Governor Kathy Hochul announced Friday that a nonprofit partnership consisting of the Fifth Avenue Committee, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and One Brooklyn Health will take over 1024 Fulton Street, a three-story building in Clinton Hill that has sat vacant since the 1990s.
The state will demolish the building to make way for 125 rental units, which will be affordable to those earning between 30 and 80 percent of the region’s median income. The project also includes 27,000 square feet of community center space managed by Fort Greene Council, and a 1,000-square-foot health clinic.
Apex Building Group and Henge Development will handle general contracting and project management. Their financial involvement in the project will be limited to collecting a portion of the developer fee.
The $111 million project is expected to be funded almost entirely through low-income tax credits, tax-exempt bonds and government grants, according to a representative from the governor’s office.
The state Office of Child and Family Services bought the property in 1997, hoping to develop a community center, but “structural problems” got in the way.
The building, which was once a showroom for Brooklyn Union Gas, has been vacant ever since. Cuomo’s administration halted an auction for the site in 2014 after then-Assembly Member Walter Mosley pushed to transfer the building to the nonprofit Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corp. The New York Daily News reported this at the time. That plan fell apart, as did another plan sell the site to a Philadelphia-based company.
The latest plan calls for the state to foot the bill for the demolition of the 30,000-square-foot structure, for which it previously budgeted $3.7 million.
Empire State Development issued a request for proposals for the site last year, seeking a development team that would be at least 51 percent owned by a nonprofit. The development partnership is 100 percent nonprofit, which gave the team a slight edge in the competition for the site, according to the scoring RFP rubric.
The project will then undergo an environmental assessment and then the state’s overall project plan process. As part of her executive budget, Hochul proposed reforming the State Environmental Quality Review Act to exempt certain housing projects. Given the parameters of the project, the Fulton Street project could qualify for that exemption if the proposal is ultimately approved.
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