The Bulwark — How Progressives Abandoned Progress For Process

IN DECEMBER 2002, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced a plan to bring more housing to New York. As the plan’s details were hashed out, they came to include redeveloping parts of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea. In 2005, the city upzoned Hudson Yards, paving the way for potential future development in the area. Then, in 2009, the city signed an agreement that included a commitment to develop a vacant parking lot at 54th Street and Ninth Avenue, owned by the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, into a few hundred units of affordable housing.

But it wasn’t until August 2022—nearly two decades after Bloomberg sketched out his original proposal and more than a dozen years after the city committed to putting affordable housing on that specific site—that the city voted to approve the permit for the Lirio housing project there. And even now, as of June 2023, construction still has not yet begun. The developer claims the project will be finished by 2025. Count me among the skeptical.