Approval of Manhattan’s Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan Takes a Step Forward
The highly anticipated Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan received a vote of approval on August 6, 2025, by New York City Council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises and Committee on Land Use. As part of the approval, the city council committees reduced the projected number of homes the rezoning will produce from 9,676 units to 9,535 units over 10 years, of which, 2,800 units will be affordable under the city’s mandatory inclusionary housing rules. The reduction in housing unit projections was reportedly the result of two changes in the heart of the Garment District on a few blocks between West 36th and 39th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues, lawmakers deciding to nix “a proposal to allow housing in mid-block buildings, instead keeping them reserved for manufacturing use,” alleviating clothes makers’ worries “that the plan would incentivize landlords to kick them out of their longtime homes by converting their buildings to apartments.” In addition, the Adams administration has agreed to make a contribution of “$122 million to a public-private fund to support Garment District businesses that feared displacement as a result of the plan” according to the article by Crain’s New York. Additional deals secured with the Adams administration are to create a car-free busway on 34th Street which had “seemingly stalled in recent weeks” and the funding of a “$325 million rebuild of Broadway between 21st and 42nd Street what will produce plazas, greenery, a children’s play area between 22nd and 25th Streets, and street beds raised to sidewalk level.” This major rezoning in Midtown “marks the biggest residential rezoning since the 2005 approval of Hudson Yards, and the first-ever chance for the city to permit a category of extra-dense residential buildings that the state legalized last year.” The rezoning plan also offers the potential to “revitalize dozens of aging loft-style buildings in Chelsea, Flatiron, and the Garment District —which have struggled notably since the pandemic but sit in a transit- and job-rich section of Manhattan.” City officials project that among the new housing anticipated to be created on the blocks between 23rd and 41st Streets, about 800-units will be built through conversions, and about half will be made possible by the ability to build bigger than 12 times the size of the building’s lot as a result of changes to state law last year that were “later codified in Adams’ City of Yes plan.