The Metropolitan Transportation Authority wants to rezone an East Harlem block to allow for a large new residential building atop the future terminus of the Second Avenue Subway extension. The project, which would help steer money toward the MTA, will be an early test of the new extra-dense housing allowed under New York’s City of Yes plan.
The MTA filed plans Tuesday to rezone the block on the south side of East 125th Street between Third and Lexington avenues, beneath which the final station of the future Q line will be built no earlier than 2032. The MTA would pick a private developer to build an apartment tower with up to 684 units on an MTA-owned site on the block’s west side.
The project would also steer revenues toward the transit authority, which would get money from the future developer through a ground lease and payments in lieu of taxes. Sean Fitzpatrick, deputy vice president for construction and development at the MTA, said the move to boost housing near the subway is a response to the first Upper East Side phase of the Second Avenue line a decade ago, where the city and state did little to encourage development.
“One of the lessons learned from Second Avenue Phase One is I don’t think we did enough transit-oriented development, both as a means of recouping some of the costs of the project with the property that needs to be acquired … and also in terms of making the end product feel more integrated with the community, and more active,” Fitzpatrick told Crain’s.
The properties around the future subway line have seen a flurry of dealmaking in recent years. The MTA bought the future development site from Extell for $82 million in 2023, after initially considering seizing it through eminent domain. The block’s east side, also formerly owned by Extell, was acquired in December for $70 million by JCS Realty, which is planning a 15-story residential project.
Although the rezoning would affect that site as well, the MTA has no indication that JCS is changing its plans as a result, officials said.
The block being rezoned has sat vacant since 2015, when a Pathmark supermarket that long occupied it was demolished. The site was mostly exempted from the city’s 2017 East Harlem rezoning as part of an unsuccessful effort to keep the supermarket open, and the MTA says its proposal would simply bring the block’s zoning in line with the denser construction already allowed nearby on Park Avenue.
The proposal would give the block a new mixed-use zoning designation — C6-11 — that was created through the City of Yes reforms approved in December, and enabled by the state law approved last year that lifted a decades-old cap on residential density. The future building would have a floor-area ratio of 15, exceeding the city’s previous limit of 14.
The building will include a subway entrance on its ground floor, along with 5,000 square feet of retail space. One-quarter of the 684 apartments would be income-restricted through the mandatory inclusionary housing program.
The MTA will issue a request for proposals to find a developer. But that process is years away: The RFP would not be issued until construction is underway, and the development would be finished around 2032, according to a presentation the MTA gave to a local community board. The MTA is pursuing the rezoning now because the federal government requires local approvals to be in place before the project gets underway, officials said.
After years of negotiations, the MTA said earlier this year that it has finished acquiring the dozens of private properties it needs to start construction on the Second Avenue Subway extension — although the authority needs 17 additional sites to build out the new stations at 106th Street and 116th Street.
