304 West 49th Street zoning filed for 72-unit, 20-story tower

A zoning text amendment filed October 27, 2026 with the New York City Department of City Planning would clear the way for a 20-story residential tower at 304 West 49th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The application, tracked in the city’s Zoning Application Portal as project 2025M0332, is seeking approximately 60,330 square feet of floor area and 72 dwelling units on the site, which currently holds a parking garage between Eighth and Ninth avenues.

The filer of record is 304 West 49th Street Garage LLC, a single-purpose entity tied to the parcel. No individual developer or sponsor name appears in the public ZAP record, and none could be independently confirmed for this specific filing.

Why it matters

The parcel sits inside the Special Clinton District, a zoning overlay in Hell’s Kitchen that has historically capped heights well below what market-rate residential towers reach elsewhere in Midtown West. Because the proposal needs a text amendment rather than a parcel-specific variance, it is classified as a non-ULURP action, meaning it skips the borough president and City Council review steps that a full Uniform Land Use Review Procedure case would trigger. That shortens the City Planning Commission’s timeline but still leaves certification, public comment, and a commission vote ahead before the applicant can build to the proposed scale. For operators tracking the Special Clinton District and the rest of Manhattan land use, this filing is a marker of whether the city’s planning staff will keep granting boundary-line relief site by site rather than rezoning the corridor outright.

The numbers

The filing calls for 72 dwelling units across 60,330 square feet of floor area, which works out to roughly 838 square feet per unit on average, a residential-scale program rather than a dense micro-unit building. A price per square foot cannot be computed from this record. The filing is a zoning application, not a sale or a construction contract, so there is no transaction basis or recorded cost to divide against the floor area. An earlier iteration of the project reported by New York YIMBY in January 2025 described a smaller 69-unit, roughly 59,000-square-foot version of the same tower, with 17 units set aside as permanently affordable under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. The current ZAP filing reflects a modestly larger unit count and floor area than that earlier public description, consistent with a revised submission rather than a new project.

What’s next

The application now moves through the City Planning Commission’s review process for a non-ULURP text amendment, which includes an environmental review step and a commission vote before the zoning change, if granted, would let construction proceed at the filed scale. Until that vote, the project remains a proposal: no building permit application tied to this filing has been confirmed, and the existing six-story garage on the site remains standing. Owners and brokers active in the Special Clinton District should watch the commission’s calendar for when 2025M0332 is scheduled for review, since the outcome will signal how much additional boundary-line relief the city is willing to grant along this stretch of West 49th Street.