply about. She said some things as a state official are out of her control and the stress is “constant,” but that as a public servant, she’s determined to fight for her constituents.
“As Black women, we often bear some of the largest disparities in these issue areas and are often the most impacted, so the gravity of that, along with figuring out ‘where do we go from here,’ is most certainly concerning,” said Webb. “I’ve just been continuing to surround myself with folks who are also doing the good work and definitely trying to take time for reflection and self care.”
Webb said she journals, does physical therapy, enjoys traveling, spends time with her family, loves karaoke and music, and paints as a way to destress in her life right now. She also has a “literal village” of friends, family, and colleagues whom she relies on for support to stay anchored.
“It can be quite challenging and daunting, but what keeps me going is knowing that I have other folks who are also on this journey with me, for sure,” Webb said.
While critics of Proposal 2 often focus on the ballot measure’s broader ties to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s Charter Revision Commission, advocates fear the expansion of his authority to deploy NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) enforcement will have a negative impact on working-class and immigrant New Yorkers.
Particular concern stems from street vendors, who will be specifically “held accountable” by the measure’s clean-up efforts. Mohamed Attia, managing director at the Street Vendor Project, said that while DSNY’s enforcement already exists elsewhere, the ballot measure greenlights agency deployment against vendors in city parks.
“Street vending is heavily enforced in city parks, given that the parks enforcement patrols are overseeing parks, and they, of course, enforce the vending laws, along with the NYPD and [the health department], so you already have several agencies that are involved in the street vendor enforcement” Attia said. “What this prop is doing is basically adding another agency to go after the vendors in city parks, which we can imagine would be very problematic and detrimental to a lot of the vendors, who are already facing crackdowns by several agencies.”
According to the DSNY, the measure does not directly expand agency enforcement authority to parks but rather, grants the mayor the ability to deploy the agency for “supplemental” clean-up efforts and enforcement. Adams has not employed the authority since its passage earlier this month.
To be clear, the DSNY already enforces street vending laws on the street — but areas in and around parks are not legally considered “streets” when interpreting jurisdiction.
Prop 2 was downballot from the presidential election, so its passing coincided with Trump’s victory and subsequent concern about mass deportations and general anti-immigrant sentiment. Attia fears further enforcement means criminal sanctions and fingerprinting for more vendors, many of whom are immigrants, potentially flagging their arrests for federal enforcement agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Even licensed and permit-holding vendors cannot operate in city parks without a request for bid, which requires “pretty difficult steps and processes to actually navigate,” according to Attia.
Advocates for the unhoused, such as VOCAL-NY’s Joseph Loonam, say they are still trying to understand how the measure language will affect those living on the streets. After all, DSNY authorities already exist to break up encampments and the Grants Pass Supreme Court decision allows cities to “punish” people for sleeping outside.
“I don’t know what changes about their ability to do that, but it is a very short-sighted way to obscure a problem from public view without actually doing anything to immediately address it,” Loonam said.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
The Knicks ensured that the Philadelphia 76ers’ seven-time All-Star center Joel Embiid’s season debut wasn’t a celebration by bettering him and his teammates on Tuesday night. The Knicks’ 111-99 road win in the opening game of the NBA Emirates Cup, which was formerly named the In-Season Tournament in its league inaugural last year, was another step in them coalescing.
OG Anunoby scored a team-high 24 points, Josh Hart notched a triple-double with 14 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists, Karl-Anthony Towns had 21 points and 13 rebounds, and Jalen Brunson contributed 18 points to move the Knicks to 5-5 ahead of their matchup with the Chicago Bulls at Madison Square Garden last night.
The Sixers fell to 2-8 playing without injured (right hamstring) star guard Tyrese Maxey. Embiid appeared in his first game after being held out for injury maintenance then serving a three-game suspension for pushing a journalist after a verbal confrontation between them in the team’s locker room following a 124-107 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies on November 2.
