South Bronx's Hunts Point Station

This report documents the recent activities of RPA’s Community Links, an initiative that applies RPA’s experience with transit-oriented community development throughout the region to leverage benefits in low-income neighborhoods. This model was profiled in the Funders Network publication Signs of Promise. Advancing Regional Equity and Smart Growth in Practice: Promising Philanthropic Initiatives. That publication identifies one of RPA’s projects, the East Harlem Community Link Initiative, as a benchmark for transit-oriented development planning in the field, and highlights the project as an example of current practice in connecting communities to regional opportunities.

Specifically, this program has strenghthened the connections between transit, development and community participation and involvement in the New York Region’s Urban Core. Building on the East Harlem experience over the last year, RPA has worked with community organizations in the South Bronx to create a framework for better utilizing transit assets in the changing neighborhood of Hunts Point/Longwood. We hope that this project will demonstrate the effectiveness of community-based regionalism by connecting transit investment and community revitalization in an area that has both existing subway service and the potential for new commuter rail service.

The lessons learned from this project can inform a broad range of opportunities throughout New York City and the Tri-State region. The region is poised for a generation of investment in new transit services, from the Second Avenue Subway and a new Trans-Hudson Tunnel to Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central Terminal and Metro-North service to Penn Station. These areas are also the location of some of the region’s low-income neighborhoods and the home of a large share of the new immigrants who are revitalizing the economy. This fact requires that we center growth on existing infrastructure to ensure the accessibility, sustainability and affordability of new development. To take advantage of the urban transit-oriented development (TOD) opportunities created by these projects, the initiative developed both an inventory of locations where community development and TOD can be joined, and the insights gained from the Hunts Point/Longwood demonstration.

First, the initiative devised criteria to identify and map both bypassed communities and ​“new immigrant” neighborhoods that could capitalize on underutilized or new transit stations to create affordable housing and job opportunities. We identified potential locations for a demonstration project for transit-oriented development in the region’s urban core. We established criteria, collected and analyzed data, and mapped disadvantaged communities with transit-oriented development potential in the five boroughs of New York City through the following steps:

1. Established criteria, including income levels, transit capacity and development capacity.
2. Developed project and station inventories based on these criteria.
3. Produced maps relating sites to transportation infrastructure and land use.
4. Selected a potential site and study area.

This first phase of work identified the site of a potential Metro-North station in Hunts Point/Longwood in Bronx County, NY and its surrounding neighborhoods as the most promising area for a demonstration project. RPA has worked with local stakeholders there to educate the community about its potential and help it visualize a development that capitalizes on these assets for the benefit of neighborhood residents. Former commuter rail stations such as Hunts Point on the Metro-North New Haven commuter rail line could provide catalysts for affordable housing and job opportunities that will be needed to accommodate the continued inflow of new residents who have fueled the labor force in the 1980s and 1990s, and will continue to do so in the coming decades.

The second phase developed an urban design and planning framework for the Hunts Point Station area by undertaking the following steps:

1. Established a community advisory group to guide the project.
2. Synthesized all of the existing plans and analyzed them in terms of their relationship to the new train station.
3. Analyzed development potential near the transit station, including analysis of zoning, land use, housing and commercial demand, local demographics and regional market opportunities.
4. Analyzed existing and potential use of transit resources in the study area, including the ridership benefits of the new Metro-North service.
5. Organized and led a community briefing workshop and illustrated urban design options that provide the basis for a feasibility analysis of the proposals

The results of this second phase of work describe the station’s transit implications and development impacts, synthesize active community plans for the area around the station, identify soft sites for redevelopment and potential reverse-commute labor market opportunities, and define an urban design and planning framework as the foundation of further work in the community. A more detailed description of the project methodology can be found in Appendix I.

The project led to the identification of several potential demonstration communities and found Hunts Point/Longwood in Southeastern Bronx as the most suitable area in which to focus the demonstration project. Hunts Point has subway service with growing ridership and additional capacity, is being considered for a commuter rail station on the Metro-North New Haven line, and has vacant and industrial land uses that are likely to undergo increasing pressure for development. These conditions lend themselves to interim development as well as long-term community visioning and planning. Community support for the construction of the rail station has been identified by Metro-North Railroad and in community based plans for the area. Before selecting the Hunts Point/Longwood area, possible stations in New York City were selected using a range of demographic, transportation and development criteria.