JFK airport hotel will become 318-unit affordable housing complex

A team of developers is turning a hotel near JFK Airport into more than 300 new apartments — putting the building on pace to become the city’s first such residential conversion under a stalled measure meant to spur affordable housing.

Developers Slate Property Group and the nonprofit RiseBoro Community Partnership are buying the Hilton hotel across from the airport and turning it into 318 permanent apartments. They’ll get significant financing through the state’s Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act, commonly known as HONDA — a program that grew out of the pandemic but lost steam as tourism began to rebound.

RiseBoro CEO Scott Short said he was happy they could “crack the code” on conversions after looking for suitable, cost-effective hotels for more than two years. Short said the hotel configuration and large lobby made it a prime candidate for conversion.

“This is a hotel with great bones [and] relatively large-sized hotel rooms compared to New York City standards,” he said. “We don’t want to create a bunch of shoebox-size apartments.”

Short said the conversion will cost about $150 million, including the roughly $70 million purchase price.

The developers will receive $48 million from the $200 million HONDA fund, along with additional subsidies from other city and state agencies. The plan was first reported by the New York Times.

More than half of the units will be reserved for people experiencing homelessness — a mandate under the HONDA program — while the rest will be reserved for low- and moderate-income households.

“We can solve the housing crisis,” Short said, adding that the Queens plan shows “we can create hundreds of units of new housing out of hotels and other underutilized assets.”

The funding source may be new, but the concept isn’t.

Developers of supportive and affordable housing have long turned temporary lodgings into permanent apartments, including recent conversions of a DUMBO hotel once owned by the Jehovah’s…