850 Hendrix Street
Brooklyn
New York
USA
Mixed Use Building
775,000 SF gross SF
576,166 SF net SF
120,578 SF lot SF
575 affordable house units
Project Team:
Developer : St. Paul Community Baptist Church (In-House Team)
Architect, Planner, Urban Design : KURV Architecture DPC / Alex Loyer Hughes AIA
Land Use Council : Herrick Feinstein LLP
Environmental Engineering : Langan Engineering and Environmental LLC
Economic Advisors: Forsyth Street Services LLC
Interior Design : KURV Architecture DPC / Alex Loyer Hughes AIA
As is the case with many traditional religious institutions in New York City, they are often “land rich and very cash poor”. This gives developers incentives to approach these institutions with sophisticated and often predatory real estate joint venture propositions that are often unfavorable to the institutional land owners, and typically add very little value for the institutions themselves and the communities they serve. Most of these propositions create profits that flow away from these communities and into the pockets of the developers and large corporations.
Many Institutions in Brooklyn have grown weary of giving up their land, or control of it, only for unfavorable debt positions and propositions that devalue their roles as equity owners of their land. Wanting to avoid ending up in a sad, unimaginative basement space of a cheaply built affordable housing complex like so many others, often with very little equity, if any, in the resulting profits or cash flowing net operating incomes of these new developments, this church sought to seek out professional advice and assembled an in-house development team in order to control their own vision of the future for their project. Simply put, they feared the dismal results of their neighboring congregations who had “sold out” and “gotten a bad deal” just before them, during similar development processes for their own land. The church therefore decided to be proactive and take action so that this fate wouldn’t also happen to their institution.
The Council of Governing Elders of the Congregation at St. Paul Community Baptist Church brought KURV Architecture DPC on board to help lead the in-house development team and KURV Architecture began to leverage a selection of our Manhattan based academic and professional consultants and presented them to the Church in order to assemble and direct an in house team of talented Economists, Land Use Attorneys, Geotechnical, Structural and Environmental Engineers as well as other AEC professionals that would allow the Church to be well informed in making critical decisions regarding their land use and therefore also allow them to develop the project on their own, without ever jeopardizing the control of their land. And so, with KURV Architecture DPC leading the master plan re-zoning team as well as the design and development of the new buildings, with the full team of hand picked consultants fully onboard working for the Church together in unison, the Church was able to develop the St. Paul Community Baptist Church’s Campus project under the guidance of the NYC’s Department of City Planning’s ULURP process and also the NYC’s Housing, Preservation and Development requirements for Affordable Projects.
Questions about community equity, profits that stay in the neighborhood, projects that create jobs, guaranteed minimum wage, reduction of poverty, fresh food availability, its correlation to neighborhood and community health, and ultimately how development can add value to the quality of life of the neighborhood and not just the developer’s pocket, were all items raised in public hearings for the project. These are all recurring concerns that strike hard with the communities involved in these public rezoning approval processes and we were forced to think very deeply about these challenges as consulting developers, urban planners and architects.
Requests for ULURP Rezoning in this part of the city often receive strong and willful opposition from community leaders and members as well as from their elected council. Developers and development projects are scrutinized with deep distrust. We witnessed many developers and proponents of new projects leave in tears after being torn apart by local community leaders for not being sensitive enough to the community’s common goals. We knew that it was fundamental to successfully capture the culture of the community and translate it successfully into the project’s Architectural and Interior identity. Another bland and generic group of buildings would never be allowed here.
Therefore, KURV Architecture harnessed the cultural power of the church’s choir music and with our own patented methodology, we translated the music into unique textural patterns that were applied to various aspects of the project such as the building’s exterior rain-screen cladding, fenestration patterns, interior wall surfaces, acoustical tile patterns and subdivisions. The concept was to represent the church’s cultural identity through music, in every corner of the Architecture of the project. The choir’s most important and perhaps musically complex piece “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in G major, was translated onto the facades of many of the buildings in the complex. Many other musical pieces such as “The Anthem“ made their way into interior murals of the community center and acoustical tile patterns in the worship spaces.
In order to succeed, the extreme rationalization of the project at all scales was necessary. KURV Architecture considered form, modularity, repetition and economy of scale at all levels, including the overall Master Plan, Individual Buildings, Apartment Units, as well as for Kitchens, Bathrooms and Furnishings. The project was completely modular to allow affordability of construction. It was key to keep costs down without compromising on the cultural identity and significance of project.
The result was a sophisticated, high end master plan for the rezoning and re-development of the church’s land in East New York. One that would allow the Church to develop its own land and keep control of it for the next 100 years of the congregation.
KURV Architecture’s new net zero, modular, passive house, mixed use campus for St. Paul’s Community Baptist Church would add 575 affordable and senior housing units, along with a densely loaded, locally centric community center program and worship space for some of Brooklyn’s poorest.
The Proposed Development consists of a 775,000 SF (gross) mixed-use complex with a concert hall, church, community center, educational facility, retail spaces, and residential units.
The Proposed Development consists of four separate developments:
(i) Three located on Block 4354, 693 Stanley Avenue, a 12-story mixed use building with residential and retail uses, another 12-story mixed use building with residential and community center uses, and a large one-story domed church, with sub-cellar and cellar parking ;
and
(ii) on Block 4353, 859 Hendrix Street, a seven-story mixed use building with commercial use on the ground floor and residential uses above. The four buildings combined, will include approximately 576,166.26 square feet of blended zoning floor area (4.8 FAR), consisting of 423,720.54 square feet of floor area (3.53 FAR) at 693 Stanley Avenue, and approximately 152,445.72 square feet of floor area (1.27 FAR) at 859 Hendrix Street.
The Proposed Development contains approximately 575 dwelling units. The Proposed Development complies with and exceeds MIH requirements, as approximately 90 percent of the proposed units are expected to be affordable to residents at or below 80 percent of AMI.
With KURV Architecture’s leadership, the team achieved having the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, relocate the Qualified Census Tract line to include the Church, by providing the ideas and drawings in order to make the formal request and re-instate previous HUD inclusions so that the project would be even more affordable to its end users by receiving over 80 million dollars more in Federal and State Subsidiaries.