Menin, Hanks Push Rezoning Vision for Staten Island's North Shore

NYC Council Speaker Julie Menin and Majority Whip Kamillah Hanks unveiled a vision plan called NorthShoreNYC on September 25, pushing City Hall to rezone Staten Island’s North Shore, the stretch from St. George to Stapleton, for new housing. The plan is not a rezoning application and has not gone through ULURP or a Council vote. It is a framework, released alongside Land Use Committee Chair Kevin Riley, that builds on the city’s in-progress North Shore Action Plan.

Why it matters

North Shore has spent decades as the borough’s lowest-density waterfront, hemmed in by the Staten Island Ferry terminal, empty city-owned parcels and a commercial strip along Bay Street that has drawn rezoning talk for years without a shovel in the ground. Menin and Hanks are using the Council’s discretionary funding power, not a land use action, to signal where they want density and public investment to land next. For developers watching Staten Island, the plan itself commits nothing legally, but it names the specific city-owned sites likely to anchor a future ULURP filing, and it puts real dollars behind the streets and public assets around them first.

The numbers

The release attaches $38 million in combined capital and expense discretionary funding to the initiative. The single largest piece, $10 million, is earmarked for Richmond Terrace street and waterfront improvements, including work tied to the Tompkinsville Esplanade and Pier One Fishing Pier. The release also lists $7.35 million for roof and facade upgrades at the St. George Theatre and $1.5 million toward an emergency room expansion at Staten Island University Hospital, both framed as part of the same North Shore push rather than a separate line item.

On housing capacity, the only site with a stated unit figure is a nearly 7 acre, city-owned parcel on Castleton Avenue, which the Council says could support more than 400 homes through a mix of rental buildings and homeownership townhouses. That figure applies to the Castleton Avenue parcel alone, not to the North Shore corridor as a whole. Two other locations, the Bay Street and Victory Boulevard intersection and unspecified underused city property along the corridor, are named as targets for future housing without any unit count attached.

What’s next

Nothing in the release sets a filing date for a ULURP application, names a zoning district, or specifies a floor area ratio change for Castleton Avenue or any other site. The next concrete marker to watch is whether the city’s Department of City Planning opens a formal rezoning application tied to Castleton Avenue, since that is the only parcel with both a stated unit count and a stated size. Until that filing exists, NorthShoreNYC functions as a funding and advocacy document, not a land use entitlement, and the $38 million is likely to move faster than any zoning change tied to it. For more on borough-level development activity, see AmDev’s New York coverage.