Throughout the 20th century, the main form of development in Brooklyn has been redevelopment, with developers razing single-family homes and small walk-up apartments to erect larger multifamily buildings. That process was severely curtailed with the 1961 zoning code, and was whittled away even more during the Bloomberg years, when growth was instead redirected to large industrial and commercial sites, for example in downtown Brooklyn and the Williamsburg waterfront.
But if you travel to one of the southernmost points in the borough, to the bungalows of Brighton Beach, you can still find single-family homes offering small development sites to builders looking to erect condos and rentals for middle-class, largely immigrant New Yorkers. (The Bloomberg administration tried to downzone this area, but was rebuffed by strong opposition from the Russian community, which has not been infected by the NIMBY bug that’s consumed much of the rest of the borough.)
Redevelopment of the decaying single-story beach bungalows was halted by the market downturn, but projects are slowly returning, as with 2931 Brighton 4th Street, a small condo (we’re guessing) project for which an application was submitted this morning.
The plans call for a five-story, five-unit building mid-block between Ocean View and Neptune avenues. With large units (five spread over a bit more than 7,000 square feet of space, for full-floor units of 1,400 square feet each) and one parking space per apartment, condos seem to be the plan.
The developer is listed as Bukaie Moshe, and the architect as Royal Engineering, led by Pirooz Soltanizadeh. The developer bought the bungalow building site in 2013 for $305,000, or jus $43 per buildable square foot.
In the new building next door, two-bedroom condos sold in 2014 in the mid- to high $400,000s, for per-square-foot prices in the mid- to high $400s per square foot, offering a hint as to pricing at 2931 Brighton 4th. (To put these prices into perspective, they’re about a third of what you’d pay for new construction in Williamsburg or the neighborhoods around downtown Brooklyn.)
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