New York City Seeks Jolt for Midtown With Plan to Build 10,000 Homes

The plan, which rezones parts of the Manhattan neighborhood, aims to address the city’s housing shortage and the area’s beleaguered commercial sector.

A new proposal to ease New York City’s housing crisis would make way for nearly 10,000 apartments in parts of Midtown Manhattan that do not currently allow new residential construction, a shift officials hope will reinvigorate an area that has come to represent economic challenge.

The plan, which city officials introduced at a Planning Commission meeting on Tuesday, seeks to change the zoning for 42 blocks of the neighborhood. That would allow for some 9,700 additional homes, including 2,900 designed to be affordable for moderate- or lower-income New Yorkers.

“It’s unfathomable that in an area this central, with a housing crisis this dire, that if you wanted to build housing here, our own rules would simply not allow it,” said Dan Garodnick, the head of the Planning Department.

The plan must be approved by the City Council, which is expected to vote on it this year. It is likely to pass because it has the support of the two Manhattan councilmen, Keith Powers and Erik Bottcher, who represent the area, which has struggled to recover from the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Bottcher said “it doesn’t make sense that we have slots of Midtown Manhattan that don’t support housing at all.”

But he said that as discussions around the plan continue over the next few months, it will be important to find a balance between new construction, the conversion of office buildings to apartments and the needs of existing businesses in the area, like the fashion industry.