NYC Picks David Schwartz’s Slate to Develop Inwood Site

The city has tapped Slate Property Group, Xenolith Partners and nonprofit Comunilife to build more than 600 affordable housing units in northern Manhattan.

The team submitted the winning bid to develop 4095 Ninth Avenue, a long-vacant, city-owned site along the Harlem River in Inwood, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced Wednesday.

The project, dubbed La Ostra, is expected to include approximately 625 units, of which 224 will be for senior residents. The other 401 will be subject to HPD’s Extremely Low & Low-Income Affordability program, which calls for most units to be affordable to those earning, at most, 80 percent of the area median income. The apartments will be spread across two buildings, with one rising 15 floors and the other 25.

Unit counts and affordability levels will be finalized when the project secures financing and the property is transferred to the development team.

The project will also include a marine science and STEM education center (operated by the Billion Oyster Project and BioBus) and an indoor-outdoor soccer field.

The plan is years in the making. The one-acre plot, which has sat vacant for the past seven years, was once home to a City Ice and Fuel warehouse and then served as a parking lot for Spectrum. The city originally only owned the waterfront portion of the site, but reached a deal with Spectrum’s parent Charter Communications at the end of 2021 to acquire the portion of the lot that has street access.

The 2018 Inwood rezoning included plans to build more than 900 units of housing on city-owned sites, including the Ninth Street property, the Inwood Library and NYCHA’s Dyckman Houses. A new library and 174 units of affordable housing opened in June 2024, but the city still needs to work with NYCHA residents before moving forward with a new building on the public housing site.

The Ninth Street project will include green technologies, including solar panels, water turbines, algae panels and a sand battery (which uses sand to store heat), according to architect Fernando Villa, of Magnusson Architecture and Planning, which is designing the buildings.

David Schwartz’s Slate recently announced that it is teaming up with Evenhar Development to build a medical office and community facility property at 1578 Lexington Avenue for Mount Sinai. The company has also agreed to build 450 affordable housing units at a parking lot at 54-19 100th Street in Corona, as part of Steve Cohen’s casino plan for Citi Field. That proposal is awaiting final approval from the state Gaming Commission.

The Ninth Street project was part of the Adams administration’s pledge to advance 24 affordable housing projects in 2024 on city-owned sites. HPD released a request for proposals for the site in October of that year. The winning bid’s unit count is slightly higher than the 570 apartments estimated when the RFP was released.

HPD Acting Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said in a statement that the project underscores that his agency is “focused on building not just units, but affordable homes and communities.”