The fight for affordable housing in New York City has come to one of Lower Manhattan’s most important developments in recent memory.

An online petition organized by the New York Review of Architecture and Citygroup has been circulating that appears to call for a 75% increase in the number of affordable units in the 900-foot 5 World Trade Center. The document, titled 100% Affordable, pressed developers to do away with the current plan, which designates 300 of the development’s 1,200 rental units for tenants earning less than 50 percent of the median income, in favor of a more progressive scheme that would prioritize 9/11 survivors and frontline workers in an alternative to the recently-approved KPF design. 

“This is not an abstract, pie-in-the-sky call for ideas,” the group’s statement reads. “This call is structured around the actual approval process for the tower. The developers backing the current proposal claim that this degree of affordability is untenable given the enormous construction and labor cost of building a supertall tower in Lower Manhattan. Counter to this, the community coalition, who now have significant political support, argue that providing deep affordability at this publicly owned site, purchased with federal funds, is a crucial political and symbolic gesture.”

The fight to make the tower more affordable was profiled by The New York Times in the fall as public attention to the matter began to gain traction and support from local politicians like Jerry Nadler, who sent a letter to the Empire State Development Corporation in August requesting an expansion of funding for affordable units on the 16-acre site.

“The timing is like by divine design,” Coalition for a 100% Affordable 5 WTC founder Mariama Jame said of the moment. “The 20-year anniversary, the housing crisis, the pandemic — it’s like the perfect recipe for something like this to finally be achieved.”

The group’s challenge comes in response to an early-December Port Authority public forum wherein the organization, which oversees the ongoing redevelopment of the site, explained that there was not sufficient state and federal funding to support developing the property, which is the only residential building on the site, completely along affordability lines. The alternative call-for-proposals asks only for simple rendering taken from the same KPF perspective as the KPF render that can be collected before the period of public comment ends on February 15th. 

Plans are due on February 12th for the alternative design contest. A full brief will be provided at sign-up. Information about registering a design with the coalition can be found here.