460 Main Street Affordable Housing Is Opening

Opening 460 Main Street on Roosevelt Island is a big deal. It increases affordable housing here with new construction for the first time. Quietly. A street ad plus a web page says it’s happening. Now.

By David Stone

With mystifying stealth, Hudson Related tipped off the long awaited opening of 460 Main Street as near. Known as Riverwalk Park, the new building resembles its neighbor at 450 Main in all but price.

This week, the construction shed came down…

After the shed came down…

Update: The lottery for 313 units here is open as of today, April 7th, and you can apply until July 6th, 2020. Details.

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460 Main Street Opening Poster — Relaxing in the sun while my wife went into Duane Reade, I noticed “Reduced Rental Opportunity” on a poster across from the subway plaza. Seconds after my eyes fell on it, I grasped what it was. For whatever reason, the builders shy away from “affordable housing,” but that’s what it is. And that’s how it got funded and approved.

Financing for affordable housing at 460 Main Street comes partly from the city in an agreement approved by RIOC in 2018, before construction started.

Details are slim and an official waiting list is not up, but a link on the website invites you to request a contact. Importantly, it asks for information relevant to affordability.

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460 Main Street Opening Puzzles

The main question involving the opening for 460 Main street is, “When?”

The website doesn’t offer a clue, although it’s clear from the completeness of the pages that it’s near.

But there are other oddities likely to raise eyebrows.

First and foremost: The website boasts of a Whole Foods on Roosevelt Island, which honestly doesn’t exist. Worse, it does not recognize Foodtown.

On a map, an icon where Foodtown should be pops up as “Bread & Butter Deli,” and another nearby, under the helix, pops up as the dry cleaners. Both are as inaccurate as is Foodtown’s absence.

Is it just more evidence of Hudson Related’s cluelessness or something else? I look at it this way. In the 460 Main Street opening website, they left out Cornell Tech too. And they built a world class passive house there.

I’m guessing incompetence.