RXR Realty has topped out The Willoughby, a 34-story residential building on the downtown Brooklyn campus of Long Island University (LIU). The ground-up development started construction in September 2019 and will feature 476 apartment units in the borough’s Fort Greene area.
Goldman Sachs provided $225.6 million in financing for the development in August of last year, split between a $155.9 million building loan and $69.7 million project loan, Commercial Observerreported. Located at 196 Willoughby St., between Flatbrush Avenue and Ashland Place, the 600,200-square-foot development will also include academic and office space and a rooftop athletic field atop a garage with 564 parking spaces.
Seventy percent of The Willoughby’s units will be priced at market rates, while the remaining 143 units will be classified as affordable to residents earning up to 130 percent of New York City’s area median income (AMI). The city’s 2020 AMI for a single-person family is $79,600, while AMI for a three-person household is $102,400.
GROWING NEIGHBORHOOD
RXR, which recently held a topping-out ceremony alongside executives from Hunter Roberts Construction Group and mechanical contractor R&S United Services, purchased the lot for the tower from LIU for $76.4 million. LIU owns the land under the academic, athletic and parking structure. The private university has nearly 17,000 students enrolled across its two campuses.
The Willoughby is located a 5-minute walk from both 9 Dekalb Ave., a 1,066-foot residential skyscraper being built by JDS Development Group, and Extell Development Co.’s Brooklyn Point, a 720-foot luxury condo tower that topped out in April 2019. Extell recently began closings and first move-ins at the 483-unit project.
RXR manages roughly 26 million square feet of commercial properties and investments and has about 3,400 multifamily units under operation or development. The developer landed a $131.2 million construction loan from Capital One for a residential tower containing 352 market-rate units in New Rochelle, N.Y., this past February.
