Bronx Renaissance

Big and Small Projects Signal a Strong Development Harvest

by Adrian MacDonald

The outer-borough resurgence is finally hitting the Bronx.

Construction in the city's northernmost borough has been buzzing with smaller residential and school construction projects for several years. But now there is a rush of high-profile projects that can stand with the already-completed MetroTech Center office complex in Downtown Brooklyn, the mixed-use Queens West cityscape on the Long Island City waterfront, and new minor league baseball stadiums in Staten Island and Coney Island.

The biggest splash in the Bronx came in mid-August when Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, and other city officials presided over two major groundbreaking ceremonies - one for the new $800 million, 54,000-seat Yankee Stadium and the other for a $500 million, 1-million-sq.-ft. retail center to replace the Bronx Terminal Market.

The two projects may finally help the city toward a longtime goal of revitalizing the South Bronx, as well as provide the 42-sq.-mi. borough with a new "downtown" center resembling the active commercial districts found in the Jamaica and Flushing sectors of Queens or the Downtown Brooklyn area of Brooklyn.

"The Bronx, unlike Brooklyn, was never a cohesive city on its own," said Petr Stand, principal at New York-based Magnusson Architecture & Planning. "It was just a lot of little communities that merged together when the city incorporated."

Stand was deeply involved in efforts by former Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who left office in 2001, to encourage downtown core-style development in a 300-block area dubbed the "Bronx Center," which includes the stadium, terminal market, and the Melrose Commons and Hub neighborhoods.

While officials no longer use the Bronx Center designation, the area is finally the site of the borough's largest projects. In public speeches, Carrión has predicted that new development surrounding the stadium could total $1 billion.

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While upscale Bronx neighborhoods such as Riverdale are adding luxury residential projects, market-rate housing remains a relatively untested proposition in the South Bronx. Jackson Development Group of Bellerose, N.Y., developed the most notable example last year - 28 market-rate condominiums in seven row houses near Yankee Stadium, said James Rausse, the borough president's housing and community development planner.

But while most of the South Bronx is still oriented toward affordable housing, the market is active, said Ted Weinstein, who is Bronx planning director for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Plans for several new condominium and co-operative projects in the last year is a strong indicator.

"Five years ago, we had a developer that couldn't get financing for a co-op," he added. "He was about to give up and build a rental. We wanted a co-op, and the community had been demanding a homeownership building on the lot. Earlier this year, the developer went back to the bank, and he got the financing."

The Briarwood Organization of Queens plans to seek land review approvals this fall for that $45 million project, which would feature two buildings of 91 units each near the Grand Concourse and would begin construction next summer.

Big Projects off the Drawing Board

The biggest projects in the borough for years have involved significant public investment, such as the $1.24 billion Croton water treatment plant that the city's Department of Environmental Protection is building in Van Cortlandt Park. The project, which broke ground in 2004, will treat up to 290 million gallons of water per day upon its completion in 2011.

Another large effort is wrapping up on the $380 million Bronx Criminal Court Complex, located east of the stadium on 161st Street, where New York-based Bovis Lend Lease built a 10-story, 640,000-sq.-ft. courthouse; a one-story, 10,000-sq.-ft. circular jury assembly building; and a two-story, 94,000-sq.-ft. parking garage beneath a large plaza.

Today, the big projects have a decidedly more commercial flavor, and they're occurring with the return of a solid working-class population to the Bronx in the last decade. The borough has 1.36 million residents, according to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau estimate, up from 1.2 million in the 1990 census.

The formerly blighted neighborhoods of the South Bronx have "limited shopping opportunities, coupled with a high demand for retail goods," said Robert Ursini, a spokesman for New York-based Related Cos., which broke ground in August on the $500 million Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market and had begun construction in March of a $56.7 million office building in the Hub district.

The 950,000-sq.-ft. Gateway project, set to open in fall 2009, will be a three-story retail complex on the site of the Bronx Terminal Market, a dilapidated facility that had housed food merchants who fought plans for the new mall. The 22 merchants eventually agreed to leave in January after city officials and the developer put together an $8 million relocation and assistance package.

The retail center, which is just south of Yankee Stadium and has direct access to the Major Deegan Expressway, will have a garage with 2,600 spaces and offer a variety of local and national retailers, including Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. The project, being designed by Atlanta-based GreenbergFarrow and New York-based Brennan Beer Gorman Architects, will include added public access to the Harlem River waterfront as well as restoration of the Prow Building at East 149th Street and River Avenue in a bid to preserve the terminal market's history.

Related also entered into an agreement with the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. to use Bronx contractors "to the extent possible," said Miquela Craytor, a spokeswoman for the organization. The agreement entails breaking down bid packages to increase opportunities for small contractors as well as training for local residents to take on construction jobs.

The new stadium is also a signal of the borough's better times, because for years, the ownership of the New York Yankees had complained that fans did not want to come to the Bronx. The team had long threatened to move the major league baseball franchise to sites in New Jersey or on Manhattan's West Side.

The new ballpark would open in April 2009 on 22 acres across the street from the existing stadium on land taken from Macombs Dam Park and part of the adjacent John Mullaly Park. Designed by HOK Sport + Venue + Event of Kansas City, the new venue will evoke the façade of the stadium built in 1923, before a major redesign of the facility 30 years ago.

