A Glimpse Of Gowanus' Future, From Inside One Of Its New Multifamily Buildings

As Justin Pelsinger stares out at construction sites visible from the snow-covered rooftop of a new nine-story apartment building in Gowanus, he’s excited for the neighborhood’s future.

“We love what's going on out here,” he said. “I think it's one of the few areas where you're building large-scale residential, affordable housing in a transformative market.”

Pelsinger is chief operating officer of Charney Cos., one of the developers responsible for reshaping the skyline of the formerly industrial Brooklyn neighborhood. 

Charney’s 224-unit Union Channel is one of 18 projects to which Gov. Kathy Hochul used an executive order to extend 421-a benefits in 2023, a year after the tax incentive’s death knell sounded. Union Channel is among the first of the beneficiaries in the neighborhood to open, with move-ins beginning in February.

“It's an infill,” Pelsinger said. “It’s an area that’s already in between two residential areas, and people want to live here.”

The building at 240 Third Ave. consists of studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units. Around 25% of all units — 58 in total — are reserved as affordable housing, pegged at an average of 60% of the area median income. The affordability component was important to Charney and its co-developer on the project, Tavros Capital, and not just to get the tax break.

“Artists are the fabric of most neighborhoods in New York City, especially in an area like Gowanus,” Pelsinger said. “There's tons of artists that are here, and they end up usually being the ones that create the area and the interest in the market.”

Gowanus has long been one of the city’s most enduring hubs for artists, thanks to its low rents. Arts Gowanus’ Johnny Thornton, the executive director of the nonprofit focused on creating opportunities for artists in the neighborhood, said Union Channel’s community benefits agreement will help the local artist community rather than displace it.

“Our big advocacy during the Gowanus rezoning was around keeping the artist community intact that has been here,” he said. 

Gowanus Arts negotiated with Charney and 10 other developers to provide studios for artists at a subsidized rent as part of the neighborhood’s 2021 rezoning. There is a lottery where applicants can put themselves forward for the units, plus a fellowship paid for by Arts Gowanus to house New York City Housing Authority residents from the neighborhood.

“Not only do we keep our foothold in the neighborhood, we've increased it,” he said. 

Among the reasons that rents have been low in Gowanus is its 2009 status as a Superfund site. In the neighborhood’s early days, manufactured gas plants, chemical plants, tanneries and paper mills discharged their waste directly into the 100-foot-wide, 1.8-mile-long Gowanus Canal, which was also one of the city’s key industrial transport routes.

The result, 200 years later, was one of the most polluted waterways in the entire country. During storms, that water — with more than a dozen contaminants, including heavy metals — would flood into the combined sewer system designed to carry sanitary waste and rainwater away from homes. Dredging of the canal, which carries an estimated billion-dollar price tag, is underway.

But even with federal efforts to clean the area, last summer residents in older buildings received letters from the New York City Department of Health asking if it could test for levels of a chemical that was previously used for cleaning but is now linked to cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Toxic gases linked to the chemical were found to be seeping into the air at the popular neighborhood Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club more than a year before the letters went out.

New buildings including Union Channel had to follow a strict testing and remediation process before beginning construction, Pelsinger said. The state sets out what testing needs to take place and has to sign off on the results and remediation.

“This site was more or less excavation of soil down to different depths and then sent off to facilities that are designed to take that soil, and then there's just a typical vapor barrier under the building,” he said. “This is a building that was tested beyond anything you could possibly imagine.”

Built on top of the freshly remediated soil, the Fogarty Finger Architecture-designed multifamily property is one of three rising in Gowanus with Charney Co.’s fingerprints on it. Nevins Landing, split into two buildings, will add more than 650 units to the neighborhood, while Douglass Port will add another 260.

All three properties are part of Charney and Tavros’ Gowanus Wharf campus. As part of the campus, each building will have a different suite of plush amenities — but the advantage of all the buildings being within spitting distance of one another is that residents won’t necessarily have to choose between amenities.

“So, for instance, Douglass has a basketball court. This building has a rooftop pool,” Pelsinger said. “If you join here, you'll be able to go to any building once they're open.”

Residents will be able to access buildings and amenities via a smartphone app, with key fobs as a backup. Other tech in the building includes a smart package room, high-speed internet throughout, a variable refrigerant flow HVAC system and all-electric appliances. The building’s commitment to all-electric even extends to its cooking equipment, with stoves inside residential units and communal rooftop grills. 

“We definitely believe that going all-electric is the way of the future to reduce the carbon footprint and being more energy resilient in the future,” Pelsinger said. “There's not many other options. It's not like you can power a whole building with solar.”

Another challenge that comes with the size of the buildings that Charney and Tavros are erecting — especially in a historically lower-density neighborhood — is fostering community in corridors where hundreds of residents could otherwise live somewhat anonymously to one another. 

Each building will have its own amenity programming as a result, Pelsinger said. Even the app that residents will use to access their apartments and book access to amenities like shared dining rooms will have a chat feature where residents can arrange to meet each other or do building activities together.

Pelsinger’s favorite of the offerings are the fitness classes, from running to high-impact or swimming, but there’s a range for all residents’ tastes, he said. In another building, an ice-bath plunge was a popular attraction for residents, while others joined for less physically strenuous activities like wine and cheese nights.

Besides the amenities and the finishes in the apartments — panelized appliances, sliding windows with waist-level glass barriers in front of them to create the impression of balconies — Pelsinger is also proud of the building’s commitment to art, which will include works from a local artist.

“I think real estate and art go together. You're building something that's going to be there for at least 100 years,” he said. “We want to build buildings that people enjoy looking at and feel very contextual to the neighborhood. We feel the same way about art.”