via Community Board 7 meeting
The Upper West Side’s biggest development in decades has spent two and a half years tangled in a question the zoning code never bothered to ask: how much affordable housing, if any, comes with a 1,200-foot tower? This week, Community Board 7 finally answered with a number of its own, voted to make it the last one it intends to offer, and then heard from the elected official who’s been at the table the whole time that she won’t be backing it.
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The full board voted 41-1 with one abstention on Tuesday night to send Extell Development what the resolution calls CB7’s “best and final offer” for the former ABC campus on West 66th and 67th streets between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, a day after the Housing and Land Use Committee approved it 11-0-1. The ask has two pieces. On-site, CB7 wants roughly 35,000 square feet of affordable housing at 7 West 66th Street, the smaller of the two buildings Extell has proposed for the block, which committee members described as about 30 apartments with a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms. Off-site, the board wants a minimum of 140,000 square feet in one or more separate buildings that are 100 percent affordable, permanently affordable, and located within Community District 7. That’s about 175,000 square feet in all, which the co-chairs estimated works out to somewhere between 10 and 13 percent of the project.It’s a fraction of where the board started. CB7’s earlier resolutions called for 30 percent of the project’s floor area, and with Extell never having supplied a total square footage, members have been working off an estimate of 1.1 to 1.6 million square feet, which would put 30 percent somewhere around 400,000 to 450,000 square feet. Housing co-chair Seema Reddy told the committee Extell’s response to that figure was that it was “insane.” From there, the offers crept up in stages: 90,000 square feet off-site, then 120,000 off-site or a 106,000 hybrid, then 140,000. Extell chairman Gary Barnett first told the committee he was open to affordable housing on the site in May 2025, and this spring the company was presenting options ranging from 120 on-site units to 188 off-site units, according to The Real Deal. Because the tower is an as-of-right project, Extell isn’t required to build any of it. “We don’t really have any jurisdiction over the whole project, sadly,” Reddy told the board.
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Where the off-site building would go is the part Extell hasn’t committed to. Board members said the developer has floated its vacant former apartment building at the northeast corner of Broadway and West 96th Street, the old Citibank site, which one committee member described as fully occupied until Extell began emptying it out several years ago. The lot is underbuilt, and members estimated Extell could put up a 200,000- to 300,000-square-foot building there as of right with no affordable requirement at all. If 96th Street falls through, Reddy said, Extell would be expected to find something else in the district, including by buying property. The resolution requires that none of the affordable space be used to satisfy any other affordable housing obligation, though several members pushed unsuccessfully across both meetings to define “net new” as new housing units rather than new affordable units, worried that Extell could empty an existing building and replace it apartment for apartment.Something else quietly fell out of the deal. The nine-story building of senior studios that Extell and Robert A.M. Stern Architects presented to CB7 last fall at 30 West 67th Street is no longer part of the affordable ask. As one committee member put it, Extell can now “do whatever they want” with that site, and the committee acknowledged the developer never actually promised the units there would be income-restricted.
The longest fight on Tuesday was over timing. The draft that reached the full board tied the affordable housing to building permits rather than occupancy, language several members said was weaker than what the committee had agreed to the night before, and members cited developers who finished market-rate towers years before their promised affordable units. The board settled on requiring delivery “on an expeditious timeline,” struck the word “ideally,” and left the exact mechanism, whether a certificate of occupancy trigger or money in escrow, to be worked out by the board’s lawyers. Extell is paying for CB7’s outside counsel, the firm Herrick, under an existing arrangement; the developer is represented by Fried Frank. The board also struck a reference to “approximately 220 units,” after a member noted the square footage and unit count didn’t line up under city sizing standards, and debated capping the income ceiling at 100 percent of area median income after one member pointed out that the 115 percent tier in the draft could mean households earning around $145,000.
The urgency was hard to miss. Board chair Alex Bell said the board had been meeting with Extell “like every week for the entire summer” and warned the committee that once the tower’s footings go in, “we lose all ability, and then we’re done with, and we get zero.” Another member suggested asking for more than the target to leave room to come down, and was talked out of it on the grounds that Extell would be watching the meeting on YouTube the next morning. Meanwhile, the stop work order issued on the site in July after asbestos turned up during demolition has been lifted, with about a week of remediation left. Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told the board that Extell “has to do better at notifying the community.” Extell filed plans in April for the 86-story tower itself, with 430 apartments and no income-restricted component specified.
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Then Council Member Gale Brewer took the microphone at the end of the meeting. After thanking the committee for its work, she said: “I cannot support something that does not include more on-site housing that is affordable. You put the rich people in one area and the poor people in another. It’s just not how I operate. So we’ll see.” Committee members had said Monday that Brewer was briefed throughout the negotiations and had told them to stay on the current path, while one predicted she wouldn’t block a deal but “may make a rumpus.”Whether Extell agrees is the next question. As one committee member reminded the board, this isn’t a deal. It’s what CB7 is asking for, and if Extell accepts, the next step is a memorandum of understanding and a community benefits agreement that would come back to the board for review.
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