Pacific Park, the long delayed plan to cover railyards in a busy patch of Brooklyn, may finally move forward after Empire State Development and the project’s community development corporation board pitched a $5 billion buildout that would build more than 5,600 residential units, more than 1,200 of which would be income-restricted.
The beleaguered project, first dubbed Atlantic Yards and still unfinished after more than two decades, originally called for $2.5 billion when former lead developer Bruce Ratner first announced it in 2003 alongside big names including late starchitect Frank Gehry and Brooklyn-born hip-hop star Jay-Z.
The Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation finally released its plan to finish what Ratner started more than 20 years ago, which rebranded a new version of the project Pacific Park in 2014. The plan includes decking over railyards that extend two long blocks of Atlantic Avenue beyond the Barclays Center to Vanderbilt Avenue, along with two additional second phase construction sites at the corner of Flatbush Avenue.
The housing proposed in this new phase two plan includes around 25 percent of income-restricted units for moderate income and 75 percent for low income tenants, with 30 percent of all units constructed to be family-sized. The proposal also includes a total of 1,000 condo units slated for construction across three of the planned buildings. The project would be built with union labor.
Forest City Ratner, now defunct, was one of multiple developers involved in the project but ultimately bailed before its completion. Greenland USA, owned by a Shanghai-based conglomerate, rebranded the megaproject into the Pacific Park project and sold some of its sites to outside developers before defaulting nearly $350 million in loans tied to the properties.
A joint venture led by Cirrus Real Estate Partners and LCOR snapped up the remaining sites in a foreclosure auction last year, leading to this latest round of proposed development.
Cirrus and LCOR have a memorandum of understanding for a project labor agreement that will lock in construction pricing, which will provide advantages that other development teams wouldn’t be able to deliver, according to Joel Kolkmann, senior vice president for real estate development and planning at Empire State Development.
“They have experience doing large-scale projects with agencies, over railyards, they’ve done all this stuff,” Kolkmann said of the specific task of decking over the development’s tracks. “We have committed $175 million so far, we know that more money is needed for this platform and we are working to find that.”
The joint venture development team is also suited to steer the development’s construction to completion because of their capacity to secure financing, Kolkmann told The Real Deal.
“The place that I’m a little bit concerned that it might be like the past, not in a favorable way, is that the presentation we heard today does involve building on the least expensive, easiest sites first, and saving the more expensive difficult sites for the end,” Gib Veconi, the Assembly’s appointee to the board and Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council chair, said. “That’s what happened 20 years ago and it’s how we ended up with two developers going under during this project.”
“Atlantic Yards is one of New York’s most significant unfinished affordable housing developments, and we are finally moving it toward completion,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul in a statement. “We will continue our work to make New York more affordable, investing $25 billion in housing and cutting red tape to speed up construction.”
In addition to the housing slated for development, the new plan calls for more than eight acres of integrated open space, which exceeds previously approved requirements in that area. The new proposal also includes an intergenerational community center in the first residential building to be constructed, along with other community facilities.
The new proposal moves certain planned buildings away from a Barclays Plaza location and a platform location above the railyard to solid ground to avoid long spans at merging tracks.
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