A new 7 story residential building is set to replace a vacant warehouse at the northern end of Manhattan Avenue between Box and Clay Streets. The developer, Domain Companies, is planning for 210 apartments ranging from studios to two-bedrooms and 8,000 square feet of ground floor retail along Manhattan Avenue. The project is slated to have an on-site parking garage, rooftop terrace, media & game rooms, fitness center, and a resident lounge with a kitchen. The architect is Perkins Eastman and they are aiming for LEED Silver Certification by incorporating several green building materials. This same architect was responsible for nearby projects 34 Berry and 390 Wythe in Williamsburg.

The project, dubbed ‘1133 Manhattan’, is being developed under Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘New Housing Marketplace Plan’, which was launched in 2004 to help create 165,000 new affordable housing units by the end of 2014. 50% of this project will be set aside for ‘low income’ and ‘middle income’ families. Specifically, 42 units will be reserved for households earning no more than 50% of Area Median Income (AMI) or $29,050 for an individual and 63 of the units will be available to households earning no more than 175% of AMI or $101,675 for an individual. The remaining 50% of the units will be market rate.

The site is currently a vacant, single story warehouse and is the former home of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Railroad car barn. This northern end of Greenpoint is still very quiet, but several large developments are in the works that will dramatically increase the density of the area. The long planned, but yet-to-be-delivered park at 65 Commercial Street will only be a block away. New residents will be able to enjoy neighborhood favorites like Milk and Roses, Champion Coffee, Lobster Joint and Eastern District. Preliminary construction appears to be underway and is scheduled to be completed in late 2014.

What would fellow Greenpointers like to see on this site? Is this project the right use, size and scale?

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  1. Seems okay for half the units to be set aside for people living in the real world (even if 100k seems pretty high to call “middle” for Greenpoint). What the real-world buyers don’t understand is that these developments only serve to erase the real world and replace it with bizarro Manhattan-meets-Dallas astroturf. Look at the Williamsburg waterfront.

    Developers usually saddle the “requirement-meeting” units with the worst locations and floor plans. Ie, bottom floors, worst views, tiny corner units, etc.

    The rest of the “market rate” units will continue to harmfully balloon Greenpoint’s renter’s and buyer’s market. When down-home places like Champion and Milk and Roses pack up and head to the next neighborhood, the people who moved in for them will be pretty confused. Or thrilled, depending.

  2. Your building all these new expensive building all over Greenpoint wit a shelter/halfway house jus 2 blocks away and not letting me no what there moving next too and that house us holding up to 250 guys by putting up new building like this and have people live there that aren’t very much street smart is not the right or smart thing to do the crime level in the neighborhood is gonna go up with more rapes and maybe even murders. Please think bout what your doin for the lives of other and there children not just about your pockets. And also with that being said your letting all these people live here making it harder for those living here all there lives to get a job..

  3. The north end of Greenpoint Avenue has always gotten flak because of the large swaths of shuttered store fronts and lack of foot traffic. Many of the people I talk to who are looking to open a business in the neighborhood pass on that area because of those reasons. That will change fast once this project and others that are going up on Commercial and around West Streets get underway. My prediction is the north end of Greenpoint will become more popular than the Greenpoint Ave./Franklin St. corridor once those residential units go in and the planned foot bridge becomes reality, drawing in additional large crowds from LIC.

  4. Since when is $101,000 medium income for an individual?! I don’t know anyone my age (30) who makes nearly that much. And what does someone who can afford the market rate make per year? These numbers are ridiculous and stink of Manhattan prices. I moved to Greenpoint because it was affordable and safe and specifically did not live in Williamsburg, which now looks more like the Miami waterfront. Wish they were building actual affordable, low rise buildings that wouldn’t totally transform the look of the neighborhood. If I want shiny high rises, I’ll move to Williamsburg or Manhattan

    1. Kate, it’s not “medium” income, it’s “MediAN” income; you line up all the income values for people in a given area and look at the value that separates the top and bottom halves of the sample. Since 101k is listed as 175% of the median and 29k is about 50%, it means that the AMI for the area is about 58k, meaning that half of residents sampled make more and half make less. Note that there tends to be under-sampling on the lower half since those people are less likely to return their census forms. They’re not suggesting that middle income is 100k, they’re reserving half the building for people who make less than 100k.

    2. @kate – AMI is based on a family of four (and is a median, not a medium). So 20% of the units will be affordable to families earning less than $30k (low income) and 30% will be affordable to families earning less than $100k. The thresholds are adjusted based on family size, but always expressed as for a family of four. The rents for the affordable units would be set to a level affordable to someone in that income band. The rents for the market-rate units would be whatever the market will bear.

      1. So there will be no apartments larger than a 2 bedroom so what is a family to do if they are a family of 4 and meet the median with 1 boy and 1 girl they each need their own room what happens ???

  5. As a North Greenpointer, here are the questions that cross my mind:
    How is the neighborhood going to handle thousands of more people moving in?
    What’s the news on the park?
    Will the park be built as the developments go up?
    What’s going on with the new foot bridge that’s part of the other development plans and supposed to alleviate the issues on the pulaski bridge?
    How is the pulaski bridge going to handle increased foot traffic and bikes until the new foot bridge is being built? Right now it can be a bit treacherous for bikers and walkers on the bridge?
    Can anyone answer these questions?

  6. Looks like a very plain vanilla design. No matter how “green” or trendy the plan, it looks like something designed with little artistic imagination and architectural creativity. Some NYC housing projects have a better look.

  7. This is completely out of scale for the area. I live in Northern Greenpoint. It can not handle this many people being added to the area at one time. It is ( was) a really quiet, quaint area. In addition, the architecture is really unattractive. There goes the neighborhood. : (

  8. Thanks for catching my typo. I did indeed mean ‘median’. And excellent questions raised by SA. To add: how is the MTA going to adjust service in the neighborhood to support the influx of residents? The G train is already overtaxed during rush hours and the buses don’t offer much relief. I hope it doesn’t follow the L train’s history where the MTA was years behind the increase in riders. The real estate investors should get on that to ensure that potential renters/buyers have a way to get to work every day.

  9. On the bright side, maybe the 8000 square feet of retail will house a grocery store. I’m a big fan of northernmost Greenpoint but it’s major drawback is that all there is grocery-wise north of the C-Town is about 10 identical shitty bodegas.

  10. This is not Williamsburg! Enough already! How many more f**kin people do we need or want. I just read something that said overcrowding of schools and incapable of paying crazy rents…….don’t live here. Go back to where you came from. And BTW…..its not North Brooklyn, North Greenpoint or Brooklyn North………..its f**king GREENPOINT! I’m waiting for the next hot new area to come so that you wannabe’s will find MY neighborhood so last year and eventually rid us all of your

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