The City Council on Friday released a new plan to build more than 5,000 apartments on Staten Island's North Shore — with an eye toward the borough’s closest neighbor, New Jersey.
Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, a Staten Island Democrat, told Gothamist she hoped to emulate the kind of housing development that helped turn moribund, post-industrial waterfronts of Jersey City, Hoboken and Bayonne into denser residential communities.
“We are in a housing crisis and when you look across the ‘pond’ to a different state they are basically cleaning our clock with their ability to build housing and build it quickly,” Hanks said in an interview.
The plan, called North Shore NYC, envisions a “downtown” Staten Island with new housing, shopping, dining and outdoor space across the neighborhoods of Tompkinsville, Stapleton and St. George, near the Staten Island Ferry.
Some councilmembers have begun to consider or release their own development plans after ballot measures approved under previous Mayor Eric Adams stripped much of the power they had to decide what gets built in their districts. Under the new rules, a panel including the mayor can overrule the Council's land use decisions. In some instances, developers applying to rezone lots to add more new housing can bypass the Council altogether.
Council Speaker Julie Menin said the new planning efforts are part of the body’s “proactive land use agenda” to wrest back more control.
“We’re making sure that we are realizing the potential of Staten Island’s North Shore and create a true downtown Staten Island,” Menin said.
Hanks, the former head of a Staten Island economic development nonprofit, said the “downtown” vision marks the culmination of her two decades touting the need for North Shore redevelopment.
“The pace of change has not matched the potential of the North Shore,” she said in a message accompanying the report. “Too many key sites remain vacant or underutilized, and too many opportunities have sat idle for far too long.”
Past development proposals meant to attract tourists and shoppers to the area, like an outlet mall and Ferris wheel, have flopped. Hanks said previous rezonings from 2006 and 2008 also failed to drive more housing creation because they didn’t go big enough.
Speaker Julie Menin and Councilmember Kamillah Hanks in Staten Island.
Today, two-story businesses, three-story homes and some apartment buildings rising up to 10-stories tall line the streets near the waterfront. Housing is prohibited in sections of the area now zoned for commercial or manufacturing use.
Hanks said allowing apartment complexes larger than current zoning rules allow, like buildings up to 14 stories tall, will provide more housing options for existing Staten Islanders now forced to look elsewhere for a place to live.
She joked that many Staten Islanders who cross Bayonne Bridge, a span linking the borough with New Jersey, “literally never come back.” Instead, they end up settling in the Garden State because of cheaper and more abundant housing.
The Downtown Staten Island plan includes other references to New Jersey as a model for waterfront housing development.
The area in the borough targeted for rezoning is roughly the size of nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, but is home to far fewer people. It includes just 21,000 residents compared to Hoboken’s population of 60,000, according to the report. The plan also praises development in Weehawken, further north in Hudson County.
“While neighboring New Jersey communities have transformed their waterfronts into thriving mixed-use neighborhoods, much of Staten Island's North Shore remains constrained by vacant and underutilized properties and a lack of coordinated planning,” the report adds.
Staten Island’s northern neighborhoods are more affordable than most of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but low rents are getting harder to find. The percentage of vacant apartments in these neighborhoods plummeted to 4.4% in 2024 from 8.4% in 2019, according to an analysis by NYU’s Furman Center, a housing research institute.
The plan targets more new housing on a city-owned lot on Castleton Avenue that was until recently the site of an abandoned hospital.
A task force convened by Mayor Zohran Mamdani identified the lot as the potential site of a 330-unit housing complex, but Hanks ’plan proposes a much larger development mixing apartments and townhomes.
Hanks also called for larger housing development along Front and Bay streets in Stapleton and near the intersection of Bay Street and Victory Boulevard, where she said empty lots and a low-rise commercial strip have left an “empty gap” in the neighborhood.
“We have 500 miles of waterfront and Staten Island's is probably the most undeveloped,” Hanks said. “So the opportunities to have a vibrant downtown with shops and open space, a promenade and housing is a no-brainer.”
