Phase one of the Hip Hop Museum’s campus is complete, bringing hundreds of apartments to the South Bronx.
L+M Development Partners, real estate agency Type A projects, BronxWorks, The Hip Hop Museum, and several elected officials unveiled 542 units of subsidized housing and 2.8 acres of public space on the Harlem River waterfront in the South Bronx on Thursday.
The 530,000 square foot unveiling marks the completion of the first step of what developers have dubbed Bronx Point, a $349 million mixed-use development with apartments directly above and retail shops and an early child care center built around the Universal Hip Hop Museum.
“The Bronx is no longer going to be first in everything bad and last in everything good,” Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson told an audience of nearly 200 attendees, noting that developers had received over 63,000 applications for those 542 units through the city’s housing lottery process.
The subsidized apartments are set aside for households earning certain incomes, defined by the area median income (AMI), a federal designation currently set at $141,200 for a family of four. Of the 542 apartments ranging from studios to three bedrooms, 81 are listed at 30% of the AMI, 108 at 50%, 162 at 80% and 108 at 120% along with one apartment set aside for a superintendent, according to L+M senior director Josue Sanchez, a Bronx native who oversees the development.
Sanchez said that residents will begin to move in next month, and expects all of the units to be leased by next summer.
“The Hip Hop Museum” is already etched onto the building, along with a line from the Notorious B.I.G.’s song “Juicy”: “It was all a dream … you never thought that hip hop would take it this far.”
The museum and housing now occupy land that had previously been slated for an expansion of Mill Pond Park following the construction of the new Yankee Stadium and its parking lots on what had been parkland.