The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) has proposed a $98 million plan to convert the closed Lincoln Correctional Facility into the Seneca, a 22-story mixed-development building, including approximately 110 affordable homeownership units, but the plan has drawn criticism from Harlem leaders and residents for projecting prices above the affordable range for a majority of community members.
The plan, which was released on December 19, 2024, will offer “homeownership units for households earning 80% and 100% of the Area Median Income” (AMI). The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which releases annual reports on the AMIs for all cities across the country, defined $139,800 as the AMI for a three-person household in New York City in 2024.
An analysis of 2023 American Community Survey data by the NYU Furman Center found that in Central Harlem, where the Lincoln Correctional Facility is located, the median household income is $51,990 — 37% percent of New York City’s AMI for a three-person household. The plan’s proposed 80% income cap on affordable homeownership units in the Seneca would restrict the units to households earning approximately two times the median income in Central Harlem, a neighborhood that residents say is already grappling with a housing crisis.
“The fact that they’re so off in terms of these income levels is a scary thought,” said Kai Cogsville, founder of Defend Harlem. “It shows that they don’t really, honestly care too much about the actual community and the people that make this city thrive.”
The Lincoln Correctional Facility building has a storied history, beginning with its opening as a community center for young Jewish women in 1914, use as a rest center for Black soldiers during World War II, and conversion into a school in the 1940s.
In 1976, the building was converted into a low-security prison, which operated for decades until former Governor Andrew Cuomo closed the facility in 2019 as part of a state initiative to decommission state prisons. The building reopened in summer 2023 as a temporary shelter for asylum seekers.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced in March 2023 that the facility would be redeveloped, stating that it represented a “prime opportunity” to address “critical needs such as affordable housing.” In December 2023, Infinite Horizons, L+M Development Partners, Urbane, and Lemor Development Group won the bid to redevelop the facility into the Seneca.
Named after Seneca Village, a community of predominantly Black landowners whose properties were seized by the state through eminent domain for the construction of Central Park, the proposed site would include a combination of community spaces, so-called affordable homeownership units, and residential amenity spaces. The project initially offered Harlem residents the possibility of owning property overlooking Central Park, a view that has gotten steadily more expensive over the past few decades.
“The transformation of the former Lincoln Correctional Facility will expand affordable homeownership in Harlem with 105 units for working New Yorkers, creating opportunities for working families to build intergenerational wealth,” an ESDC spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Amsterdam News. “ESD, in partnership with its development partner, remains committed to working with local leaders and to ensure this project serves the community and its needs.”
The ESDC plans to partner with Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, a coalition of interfaith organizations involved in supporting programs related to affordable housing and economic development, to make neighborhood residents aware of the future affordable homeownership units. However, several elected officials and community members have alleged that the ESDC has made minimal effort to engage with the community in its creation of the Lincoln Correctional Facility plan.
At the ESDC’s Jan. 23 virtual public hearing about its proposed plan for the Lincoln Correctional Facility, State Sen. Cordell Cleare, Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs, District Leader William Smith, District Leader William Allen, and other community members testified their opposition to the development. More than 80 community members, including Cogsville, also attended the hearing, where several testified in opposition to the plan as well.
At the hearing, Cleare and Smith criticized the use of AMI’s as a measure of affordability, due to it being significantly higher than the incomes of district residents.
“Many people in our community — our East Harlem community and lower Central Harlem community — are being priced out and dealing with [a] significant rise in rents,” Smith said at the hearing. “Rent inflation is a very big issue. The fact that we’re having a project that’s being built in our community — we want to ensure that local residents are getting the largest percentage in access to the units and also that the AMI levels are realistic.”
New York City’s AMI, which includes the median household incomes of New York City’s five boroughs and Rockland, Westchester, and Putnam counties, has been criticized by housing activists as unrepresentative of the economic realities of many New York residents, yet remains a key measurement to determine eligibility for city-financed affordable housing projects.
In a Jan. 24 letter to Empire State Development senior project manager Christopher Wasiff that was shared with the Amsterdam News, Cleare wrote that “prices put forward to address housing insecurity in Harlem must be adjusted to mirror the median income of Black residents from Harlem.
“I want to echo District Leader Smith’s testimony and urge the ESDC to halt any future action on this project until more community input is taken into account, and deeper affordability is finally promised.”
At the hearing, several community members also expressed concerns that the project would contribute to Harlem’s ongoing gentrification. In Central Harlem, the population of Black residents has decreased by more than 20% since 2000. A similar situation has unfolded in West Harlem, where the population of Black residents has declined by 14% and the population of Hispanic residents has declined by 10% since 2010.
A 2024 report by the Community Service Society found that West Harlem’s demographic changes accelerated following the beginning of Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus expansion, a project authorized by the ESDC in 2008.
“I think the governor has turned her back on our community, and so has the ESDC,” said Cogsville, whose organization Defend Harlem protested against Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion.
Several Harlem residents echoed Cogsville’s dissatisfaction with the ESDC, noting the organization’s lack of meaningful community engagement at the Jan. 23 hearing.
“I feel like the state should have come to the community board and given us some information about what they were thinking, what was going on,” said Donna Gill, a member of Community Board 10, at the hearing.
She said that conversations about the Lincoln Correctional Facility’s redevelopment was “just all done in silos without community involvement,” and expressed a concern about the affordability of high-rise building projects such as the Seneca for Harlem residents.
“I view it as a displacement for the people that have been in this community and continue to want to stay in this community, but the prices are pricing us out and we really have nowhere to go,” Gill said.
I don’t understand why this article completely skips over the substantial portion of this building’s history as the home of the interracial progressive New Lincoln School as well as the Westside Psychiatric Center run by Dr. Mamie Clarke, the wife of Dr. Kenneth Clarke. This is a storied building. I went to school there. The graduating class of 1968 held a reunion there in which some graduates from 1969, such as myself, and 1970 such as my sister participated, during which we all got to see what the facility was like. It seems to me that the prison authority sold this building to whomever is now developing the housing. I gather there have been a lot of meetings but as typically with so called affordable housing in Harlem, and all over the country, it is never affordable for the people who are actually in need of such housing. Here we go again.