The project won New York City Council approval in the spring but had to secure various other approvals - and defeat a court challenge by residents who opposed the loss of the two large parks - before construction began in August, when the site was turned over to New York-based Turner Construction. The construction manager immediately began mobilizing for foundation work, said Mark Pulsfort, vice president and operations manager.

"The playing field is below grade, so we have some excavation work," he added.

After installing piles and a cast-in-place concrete level that will house stadium services, the project team will begin erecting the structural steel and precast stadia seating sections.

The broader redevelopment effort around the stadium includes more than $400 million in projects that will create four new city-owned parking structures, various smaller parks that will total the area of the larger ones taken for the stadium, and infrastructure improvements such as a new Metro North commuter rail station. The city, state, and private developers are funding the additional projects, while the team is funding the stadium construction costs, using New York-based Tishman Speyer Properties as development manager.

The Yankees signed a Community Benefits Agreement that pledges to assign at least a quarter of construction contracts to Bronx-based companies, half of which would be owned by minorities or women. It would also assign a quarter of the construction jobs to Bronx residents.

The large projects won't be isolated pockets. Related is already working on its other South Bronx project, a two-story mixed-use building in the Hub, one of the area's historic commercial centers. The Hub Retail & Office Center, a 170,000-sq.-ft. facility, will house the city's Department of Finance and includes renovation of an adjacent garage to provide 225 parking spaces.

Another shopping center will rise nearby in Plaza at the Hub, a project that will encompass three city-owned blocks in the triangle formed by Bergen Avenue, Brook Avenue, and East 149th Street. Three New York-based firms -Starrett Housing, Black Acre Capital, and Cypress Equities - plan to acquire the property from the city and begin construction next year on the $400 million development, which will combine the retail space with office, residential, and entertainment elements.

The largest block will consist of a four-story, 490,000-sq.-ft. shopping center integrated with a nine-story office tower and parking garage. The entire building will span over an at-grade subway track that currently bisects the block.

The smaller blocks would house two middle-income, co-op apartment towers with up to 250 units, as well as a supermarket and six-screen cinema multiplex. The co-ops would be subsidized by the city's Housing Development Corp.

Nearby in the Hunts Point district, the Bloomberg administration is mapping out a neighborhood plan with local residents to support residential and commercial projects. The city already set aside $27 million in capital funds for the plan as well as $110 million for the construction of new facilities, including a new home for the Fulton Fish Market, which the city relocated from Manhattan last year.

New Housing Driving the Market

The big retail and commercial projects have roots in the residential resurgence that has swept across the borough. The sum of residential investments in the Bronx from all sources since 2003 totals $1.87 billion, according to the borough president's office.

It was a long road back from the 1970s, when the Bronx became a national emblem of urban blight as neighborhoods emptied and entire blocks of buildings were abandoned or left to crumble. The city estimates that more than 250,000 residents fled the South Bronx in that decade, with the government becoming "landlord of last resort" on as many as 100,000 units, Bronx planning director Weinstein said.

"There was a large geographical area involved," he added. "It wasn't just one neighborhood - it was a whole section of the borough."

The core of the recent change has been a push to hike the share of owner-occupied dwellings. The Bronx's 22.5 percent home-ownership rate, the lowest of any county in the state, has spawned efforts by the borough president to boost the share of owner-occupied residences, Rausse said.

"When a county has a high rate of homeownership, it means people have more of a stake in the community," he added.

Efforts toward renewing neglected areas began with the creation of single-family homes in suburban-style developments in the 1980s. The city later worked toward creating denser housing matching the area's urban character, such as two- and three-family town houses, Weinstein said.

In 2003, Bloomberg launched a $7.5 billion citywide plan to create 165,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years. The housing corporation, which issues low-interest bond financing for affordable housing projects, has invested $910 million in the Bronx since 2003, representing about half of the roughly 5,000 units it subsidized.

"The Bronx is our most active borough recently," said Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for the agency. "There's a lot of building in the Bronx because it still has a lot of available lots. Brooklyn has a lot of row houses, which are harder to tear down."

Now, the abundance of vacant property in the South Bronx is piquing the interest of private developers. The vast majority of development is subsidized affordable housing for existing residents, a quarter of whom live below the poverty level.

One surprise in recent years has been the willingness of private banks to finance new projects. Prior to recent revitalization efforts, banks were unwilling to finance projects or even mortgages in the dense 35-block Melrose Commons neighborhood near Yankee Stadium, said Yolanda Gonzales, head of Nos Quedamos, a not-for-profit development organization in the South Bronx.

"The banks claim 'redlining' never happened," she added, referring to the practice in which banks avoid lending within lower-income income segments and neighborhoods. "But there were no loans."

Toward the end of the last decade, groups such as Nos Quedamos teamed up with private developers in the city such as Atlantic Development Group, Procida Realty, L&M Equities, and Phipps Houses to develop new residential projects in Melrose Commons. Many combine subsidized loan financing from city housing agencies with federal tax credits and conventional market-rate bank mortgages.

Atlantic Development's plan for the Boricua Village project in Melrose Commons provides a good example. Weinstein said Atlantic is seeking public approvals for the development, which would feature a new Bronx campus for Boricua College, a 1,200-student liberal arts university with campuses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It would also feature a superblock of town houses and five apartment towers that will result in 695 new units, some of which would be co-ops, with 75 percent reserved for low-income residents and a quarter for moderate-income residents.