CB4 Letter Blasts Proposed Zoning Changes For Possible $12 Billion Hudson Yards Casino

As Related Co. seeks to earn the rights to operate a casino complex in Hudson Yards, it is drawing the ire of a local community board, in part because a new proposal drastically cuts the number of housing units that will be built.

“MCB4 must note it cannot support the proposed project’s drastic shift from residential to commercial use,” the board wrote in a blunt April 1 letter, which was sent to the development giant Related Co. and the NYC Department of City Planning.

The letter further posed a rhetorical question: “Why should communities around the City of New York work with the real estate industry and the City government to respond and agree to zoning changes...when such plans and agreements can be discarded at a later date?”

CB4 made the charges in response to proposed zoning modifications to the Hudson Yard Special District’s “West Rail Yard,” which would allow Related Co. to build their $12 billion project; the community board succinctly portrayed this as “2 oversize commercial towers, one of a hotel with 1,750 keys, sitting on the equivalent of a 20-story base containing a casino.”

Instead, the board wrote, they’d rather see the city government and Related Co. stick to a negotiated 2009 zoning rulebook known as the “West Yard Point of Agreement.” They called this “the result of a thoughtful and collaborative process, painstakingly negotiated among the city, the Related Companies, MCB4 and the Hell’s Kitchen community 15 years ago.”

What the zoning agreement intended to foster, the letter added, was a “dense residential neighborhood with small residential footprints to maximize light, air and views from the public open spaces.” The proposed modifications, CB4 believes, would throw most or all of that away.

One way it would do that, the letter claimed, is by reducing “the number of planned dwelling units from 5,762 in the West Rail Yards Points of Agreement to 1,507 in the proposal.”

Of course, Related Co.–who is partnering with Wynn Resorts on the casino proposal–dispute the notion that they will be disrupting the community by constructing a casino. As Straus News reported in March, the two developers claimed that their proposal would be the “single largest investment ever to be made in the local communities of Chelsea, Hudson Yards, Hell’s Kitchen and the entire West Side.”

Some of the other proposal elements that CB4 asked for more “study” on, or outright changes to, include: the extent of publicly accessible open space, shadow impacts, the impact of hazardous materials, the management of stormwater, waste and trash mitigation, pedestrian safety, transportation access, addiction issues, and the usage of carbon-emitting natural gas.

CB4 elaborated on how the zoning modifications would irrevocably transform the Hudson Yards Special District. “The varied, crafted open spaces will be consolidated into one bounded by the 20-story casino wall to the North and shadowed by a 1,366-foot-tall commercial tower to the south...the result will be an inward looking, protected enclave for an inward focused casino, disconnected from the surrounding community,” the letter reads.

The community board’s letter was formally intended as a response to a “Draft Scope of Work” that outlined the proposed zoning changes, and indeed, the changes remain in the preliminary stages of approval. Specifically, the proposal has been going through a period of environmental review. CB4 said that the letter effectively summarized their participation in that process.

CB4 also seemed to promise that they wouldn’t let up the heat on Related Co. and the city any time soon, dryly writing that they will “act in similar fashion as the proposal proceeds to the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP).”

Related Co. did not return a request for comment as of press time.