An Affordable Housing Project Faced a Huge Backlash. It Won Anyway.

A developer wanted to replace parking garages with affordable apartments in Manhattan, but some residents on the Upper West Side resisted. Here’s why the housing won.

This is The Housing Crunch, a five-part series on New York City’s affordable housing crisis.

On West 108th Street in Manhattan, between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, a modern 11-story apartment building stands in stark contrast to an aging parking garage with boarded-up windows at the other end of the block.

The building holds almost 200 homes that were made to be affordable to the poorest New Yorkers. During a ribbon-cutting in 2022, the Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, called the development “one of the most important affordable housing projects in the city.”

He also said it was the “toughest land use fight” he had ever been in. Even before the development was formally proposed in 2017, thousands of residents banded together against it under the moniker “Save Manhattan Valley,” referring to that part of the Upper West Side. Opponents discussed filing a lawsuit to try to derail the project.

But they lost the battle.

In New York City, where the housing crisis has become a top political issue, new developments often face intense backlash. Opponents say they are worried about traffic and noise or any change to the character of the neighborhood. They say projects will be bad for the environment or for children. The West 108th Street project faced all of that — and still opened its doors.