After years in limbo, a troubled state-owned building is changing hands and getting a makeover.
Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday announced that a nonprofit partnership made up of the Fifth Avenue Committee, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and One Brooklyn Health will take over 1024 Fulton Street, a three-story building in Clinton Hill that has sat vacant since the ’90s.
The state will demolish the building to make way for 125 rental units, which will be affordable to those earning between 30 percent and 80 percent of the area median income. The project will also include 27,000 square feet of community center space operated by Fort Greene Council, and a 1,000-square-foot health clinic.
Apex Building Group and Henge Development will handle general contracting and project management. Their financial involvement in the project will be limited to collecting a portion of the developer fee.
The $111 million project is expected to be almost entirely financed through low-income tax credits, tax-exempt bonds and public capital subsidy, according to a representative from the governor’s office.
The state’s Office of Children and Family Services bought the property in 1997, hoping to develop a community center, but “structural issues” stood in the way.
The building, which was once a showroom for Brooklyn Union Gas, has since sat vacant. The Cuomo administration halted an auction for the site in 2014, after then-Assembly member Walter Mosley urged that the building be transferred to the nonprofit Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corp., the New York Daily News reported at the time. That plan fell apart, as did another to sell the site to a Philadelphia-based company.
The latest plan has the state footing the bill for demolishing the 33,000-square-foot structure, for which it previously allocated $3.7 million.
Empire State Development issued a request for proposals for the site last year, seeking a development team that is at least 51 percent owned by a nonprofit. The development partnership is 100 percent not-for-profit, which gave the team a slight edge in the competition for the site, according to the scoring RFP rubric.
The project will next undergo environmental review and then the state’s general project plan process. As part of her executive budget, Hochul proposed reforming the State Environmental Quality Review Act to exempt certain housing projects. Given the project’s parameters, the Fulton Street project could qualify for that exemption if the proposal is ultimately approved.
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