‘The Billionaires Don’t Give a Flying F—k About Us!’ Chelsea Continues Revolt Against Demolition
CB 4 Land Use Committee Chair Greg Morris tries to cope with frustrated Chelsea residents fed up with plans to demolish their community to make way for new development. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Twenty-one-year-old Chloe Jacobs is a fourth generation Chelsea resident. Her grandparents moved into Penn South during the 1960s when the west side neighborhood was still developing as a cozy enclave where poor and working class New Yorkers could thrive and raise their kids in peace.
Today, however, Jacobs knows all that could very well end with her because the billionaire developers behind the massive Hudson Yards project want what the residents of Chelsea have.
“It is so blatantly obvious that all this project is, is to rid Chelsea of poor people,” Jacobs told Community Board 4’s Land Use Committee on Tuesday night. “That’s it. That’s all this has ever been. They want to create a Chelsea that is Hudson Yards—and Hudson Yards only. They don’t care about anyone in this room. They don’t give a flying f—-k about poor people. They don’t give a flying f—-k about any of us.”
The Chelsea residents who packed the Hudson Guild Center on W. 26th Street this week made it painfully clear to members of the Land Use Committee that they reject the New York City Housing Authority’s leasing scheme to give up the Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton Houses so that Related Companies and its minority-owned partner Essence Development can level their homes and replace them with towering high-rises—most of them containing market rate housing.
Instead of displacing them and turning their neighborhood into an active construction site for at least the next 16 years, residents continue to demand NYCHA do its job and properly maintain public housing like it’s supposed to.
Chelsea residents attending Tuesday night’s Land Use Committee meeting on W26 Street clearly indicate they are against demolition.
“You must choose which side of history and what side of heaven you will be recorded on,” longtime Chelsea resident Luana Green told members of the Land Use Committee. “Will you contribute to the demise of our community—or will you be brave and bold and vote for the truth, transparency, justice and fairness for your residents of Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton Houses?”
Green remembers growing up in Chelsea when public housing residents enjoyed supportive social services that strengthened families and bolstered the entire community. She remembers the very same center where Tuesday night’s Land Use meeting was held as being instrumental to neighborhood life, a place that offered tutorial programs, pottery, band practice, and more.
Now, however, residents say vulnerable neighborhood kids can’t even access the local recreation center when they need it.
“The problem is we have a minority community with very little voter push and very little elected support,” Green later told Work-Bites. “We are dispensable people with dispensable buildings, and a dispensable community. But what [developers] don’t realize is—no—[residents] are not dispensable. They are human beings deserving of a home that’s reasonable to live in. They need clean conditions and safe buildings. They just want to live their lives and be good neighbors. [NYCHA] is not dealing with their problems. [The U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development] is not holding NYCHA responsible for doing their duty.”
Eighty-one-year-old Christina Ember lives in one of the first two buildings slated for demolition under the reportedly $1.9 billion demolition and rebuilding plan. It’s designed specifically and exclusively for elderly residents. But Ember isn’t sleeping well after receiving the 90-day vacate notice she and the rest of her neighbors started receiving last month.
She still doesn’t know where she’ll end up if her building is leveled—and she also worries about forever losing the Section 9 housing protections she now enjoys.
It was a packed house for Community Board 4’s Land Use Committee meeting on Tuesday night.
“They want to take it away, and treat us like dirt,” Ember told Work-Bites on Tuesday night.
Local resident Lizette Colón has seen this kind of treatment before in the City of New York’s multi-year campaign to strip municipal retirees of their Traditional Medicare benefits and force them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.
“[Elderly residents] have been asking for everybody on the board to come and see their apartments. They should see the lovely apartments that they have in the senior building. They don’t want to leave,” Colón told Work-Bites. “They have a community and feel safe. Now, they are going to distribute them wherever they have a vacant apartment.”
Tuesday night was the Land Use Committee’s turn to weigh in on the demolition and rebuilding project before the question goes before the full Community Board for consideration on Sept. 3. Ultimately, the Land Use Committee on Tuesday night approved a motion to reject the plan as currently proposed.
“I’m very glad the committee voted not to support the currently proposed plan—period,” Land Use Committee member David Holowka told Work-Bites following the vote. “It puts our elected officials on the spot for supporting the plan against the will of their own community board.”
But the action, which also came with a number of suggestions signaling the community board might be, as Holowka said, “open to a different path than the one that’s been proposed” was not what the overwhelming majority of residents who turned out for Tuesday night’s meeting and reject demolition demanded.
Will public housing at the Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton Houses be turned over to the developers of Hudson Yards to built market rate housing for the rich?
And although the Land Use Committee supports calls for requiring an opportunity for residents of the Elliott-Chelsea and Fulton Houses to vote on the demolition plan—Holowka also suggested that getting a consensus on demolition isn’t possible.
“Some members feel that partial demolition could make sense with resident approval,” he told Work-Bites.
Colón dismissed Tuesday night’s Land Use Committee meeting—which Chair Greg Morris conceded did not have normal translation services and was hampered with poor amplification—as a circus.
“And it’s very deceptive,” Colón told Work-Bites. “They keep saying we want the best for you—but they’re not my parents. [Residents] know what is best for them. They want their apartments to be renovated and NYCHA has been neglecting them. The city has been neglecting them. And now they want to say, ‘We’ll take care of you—but first you have to leave. You’ll come back in 10 to 15 years, or when you’re dead.’ It’s a joke.”
Work-Bites called and emailed New York City Council Member Erik Bottcher’s [D-3rd District] office for a comment on this story, but we haven’t gotten a response. The Chelsea representative has previously expressed support for the demolition plan.
Community Board 4 will next consider the plan on Sept. 3. That full board meeting will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Pier 57 located at 25 11th Avenue (W. 15 St). in Manhattan. Participants are advised to walk through the food court to the classrooms in the back on the right.