Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is advancing plans to build a large residential tower on the city-owned site of Manhattan’s last meatpacking plant — but is contending with some unexpected opposition from the local City Council member.
On Wednesday morning the city released a request for proposals for its Gansevoort Square project, which calls for developers to build up to 600 housing units and ground-floor retail on the site, located on Little West 12th Street between 10th Avenue and Washington Street in the Meatpacking District. At least half of the residential units ideally would be permanently affordable, and the city has specified that they should be funded by the developer rather than public subsidies.
The city in October first announced the project, made possible after the operators of the century-old Gansevoort Meat Market agreed to end their lease early thanks to a $31 million buyout from the city’s Economic Development Corp. — a payment that the city did not mention at the time. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which has the rights to most of the market site, will use it to expand its existing adjacent building, and the nearby High Line will construct a new maintenance building on another sliver of the block.
An additional 11,000 square feet will be set aside as public open space, owned and operated by the Whitney.
Proposals for the housing project are due April 30, and the EDC expects to choose the winning team by the end of the year. Officials then hope to see the land-use review process wrap up by the end of 2026 and the project completed by mid- to late-2027.
The housing site covers 10,000 square feet of the roughly 66,000-square-foot block. Because the city is giving itself a small section of the public site, a developer will need to build tall — more than 500 feet high, according to a December presentation by EDC — to accommodate the 600 homes that the city is requesting.
That has sparked early opposition from preservationists — complicating the political landscape for local Councilman Erik Bottcher, who will get final say on the project once it reaches the City Council next year. The neighborhood group Village Preservation has come out against the project, labeling the tower “ludicrously oversized.”
On Tuesday, the eve of the RFP’s release, Bottcher posted on X that he had asked the EDC to pause the solicitation, calling the planned tower “obviously out of scale for the Meatpacking District.” The stance was unexpected, given that Bottcher has typically aligned himself with pro-development causes.
“Is it possible to be both YIMBY while also feeling that 60 stories is a tad bit tall for the West Village? Asking for a friend,” he wrote cheekily in a follow-up post.
Bottcher’s office declined to comment further. His name was conspicuously absent from the Adams administration’s Wednesday press release celebrating the RFP, which instead featured supportive quotes from leaders of the Whitney, High Line and Gansevoort Market — as well as Adams’ omnipresent ally, Queens Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar.
The meat market cooperative that occupied the building agreed to leave in August, in cooperation with the city. After nearly 100 years, its operators were looking for a more modern facility even before the city announced its housing plans.
The Whitney gained its right of first offer to expand onto the meat market site as part of its 2009 deal with the city that paved the way for its current home. Its new expansion building could be as big as 300,000 square feet — larger than its existing building — while the High Line’s new building would be about 30,000 square feet.
The city’s RFP says the development would follow the rules of the 485-x tax break that requires 25% of units to have rents below 60% of the area median income, which is about $93,000 for a family of four. The program was included as a 421-a replacement in last year’s state housing deal, although it has been met with little to no enthusiasm from the real estate industry.
The city estimates the Gansevoort project will create 2,600 construction jobs, more than 160 permanent jobs and $940 million in economic impact. The Adams administration is billing it as part of the mayor’s “Manhattan plan,” laid out in this year’s State of the City address, that calls for building 100,000 new homes in the borough over the next 10 years.
The Adams administration has made increasing the city’s housing supply a top priority and notched a major victory on that front in December, when the City Council passed its package of zoning reforms known as City of Yes, meant to make it easier to build residential projects across the five boroughs. Adams also set a moonshot goal in late 2022 of building 500,000 homes in the city over the next decade and announced plans in last year’s State of the City address to preserve or build affordable housing on 24 public sites in 2024, a goal the city said early this year it had surpassed.
