Chair Riley reads Council Member Farias' question on school site co-location

I have a statement by Councilmember Farias that I'm going to read and then ask you guys a question.

The block-by-block report states that one of its goals is to maximize the potential of city-owned land, including school properties as sites that can support new housing.

My question concerns 1880 East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, located near White Plains Road.

As a part of the Bronx Metro North Rezoning, this site was expected to be developed with over 500 units of new housing with at least 125 affordable units,

along with publicly accessible open space and neighborhood serving retail.

However, the majority of the site is now slated for a development as a school.

When the city plans new schools on city-owned property, what process is used to assess opportunities for co-locating housing?

Is there a formal framework or set of criteria used to evaluate whether a site can accommodate both educational and residential uses?

And how will the city ensure that publicly owned sites are being evaluated?

comprehensively so that opportunities to produce housing are not missed when other public facilities are planned.

And once again, this is Councilmember Amanda Farias from the Council District 18 asking this question.

Okay, thank you.

I can speak a little bit to the Mayor's LIFT initiative, the Land Inventory Fast Track.

This was an executive order issued on day one of the administration.

The executive order tasks us with looking comprehensively at the city's assets to evaluate which assets can be

used to develop affordable housing or housing generally.

And as part of that executive order, it also ordered that agencies pursuing capital projects on city-owned assets have to coordinate with the list task force to evaluate the opportunity for housing.

So that coordination is happening now as a result of this task force.

And we have DCAS and a number of different agencies, including HPD, EDC, Department of City Planning, who are all looking at city-owned sites.

And then as different capital projects are coming through on or proposed capital projects on city-owned sites, we're looking at should this project move forward or should we be looking at housing and co-location in addition to that facility?

Well, originally this site was supposed to be housing, and now they're talking about...

Majority of yeah I'm not familiar with the exact site so I'll have to follow up and look into that okay all right

okay if you guys could look into it because this we held the process community input many community members thought that this was going to be housing opportunities and now it's going to be

a school which we embrace and welcome new schools of course um talking to any other council members you could tell them that they are trying to get as much new schools in the district as possible

but specifically for council member faris this was something that was supposed to happen in a district so if you could just follow up with her because um it's a concern to that community yeah we'll follow up with council member faris