A new city-owned park being built on Manhattan’s far West Side is being supported by neighborhood developers and landlords, but the Related Companies, whose 26-acre Hudson Yards project kisses the park’s southern edge, is refusing to contribute dues, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Executives at Related told people working on the park that the company is already responsible for bankrolling the maintenance and operations of more than 12 acres of open space on the Hudson Yards site, according to the Journal. Paying dues for the park, the executives believe, would amount a form of double taxation.
The park’s first phase is slated to run from West 33rd to West 36th streets. Landlords in the area who are contributing dues feel that Related should step up.
“They should be paying the same thing as everybody else does,” Oskar Brecher, director of development for Moinian Group, told the Journal.
The park is eventually slated to cover a large part of the West Side from West 30th Street to West 42nd Street, and from Ninth Avenue to the east side of 11th Avenue. Landlords would pay into a business improvement district fund based on the square footage, assessed value and type of property they own.
But that proposed area would include the eastern half of Related’s 26-acre development, and the developer feels that the BID boundaries should be redrawn to exclude it.
“We are supportive of the creation of a BID to provide enhanced services to the new neighborhood and maintain the new Hudson Park and Boulevard, funded by the properties that border it and will primarily benefit,” a spokeswoman for Related said in a written statement to the Journal. [WSJ] – Hiten Samtani