An Unmade Bid

City Cancels Plans to Sell Tribeca Property to Developers

Faced with objections raised by City Council member Christopher Marte, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has dropped plans to auction off to the highest bidder a City-owned building in Tribeca that has been abandoned for almost a decade. The structure, located at 7 North Moore Street between Varick Street and West Broadway (outlined in red on map), was built as an adjunct office facility for the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) in 1939. It was last used in 2015 as locker room and meal facility for DSNY personnel working in Lower Manhattan.

First announced in December, the plan was predicated on DSNY’s determination that the building’s poor state of repair would have made repurposing it for other operational needs prohibitively expensive. This led the agency to begin the process of selling the building (and the land beneath it) through the City’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which automatically triggered the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP).

At the time, Mr. Marte said, “I don’t support this because we should know what gets built there. It’s public land and public property. We should have a say in this and not just give it away. There are a lot of good uses of that can go there.”

He raised these concerns with both DSNY and DCAS. At an April 30 meeting of Community Board 1, Mr. Marte offered an update, saying, “we intervened, especially since the Community Board wrote a resolution that they do not want to just give this site to whatever landlord or developer wanted to take it over.”

This was a reference to a resolution enacted by CB1 in December, expressing “deep concerns about simply disposing of the property by, for example, selling it to the highest-bidding private developer,” when Lower Manhattan has “other great needs for public uses or benefits, including but not limited to additional affordable housing.”

Mr. Marte continued, “so we stopped them from doing so. We told the agencies to go back and reconsider transferring it to other agencies that can possibly use it for other needs. We gave them a few ideas, whether for a senior center or a clinic that Health and Hospitals can run. So DCAS and other agencies are again getting together to give us a framework, then come back to the Community Board and discuss what are some things we would like to prioritize at that site.”

“We don’t know how quickly they’re going do this,” he acknowledged, “but hopefully in the near future, we’ll be able to do something that’s more community oriented at that location.”

A DCAS spokesman confirmed, “responsive to the Council Member’s request that the administration explore other options for the property, DCAS and DSNY withdrew the ULURP application.”

The structure at Seven North Moore, which sits on a lot of 1,405 square feet, is three stories tall and encloses 3,393 square feet of interior space. The lot is located within the Tribeca Mixed Use District and zoned C6-2A for commercial use, with the equivalent residential zoning of R8A. This means that a developer who purchases the building could, as of right, double the size of the current structure, with a six-story building mixing commercial and residential use—most likely with retail or a restaurant at street level and apartments above. If such a developer chose to include any affordable housing with the new building, a zoning bonus could allow it to reach between seven and nine stories.

The value of such a redeveloped building, based on data for Tribeca that includes recent sales, as well as the asking prices of comparable buildings currently offered sale, would likely run to between $5 and $15 million.

Mr. Marte added, “we’re happy that this disposition has been withdrawn due to our desire to find a future use for it that can really benefit our community. Too often, when a blind eye is turned to these small public sites, we see them given away to private developers. We have to utilize what public land we have left to meet the urgent needs of our City—especially our affordable housing crisis.”