kurv architecture

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

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 real estate joint venture propositions that are often unfavorable to the institutional land owners, and typically add very little value for the institutions themselves. Most of these propositions create profits that flow away from these communities and into the pockets of the developers.

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, 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 profession advice. Simply put, in the case of this particular institutional client, they feared the dismal concrete results of their neighboring congregations who had “sold out” and “gotten a bad deal” just before them, during their same development process. The church 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 had been approached many times by long established local developers seeking agreements to control their land and even collateralize it for debt. As described above, the Church feared going forward into unfavorable contracts with developers, yet wanted to develop their own land to the its full potential and needed help to do so.

The Church Elders had personally visited and experienced the dismal results of many of the resulting constructions financed by the “deals” of their neighboring congregations who had undergone ULURP procedures. Yet, the Church knew, that many of the religious institutions that had fallen before them, often simply just did not have the urban planning, land use development skills and contacts to defend themselves. They typically do not have the in-house technical staff to create their own opportunities for development. They needed a vision for a new project and a team to create a new conceptual reality, which presented the possibility of added value for their land.

KURV Architecture DPC were asked to support the church’s internal council and review all external developer proposals. What we found was shocking. In many cases, they were being asked to put up their land for collateral in exchange for debilitating loans with high interest rates to “cover the development costs” of their project. Consultant costs were extremely inflated at times, in some case at more than 725% of the real cost of the Church simply doing it for themselves, in-house and hiring the same consultants directly. To help the Church create an in-house vision for developing the land,

KURV Architecture DPC leveraged a selection of their Manhattan based academic and professional contacts and presented them to the Church in order to assemble and direct a team of multi-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 allowing 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 group 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.

We even 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 to 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.

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 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 for 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.

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.

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.