Penn Station task force starts push to make transit hub more residential

Urban designer Shachi Pandey presents the Community Led Improvement Programs task force’s goals for Penn Station’s redevelopment.

Photo by Max Parrott

A Penn Station task force helmed by Manhattan’s Community Board 5 outlined its long-term goal of increasing housing in the station’s surrounding area and making it more of a neighborhood in coordination with the state’s transit redevelopment plan.

The Community Led Improvement Plan (CLIP) task force held its first committee meeting on March 8 that brought together a range of city and state transit and city planning agencies to discuss the community group’s goals of creating more of a mixed-use neighborhood around the transit hub.

“The Penn CLIP process offers us a new path to generate a range of housing options with a focus on affordability that will accommodate our district’s fair share of the population growth,” said David Sigman, a community board member.

But major questions remain about the Penn Station redevelopment process. The federal government is currently conducting an NEPA review of multiple operating models for the tracks underneath the station that an Amtrak representative said would last another two years. The task force sees the interim time period as an opportunity to develop a concrete set of suggestions for when the plan is ready to move forward.

What is clear is that the community board hopes to get the state to reconsider the neighborhood plan it proposed for the transit hub district. In January, CB5 passed a resolution opposing the land use proposal that the state has advanced, arguing that the plan needs to do more to prioritize more housing.

For help, CLIP brought on an urban designer consultant named Shachi Pandey, whose specialty lies in eliciting planning ideas from neighbors and daily commuters and translating them into policy suggestions.

In Pandey’s presentation, she likened an ideal mixed-use zoning makeup for the future of the Penn Station…