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For years, the far West Side of Manhattan has been a lonely place. The Javits Center, New York’s convention center that had been plagued with structural, not to mention locational, problems since the start, didn’t do much to resurrect the area. It has been an industrial and residential no man’s land, north of Chelsea and south of Hell’s Kitchen—the poor nabe doesn’t really have a name, much less an identity.
This weekend was part of the major change to that legacy and the continuing change to real estate in the area; developers are now calling it the “New West Side.” A spanking new, $2.4 billion subway stop, and three parks with it, was opened at 34th and 11th Avenue—the farthest west of any Manhattan stop. It’s New York City’s first brand-new subway stop in more than 25 years.
So will this help make Manhattan’s last remaining wild west neighborhood a great—and maybe even affordable—place to live?
By 2018, there will be some 20,000 new units of housing, thanks to the Hudson Yards development, a site bounded by West 42nd and 43rd Streets, 7th and 8th Avenues, West 28th and 30th Streets, and Hudson River Park.
None of those residential buildlings, the first of which are designed by starchitect firms such as SOM and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is open yet. (“The first two residential condominiums, 15 Hudson Yards and 35 Hudson Yards, will be available within the next few years,” they offer vaguely.) But, as the Hudson Yards site points out, you can still live nearby.
Their suggestion: a series of luxury buildings created by developers Related. The cost of a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit at Abington House at 29th Street and 10th Avenue: $10,500. Huh. Guess that no-man’s land thing hasn’t fully deterred folks from the area.
So will thousands of additional units, and the cool new subway stop, bring prices down? Sadly, not likely.
“In a city like New York where mass transit is key to livability, the new stop will likely drive nearby rents and prices higher as the area will be more attractive to more people who are willing to pay a premium for better transportation access,” says Jonathan Smoke, chief economist of realtor.com®.
The fact that the neighborhood is gaining amenities by the minute—and the fact that this most inaccessible of Manhattan locales is now slightly more accessible—will only make it more desirable. And we already know that New York City housing somehow manages to elude the laws of supply and demand, anyway.
Not that everything will be all shiny and spectacular now. For one thing, New Yorkers already have complaints about the new station, which was funded almost entirely by the city (rather than the usual brew of city, state, and federal funding). Though it has lovely mosaics overhead and the first diagonal, inclined elevators in the city, riders don’t care much for the vertiginous 125-foot decent into the city, nor the price tag. As one tweet said:
As far as $billion boondoggles go, at least the "Big Dig" was big. #7lineextension would've been a waste at half price.
— CassiusK (@UWRockBuster) September 14, 2015
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