Slate, RiseBoro land $163M for 312 Williamsburg apartments

Slate Property Group and RiseBoro Community Partnership have landed a $162.9 million loan to build 312 deeply affordable apartments across two Williamsburg sites, a deal that leaned on a nominal land basis and a public lender to make the math work in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive submarkets.

Why it matters

The financing is a template for how affordable product still gets built where land is dearest. The joint venture bought the two parcels from Two Trees Management for $2, with the seller keeping the air rights, which strips out the biggest line item on any New York pro forma before construction debt is even arranged. Pair that with a below-market public loan and roughly 60 percent of the units reserved for formerly homeless households, and a project that would never pencil at market land cost becomes financeable. For developers, the actionable read is that the capital stack, not the rent roll, is what unlocks deep affordability in high-cost New York neighborhoods.

The numbers

The loan, arranged through the New York City Housing Development Corporation with J.P. Morgan Chase, covers 178 Montrose Avenue (163 units) and 73 Meserole Street (149 units). Rents are set well below market, with studios around $1,339 and three-bedrooms near $2,304 a month, against a metro where asking rents ran up 4.4 percent year over year to roughly $3,503. “Solving New York’s housing crisis means building affordable homes in every neighborhood, including high-cost communities where this housing is most needed but rarely built,” said Slate co-founder David Schwartz.

What’s next

With financing closed, the partners can move both Williamsburg buildings into construction. The deal adds to a run of large Brooklyn affordable-housing packages, and it sharpens the question every New York developer is now running: which combination of cheap land, public debt and set-asides actually clears, and which sites can replicate it.