Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, amid mounting financial pressure, is looking to sell its SoHo building and shutter the clinic there, a move that will leave the nonprofit with no services in Manhattan, the reproductive health care provider told Gothamist.
The property at 26 Bleecker St. will go on the market this week with an asking price of $39 million, said Wendy Stark, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York.
Plans are to close the clinic, though that will first require state approval, Stark said.
“It is a building that requires more and more expensive maintenance, and it’s not designed to support the health care needs of the future,” Stark said of the SoHo building. Planned Parenthood moved into the site in the early 1990s. It once bore the name of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger.
The move comes amid financial troubles that have already forced Planned Parenthood to shut down four clinics across the state in recent months, including one on Staten Island, and cut some services. The nonprofit stopped providing abortions after 20 weeks at its Manhattan health center and discontinued the option of deep sedation for IUD placements.
Stark said the money from the sale of the Manhattan building will allow Planned Parenthood to “ redirect those resources to health centers in historically underserved communities,” including three remaining New York City clinics, in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
More than 18,000 patients visited the Manhattan clinic last year, according to Planned Parenthood. Stark said the organization could eventually open a new clinic in Manhattan, but there are no immediate plans to do so.
She attributed the ongoing budget issues to rising costs — including for wages and supplies — and inadequate reimbursement from Medicaid, the public health insurance program that covers more than half of Planned Parenthood’s patients.
The financial woes come at a time when Republican lawmakers in Congress are trying to push through cuts that could reduce Medicaid funding in the future, creating greater uncertainty for health care providers that rely on it as a funding source. Planned Parenthood is currently pushing for new funding in the upcoming city and state budgets that isn’t tied to the insurance program.
Money problems have affected the infrastructure and quality of care at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, the New York Times reported in February. They generally are not able to use money raised by the national Planned Parenthood Federation of America to cover the cost of direct services, according to that report, which referenced a 2022 lawsuit over a botched abortion at an Albany clinic.
But Stark defended Planned Parenthood’s services as “safe and high quality.”
“ Our rates of adverse outcomes, which exist in the provision of any medical care, are very low,” she added.
Stark said Planned Parenthood could shutter its centrally located Manhattan health center “without reducing our ability to care for folks.”
But the nonprofit will still have to apply for a “certificate of need” from the state, and will have to outline the reasoning behind the closure and how it will affect access to care. Approval is up to the state’s Public Health and Health Planning Council.
Last year, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York spent about $67 million on health care services and received about $36 million in reimbursement, creating a shortfall of $31 million, Stark said. The organization’s financial records for 2024 are not yet publicly available.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year includes several pots of grant money for abortion providers, including the continuation of a $25 million grant fund that was created in 2022 to enhance abortion services in New York.
Planned Parenthood Empire State Acts, the New York chapter’s advocacy arm, is urging Hochul and the Legislature to increase that fund by $10 million in the final budget, which is due April 1.
Rather than allowing providers to expand services, for many, the money has been “desperately needed funding to retain the existing abortion access points that were faltering under decades of underinvestment,” the lobbying group said in submitted written testimony on the state budget last month.
Planned Parenthood Empire State Acts applauded Hochul for also proposing a new $20 million “flexible funding stream” to make up for low reimbursements for medication abortions, which now account for the majority of abortions in the United States, and for including additional grant funding for security and capital improvements for abortion providers.
Planned Parenthood is also seeking an additional $2.5 million this year from the City Council, partly to cover sexual health education for young people.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
