NEW YORK CITY-A pair of unanimous approvals by City Council committees has the team behind the $1.2-billion New Domino housing development optimistic about the prospects for the Brooklyn mixed-use development getting final approvals later this summer. “It looks very promising,” attorney Mitchell Korbey, who’s representing the New Domino team and calls the project “transformative,” tells GlobeSt.com. “We have a unanimous approval by the Land Use Committee, which is a testament to the negotiations and give-and-take.”
Next steps for the project, which also garnered a 9-0 vote Tuesday by the council’s Subcommittee on Zoning, are approvals by the City Planning Commission and the full council. Both are likely to occur by the end of July. “Unless something unexpected happens, we expect the project to be approved,” says Korbey, a partner in the real estate practice at Herrick, Feinstein.
Although nowhere near as contentious as another major Brooklyn project, Atlantic Yards, the redevelopment of the former Domino Sugar factory site on the Williamsburg waterfront has had to traverse a lengthy road to City Council chambers. It’s been in the works since CPC Resources and its partner, the Katan Group, purchased the site in 2004, although the formal public review process was launched this past January.
Tuesday’s votes occurred after a series of minor modifications to the project, many at the behest of Council Member Stephen Levin, who represents the district. Levin had previously criticized the project as “too big,” but now says in a statement that he’s pleased with the move to shorten the project’s two apartment towers from 40 stories to 34 while maintaining the same number of affordable housing units.
CPC will also provide a shuttle bus to nearby subway lines and has agreed to provide prevailing wages to building services workers, construction trade workers and supermarket workers. Other modifications made at Levin’s request included asking the Bloomberg administration to conduct a comprehensive traffic and transit study and the creation of a community advisory council to oversee the project. Earlier this year, the project’s design was modified to incorporate the iconic Domino Sugar sign, thereby quelling protests from community groups.
In between the project’s inception six years ago and the council committee endorsements was “one of the most complex entitlement applications in recent history for Brooklyn and probably the five boroughs,” Korbey says. This was because of the site’s location on the waterfront, the affordable housing component, reconnection to the existing street network, open space, environmental issues and “infrastructure concerns, including rebuilding an entire wharf.”
Along with shepherding the project through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, Herrick had to obtain approvals from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the US Army Corps of Engineers. “Taken together with the rezoning applications themselves, the design controls and special permits, it is a package of zoning approvals that are almost without precedent for their complexity,” says Korbey.
He notes that CPC’s parent organization, the nonprofit lender Community Preservation Corp., has established “a very long track record of building and maintaining affordable housing in the boroughs. So in some ways it was a good fit.” The result, Korbey says, “has the opportunity to be transformative for the Brooklyn waterfront.”
Similar sentiments were expressed in a statement from Mayor Michael Bloomberg after Tuesday’s approvals. The project, which also includes office and retail components as well as a school and public space, “will be an enormously beneficial development for the local community and the city’s economy,” says Bloomberg.
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Paul Bubny
Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.
