New York City Housing Authority Postwar Projects

The goal of this thesis is to develop a set of design criteria that can be used to evaluate new housing interventions on Tower in the Park public housing sites in New York City. Three projects have been completed in the last ten years, where affordable housing has been built in the place of existing “underutilized” parking lots. With the rising deterioration of housing stock due to several decades without adequate funding, the city is encouraging market rate and affordable housing development within the footprint of existing NYCHA sites. At the same time, the need for senior housing in the city has grown, and several new developments have been built within the existing NYCHA sites to house seniors. These sites have great architectural and social significance, and many interventions fail to engage the historic fabric in a meaningful way. My goal is to determine whether these three additions were supportive of the significance of the site and look at alternate siting possibilities based on analyses of the site that value existing patterns.

Millbrook, Van Dyke, and Ingersoll are similar in site plan, density, height, facade material, program, and date of completion, and so are most useful in determining strategies for future development on high rise public housing sites. I believe that there are on site alternatives and off- site alternatives that better support the significance of these sites.