A community tries to balance development with affordability

The Church of the Good Shepherd on Roosevelt Island will be home to a new concert series this summer designed to benefit the community both artistically and tangibly, as donations will be collected for the church’s food pantry at each event. The concert series caters to those seeking Manhattan-style cultural fulfillment while at the same time recognizing that the island is not (yet) 21st-century Manhattan. Instead, Roosevelt Island is an explicitly mixed income community just across the river, where for over 30 years the state has maintained affordable housing. The affordability of Roosevelt Island has allowed for large numbers of working class, elderly, and disabled residents to call it home. The island has a small-town feel, with a relatively large number of community organizations for its small population of around 12,000 residents.

Construction is underway on the final stages of Riverwalk, a new development on Roosevelt Island.

Photograph by Jennifer Bussell

However, continued development of the island has recently brought an influx of more affluent residents who are looking for cultural amenities more typical of the rest of New York City. “When I moved to Roosevelt Island last July, I moved from Lower Manhattan where there was much happening culturally—with music and the arts,” said Marianne Labriola, the concert series’ artistic director. “I met a number of residents… and found that they were craving more arts on the island, especially music… People want to be able to go out their door (without crossing over to Manhattan) and do something interesting.”

The new residents have contributed more than just increased demand for cultural events; they have galvanized new businesses on Roosevelt Island, from a Starbucks and Duane Reade drug store to more upscale restaurants. The new businesses are concentrated in the southern part of the island, known as Southtown, where the recent development is occurring as the second phase of the original master plan. Even those who are enthusiastic about the new retail options contrast the improvement in Southtown with the situation in older Northtown. “We have a revitalized commercial situation,” said Opher Pail, the co-chair of the Westview Task Force, which is fighting rent increases in the Westview building in Northtown. “The problem still is if you walk along Main Street in Northtown, the commercial environment is very empty, and you see closed storefronts.”

The island’s development as a residential community began in 1968, when New York City Mayor John Lindsay organized a committee to find uses for what was then known as Welfare Island, having served for decades as a site for city prisons, asylums, hospitals, and nursing homes. After the committee agreed on a residential community, the city signed a 99 year lease with the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which was charged with developing the island following a master plan created in 1969 by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The plan calls for mixed income housing for approximately 20,000 residents.

Development proceeded in phases, with most of the housing designated “affordable” being built first to avoid the risks associated with developing market rate housing, according to Stephen Shane, the current president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), which now runs the island. In 1989, developers built Manhattan Park, which provided the first market-rate housing on the island. Rockefeller University’s housing on Roosevelt Island is in Manhattan Park.

According to Shane, an agreement for Weill-Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center each to pay for a building to house their staff galvanized the second major phase of development, which includes the Riverwalk projects in Southtown and the Octagon, a luxury condominium development featuring the octagonal rotunda of a 19th century hospital on the north side of the island. It is these developments which have brought in more affluent residents. “It’s an interesting dynamic,” Shane said. “It’s ripe for socioeconomic study because of the timing differences as to when people came here. There is an older and graying population from more modest means and newer people arriving in the market rate units.”

The new developments have met with controversy, as other island residents allege that they violate the terms of the master plan. The Octagon, in particular, was not included in the General Development Plan (GDP), the master plan adopted by RIOC in 1984, and offers only market rate condominiums. The Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) unsuccessfully sued the state to block its construction.

Island residents also allege that the developers of Riverwalk, the Related Companies and the Hudson Companies, have used the Weill-Cornell and Sloan-Kettering employees as a way to bypass the GDP’s affordable housing requirements. “What we have seen in the development of Southtown is that the promises made within the GDP [to maintain a] ratio of low to high-income residents have been utterly abandoned,” said RIRA president Matthew Katz. “The premise of the original organizers has simply been violated. The island has been becoming a high income gated community.”

Local blogger Rick O’Connor agrees that hospital staff may not be the lower income residents originally envisioned in the master plan. “They fit the affordable housing component, but that’s not really what ‘affordable housing’ is meant to convey,” Rick said. “They may fit the income requirements, but from the point of view of someone who has been living here for 25 years and may be on disability or retirement, that really doesn’t help them.”

Developers of the newer buildings see the influx as positive, bringing in active residents and consumers needed to bolster the island’s businesses, and maintain that they are following the development plan. “The new residents are already getting involved in all the Roosevelt Island civic organizations. Having more people live on the island helps make the retail stores more successful,” said David Kramer, a principal at the Hudson Companies. “Riverwalk was always intended to be built by the master development plan, and until we started building in 2002, the island was under-populated. We still have a 40% affordability requirement for Riverwalk.”

Authorities maintain that the newly installed state government as well as local officials are committed to keeping the island affordable. “Most of us who are here now believe that affordable housing is a public resource,” Shane said. “We are doing whatever we can to ensure that it stays a mixed income community and maintains its character that way.”

While many local residents are excited by the prospect of more to do on the island, there are concerns about how gentrification will affect island residents with less disposable income. “[Pricing out residents is] an issue which does exist here, as it does in any gentrifying New York City neighborhood,” O’Connor said. “The difference with Roosevelt Island… is that it’s very, very small… It’s geographically isolated because we’re surrounded by water, so any change is magnified more.”

However, despite the large number of community organizations, Labriola had trouble getting them to sponsor her concert series. In the end, she partnered with the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd. The partnership will allow residents of all economic backgrounds to attend the concerts as well as benefit the food pantry. The Episcopal congregation, which expects to continue its growth with parishioners new to Roosevelt Island, is one of several users of the Good Shepherd building, which is also home to a much larger Catholic congregation and the island’s community center. “People on Roosevelt Island don’t know about us,” said Pastor Lewis Johnson. “We’re hoping this concert series might make us a little more visible on the island.”