Rabsky, Spencer land $70M refi for Broadway Triangle site

Brooklyn developers Simon Dushinsky and Joel Gluck have secured another one-year loan for their massive Broadway Triangle development in Williamsburg.

Bank Leumi USA, a New York-based subsidiary of Israel’s Leumi Group, provided $70.5 million in new financing for the development site, which spans two trapezoidal blocks in the triangle bound by Harrison, Union and Flushing Avenues, city property records recorded Thursday show.

The new debt replaces a one-year, $65 million loan provided by Centennial Bank in late 2018, and carries an interest rate of 4 percent over LIBOR, 0.5 percentage points lower than the previous loan. The developers have the option to extend the loan by another year, provided that they first pay off $20.5 million of the loan’s principal, according to a disclosure filed Tuesday on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Dushinsky’s Rabsky Group and Gluck’s Spencer Equity are 50-50 owners of Harrison Realty LLC, the entity that owns the project. Spencer has also provided a number of loans to Rabsky in recent years, and an outstanding $20 million loan is set to mature at the end of February after several extensions, according to Spencer’s latest quarterly earnings report.

Rabsky secured a rezoning in 2017 for the two blocks to allow for a 1,146-unit development with 287 affordable units and about 63,000 square feet of retail. The developer acquired the site from Pfizer for $12.75 million in 2012, while an appraisal from 2018 valued the property at about $192 million.

The project was briefly held up in 2018 when fair housing groups filed a racial discrimination suit against the developers and the city, but that lawsuit was soon dismissed.

Plans for portions of the eight-building project have been filed with the Department of Buildings in recent months, including a 65-unit building at 58 Union Avenue and a 50-unit building at 269 Wallabout Street.

Leumi has financed a number of the developers’ other projects in the past. In 2016, the bank provided a $93 million construction loan to Rabsky for a 400,000-square-foot rental project at 10 Montieth Street in Bushwick, which was later refinanced with a $200 million loan from Berkadia Commercial Mortgage.

That same year, Leumi also provided $100 million for a 942-foot-tall rental and office project at 625 and 635 Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. That loan has since been extended through mid-July of this year, according to disclosures from Spencer, which is co-developing that project as well.

Rabsky and Spencer did not reply to requests for comment, and Leumi could not be immediately reached.