The Knicks’ starting lineup this season features newcomers Towns, a four-time All-Star forward/center, acquired from the Minnesota Timberwolves on October 2 in exchange for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo, and Bridges, a small forward who was the Brooklyn Nets’ best player for the better part of the previous two seasons before joining the Knicks this past July 6. New York’s team president Leon Rose determined that Bridges was worth dealing five-future first round picks to the Nets.
The returning three starters, forward Anunoby, in just his second season with the team, guard Brunson, and guard/forward Hart, have continued to ably fill their multifaceted roles in the early part of this season while Towns and Bridges adapt to head coach Tom Thibodeau’s vision how they can build a championship group after reaching the Eastern Conference semifinals last season.
Brusnon and Towns are on an All-Star track. Both were selections last February and have continued to be among the league’s best players. Towns leads the Knicks in both scoring (24.5 points per game) and rebounding (12.4), while Brunson was only two-tenths of a point behind him at 24.3 and was pacing the team in assists (6.4) before facing the Bulls.
Bridges, who averaged 26.1 points per game in 27 games with the Nets two seasons ago after coming to them via a trade with the Phoenix Suns, and 19.1 last season, was at 15.2 points on 47.4% shooting through 10 games before last night. However, Bridges was the primary scorer for the Nets and had a higher shot volume than he does as a Knick.
Although Bridges’s need to score at the same rate has been reduced in the Knicks’ lineup, he is still a key component of the offense.
In several races that were still too close to call a week out, Republicans were projected to keep majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives and did this Wednesday.
As of Wed., Nov. 13, House Democrats had 207 seats and House Republicans maintained 217 seats. A party needs 218 seats to determine which one wins control of the House for the next four years of Trump’s term. Most estimates were leaning in favor of Republicans by Wednesday afternoon.
“If I have the opportunity to continue to lead House Democrats in either the majority or the minority, it certainly would be an opportunity that would continue to be a great honor,” Dem House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black person to hold that position, had saidabout his future as the top Dem in the country.
Jeffries clinched his re-election in New York’s 8th Congressional District with no real opposition. He scored 74.61% of the votes while his Republican opponent, John J. Delaney, got 22.05%, according to the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) unofficial Election Night results.
With Jeffries’s victory secured, all eyes turned to a cluster of House races in various states, including in California, Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon, and Iowa. Republicans were defending their narrowest House majority in decades, and Democrats only needed to flip four seats to take back control of the chamber.
“Those races are both too early to call in terms of the number of ballots that are still out there — we’re talking about, in some cases, more than 100,000 ballots that have yet to be counted because of the manner in which elections are run in California — and that’s just the reality,” Jeffries said in an NY1 interview. “It’s going to take a week or two. Or others in Southern California [where] we’re still waiting on additional ballots to come in.”
Jeffries said he was especially proud of the effort fellow New York Democrats put into flipping three House seats, two of which had been lost to Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections. Those races include the 22nd Congressional District up in Syracuse, where John Mannion beat incumbent Brandon Williams; the 19th Congressional District in the Hudson Valley, where Josh Riley beat out Mark Molinaro; and out in Long Island’s 4th congressional district, where Laura Gillen won over Anthony D’Esposito.
Regardless of the state wins, Jeffries said that it cannot be ignored that President-elect Donald Trump did better than “almost any other Republican presidential candidate in modern political history” in New York State.
“It was very interesting because in the context of the House of Representatives, we’ve been able to withstand that presidential wave that broke against us,” he said. “By way of example, there were only 194 Democrats in the House of Representatives in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in November of 2016. Both sides believe that whatever happens with the majority in the next Congress, Democrats will be no shorter than 212 to 214 votes, and we still have a clear pathway to taking back the majority.”
Republicans had already usurped control of the U.S Senate, with 53 seats to Democrats’ 47. They needed 50 in total.
In the interim, Jeffries vowed to push back against MAGA extremism whenever necessary, and defend Social Security, Medicare, reproductive health care, the Affordable Care Act, and climate progress.
