Timber and a tax break: New RFP lures developers to Staten Island

Not exactly known for environmentalism, Staten Island will become a showcase of mass timber construction — if city officials can persuade a developer to try it.

The city issued an RFP Thursday for someone to build 500 apartments using wood. Two 50-foot-tall buildings would go on city-owned land along the Stapleton waterfront on the North Shore, about a mile from the Staten Island ferry terminal.

“This is the biggest opportunity to use mass timber at scale in the city,” said Melissa Román Burch, chief operating officer of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which put out the request for proposals.

Up for grabs are 99-year ground leases on two parcels just south of the Urby, a 571-unit residential project developed by Ironstate at 7 Navy Pier Court, where tenants can watch boats come and go from the Homeport pier that juts into the New York Bight.

With the expiration of 421a, virtually no one is building rentals without subsidies. But this project comes with a tax break.

The winning developer will make payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to the city for the rights to build the projects, which will be “fully capitalized privately,” Román Burch noted. One quarter of the apartments will be reserved for households earning between 40 percent and 80 percent of the area median income.

The projects are “the next step forward in delivering on the Adams administration’s North Shore Action Plan,” said Andrew Kimball, EDC’s president and CEO. The plan envisions more than 2,100 new apartments on the North Shore, Román Burch said.

The call for arboreal apartments follows a $400 million commitment from the city to beautify the Stapleton waterfront in the image of Brooklyn Bridge Park or Hunters Point South Park.

Revitalizing Staten Island’s waterfront physically and economically has long been a goal of city authorities, but getting the 7 million people who ride the ferry to Staten Island each year to explore the “forgotten borough” has proven challenging. And the borough’s woeful transportation network renders the North Shore difficult to reach for most of the island’s 475,000 residents.

BFC Partners’ Empire Outlet Mall, meant to draw hordes of bargain hungry shoppers, started out on poor financial footing because of the pandemic and succumbed to foreclosure. The New York Wheel died part way through construction. And the Staten Island Yankees packed their bags in 2020, leaving a city-funded stadium that never came close to delivering the results predicted by the Giuliani administration.

Residents have long complained that parts of the island’s waterfront, with views of southern Manhattan and the Verrazzano Bridge, remain inaccessible to pedestrians.

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In response, Román Burch said the September announcement of the North Shore Action Plan for Staten Island showed that “the public sector is taking the lead now,” and predicted that public-private partnerships like the Stapleton waterfront plan will work best.

“Investment in parks is critical to activating neighborhoods,” she added, “and making successful, long lasting places that are loved and cherished.”

According to the EDC, redeveloping the two-mile waterfront from Stapleton to St. George will deliver more than 20 acres of public space and 7,500 jobs over the next 30 years.