David Bistricer is taking the 99-unit strategy to the extreme.
Bistricer’s Clipper Equity filed plans for seven residential buildings at a long-stalled development site at 1800 Park Avenue in Upper Manhattan, according to filings with the city’s Department of Buildings. Each building would contain 99 units, just under the wage requirement threshold in the state’s new 485x tax abatement program.
Together, the buildings would total 693 apartments and about 628,000 square feet. Bistricer confirmed the filings but declined to comment further.
The plans appear to be the most extreme example yet of a developer structuring a project to avoid the wage requirements for projects with 100 or more units tied to the new tax break. The site at 1800 Park Avenue is outside the two zones with the most restrictive wage requirements, but Bistricer can avoid them altogether by splitting it up into parcels of fewer than 100 units each.
Bistricer bought the large vacant parcel from the Durst Organization in November for $50 million, according to property records. Last year, broker Bob Knakal pointed to the site as an example of a property where prospective buyers were exploring how to split large projects into multiple 99-unit buildings.
“Every large site that I have where rental housing is the highest and best use, developers are spending more time trying to figure out how to subdivide the site to create pads on which they could build 99-unit buildings than thinking about anything else,” Knakal said at the time.
Dividing projects comes with added costs — like duplicate building cores, heating plants and roofs — but Knakal said the math can still work out in developers’ favor.
The site has traded hands multiple times over the past decade. Vornado Realty Trust bought the property from the New York College of Podiatric Medicine in 2007 for $39.5 million with plans for an office building anchored by MLB Network. The REIT sold the parcel in 2013 to Bruce Eichner’s Continuum Companies for $66 million, and Eichner pitched a 700-unit rental development before falling behind on his loan.
The Durst Organization later acquired the property’s $100 million debt and ultimately took control of the site in 2017 for nearly $91 million.
Plans to redevelop the property stalled after the state’s 421a tax abatement expired in 2022, freezing projects that had not already started construction. Its replacement, 485x, went into effect at the beginning of last year.
Read more
The era of 99-unit buildings has arrived
Dursts look to sell major East Harlem dev site
David Bistricer buying Durst’s East Harlem dev site for $50M+