He also concluded that electeds have to focus on the issues that Americans, especially Black and Brown people, have said they care about throughout this election: inflation and affordability, the broken immigration system, securing the border, and the economy. “I think that people have been feeling economically distressed for decades; certainly in many communities of color. And we’ve got to do a better job of transforming that economic reality,” said Jeffries. “In this particular context, I think the economic anxieties exacerbated by the inflationary pressure that people have been under — gas, groceries in particular, which are everyday expenses and, certainly, rent or the cost of housing — things that consume the day-to-day existence of everyday Americans, and they should … We’ve got to do a better job of addressing those anxieties and coming up with plans to deliver real results.”
The Jets and Giants are still trying to get it right. The Jets have not made the playoffs in 13 years, the longest active streak in the NFL. It is almost certain to extend another year. The Giants have reached the postseason just twice over the past 11 seasons, and it will be 12 when they complete this season.
University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, 22, could be a force multiplier in helping New York’s two NFL teams reverse this negative trend. The leaders of both organizations should be unwaveringly determined to make him the face of their franchise.
Aaron Rodgers will not be back as the Jets QB next season. Daniel Jones is virtually finished as the Giants starting signal caller. Shedeur should be up next for one of the teams even if it requires trading future high draft picks, which might be the price if neither has the NFL draft’s No. 1 overall pick at the end of this season. If it takes moving up in the draft, then that’s what they should do.
Shedeur has stardom stamped all over him as a son of Deion Sanders, one of the greatest football players and athletes of all-time and the head coach of the 7-2 Colorado Buffaloes. Shedeur’s pedigree and resume affirm his talent — he’s the reigning Big 12 Conference Offensive Player of the Week after leading the AP’s No. 18 ranked team as of Tuesday morning to a 41-27 win over Texas Tech this past Saturday, passing for 293 yards and three touchdowns.
Starting his collegiate career with his father at HBCU Jackson State after being recruited by numerous top programs out of Trinity Christian School in Cedar Hill, Texas near Dallas, Shedeur was awarded the 2022 Deacon Jones Trophy as HBCU’s most outstanding player. He has risen to be the No. 1 draft-eligible pro prospect at his position.
Some evaluators have Texas’ redshirt freshman Arch Manning, the nephew of Eli and Peyton Manning, who won’t be draft eligible until 2026, as the most promising. That’s debatable. However, Manning does align with the Giants’ historically safe and relatively conservative quarterback personality profile. So does Jones, even though it hasn’t led to winning many games.
Shedeur, similar to Los Angeles Lakers rookie Bronny James, the son of LeBron James, is built for the immense media spotlight of NewYork City having been raised as an elite athlete of a famous father whose magnetic persona as Prime is iconic.
Contrary to perceptions as a product of Deion’s outsized image, Shedeur is not brash or verbose. He has been characterized as a mature grinder by his coaches and those who know him best. This season, under the tutelage of Pat Shurmur, Colorado’s offensive coordinator and the Giants’ head coach for the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the 6-2, 215 pound prospect has further sharpened his skill set as a lethally accurate passer who can make every throw and cerebrally dissect defensive coverages.
Securing a transformational head coach and transformative quarterback to lift them from the depths of the NFL’s standings and build a sustained playoff contender has been elusive for both the Jets and Giants. The Jets are 3-7 this season heading into this Sunday’s home game versus the Indianapolis Colts and the Giants 2-8 entering their bye-week. Both occupy the bottom space in their respective divisions, the Jets are tied with the New England Patriots for last place in the AFC East and the Giants alone in the NFC East basement.
The Jets will have a new head coach next season after team owner Robert “Woody” Johnson fired former head coach Robert Saleh on October 8 in the midst of a 2-3 start. Since, they have regressed even further. The Jets are 1-4 under Jeff Ulbrich, who was elevated from defensive coordinator to interim head coach status.
