NEW YORK CITY-The redevelopment of Staten Island’s North Shore cleared a major hurdle on Friday morning as Hoboken, NJ-based developer Ironstate Development closed on the sale of the Homeport site in Stapleton. The deal will pave the way for 900 units of new rental housing and 30,000 square feet of retail situated on the former US Naval Base here. Ironstate will invest $150 million into the project, while the city will chip in $33 million for road improvements, a new waterfront esplanade and upgrades to the Staten Island Railway station adjacent to the property.

Set against the backdrop of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, local officials gathered at the seven-acre site to commemorate the beginning of the transformation of the neighborhood, a largely industrial area with a re-emerging downtown along the Upper New York Bay. After the construction of the bridge in the 1960s, much of the borough's commercial development moved to the center of the Island, leaving its northern retail corridors with high vacancies. “At one time, the Stapleton and Port Richmond communities were the shopping centers of Staten Island,” said Borough President James P. Molinaro. “If you wanted to go shopping, there was no mall at the time; you went to Stapleton or Port Richmond, and we are going to bring it back, step by step. This is going to be the start of the renaissance of Stapleton, St. George and the whole North Shore.”

The project marks the largest development of market-rate rental housing on Staten Island in the last 40 years, but it did not come without complications, Molinaro said. In the early 1990s, the entire 35-acre Homeport property was retained by the city. After the base closed several years later, the borough considered redeveloping the underutilized site into a sports complex or a movie studio, but none of those plans stuck, Molinaro explained.