Residential towers will provide approximately 2,050 income-based apartments, with space for a host of community facilities at the ground level. The new day care will serve the neighborhood, and the performing arts center will provide a much-needed venue for existing East New York cultural organizations, offering a variety of programming. Along the interior street, two-story maisonettes with front stoops will back up against the residential towers; the avenue sides of the towers will be lined with ground-level space for a variety of retailers, including a fresh food grocery store and small shops to meet community needs. A wide piazza at the corner of Flatlands and Louisiana Avenues welcomes the public into the campus. Seamlessly connected by walking paths and green spaces, these services and spaces combine to create a collaborative, accessible, “urban village” lifestyle for longtime as well as new members of the neighborhood.

Following a strong endorsement from the local community board (one vote shy of unanimous) and pronounced statement of support from Borough President Antonio Reynoso—the rezoning for the project was approved by a unanimous vote of the New York City Council and signed into law by Mayor Eric Adams in December 2022, making it among the largest fully affordable private developments approved in the city’s history— a scale of affordable development not seen since the Mitchel-Lama program of the 1970.

PAU is currently designing Phase 2 of the plan while the first four buildings of Phase 1 are already under construction. The design of the façade is being calibrated to a series of constraints including; a limited latitude for window sizes and distance between widows driven by the structural logic of the block and plank system; the intricacies of HPD’s strict requirements for light and air and room sizes; and client-driven non-standard floor layouts needed to meet unit counts. The façade design was derived from these constraints to create a systematized, rational grid that mitigated cost through economies of scale while still enabling a diversity of expression between buildings. This creative approach maximized the impact of limited opportunity for shadow lines and reveals, creating dynamic play of light in the tradition of hand-laid brick buildings rather than the flatness so endemic to affordable housing.