Several weeks ago when the Giants were 2-5, co-owner John Mara said he wasn’t going to terminate third-year head coach Brian Daboll after this season, implying he would bring him back for another year. Now, after losing 20-17 in overtime to the Carolina Panthers on Sunday in Munich, Germany, Mara’s calculus might change. The 3-7 Panthers were widely considered the worst team in the league before beating the Giants.
The Giants and Jets need a singular figure to do what dynamic rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels has done in being central to dramatically changing the culture of the Washington Commanders from a dysfunctional franchise to playoff contender.
Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) announced the next phase in their plans to demo and reconstruct the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in lower Manhattan, set to begin in 2025.
NYCHA adopted a Master Development Agreement in October 2024 with terms and conditions agreed upon by the community and all entities involved with the demolition. It also details The Bridge Plan, which calls for repairs and quality-of-life improvements for residents while they wait for construction to start.
“All New Yorkers, especially our residents in public housing, deserve to live in safe, high-quality, and dignified housing — and for the first-time ever in city history, we are completely rebuilding existing NYCHA developments through PACT and ensuring that all existing residents will have brand new apartments on their home campuses,” said Adams in a statement. (PACT is the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together program.)
Rendering courtesy of NYCHA’s PACT partners, Essence and Related, for illustrative purposes only.
The 18 public housing buildings in Chelsea that collectively make up Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses were built in 1947, 1964, 1965, and 1968, respectively. There was a capital deficit and crumbling infrastructure for years after decades of disinvestment, similar to other developments across the city that were placed under an ongoing federal monitorship by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This led to talks of razing two 36-unit buildings and starting from scratch in 2019.
Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city and NYCHA formally created a working group to discuss converting the two buildings into Section 8 PACT/Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) affordable housing. The intent was to craft a plan that would phase in construction so residents would not be displaced.
Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea resident surveys officially began in 2023. Over a 60-day period, resident association leaders, NYCHA, and the PACT Partner hosted town halls, knocked on doors, canvassed thousands of residents in both developments, and held meetings with residents. About 29% of the total eligible population participated in the surveys and of that, more than half opted for new construction, according to city numbers.
In one meeting last September, NYCHA Tenant Association (TA) Presidents said that it’s “unfortunate” that the demolition was happening and that more resident turnout might have prevented the decision to move forward with the demo. There were also concerns about the shift from Section 9 to Section 8 housing and whether this could lead to a demolition of more NYCHA buildings across the city.
“In regards to the demolition of any public housing that’s happening right now, it’s like a domino: If you do one, the next one comes around,” said Manuel Martinez, TA President at South Jamaica Houses. “And then, you got to remember that this is a private management company proposing this idea and if they’re proposing this idea, then there’s a profit function. When someone else is looking at a profit, promises tend to be broken and expectations are leveraged to them, not to us.”
The master development agreement states that all existing 2,056 apartments at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea will be replaced with “high-amenity permanently affordable homes.” Other stipulations include in-unit repairs while the replacement buildings are being constructed, mixed-income and mixed-use communities, centering resident voices to guide the overall redevelopment, ensuring a collaborative process, and ensuring that all residents have rights to a new apartment and to return if temporarily relocated. The plan aims to have the vast majority of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea residents stay in their existing apartments while NYCHA replacement buildings are constructed.
This method of tearing down NYCHA buildings to build new ones has been touted in the past as the more cost-effective approach to preserving affordable housing, but has had mixed results.
After NYCHA tore down 22 decaying tenement buildings on 114th Street in central Harlem in the early 2000s, tenants said they were happy with the results — but “many passed away before the completion.” In the case of the redevelopment of Prospect Plaza, a three-tower complex in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 200,000 units of public housing were destroyed in 2002 and 300 families moved out before the whole project became too expensive to keep as “affordable” housing. Some residents were successfully relocated.
More details about construction timelines will be shared with residents as plans are finalized, NYCHA said.
