YIMBY has snagged a rendering for a small affordable housing development at 7 Stagg Street, between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street, in Williamsburg.
The little four-story structure will hold four apartments spread across 3,349 square feet of space, for an average apartment of 837 square feet. There will be one unit per floor, beginning on the ground floor.
Plans were first filed back in 2013, but the DOB didn’t approve building permits until last month. Construction has begun, our tipster tells us, and the foundation was poured in the last few weeks.
Affordable housing developer St. Nicks Alliance is building the project, along with three other small affordable buildings in Williamsburg: 198 Montrose Avenue, 40 Scholes Street and 566 Graham Avenue. The group is also rehabbing an older building at 44 Morgan Avenue. When all five buildings are complete, they’ll bring 24 below-market units to the neighborhood, according to St Nicks Housing Director Frank Lang.
The apartments will be set aside for families making 60% of the Area Median Income, or up to $51,780 per year for a family of four, and rented through HPD’s lottery process.
Each of the buildings will also be outfitted with energy-saving appliances and construction materials, including high-efficiency boilers, specially-designed fiberglass windows that prevent heat loss in the winter and help trap cool air in the summer, low-flow toilets and sinks, and “a controlled ventilation system for indoor air quality.” North Williamsburg-based Joseph Vance Architects is handling the design of all four buildings.
They were financed with $8,400,000 from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, a $4,750,000 construction loan from Capital One Bank, and $6,700,000 in low-income housing tax credits, according to the developer.
Construction at 7 Stagg is expected to wrap by the end of 2016, reps from St. Nicks told YIMBY.
The property was city-owned and long-abandoned, until St. Nicks took over the 2,500-square-foot plot in 2002. It was home to a sealed and derelict two-story factory, which was demolished in 2013.
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1. Because it’s good public policy to spend almost $550k per key to build affordable housing, and that doesn’t even include the tax credit. 2. Because the answer to providing housing to low income families is to build new construction. In the middle of freaking Williamsburg. 3. Because hey, if we spent the same amount of money rehabbing an existing building in The Bronx, we probably wouldn’t have created any more homes, right? 4. Oh wait, there’s a 49,000sf multi-family building on the market near Fordham for $8.2mil right now, a few blocks from 3 different trains, that could accommodate a mix of approximately 50 similarly sized units. Hmm.