Chair Riley asks HPD to prioritize council-identified library sites

I want to talk about an initiative that the council has presented, which is libraries.

So the council has identified three additional library sites, one of each in New York, Brooklyn, and Queens Public Libraries, Parchester, Marcy, and Sunnyside.

Where the conditions are right, the sites are largely enough to accommodate HPD's development and a new library.

The existing library needs updates, and the surrounding neighborhood has the right conditions to support density.

Is HPD ready to add these sites to the pipeline and make them a priority?

Yeah, thank you, Council Member, and thank you to the Council for the leadership on identifying these sites and expressing that community support up front.

That's really important to being able to move these projects forward.

We share the goal of advancing projects that co-locate libraries with affordable housing.

We have three projects right now that we're advancing through our kind of libraries initiative.

We have the Grand Comp.

Course Library in the Bronx, the new Utrecht Library in Brooklyn, and the Bloomingdale Library on the Upper West Side.

And these projects are important, and they're also, you know, as part of the housing plan, we're looking at other public facilities that are aging in similar ways and need similar investment.

We've got three for you.

Yeah, so...

We're evaluating these sites, we're speaking with the public library systems, and we're eager to continue talking through these opportunities.

We have to balance in our pipeline.

So we've been talking about these opportunities, I believe, started early as soon as Speaker Menden came in, when she said she wanted to potentially look at library sites.

We just haven't heard anything back from the administration.

So I understand that you're reviewing the library sites that you're looking at now.

But there are council members who want to not only upgrade the libraries within their communities, but also add some density.

So I would just ask that on the record, if you guys could actually look at the sites that we're putting to you now to see if we could come up with some form of conversation.

We are looking at the sites.

We've spoken with Council Land just about these specific sites.

We've spoken with the library systems about these specific sites.

We have a long pipeline of sites that we've already committed to communities to develop.

Like this year, we're working on sites that we've committed to council members to move forward, and we're excited to move those forward and want to figure out how we can fit these into our pipeline.

Okay.

We need to talk about that some more, but all right.

Thank you.