The New York City Housing Authority has sent lease termination notices to a handful of public housing tenants who are refusing to relocate to make way for a $1.2 billion project to demolish and rebuild some deteriorating buildings in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Working with private sector developers, the Housing Authority plans to take down 18 buildings in three developments — the Fulton, Elliott and Chelsea Houses — and replace them with six towers that will house the 2,056 tenants who live there now. Nine more buildings will be built at the site that will include 1,000 permanently affordable units and another 2,500 market-rate apartments NYCHA says make the project financially feasible.
To pull off this transformation, NYCHA is requiring tenants at two of the buildings set for demolition first — one of the Fulton Houses buildings, known as Fulton 11, and a seniors-only development called Chelsea Addition — to relocate until the demolition and rebuilding of the first new tower is complete. That is expected to take three years.
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As of this week, 73 households in the targeted buildings have already relocated to other buildings within the three developments, but a handful in both Fulton 11 and Chelsea Addition have vowed to stay put amid a bitter legal battle.
Two weeks ago the Housing Authority began notifying holdouts that officials have started the process of terminating their leases through an internal system that doesn’t include an independent court.
One of the six households has since acquiesced and agreed to move. Another tenant has unrelated issues involving alleged nonpayment of back rent. But four households are now facing eviction simply on the grounds of “failure to transfer.”
“If you relocate, that charge against your tenancy will be withdrawn,” the letter reads.
Twenty-four households at Chelsea Addition have sued, alleging the Housing Authority is employing harassment to force them to move out of a seniors-only building into a less secure development that isn’t dedicated to seniors. Their cases are currently pending in housing court.
In response to questions, NYCHA spokesperson Matthew Horgan said all of the Fulton 11 tenants were “offered at least two different temporary apartments that fit their household’s needs.” Five of the six were offered units within other Fulton buildings, while one was offered an apartment in nearby Elliott-Chelsea.
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“These households have been offered new apartments in the community but have failed to relocate, which is a breach of the rules in their leases. That is what triggered these notices,” Horgan said.
One of the families that got a termination letter has lived at Fulton 11 since the 1960s. Jonathan Santiago, 37, who described himself as a third-generation Fulton resident, lives there with his mother, Lourdes Ortiz, 61, who grew up and met her husband there. His father’s family had lived in another Fulton building for years.
Santiago’s mother, who is listed as the tenant of record, received a notice telling her she had to relocate within 30 days in the fall of 2025. That was followed by a 60-day notice, then a final 90-day notice that required the household to move to another Fulton Houses apartment by mid-October.
The Related Companies and its partner Essence Development, who are constructing the new buildings and will run the properties for NYCHA, brought in another firm, Housing Opportunities Unlimited, to persuade tenants to relocate. The group twice showed Santiago and his mother other apartments nearby in the Fulton Houses.
“At first my mother wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t too sure what to do. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was willing to go with the flow,” Santiago recalled.
But he said he heard from other Fulton tenants that the relocation units they had been shown were recently renovated and were already falling apart.
Santiago complained he had received conflicting information about whether his current building was slated to be demolished at all.
“That was the turning point,” he said. “It was too much lies.”
Enter the Activists
Santiago then encountered the Save Chelsea Public Housing Coalition, a group that includes some Fulton tenants and several outside housing advocacy organizations. Their message was straightforward: Stop the demolition/rebuild project from going forward at all.
“I found there were people who don’t want the buildings to be demolished. I said, ‘Let me see what this group of people are talking about,’” Santiago said.
The coalition is demanding the cash-strapped Housing Authority simply pay for all needed upgrades and repairs at the three developments, but NYCHA contends they don’t have the money to do that.
The authority says it needs $78 billion over the next 20 years to bring its entire aging portfolio of buildings up to par and the public-private arrangement at the Chelsea developments is essential.
The developers plan to build new public housing there in exchange for erecting market-rate units on Housing Authority-owned land in Chelsea’s hot real estate market. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has thrown his support behind the demolition/rebuild project as well.
NYCHA officials also insist they have sought and obtained support from most residents in the Fulton, Chelsea and Elliott Houses, including in the Fulton 11 and Chelsea Addition buildings. But coalition member Marni Halasa says the authority’s new tactic to terminate leases runs contrary to its claims of partnership with residents.
“For years, the administration, NYCHA and its real estate partners have wrapped this project in the language of choice, partnership and resident empowerment,” she said. “A ‘notice of termination’ tells a totally different story. Tenant consent is now being coerced through the brutality of court proceedings against law-abiding residents.”
Unless the four Fulton 11 holdouts agree to relocate, their lease termination proceedings are set to go before a NYCHA hearing officer beginning next month.
Thomas Hillgardner, an attorney who is representing both the Fulton 11 and Chelsea Addition holdouts, said: “We’re going to [contest] these lease terminations vigorously. We do not believe that NYCHA is asking these people to move for any lawful purpose.”
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