Fulton Houses


The Robert Fulton Houses is a housing project located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, owned and operated by the New York City Housing Authority. The site is located between West 16th and 19th Streets and bound by Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The project consists of 945 apartments in eleven buildings; three of the developments are 25 stories, while the others are 6 stories high.

History

The Robert Fulton Houses were designed by architects Brown & Guenther and were developed as a "vest pocket" site that retains the street grid. The groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 15, 1962 and the buildings were completed on March 31, 1965. Its confines are within the 10th Police Precinct.
The housing project is named after engineer and inventor Robert Fulton.
Due to financial needs of the NYCHA, the de Blasio administration began putting plans together to begin working with private developers in 2019. Fulton Houses is located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where median asking rent is $3,462. The plan proposed by the city includes demolishing and rebuilding two buildings and a parking garage in the housing project and replacing them with three larger buildings of which 70 percent would be market-rate and 30 percent would be “affordable enough” for current residents; and to turn over management to a private developer. Residents of the project do not have any input in land-use decisions, and residents are organizing in opposition noting that previous conversions of public housing came with a 57 percent rent increase. Average monthly rent for residents is $660.
Development firms Related Companies and Essence Development proposed demolishing and then rebuilding this housing project and the nearby Chelsea-Elliott Houses in early 2023. In a survey in June 2023, residents of the Chelsea-Elliott Houses and Fulton Houses voted in favor of demolishing the existing towers and constructing a 3,500-unit apartment complex on the same site. At the time, NYCHA officials estimated that the complexes needed about $1 billion in repairs and that it would cost about as much to build new complexes on the site. PAU, COOKFOX Architects, and ILA were hired in early 2024 to design the Fulton Elliott-Chelsea Plan, which would involve converting 2,056 NYCHA apartments into mixed-income units. Under the plan, six new towers would be built on the two sites before the existing buildings were demolished. NYCHA's board approved the redevelopment of the Fulton Houses and Elliot-Chelsea Houses in November 2024. The proposed cost for the two projects had risen to $1.9 billion by early 2025. Opponents sued to prevent the demolition of the buildings; the lawsuit gained notice after their lawyers were caught using generative artificial intelligence in legal filings.

Notable people