In a bizarre turn of events, Ian Bruce Eichner said Monday he would withdraw his Crown Heights project application as the City Planning Commission approved it.
After years of setbacks, Eichner seemed to have finally notched a win Monday as the City Planning Commission modified his proposed rezoning to reduce the shadows that Eichner’s multifamily building would cast on the nearby Brooklyn Botanic Garden, compared with earlier designs.
“With today’s action, we are charting a path forward that balances the need for new housing with critical protections for a treasured community space,” the commission’s chairman, Dan Garodnick, said in a statement.
But an attorney for Eichner’s Continuum Company said the changes, which Garodnick described as a carefully crafted compromise, rendered the project impossible to finance.
“As we told the commission, these changes significantly impact our ability to deliver on the promises we’ve made to the community — including the creation of much-needed affordable housing units and hundreds of good-paying union jobs,” said lawyer David J. Rosenberg. “Today’s vote makes that financially unworkable.”
He added, “A well-meaning project that cannot be financed will not be built. We are currently evaluating our path forward, but we intend to withdraw the application.”
The rezoning, if enacted, would effectively devalue the site, preventing anyone from building on it, Rosenberg explained in an interview. Lenders require projects to be profitable enough, on paper, to compensate for the risk that they will fail.
Eichner had proposed 475 apartments, including 119 income-restricted. The city’s action would allow for only 355 units, of which 91 to 106 would be income-restricted — not enough market-rate units to offset the cost of the affordable ones, in Eichner’s view.
The fate of the application would have been decided by City Council member Crystal Hudson, who likely would have demanded even more concessions on affordability than are required by the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing law.
Eichner’s previous attempt to rezone both 960 and 962-972 Franklin Avenue, to build two 39-story towers with 1,500 units, never got far because of objections by the Garden.
The modified plans for the latter site were the result of tense negotiations involving Eichner’s firm, the office of Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer, the Parks Department, the Department of City Planning, the Botanic Garden and the mayor’s office.
The expectation was that the Garden would no longer object to the rezoning. Continuum argues that the institution should support the developer’s proposal because it provides more protection against shadows than the current zoning.
The Adams administration, for its part, wants more mixed-income housing, and that is what Eichner wants to build. The revision would shorten the portion of the building on the west side of the site, closest to the Garden, and leave the east side section at 14 stories.
Hudson loomed as an obstacle for Continuum, but she would not likely reject a rezoning out-of-hand the way she did at 962 Pacific Street.
The difference between the sites are the alternatives.
Without new zoning, the Franklin Avenue site would likely be developed into a market-rate condominium, similar to the project at the former spice factory site next door at 960 Franklin Avenue.
Hudson did not face the same pressure at the Pacific Street site, where Nadine Oelsner sought to build a $115 million project with 150 mixed-income apartments, a day care and manufacturing space. The site is currently zoned for manufacturing, and so will remain an empty lot until it is rezoned.
Hudson opposes new housing without affordable units, but that is what she is getting next to Eichner’s site after the de Blasio administration and Brooklyn political establishment rejected Continuum’s rezoning application two years ago, citing the shadows its 1,578-unit project would cast on the Garden. Now she could end up with about 150 condo units and no affordability at 962 Franklin Avenue as well.
Eicher’s 2017 agreement to buy 960 and 962 Franklin Avenue from Zev Golombeck was contingent on the rezoning being approved. That proved a hopeless endeavor, despite strong support from unions representing construction and building-service workers, because of the shadow issue. Some community members also said the rents would be too high.
The 960 Franklin site was then sold for $43 million in 2022 to Isaac Hager and Daryl Hagler, who in turn sold it to another developer, Yitzchok Schwartz, in April for $64 million. Schwartz plans 300 condo units across seven stories and 240,000 square feet, which he can build without political approval. He has a $75 million construction loan from G4 Capital Partners.
On Eichner’s portion of the site, an accessory structure next to the spice factory was demolished some time ago. His rezoning application, which also called for 100,000 square feet of commercial space, is going through the city’s land-use review process, known by its acronym Ulurp.
The Planning Commission, which is controlled by mayoral appointees, overwhelmingly approved the revisions. Member Leah Goodridge cast one of three dissenting votes, saying the income-restricted units would still be too expensive. In her comments, she did not address that the as-of-right alternative would yield even costlier housing.
The members, who voted just before 4 p.m., seemed to be unaware that Eichner objected to what Garodnick had described as a compromise. One source said that as recently as noon on Monday, the developer had not opposed it.
Eichner grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and was working as a prosecutor when he got started in real estate with a Park Slope townhouse in 1973.
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