Forest City now playing role in ground-up office tower in Downtown Brooklyn

It's notable that Forest City Ratner, which as part of Greenland Forest City Partners now aims--or claims to aim--to build a significant amount of office space at Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, is getting involved in the the only ground-up tower in Downtown Brooklym.  be at 420 Albee Square, on a parking lot just west of the City Point project and between Fulton and Willoughby streets/

The Wall Street Journal, in its real estate roundup yesterday, reported JEMB and Forest City Join Forces on Tower:

JEMB Realty Corp. in Manhattan has taken on Brooklyn-based developer Forest City Ratner Cos. to build an office tower in downtown Brooklyn.
The site, a vacant parking lot purchased by JEMB in 2014, is on Willoughby Street between Duffield and Gold streets.
“We spent almost a year planning a 70-story, mixed-use building,” said Morris Bailey, JEMB’s chairman. “But we looked at the market and saw all the new residential buildings planned. The market felt overloaded.”

The terms of the partnership weren't specified. Forest City of course has office expertise with MetroTech, although those towers were built for a different market. Some are being adapted to serve smaller companies. Surely the expertise and effort in finding an anchor tenant would help GFCP in its own quest.

The building is expected to have some 500,000 square feet, which would be less than one of the four scenarios considered at Site 5 of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, but more than at two of the scenarios.

As of last November, the building was expected to be some 400,000 square feet, as noted in the press release from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. As I wrote, because the city could sell nearly one-third of the development rights, it could mandate that the building have office space.

And that raises the question of how the city might help ease more office space.