Roosevelt Island, on the WIRE of change
Briana Warsing, the new editor-in-chief of Roosevelt Island’s community newspaper, checks apartment prices every day. She’s living what she says is one of the biggest stories on the island: the loss of the affordable housing that once defined the community.
Warsing grew up on Roosevelt Island, the 2-mile strip of land east of Manhattan so narrow that a person standing in the middle can see the East River on either side. In 2012, she moved back there into a sublet with her husband and their three young children after getting priced out of Long Island City, she said. Now the family is trying to find a permanent, affordable apartment to live in on Roosevelt Island.
A three-bedroom apartment can cost more than $5,000 a month. That’s just too much, Warsing said. “There used to be family-sized apartments for every-size family, and now there are so many stories about one bedroom apartments and parents and two kids, and convertible three-bedrooms,” Warsing said. “That just wasn’t how it was. I know the rest of New York City is like that, but we never were.”
The Main Street WIRE, the community’s largely volunteer newspaper, has tracked the comings and goings of New York City’s “small town” since the 1980s, a free print copy sent to every household on the island twice a month. As the community newspaper changes hands for the first time in 20 years, Warsing hopes to use her role as the new editor-in-chief to glue together a community that has changed drastically from its roots, she said. Meanwhile, the island of about 12,000 people readies for what could bring its biggest changes yet: Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s graduate business and technology program, will open a new campus there next year.
Warsing, 40, a former lawyer, has the background to be a bridge between the two parts of the island’s community: the older group of residents that came to Roosevelt Island on subsidized housing in the 1970s and 1980s, and the younger group that moved to the island in the last decade into newer, often market-rate apartments. She wants to provide continuity and teach newcomers about the island’s history and its original mixed-income goal. “I don’t see us as newsmakers, I see us as covering the news,” Warsing said. “But community journalism is different than like the New York times, so I think we do have an advocacy role as well.”
Roosevelt Island was founded to be a mixed-income community. Once called Welfare Island from its history as a home to hospitals, prisons and an insane asylum, the city leased the island to the state in 1969 for 99 years for redevelopment. The residential community began with the four “WIRE” buildings — an acronym for Westview, Island House, Rivercross, Eastwood — and the first residents moved there in 1975. The state governs the community through a state-appointed board called the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation.
The economic diversity of the island is changing. The original lease required a mix of affordable housing units, with only 25 percent at market rate. That was amended in 2003 between the two sides of the neighborhood. Northtown, where the original WIRE buildings are located, would remain at only 25 percent market rate units. Southtown, where the newer residential buildings have been built, can have as many as 40 to 60 percent market rate units. Over time, many of the community’s most-used housing subsidies expired with nothing to replace them.
Today, signs hang from buildings on Southtown boasting “Luxury Rentals.” According to StreetEasy, a New York City real estate website, the median rent on Roosevelt Island is $3,173, and the median sale price is $1.035 million. In comparison, directly across the river in the Upper East Side, StreetEasy lists the median rent at $2,400 and the median sale price at $1.1 million.
“The great social dream of the 1960s went down the tubes,” said Judith Berdy, resident since 1977 and president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.
Berdy rented until 2005, when 13 years on a waiting list paid off and she bought a subsidized co-op apartment on the island, she said. Her building went private in 2013, which means she could now sell high after buying low. “But that means that no middle-income families are going to move in here again,” Berdy said.
Warsing remembers growing up on a Roosevelt Island that all families could afford. “It’s actually just as diverse culturally, but it’s less diverse economically,” she said. “It’s no longer a place where anyone can come and raise a family, and that’s really, really upsetting.”
The next stage of the island’s development has been taking place south of the Queensboro Bridge. In 2011, Cornell University, in a joint bid with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won a contest to build a new applied sciences graduate program and campus on the southern half of Roosevelt Island, demolishing the old Goldwater Hospital.
The new campus will bring both new residents and commuters. Between students and faculty, about 600 are slated to arrive next year when the campus opens, plus staff and those who will work on the island through partnerships with companies. Cornell Tech’s 12-acre campus will be open to current residents, and Cornell students are already providing free technology programs at the island’s one public school, P.S./I.S. 217. The university is also building its own residential building to house students and faculty, and the city is opening a new ferry stop on the island.
“Cornell is the big question mark,” said Jeffrey Escobar, president of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association. He does not want a relationship where the university feeds off of the community, and instead wants Cornell to be, “a part of Roosevelt Island rather than we are a part of Cornell.”
Erica Spencer-El, community relations manager for the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, said the extra foot traffic will help the businesses on Main Street, which has empty storefronts, and the island’s new ferry stop will accommodate the commuters. Roosevelt Island is “a melting pot of a community,” she said, already home to many students and young families, and that Cornell, “is going to add to the mix of people who currently live here.”
Nina Tandon, 37, works in biotechnology and grew up on the island — her parents moved there in 1977. She hopes Cornell will help the island reach critical mass, both economically and culturally. “I think we’re at an inflection point where we have the opportunity to really steer this in a positive direction,” Tandon said.
Part of the original group of residents, Tandon said she doesn’t see one answer for the island’s changes. “You don’t want to preserve things in a way that stifles their ability to grow,” she said, “but it would be really lovely to see a flowering of the community that’s in part led by continuity, as opposed to just hoping the answers will come from the outside.”
