At the Historic Districts Council (HDC), the citywide advocate for New York’s architectural, historic and cultural neighborhoods, we champion adaptive reuse citywide, and are thrilled by new uses that help New York’s historic buildings meet the city’s current needs – for example, turning overbuilt but underutilized historic buildings into housing is one of the fastest and most sustainable ways to create affordable housing across New York.
Too often, instead of utilizing the vast potential and embodied carbon of New York’s historic buildings to create the homes, community spaces, schools and other necessities, our city has allowed many landmark-worthy buildings to be demolished, and to remain vacant lots for years or decades.
Consider some of the stellar structures in Manhattan that were torn down rather than preserved and reused whose sites have become long-term vacant lots, depriving the city of irreplaceable structures, and their positive potential for reuse:
- The Hotel Pennsylvania (401 7th Avenue, 1919-2023), once the world’s largest hotel, offered 2,200 rooms, complete with bathrooms, that could have become affordable housing in a transit rich environment. Instead, the developer suggested tennis courts for the site, while ultimately building nothing.
- The Bancroft Building (3 West 29th Street, 1896-2015), once a 10-story limestone and brick Romanesque revival office tower, has languished as a vacant lot for a decade.
- The Kaskel & Kaskel Building (316 5th Avenue, 1903-2017), once a Beaux Arts commercial building with mansard roof, has remained a vacant lot for eight years.
- The Demarest Building (335-339 5th Avenue, 1890 – 2022), designed by James Renwick, the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, featured sumptuous terra cotta and three-story arched windows. The site languishes as a vacant lot across from the Empire State Building.
Each of these buildings was the subject of a robust preservation campaign that gained the support of elected officials, community boards and thousands of community members. In each case, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) declined to designate, and in each case the building was demolished, and not replaced.
At HDC’s 2025 conference, focused on Challenges and Opportunities for Historic Affordable Housing, HDC Board Member George Calderaro brought this issue to the fore, and raised the subject to the expert panelists in attendance.
In response, Leila Bozorg, Executive Director of Housing in the Mayor’s Office, made the salient point that “one of the perverse things in our tax code is that we basically keep taxes really low on vacant lots, [including] surface parking lots. If we just jack the taxes on anything that stays vacant in this city, you would change this pretty quickly.”
HDC supports raising taxes on vacant lots and surface parking lots to disincentivize long-term vacancy, and instituting a demolition tax to incentivize retaining and converting buildings.
Not only would these taxes spur potential and necessary growth on vacant lots, but also they would help create an urban ethic of civic responsibility: Keeping taxes low on vacant lots suggests that the lot owner is the deprived party, because they have demolished property and thereby have no property on which to be taxed, but to demolish buildings without a plan for their replacement, and to hold lots vacant, is to deprive the city of resources and potential, without offering anything in return. The city deserves better. By making these changes to the tax code, we might get it.
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To learn more about this issue and HDC’s policy proposals, contact Frampton Tolbert, Executive Director, [email protected]