CW Realty Buys Crown Heights Development Site for $40M

Cheskie Weisz’s CW Realty Group has snapped up a Crown Heights development site after the City Council approved a controversial rezoning of the property.

The Brooklyn-based developer bought 73-99 Empire Boulevard for $40 million from a group of investors that includes Manhattan-based Bridges Development Group and Harry and Alex Adjmi’s A & H Acquisitions, a source with knowledge of the deal said.

The sale comes after the City Council approved the rezoning of the long-neglected corner lot, originally developed as a single-story garage, paving the way for a 13-story, 250,000-square-foot mixed-use development with 20 percent of the units set aside for affordable housing.

Newmark’s Daniel O’Brien and Caroline Hodes arranged the sale.

The property traded for 167 percent more than the $15 million the development group paid for the property in 2021. That was before Bridges submitted preliminary plans early last year for a mixed-use development with affordable housing to the Department of City Planning, kicking off the rezoning process.

The plan required rezoning from commercial to mixed commercial and residential. At the time, Bridges’ Michael Berfield said the project would include about 250 studio to three-bedroom apartments, more than half of them affordable. The 90,000-square-foot retail portion of the project would also include a grocery, he said.

The City Council approved the rezoning in June, despite concerns from local residents about shadows on local play areas for children and fears of gentrification, but with deeper affordability than was initially proposed. The developer must now set aside 20 percent of the project’s units for households making an average of 40 percent of the area median income, with income bands capped at 130 percent AMI, according to the approved rezoning.

Berfield said that Bridges and its partnership had invested close to $10 million in additional equity during the past five years during what he called a “complex re-zoning.”

“Throughout that process, we made significant changes to the plan in response to community input and feedback from government officials regarding the amount and deeper levels of affordability they wanted to see from this project,” he said. “Due to the longer-than-anticipated duration of the process, it was clear that the best path forward was to transfer the property to an experienced developer who is prepared to immediately move ahead with the project. All of our community commitments remain in place, and will result in a project with apartments at the lowest AMI bands, meaning brand new apartments will be available for as low as $1,000 per month.”

He called that a “tremendous win” in terms of adding affordable housing in “one of the best neighborhoods in Brooklyn.”

Representatives from CW Realty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story has been updated with comment from the seller.