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New plans and an alternative proposal for the White Street jail
A group of city agencies will host a Construction Kick-off Meeting for the White Street jail tonight at 5:30 to 6:45 on Zoom. Registration is required here. I will follow up with a review of the meeting next week.
Representatives from the NYC Department of Design and Construction, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, Department of Correction, and the Borough Based Jail Project’s Design-Build Team will present the construction methodology and schedule, and address questions from the community.
Plans for the construction of the four borough-based jails to replace Rikers Island were launched during the de Blasio administration; they were perpetuated under the single term of Adams; now they are in the hands of the Mamdani era and we will see if things keep moving forward.
Already they are woefully behind on schedule and inflated on budget. The new budget for the White Street jail alone has swelled from $2.13 billion (what I reported in 2023) to just about $3.9 billion. And the competion date is now 2032, despite the fact that the City Council passed a bill requiring that Rikers close in 2027.
The city released preliminary illustrations in October — the renderings here are just for discussion purposes, and I am not sure they even reflect the correct massing. The facility will contain 1,040 beds for men, 125 parking spaces below grade for authorized vehicles, 20,000sf of community and commercial space on the ground floor, dedicated space for on-site services and programming, indoor and outdoor recreation, food services, staff offices and facilities, amenities and a secured entry (sally port).
The civic organization Welcome to Chinatown introduced an alternative plan last May, proposing that the jail facility be moved to the existing — and empty — federal Metropolitan Correctional Center just east of Centre between the courthouses and One Police Plaza. And instead, the city should build affordable housing on at 125 White Street. Makes sense to me!
More TK after tonight’s meeting.
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Link to sign the petition for alternate location: https://www.change.org/p/oppose-the-current-manhattan-bbj-plan-support-affordable-housing-alternative-sites?redirect_reason=guest_user
Builds affordable housing at 125 White Street.
Relocates the jail to the former MCC or another suitable site.
We’re still doing this?
This is happening and the focus should be on pushing for the best version of this as we can.
Alternative Plan #2: Renovate Rikers Island instead.
As I have mentioned here before: just from a financial perspective, this would cost a lot more than the borough-based jails, and that’s before taking into account that construction has already started. The Brooklyn one is over 10 stories high already.
Contracts are in place and shovels are in the ground. That’s why I keep encouraging us to accept this and direct energy into ensuring they address community concerns and being the best neighbor they can.
Thank you for comment. I don’t recall this comparison; why would it cost more?
Let’s also consider that there won’t be enough space in the new jails for all the inmates. So likely Rikers will have to stay open in some way for the foreseeable future anyway, no?
Per Gothamist:
“That puts the total capacity of the four new jails at 4,160, but that’s still not enough space to move out all the roughly 6,000 current detainees at Rikers Island.”
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-increases-number-of-detainees-to-be-held-at-borough-based-jails-that-will-replace-rikers
Furthermore, with the possibility of future crime-increase waves , or tougher-on-crime admins than the last couple lax ones, or changes in bail rules, etc. there may be need for a lot more capacity.
The whole plan seems insanely optimistic in thinking we would permanently reduce crime to the levels that we would never need more than 4k spaces for this city of millions.
Logistics and isolation.
There is a single bridge connecting the island, and they’d also have to work around an existing jail (à la reconstructing LGA).
There are also remediation costs involved, because it would have to be built on top of an old dump.
From a Gotham Gazette article in 2022: Such a scheme would cost up to 15% more than the borough-based jail plan and take years longer to finish. Demolition and site remediation alone on the former garbage dump would cost billions. Having to work around an active jail complex would severely limit construction hours and access.
In the four years since, with inflation, that cost gap is likely wider. Again, we also need to take into consideration that a lot of work is already completed.
Here’s a view from November of how far along the Brooklyn jail is: https://www.brownstoner.com/development/boerum-hill-brooklyn-jail-construction-275-atlantic-avenue/
These in-progress projects cannot easily just be converted to residential. The programming and construction of a jail is much different, which is partially why the dollar figures are eye-popping.
Huge deficits are looming on the horizon for our City. The money matters. (I obviously also believe in the moral arguments for Rikers closure, but most people here disagree. So I’m confining my arguments to the financial ones which are quite clear, I believe.)
I don’t know enough about the carceral situation to address the inmate numbers. Perhaps once the borough-based jails are done, there’s a conversation to be had about renovations at Rikers if more capacity is needed. But I do believe it’s a separate conversation right now given the road we have already gone down.
I attended. Construction is scheduled to last through 2032 and hours will be M-F 7:00a – MIDNIGHT. Saturday hours too!!! Hopefully this doesn’t happen, but if it does, how could they approve near round the clock hours for soooo long. This will be noisy and messy for all neighborhoods nearby.
Of course the cost has already doubled, and the timeline will keep stretching into infinity, as anyone who has lived in NYC for more than 10 minutes knew it would.
Bets on final costs? Triple? Quadruple?
This whole idea was poorly conceived. Ludicrous waste of time and the mess it has created is unconscionable.
Nothing wrong with Rykers except it needs a lot of work. One can’t help suspecting this was some land grab scheme initiated by developers at the time. Three mayors later and a massive gaping hole in our neighborhood with more ‘ideas’ is hardly convincing.
I heard that Alternate Plan #3 is to turn it into a ballroom.
I’m a bit confused by the whole thing. That approximate location has historically been the location of the city jail since 1838 give or take a block so no problem with that. I also think that Mayor De Blasio’s idea to shut down Rikers and have jails distributed to the boroughs where lawyers, family members and others could visit more easily was and is a good idea. Also proximity to the courts is certainly desirable as having people on a bus for hours for a hearing is inhumane and not cost effective. What bothers me is the scale. Is such a large facility needed? Especially when the crimes that require incarceration are at or near historical lows. Something here is eluding me. It just seems wrong.
The scale is one of the major objections to this project. Actually, you could call it two objections about scale:
– Too big (and disruptive: construction, future traffic, etc.) for the neighborhood
– Too small to hold even the existing inmates. And what happens when another crime wave hits, or we get an administration that actually bothers to arrest and hold people for crimes?
Other objections have been widely discussed: The cost, whether this actually addresses the problems with the existing conditions in Rikers or just shuffles the problems around, etc.