It’s not easy to build housing in a City that seems to hate housing people…
This project was our first acquisition after Vivian Liao Korich and I started | TOTEM |. And with our partners Ofer Cohen and Lee Brodsky of BEB Capital, we embarked on a seemingly straight forward project to extend an existing zoning district one block and turn a Dunkin Donuts drive-in, into almost 200 homes for New Yorkers. Nothing about what happened next was logical. We weathered blistering personal attacks, a global pandemic, ever accelerating interest rates and the complexity of navigating seemingly endless layers of government oversight often at odds with itself.
In order to ensure that our building would eventually reflect the priorities of the community in which it sits, we spent nearly 3 years meeting with community stakeholders. And worked hard to infuse this feedback into the final product. And when naysayers tried to intimidate us into not building by calling us racist vampires, suggesting we replace the Dunkin Donuts with a Starbucks drive-in, or take to social media to attack our character, motivations or spread disinformation - we methodically kept our heads down and focused on the work. In part because of our deep love for Sunset Park. The neighborhood that our colleague Elizabeth Canela grew up in. The neighborhood that welcomed my great grandmother to NYC when she immigrated to the US from Italy. The neighborhood that perhaps suffers most greatly from today’s housing crisis due to the age of the existing building stock, the lack of new development due to antiquated zoning restrictions, and a surging population of largely immigrant residents hoping to gain a toehold in America.
As one Community Board member put it on the night they voted to approve the project: The 50 or so affordable apartments that will be in this building may not mean much in the grander scheme of things, but they will mean EVERYTHING to the families that eventually live in them.
We counldn’t agree more. And now embark on the final staging of building and delivering them posthaste. And we are all grateful for the opportunity to do so with Scott Shnay & David Manheimer. Excelsior ????
