New York state and the current Atlantic Yards development team on June 29 unveiled a $5 billion plan to build six high-rise apartment buildings over a downtown Brooklyn rail yard, according to the Brooklyn Downtown Star. The plan was announced more than a year after 2,250 affordable housing units were legally required to be available at the site. 877 of them are still unbuilt.
The project, first proposed in 2003, has so far produced Barclays Center and more than 3,200 apartments. The current development team, Cirrus Workforce Housing and LCOR, took over from a revolving door of prior developers who made only partial progress on the project, per the Brooklyn Downtown Star.
Phase II would add 5,600 apartments across the six towers. The project area runs from the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in the west to the eastern tip of the rail yard at Vanderbilt Avenue in the east. About 1,200 of the new units would be income-restricted, with 900 reserved for low-income residents. The plan also includes upwards of five acres of open space throughout the project area.
Funding comes partially from union pension fund investments and roughly $700 million in added government subsidies to finance the rail yard platforms the buildings would sit on, according to the Brooklyn Downtown Star.
At the Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AYDC) meeting where the plans were presented, board chair Daniel Kummer called it progress after years of stalled momentum. “People may have issues with it, but I hope there’s a shared feeling in this room that we’re glad we’re at this stage of having a plan for the next phase of this project,” Kummer said, per the Brooklyn Downtown Star. He noted he had been on the 14-person regulatory board since its founding in 2015 and had been “waiting for this day for quite some time.”
Joseph McDonnell of Cirrus acknowledged the pace. “I think some people sort of wonder, what takes you so long?” he said, conceding that several months had passed since the developers had spoken to the public. He said the team had worked through roughly 40 to 50 design iterations before arriving at what was presented Monday. “What we’re showing you today is not iteration one, or 20 – it’s iteration 40 or 50,” McDonnell said.
During public comment, community leaders pushed back. Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, pointed out that the developers have not been forced to pay a $1.7 million monthly fine they owe for breaking the terms of an earlier agreement. “This presentation didn’t really talk about accountability,” she said, per the Brooklyn Downtown Star. “I would love to see the details connected to ensuring this actually gets built.” De la Uz also argued the project should be brought under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing framework, which sets baseline affordability requirements for new buildings, rather than operating under a bespoke system. “If we’re giving five, 10, 15, or 20 more years, whatever it’s going to be to deliver this,” she said, “then I think we have to ensure that the public is getting the benefits in real ways.”
Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, recently reelected to a seventh term, agreed with de la Uz on accountability but focused on Site 5, a lot across the street from Barclays Center that formerly housed P.C. Richards and Modell’s. Simon said the proposed density at Site 5 is excessive because the site has no adjacent open space. If Site 5 were built to a million square feet, Simon said, it would carry a Floor Area Ratio of 25, well above Brooklyn Tower’s FAR of 15, which she called a one-off, unusual thing. “There’s no there there,” Simon said, per the Brooklyn Downtown Star. “It’s unfair, if a family is living at Site 5, for them to schlep over to what someday may be the Garden of Eden that we were promised twenty-something years ago.”
The AYDC posted a full recording of the June 29 presentation at youtube.com/watch?v=NfBTVtc3Mao.
