Alafia Phase 4 Files 329 Apartments in East New York

A 13-story, 329-apartment building has been filed at 960 Fountain Avenue in East New York, on 261,520 sq ft of construction floor area. The job description names it directly: Alafia Phase 4, buildings D1 and D2. Daniel Heuberger of Dattner Architects is the applicant of record.

Why it matters

A phase number in a Buildings Department job description is one of the cheapest pieces of forward intelligence available, and it is routinely ignored. It tells you this is not a one-off filing but a scheduled tranche of a staged build on the former Brooklyn Developmental Center land, and that further tranches are coming behind it on the same site. For a contractor or supplier, that changes the value of a relationship here from one building to a program. For a developer holding land in East New York, it is a supply signal with a date attached rather than a press release.

The numbers

The parent application, B01453330-I1, was filed September 4 and is at plan examiner review. What has happened since is the part worth reading. Five sub-filings landed inside a week: mechanical, plumbing and a building performance application on September 9, then foundation and structural work on September 11. Chok Pan Wong is the engineer on foundation and structural, Michael Maybaum on mechanical and plumbing.

Foundation and structural filings arriving a week after the parent is a sponsor moving at speed, not a placeholder. The tax lot itself, Brooklyn Block 4586 Lot 303, returns nothing in the city’s land use file, which is the signature of a parcel subdivided recently enough that the lot data has not caught up, and is consistent with a master plan being carved into development sites as each phase is financed.

What’s next

The number to watch is the filing status, since a plan examiner objection is what separates a September filing from a spring construction start. Watch also for Phase 5 to appear in the same file under the same naming convention, which would confirm the pace of the staging. For the other large Brooklyn affordable transaction in the file this week, see our coverage of DeMatteis exiting the 1,527-unit Linden Plaza and the New York market.