Quinlan pays Soho charity $4M for air rights, paving way for condo development

Quinlan Development Group will pay $4 million for air rights from God’s Love We Deliver — a Soho nonprofit that is expanding its headquarters in the neighborhood — and intends to build a 14-story residential condominium project, the New York Times reported.

The charity, which provides the sick and homebound with meals, wants to sell the development rights to raise funds for a $26 million expansion at 166 Sixth Avenue, at Spring Street.

For the developer, the air rights will provide an extra 19,000 buildable square feet for the project, at 180 Sixth Avenue. Current zoning allows for a 14-story building at the site, but without the air rights, it would have had to be much slimmer. The site is currently a vacant lot and an empty retail space.

The building will extend to the charity’s northern wall. Residents of the new condos will have unrestricted access to a 3,360-square-foot rooftop garden atop the nonprofit, which can be entered from their own terraces, the newspaper said. The project will also have a terrace at its second floor, but it cannot count its rooftop as open space, Timothy C. Quinlan of Quinlan told the Times. [NYT] –Mark Maurer