Earlier today, a permit application was submitted for an unusual building in Brooklyn: five stories of commercial and community facility space, with no housing. While normally rents are not high enough in the borough to merit purely commercial new construction (aside from the Williamsburg waterfront, where miniature office towers are starting to pencil out), ethnic business districts in southern Brooklyn can have high demand for commercial space, but little actual building stock devoted to it, since they were largely built out before they became immigrant hotspots.
And so it is that a permit was filed for a new building at 2579 East 17th Street, near the corner of Avenue Z in the Sheepshead Bay section of southern Brooklyn.
The 13,000 square feet of commercial and community facility space will likely be rented to businesses catering to Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who dominate the far southern edge of Brooklyn around Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay.
The cellar floor of the 60-foot-tall building – really the ground level – will contain retail space, with two floors of medical office space stacked above. The third through fifth floors (which will appear as the fourth through sixth) are planned to contain a “commercial day camp,” per the filing. While the zoning normally accommodates only low-density strip mall-style retail, the community facility bonus allows developers (this isn’t the only commercial/medical building on the block) to build denser, more urban buildings.
Sheepshead Bay-based Alex Finkelshteyn is the developer, and Robert Palermo’s Corporate Design of America – also based nearby, on Voorhies Avenue – is the architect. The developer paid $1.4 million for the site, or $107 per buildable square foot, taking into account the community facility bonus.
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