Midtown Manhattan development site to be new homes for seniors

(Bloomberg) — Hines, the developer behind the ultra-luxury condo tower rising by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has a new project coming to midtown Manhattan: a senior-living community.

The builder, in a partnership with senior-housing owner Welltower Inc., acquired a site at the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue for an undisclosed price, according to a joint statement Tuesday. They plan to tear down the existing building and construct a 15-story tower for people in need of assisted-living and memory-care services.

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The site at 139 East 56th St. — currently home to a T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant — is in the heart of Manhattan’s office district and just a few blocks of east of the sky-piercing condominium towers of Billionaires’ Row. A senior-housing project would mark a shift for an area where ultra-luxury housing has proliferated, leading to a glut of high-end properties.

“It’s a different conversation than what we would typically have on a redevelopment site in Midtown,” said Jonathan Miller, president of New York appraisal firm Miller Samuel Inc. “The default thinking for the last five years has been that a patch of dirt is there to inevitably be a super-luxury condo tower.”

The project is the first foray into senior housing for Houston-based Hines, a global real estate developer with about $89 billion of assets under management.

Manhattan’s aging population has been “vastly underserved” in the number of assisted-living facilities available to them, Hines and Welltower said. The design and development plans for the project are under way and will be announced later, the companies said.