


It’s a done deal! Gov. Kathy Hochul announced she’d struck an agreement with lawmakers to develop an apartment-filled skyscraper at 5 World Trade Center on Thursday, ending a two-year fight over the building.
The Lower Manhattan tower will include 1200 new apartments, with roughly 400 units going to low-and moderate-income New Yorkers — 80 of which will be set aside for 9/11 survivors and first responders.
“It’s not just about the skyscrapers,” Hochul told a room full of dignitaries celebrating the deal’s announcement in Lower Manhattan on Thursday. “It’s about the people who inhabit them.”
Hochul said it would be the largest single housing project in the apartment-starved Financial District in decades.
The state’s obscure but powerful overseer of redevelopment projects, the Public Authorities Control Board — which has three voting members, appointed by Hochul, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Westchester) and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-The Bronx) — blessed the project shortly before Hochul took the stage.
It brings an end to a two-year battle over the future of the site, which developers proposed should be flipped from an office tower to residential in 2021 as the Big Apple’s housing crisis intensified and the coronavirus pandemic cratered demand for commercial space.
The plans initially drawn up by the partnership of Brookfield Properties and Larry Silverstein called for building a tower approximately 900 feet tall that would house some offices alongside more than 1,300 apartments — 25 percent of which would be rent-stabilized.
Some neighborhood activists pushed back hard, arguing the entire tower should be set aside and put into affordable housing programs because the building would be built on government-owned land. The developers countered it would require a half-billion-dollar subsidy.
They also pushed that preference for the apartments be given to survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks and set aside 80 affordable units for Sept. 11 survivors and first responders.
“This is really a huge addition to affordability in a community that has over the last two decades lost affordability at a greater rate than almost any other community in this state,” said state Sen. Brian Kavanaugh, who represents the neighborhood and is the chairman of the chamber’s housing committee.
Hochul and state lawmakers threw in $65 million in additional state funding to subsidize boosting the number of units in rent stabilization.
Under the deal, households of three making between $50,840 and $152,520 would be eligible for an income bracketed unit — with the bottom end of the spectrum paying $1,271 a month, while the top end would pay up to $3,813.
Officials said that nearly two-thirds of the affordable units would go to families making between $50,840 and $101,680.
The tower will be developed by a consortium of real estate powerhouses, including Silverstein Properties, Omni New York, Brookfield Properties and Dabar Development Partners.
“We figured out the formula, we didn’t walk away, we walked for each other, and that’s how we got to the right place,” said a triumphant Hochul.