A Stanley Kubrick movie about the year in New York City development might be called “How Developers Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Conversions.”
In TRD Data’s tally of the biggest project filings of 2024, office-to-residential conversions took four of the top five spots. The trend, fueled by an office glut and housing shortage, may well continue, as the state in April okayed a tax break for conversions that make a quarter of units permanently affordable.
Metro Loft will tap the incentive for its conversion of the Pfizer Building — the largest project of the year, which the developer was planning before the tax break passed. Its principal, Nathan Berman, believes the program will push more projects forward.
“I believe so,” Berman said. “This particular incentive is very meaningful for conversions.”
This year’s top filings also reflect the comeback of retail, much love for luxury condos and some for multifamily, plus the city’s first privately financed stadium in generations.
Taken together, the filings show that New York developers dug themselves out of 2023’s rut.
To identify the top projects proposed in 2024, TRD Data analyzed new building and major alteration permits filed with the city’s Department of Buildings and ranked them by square footage.
Here are the top 10.
Pfizer Building, 219-235 East 42nd Street
Metro Loft’s conversion of the former Pfizer headquarters isn’t just the city’s biggest project of the year. At a whopping 1.3 million square feet, it’s the biggest ever for, arguably, New York’s King of Conversions.
Berman has been in the game since the 1990s and has five conversions underway, including FiDi’s 25 Water Street — previously the biggest project before Metro Loft and partner David Werner filed plans for 219-235 East 42nd Street.
The project will deliver 1,500 units and add four floors to the 33-story 235 East 42nd and 20 floors to the 10-story 219 East 42nd. Berman projected the first rentals will come online in the next 20 months.
The Pfizer Building is a bit of a White Whale for Berman, who said the deal with Werner was years in the making.
So, why now?
“The distress in the commercial office market made it happen,” Berman said.
574 Fifth Avenue
As developers deconstruct office towers from Midtown to Downtown, Gary Barnett is building one.
The head of Extell Development filed plans this fall for a 32-story office building spanning 875,000 square feet.
A key ingredient of the project, which is around the corner from the Diamond District, is the retail space. It includes three stories totaling 90,000 square feet, the bulk of which is owned by Ingka Investments, a slice of Ingka Group, which owns Ikea Retail.
So is Ikea coming to Fifth Avenue? Quite possibly. An Ingka Group statement said the deal is “a significant step in Ingka Group’s long-term strategy to enhance its city center retail presence.”
222 Broadway
A deep discount turned Jeff Gural’s conversion dreams for a FiDi office tower into actual filings.
Gural’s GFP Real Estate and partner TPG Real Estate went into contract on 222 Broadway in March for $150 million, less than one-third of the $500 million that seller Deutsche Bank had paid for the 31-story building in 2014.
In August, the team submitted plans for a 31-story building that would span 756,000 square feet and deliver 798 apartments.
GFP is no stranger to conversions; Gural’s firm is partnering with Berman on 25 Water Street.
TPG, meanwhile, had a busy 2024 with $1.2 billion in deals done by mid-year, including 101 Franklin Street in Tribeca, another devalued office building. TPG bought it for about $96 million, half of what Columbia Property Trust paid in 2019.
170 Remsen Street
In another proof of concept for Albany’s new housing legislation, Rockrose Development is tapping the state’s tax break for mixed-income apartment projects, 485x, to redevelop a former college campus into 674,000 square feet of rentals.
The project, in Brooklyn Heights, is partially an office-to-residential conversion. The eight-story office building at 176 Remsen Street was constructed in 1914, served as Union Gas Company’s headquarters and was folded into St. Francis College in the ’60s. It was designated a New York City landmark in 2011, which should entitle Rockrose to conversion tax credits.
Rockrose plans to level the rest of the site and build residential buildings under 485x, making 25 percent of the project affordable. All told, the project will deliver 745 units, Rockrose president Justin Elghanayan said.
Elghanayan called it “a long-term bet about the future of Brooklyn.”
80 Pine Street
Bushburg Properties is joining the FiDi conversion club with 80 Pine, a 40-story, 60-year-old office tower that it plans to redevelop.
Joseph Hoffman’s firm, which expanded from Brooklyn in recent years, will convert the half-empty tower’s lower floors into 500 units. The 666,000-square-foot building will also include office and retail, according to Bushburg’s site.
It’s unclear if Hoffman will tap the state’s 467m tax break for New York City conversions, but 80 Pine is eligible for a 35-year abatement, including 90 percent off for the first 30 years, so long as it hits the affordability requirements.
126-87 Willets Point Boulevard
Citi Field is getting a new neighbor in Etihad Park, the proposed home for Major League Soccer’s New York City Football Club.
In December, the city and team broke ground on a 612,000-square-foot stadium more than a decade in the making. The stadium — one of the few in memory to be privately financed — will have 25,000 seats and be part of the city’s larger Willets Point transformation.
The redevelopment of the industrial area is set to deliver 2,500 affordable units, a hotel, a school, ground-floor retail and 40,000 square feet of open public space. Etihad Park is projected to open for the 2027 season.
635 West 165th Street
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is expanding its footprint in Washington Heights with a 16-story cancer center at its Columbia Irving Medical Center.
The 507,000-square-foot project would consolidate cancer care facilities and allow NYP to expand cancer research and clinical trials, according to zoning documents.
205 Montague Street
Brooklyn is set to get another new skyscraper with the 47-story mixed-use project headed by Jonathan Landau.
The Brooklyn Heights development is a contender to be the third-largest building in the borough, behind Brooklyn Tower and Brooklyn Point. It will mark Landau’s New York debut as head of Landau Properties. The developer ended his 17-year stint at Fortis Property Group, where he was CEO, in 2022.
A likely condo project, 205 Montague is slated to deliver 136 apartments with an average unit size of 2,100 square feet.
5921 Palisade Avenue
RiverSpring Living, an owner of senior living homes, is building out its corner of the Bronx with a 12-story residential building in Riverdale, steps from the Hudson River.
The project is set to deliver 260 residences, plus cafeterias and recreation space, and should meet the demand of the suburban Bronx neighborhood where more than one-fifth of residents are 65 and older.
Williamsburg Wharf, phase 2
Miki Naftali kicked off 2024 by filing plans for the final two buildings of his million-square-foot Williamsburg waterfront project, Williamsburg Wharf.
The two towers at 80 Wharf Way would span 387,000 square feet and deliver 218 condo units.
They would flesh out Phase 2 of Naftali Group’s Williamsburg Wharf, which includes five 22-story towers on one of the last undeveloped patches of the North Brooklyn waterfront. The development will be part rental, part condo, with an “urban resort” feel, as Naftali put it.
Atlantic Chestnut
Phipps House, the city’s largest and oldest nonprofit affordable housing developer, is geared up for another phase of its sprawling East New York project.
Atlantic Chestnut, an affordable housing development made possible by the de Blasio administration’s East New York rezoning, will ultimately deliver 1,200 units across three interconnected buildings. The most recent filing is for 275 Chestnut Street, a 14-story building with 327 apartments, 85 of which will be affordable.
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