Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Who knew: the luxury fitness club Life Time's lease at 18 Sixth Avenue (aka Brooklyn Crossing, or B4) is  Brooklyn’s largest retail lease of 2023, in square footage, according to The Real Deal . The publication, which did not rank leases in overall cost or cost per square foot, noted that it was the borough’s second year in a row without any deals larger than 40,000 square feet.  All three floors? "The fitness center agreed early this year to lease the first three floors of the 51-story Brooklyn Crossing tower," built by the Brodsky Organization and Greenland USA, the Real Deal reported. That's not quite true. As I wrote in January, The Commercial Observer reported Life Time leased 36,470 square feet for 20 years. The publication said the club would "occupy" the first three floors, which is not incorrect, but misleading. The lease, as far as I can tell, represents the full second and third floors, plus one of the three ground-floor retail spaces, given that

The latest Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Construction Update (bottom), covering the two weeks beginning Monday, Nov. 27 was circulated Monday, Dec. 4 at 9:52 am (way late) by email by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority that oversees/shepherds the project. As with the Update two weeks earlier , there's nothing new to report. There are no construction activities planned for the platform needed for construction over the railyard. Each of two platform blocks would support three towers. The ESD stated in the cover email: Please be advised that construction alert emails will be moved to monthly alerts until there is a change in construction activity. Biweekly construction alerts will continue to update on the Atlantic Yards website. What about the project's future? Big questions about the project's future loom. As I  reported , while the advisory Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation on Aug. 2 requested that the parent ESD prepare, by Oct. 3. a financia

So the Brooklyn Daily Eagle--which has a handful of staffers, none with a history covering Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park--last night posted Owner of Pacific Park defaults on site, auction set for January , without byline. It was promoted in this morning's email. On one level--it's a low bar!--it's good that they followed up on the news that surfaced more than a week ago, since, for example, neither the Brooklyn Paper nor the city's major dailies have done so.  (The news was broken by The Real Deal, which the Eagle helpfully described as a "well-known New York real estate publication," and followed up by my coverage and also Crain's New York Business and the real-estate site Bisnow.) But the Eagle distillation has major errors, starting with--as Gib Veconi (a leader in BrooklynSpeaks and the Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation) pointed out--the default affects not the entire 22-acre site, which has eight buildings (plus the arena) with multiple

The Barclays Center yesterday released its December 2023 calendar of events: 16 ticketed events including five Brooklyn Nets games, one college basketball tournament (the NABC Brooklyn Showcase , with four games in one day), one college game with a local host (LIU), one wrestling event, and eight concerts. The latter include three Madonna concerts, two from Travis Scott, and a New Year's Konpa Kingdom show . That's a significant improvement over December 2022 , which had only eight ticketed events, including one concert. Should that be attributed to the switch from SeatGeek to Tickemaster? A declining honeymood period for the UBS Arena in Nassau County? Note: they don't sell the upper bowl for the college basketball games. December 2022, and before The December 2022 calendar included six Brooklyn Nets games, one basketball tournament (the  Basketball Hall of Fame Invitational , with four games), and one concert. (There were also two unspecified private events, on Dec. 6 a

Looking east on Dean Street, from 535 Carlton So, how many parking spaces are there on Dean Street under the three apartment buildings--535 Carlton and the two-tower 595 Dean--stretching east of Carlton Avenue? The total is now apparently 772, as 469 spaces under B12/B13 (595 Dean), which opened earlier this year, have been added to the initial 303 spaces under B14 (535 Carlton Avenue), which opened in 2017. That's according to documents filed with the Department of Buildings. And that's slightly more than the 455 spaces announced earlier--which itself was the product of multiple adjustments. (There's no parking under the fourth tower on the block, the condo building 550 Vanderbilt.) Time will tell I dig into the numbers below, but the bigger question is: what happens if and when several hundred drivers drawn by an arena event all want to enter around the same time or leave at the same time? As shown below, there's only one way in and out, and it's a relatively narr

The coalition BrooklynSpeaks--the only long-running community entity left to speak on Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park--has issued a  statement  calling the pending foreclosure sale of six development sites over the Vanderbilt Yard "a potentially fatal setback for the project, and a searing indictment of New York State Empire State Development’s [ESD] failure to oversee Atlantic Yards in the public’s interest." Though dated Nov. 29, a day after news broke of the sale, the statement--which calls for governmental investigations of ESD's "stewardship" over the project for now owned by Greenland USA--was released today. I've reproduced it in full below, with annotations in italics. “The public deserves a full accounting of how things have gone so wrong at Atlantic Yards,” added Michelle de la Uz, Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit affordable housing group that also partners with developers on affordable housing. “We call upon the New York

How much are the six development sites over the Vanderilt Yard, scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction in January, worth? Would the holders of the debt, incurred by master developer Greenland USA (which owns nearly all of the project going forward) be paid back? And might it be worth it for a buyer to build on the first block, including only three of the development sites, between Sixth and Carlton avenues? The answers to those questions are murky, since neither the private parties involved nor the state authority overseeing the project have released any details, though I'll attempt some ballpark estimates below.  Looking west from Vanderbilt Avenue at two railyard blocks needing platform Big platform cost One obvious conclusion: the cost of the platform cuts deeply into the value of the sites, and the potential fines for affordable housing cut even further. As estimated in 2016--and costs surely have risen--the platform over the first block, in two parts (for B5, and B6/B7