Past issues
RSS feeds
Print edition (PDF)
The Paper in print
Twitter
Facebook
Email newsletter Twitter Facebook RSS Feeds
A 15-story building will rise on a vacant waterfront lot on the edge of Broadway and Kent Avenue, adding another residential tower to Williamsburg’s fast-developing south side — though this one is mostly comprised of affordable units.
The developer of the site, L+M development partners and Goldman Sachs, secured financing for the $70-million project earlier this month, after plans to build a 200-room luxury hotel on the site sputtered for three years.
The new plan, according to a report in Crain’s New York, will comprise 160 units, 80 percent of which will be offered at below-market-rate prices.
Lisa Gomez, executive vice president at L+M Partners, which co-developed the Schaefer Landing building on Kent Avenue, called its decision to provide four-fifths of the building’s units to low- and middle-income households an “upside-down 80-20” that neighborhood residents would heartily embrace.
“We believe there was a need and we also didn’t want to be competing with luxury product, which there is a fair amount of in the marketplace right now and we felt it was the way to mitigate risk for our investors and lenders,”’ said Gomez.
There will also be ground-floor retail and commercial space, and underground parking.
Construction will begin this month and the project should be completed by 2012.
The residential tower is the latest significant waterfront property in Williamsburg to come online in the past year, joining the redevelopment of the old Domino Sugar plant and the Rose Plaza on the River project — bringing a total of 3,034 new units to Kent Avenue, in addition to several smaller projects currently in development.
The residential building will likely have stunning views of the Williamsburg Bridge and the lower Manhattan skyline, but Community Board 1 member Ward Dennis believes that much of the building’s views to the north and west will be cut off by the 34-story towers of the Domino development.
“What you’d see from this [building] is the East River and Corlear’s Hook — the part of Manhattan just south of the Williamsburg Bridge that is loaded with public and union housing projects,” said Dennis on his blog, Brooklyn11211. “Not exactly million-dollar views.”
©2010 Community Newspaper Group
By submitting this comment, you agree to the following terms:
You agree that you, and not BrooklynPaper.com or its affiliates, are fully responsible for the content that you post. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site. You grant to BrooklynPaper.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part world-wide and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.
Print this story
Digg this
Del.icio.us