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COURIER LIFE, APRIL 1-7, 2022
Broadway Junction to get facelift
Developers look to revamp hub with 24-story towers, hundreds of ‘affordable’ units
BY BEN BRACHFELD
A developer is seeking to build
an affordable housing and commercial
hub, including residential
towers up to 24-stories tall, at
Broadway Junction, a major transit
hub in East New York long recognized
as blighted and underutilized.
But some long-time residents
are sounding an alarm at what
they see as a ploy to turn the
Junction into another Downtown
Brooklyn, especially after what
many in the neighborhood characterize
as broken promises from
the city following the 2016 East
New York rezoning.
The plan by Brooklyn developer
Totem Group is in its infancy,
but the firm currently envisions
constructing four towers,
including two residential buildings,
housing about 650 new units
of below-market-rate housing.
The other two 24-story buildings
would hold about 900,000
square feet for offices, plus about
270,000 square feet of retail space
and about 90,000 square feet of
public community space, according
to a presentation by the firm
to community residents at a virtual
town hall Tuesday night,
hosted by new City Councilmember
Sandy Nurse.
The rezoning would cover a
patch of land bound by Fulton
Street to the north, Van Sinderen
Avenue to the west, and East New
York Avenue to the southeast.
Totem’s plan also calls for demolishing
and “demapping” the
block of Herkimer Street between
Van Sinderen and East New York
avenues to make way for the development.
The builders want to take advantage
of Broadway Junction’s
status as an underutilized transit
nucleus — where the A, C, J, Z, and
L trains, plus the Long Island Rail
Road, all meet, and where Bushwick,
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown
Heights, Brownsville, and East
New York all converge — to create
a new transit-oriented mega-hub,
with housing and new jobs ranging
from light manufacturing to
high-technology into the area.
“Brooklyn’s our home, we
care about it,” said Tucker Reed,
co-founder of Totem, in an interview
with Brooklyn Paper. “Any
Brooklynite is aware of the fact
that Broadway Junction is one of
the city’s great transit nodes, and
it’s a neighborhood that’s articulated
The Broadway Junction subway hub. Photo by Ben Brachfeld
for many years they’d like to
see additional investments in jobs
and affordable housing.”
Busy hub
Broadway Junction is one of
Brooklyn’s busiest subway stations,
but almost all of that foot
traffic consists of people transferring
trains rather than entering
or exiting the station, especially
as compared to similar outer-borough
hubs like Atlantic Terminal
and Jamaica Center.
The parcel that Totem wants
to develop currently consists of
industrial uses like chop shops,
used car dealers, and an MTA
maintenance facility, along with
parking lots, empty lots, the Calvary
Unified Free Will Baptist
Church, a hotel, and lots of land
devoted to supporting the giant,
labyrinthine above-and-underground
subway complex. Totem
already owns a decent chunk of
the land, though not all of it.
Advocates, and elected officials
have long complained that
the area is blighted and underutilized,
and numerous studies have
been commissioned over the past
decade to consider ways to redevelop
the Junction, most recently
by the Economic Development
Corporation in 2019, at the behest
of then-Borough President and
now-Mayor Eric Adams, which
found that redeveloping the area
presented a “unique opportunity
to bring education, workforce
training, and quality employment
opportunities closer to” neighborhoods
with higher unemployment
and lower incomes than the city.
The area around the station
also sees chronic underinvestment,
with one of the most frequent
complaints being poor lighting
that makes the surroundings
unsafe at night. Despite the general
agreement on the need to redevelop
the area, no such initiatives
have been undertaken.
“It’s okay for us to be honest:
the state of Broadway Junction
is not okay for our people,” Nurse
said at the town hall. “There is
lead paint falling from the tracks.”
Reed and his fellow Totem
principal, Vivian Liao, took pains
at the town hall meeting to note
that the process was only in its
amniotic stages, with the start of
the lengthy Uniform Land Use Review
Procedure still years away,
at best, and said that they’re open
to a slew of ideas derived from
community input, like a trade
school or a formal space for local
street vendors.
The firm touts itself as a socially
conscious developer driven
by the interests of the community,
citing its proposed 17-story
building at 1045 Atlantic Avenue,
recently approved by the City
Council, that would be the first
all-electric-powered residential
building in central Brooklyn.
The firm is seeking to develop
all 650 residential units to be permanently
affordable, ideally at an
area median income that matches
the surrounding community
(asked by a resident if they would
target an AMI of about 30-35 percent,
Reed said those were among
the AMI levels they were targeting),
with no market-rate housing;
Reed told Brooklyn Paper that it
would have to win city approval
and funding to do so.
But many participants in the
town hall were not ready to trust
Totem’s claims, nor those of the
developer’s allies.
“There’s a high degree of distrust
towards developers,” said
Bill Wilkins, president of the East
New York Local Development
Corporation, who is a supporter
of the project. “And that has to do
with the lack of capital investment
coming into East New York for decades.”
Broken promises
Also at play are broken promises
from the city in the wake of
the 2016 rezoning of East New
York, including a slow pace of
development of new affordable
homes and, even more saliently,
the promise of 3,900 new manufacturing
jobs in the rezoned industrial
business zone that have not
come close to fruition.
Wilkins — who lives near the
Junction and uses the subway
stop daily — told Brooklyn Paper
that the failure to produce 3,900
jobs likely stemmed from the “bifurcation”
of the 2016 rezoning to
exclude Broadway Junction, the
area he believes has the most potential
as an employment hub.
At the town hall, he said the
area as currently constituted is
“blighted, distressed, underdeveloped,
and underutilized,” and
is in need of a “revolutionary and
evolutionary transformation that
reflects community-driven development.”
Reed said that while he
can’t force employers to occupy
his new towers, he’s open to working
with the community on ideas
on attracting new jobs that would
hire locally. “I don’t claim that
we have all the answers for how
we’re gonna convince a significant
number of employers to move
here,” he said. “But we have a lot
of ideas about how.”
But to those residents who remember
the broken promises of
the East New York rezoning, and
other rezonings like Williamsburg
and Downtown Brooklyn, a
developer’s promises are worth
essentially bupkes.
“You’re giving us promises,
you’re not giving us anything definitive.
It never works out in favor
of the community,” said Debra
Ack, a 20-year neighborhood resident
opposed to the rezoning, who
says she doesn’t want 24-story towers
in the neighborhood. “I don’t
want to see East New York turned
into Downtown Brooklyn...The
times are changing, we do need to
evolve, but there’s a limit to it.”
With ULURP still eons away,
Nurse said that the developer will
need to provide more than just
promises to win her support. And
beyond that, she and others —
like Borough President Antonio
Reynoso, who was also present at
the meeting — decried the format
of the current land use process as
dooming an area like Broadway
Junction to blight unless a developer
can come in and seek a profit.
“We should not have to wait for
developers or for our city to make
investments,” Nurse said. “And
it’s appalling how long the city has
allowed Broadway Junction to be
in the state it is.”
This story has been edited for brevity.
For more, visit BrooklynPaper.com.
/BrooklynPaper.com
