SROs, or single room occupancy hotels, house some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in New York City, but policies created dating to the 1950s and 1960s have resulted in residential hotels being gradually converted to market-rate housing or hotels. Yesterday, an SRO owner in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx filed plans to convert his five-story building at 2327 Grand Concourse to a hotel or a dormitory.
The property currently has 20 SRO rooms spread across 33,503 square feet of residential space. The plans call for 130 “transient occupancy” rooms, with 20 on the ground floor and 26 on each of the upper stories.
Benjy Berger is listed as the owner and Rajendra Parikh of Metropolitan Building Consulting Group applied for the permits.
Typically we would assume this was a hotel conversion, but the filing only shows residential space, not commercial. The landlords might be planning to rent the building out to nearby Fordham University as a dormitory or they might want to dramatically chop up the existing units.
The building, which dates to 1915, has not changed hands since 1975. It sits next to an imposing, burned-out church between Field Place and East 183rd Street, only a block and a half in either direction from the 182nd Street and Fordham Road stops on the D train.
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Another latest permits filed moving forward, developer able to building with changing on rooms and space.
If dormitories – I’m more inclined to think Monroe College is the target – as opposed to Fordham U. Monroe is much closer to this site. I know Monroe has dorms at the New Rochelle campus – so maybe they want it at their main campus – which is The Bronx.
Also in the Bronx. Prison to housing conversion:
Multi-Million Dollar Redevelopment Planned for Former Bronx Juvenile Detention Center
http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2016/10/27/multi-million-dollar-redevlopment-planned-for-former-bronx-juvenile-detention-center.html
Vulnerable? From what I have observed over the years, the SRO tenants loiter, use drugs openly on the street and are generally a nuisance. Converting the building to house students seems like a giant leap forward. Let’s hope that is the intent. For all we know the slumlord may have just found a legal means to cram more degenerates into the building.