The Broadway Triangle Site: Maximizing Public Value with Mission Driven Developers

ANHD commends the New York City Housing Preservation and Development Department (HPD) on their announcement last week selecting a partnership led and controlled by local, mission-driven developers for the Broadway Triangle Site, the largest vacant City-owned site remaining in North Brooklyn.

The project is notable for the amount of public value it will create with 380+ new apartments that will serve extremely low-, very low-, low-income, and formerly homeless households. Also notable is the fact that the Broadway Triangle site is famously contentious, held up for years in a sometimes bitter fight about how the site should best serve the community's complex needs.

The project's development partnership, known as "Unified Neighborhood Partners," is comprised of four mission-driven community based non-profit developers: St. Nicks Alliance, RiseBoro Community Partnership, Southside United Housing/Los Sures, and the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg. Together with Mega Contracting, they will work collaboratively to construct five new entirely affordable buildings on this site. These mission-driven community based non-profit developers played an essential role in creating a successful project after many years of stalemate. Mission-driven developers are motivated to find the highest level of public value in any development since they have no bottom-line economic self-interest, which is clear in the Broadway Triangle project plan and which helped to win community support.

But local mission-driven developers have played an even more important role in getting this particular project off the ground since the deal was so historically contentious among so many different parts of the community. The project might not have won enough support to be possible at all if it wasn't for the local non-profit developers involved – representing various points of view from within their community – getting together and finding a way to balance different needs and concerns, with an approach that finally won the broad support the project needed.

ANHD congratulates our member agencies St. Nicks, RiseBoro, and Los Sures. And, we applaud HPD for working with mission-driven developers to do what they do best by designing a project that delivers the highest level of public value and builds local community consensus to support essential affordable development.

Want to Learn More About Maximizing Public Value?

Housing plans have played a crucial role in mayoral policy agendas. Too often, housing plans have prioritized the number of units to be produced versus how the units will solve the affordability crisis. At our Annual Community Development Conference on Thursday, April 11th, we will explore if New Yorker's are getting the most benefit from their investment in affordable housing and what should be done to ensure greater public value in the future.

Find out what other workshop discussions are taking place and get your ticket today!