Development Blog: Inside Third & Bond
Today we launch an experimental new feature on the site, a development blog written by a developer. Despite having taken a few lumps from us in the past over the J Condo, The Hudson Companies is going to blog its next Brooklyn project, the townhouse condos at 111 Third Street in Gowanus, on Brownstoner.com. Frankly,…
Today we launch an experimental new feature on the site, a development blog written by a developer. Despite having taken a few lumps from us in the past over the J Condo, The Hudson Companies is going to blog its next Brooklyn project, the townhouse condos at 111 Third Street in Gowanus, on Brownstoner.com. Frankly, we’ve got no idea what to expect, but suspect that on balance it’ll be a pretty interesting exercise. Every Thursday, David Kramer, one of the firm’s principals, and his associate Alison Novak, will pen a new post. There are only two things we’ve suggested they bring to the table: total transparency and a thick skin.
After reading the first posting about our latest development at 111 Third Street (GMAP) on Brownstoner two weeks ago, we pitched Mr. B on the idea of an ongoing weekly blog, reporting the process (warts and all) as we design, develop, finance, construct and market our new housing project. For the Brownstoner community, this will be a chance to peer inside the real estate development world to see how we make the sausage. For us at Hudson, a chance to take advantage of a built-in focus group of informed Brooklynites while getting some free publicity.
It all started last summer when the Vitanza brothers, plumbing contractors who had been at the site for 10 years, decided to relocate to Red Hook and take advantage of the skyrocketing land prices in brownstone Brooklyn. Like many of the listings that cross our desk, this one, for a site with 180 feet of frontage on Third Street and potential for almost 50,000 square feet of development, came from Massey Knakal. Four out of five listings that we get we immediately discard….too expensive, lousy location, too small, too big. If we had a dollar for every flier advertising a site in Downtown Brooklyn (i.e., Flatbush/Willoughby) to build a 30 story building and pay $200/sf for the land. What are they smoking? But we focused on this listing.
For starters, it was down the street from our then office location…
…We had noticed the increasing desirability of this area—Park Slope moving west, Carroll Gardens moving east, Gowanus becoming a hipster name, the F train 2 blocks away, and coming slowly into focus, a distant image in the future, the first Whole Foods of Brooklyn coming to Third & Third.
We also liked the price, $160/sf. We thought you could sell finished condos in a quality product for at least $700/sf, so there could be a profit if you didn’t screw up. Finally, we had a concept for the housing that fit well with the R6 zoning…a row of townhouses, 4 stories high, each one consisting of multiple condos so that the price could be affordable for each unit, and we wouldn’t have to worry about selling each house for $2-3 million. These condos would have a range of sizes and prices, from $400K to $1.4 million. We could build 20-foot wide townhouses, 9 of them in a row, that was our plan.
We placed our bid, got encouraging feedback from Ken Freeman of Massey Knakal that our bid was competitive…..and we didn’t get the deal. The Vitanzas signed a contract with Developer #1. Oh well, more frogs to kiss, more development sites to explore. Or so we thought…
See you next week,
David & Alison
Those of us who actually live behind this site are going to be very interested in this blog. If you look at the picture above, you may just see a large maple tree that lies in our back yard. The history of these lots is pretty sordid. The Vitanza brothers tore down a garage that is now the empty lot on the left of this picture with complete disregard to the damage that it caused to the houses both adjacant to the lot on 3rd street and those behind it, including ours, on 2nd Street. This was all done to ensure a change in zoning to allow residential development. Having succeeded in doing so, they then sold to ‘Developer #1’ who I shall not name and shame, who then proceeded to spin a web of lies to those of us living next to the property which resulted in a substantial cost to the owners of 5 properties adjacent to the lot in legal fees related to a deal proposed by ‘Developer #1’. Having been completely led up the garden path by this developer we discovered out of the blue that they had flipped the deal. We, the owners of the properties adjacent to this development will be very interested to see how much transparency there will be in the proposed plans and how the blog develops.
I was curious about the choice of 20′ wide row houses. As an owner of a 22′ house, the office/little room is so small, would they be keeping the traditional layout of a brownstone or would the front rooms be full width? Or skinny (2) 10′ rooms?
Would the depth be a 40-50′ or 60-70′?
Would the streetscape be a simulation of a row of brownstones, or Canarsie houses with bay windows etc? Would the houses have symmetrical 2 or three windows with stoops?
I am interested in the inner workings of a development like this, thanks for starting this blog.
What we really need is an dedicated anti-development site maybe funded by a NIMBY-BANANA foundation of some sort.
I welcome reading the process from their perspective. Of course I realize will all be from a profit making point of view. Am sure I’ll have dozens of questions which hope to some extent they might answer.
Also looking forward to the actual development – and I confess I’m the one that made the defensive and what were considered snarky comments for this project on the posting last week.
Here’s my concern: How do we know these people are being transparent, or that they’re showing all the “warts”? It’s not like Brownstoner is going to independently vet their claims. They are blogging a process that will end in their having a product to sell for a profit. They have every financial interest to cast themselves and that project in as positive a light as possible. It’s not as though we can expect Brownstoner to edit and vet every claim they make. For the developers to do that in their own commercial blog would be one thing, but it doesn’t seem to fit in a blog like Brownstoner, which aims to be an independent blog covering Brooklyn and Brooklyn real estate.
If anything the developer is going way out on a limb if they truly are going to provide the total transparency Brownstoner has requested. From my pespective, as a small scale developer, there appears to be significant risk for the developer in the trade off of insight from “built-in focus groups” in exchange for an inside look at the harsh reality of some aspects of real estate development. They might have already thought of that. It will be interesting to see if the degree of transparency they offer is linked to the value of the feedback and interest in the project they receive.
Nope, no money’s changing hands. What you see is what you get on this one.
I don’t see what the problem is if everything’s out on the table. No money’s changing hands here, Mr. B?
wait, hold on, i think this is the WORST idea ever!!!! i hate it how developers get everything they want, now, including free advertizing on brownstoner. brownstoner how low will you go?