BK Navy Yard set to launch $2.5B redevelopment plan

The Brooklyn Navy Yard will undergo a $2.5 billion development plan that will add an additional 5.1 million square feet of space to the Tech Triangle site. But rather than turn to private developers as it’s done in the past, the nonprofit that runs the yard will self-fund the expansion with revenue from the site.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation projects the redevelopment plan raise the workforce from 7,000 current to employees to roughly 30,000, Bloomberg News reported.

The project will focus on 24.5 acres of the 300-acre complex, and the largest new complex would have as much square footage as the Empire State Building. The development corporation recently turned to the EB-5 program for funding.

But there are questions as to whether the Navy Yard can absorb all that new supply, as large leases in the borough have dried up and there’s still much more inventory in the pipeline.

Brooklyn’s added about 2.75 million square feet of new office space since 2016, and there’s another 2.4 million square feet under construction, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

But Clare Newman, chief of staff and executive vice president of the development corporation, said there’s plenty of demand for the Navy Yard.

“We’ve reached a point where we have really finished rehabbing all of the existing buildings at the yard, and we’ve been over 99 percent leased for the past decade,” she said. “So there’s clearly demand out there, and we want to make sure we’re continuing to add space to support these manufacturing businesses and, most importantly, to support the kinds of jobs they create.” [Bloomberg] – Rich Bockmann