Ian Bruce Eichner unloaded a Crown Heights development site at the center of a fierce zoning fight over shadows on the nearby Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Isaac Schwartz snapped up 970 Franklin Avenue for $54.3 million from Eichner’s Continuum Company, according to a press release from JLL. The site is approved for a 10-story building with 355 units, of which 106 must be income-restricted.
JLL’s Andrew Scandalios, Ethan Stanton, Brendan Maddigan and Michael Mazzara arranged the sale.
The deal closes a tumultuous chapter for Continuum, which spent six years trying to push through rezonings that would have allowed larger multifamily projects on the site. The City Planning Commission scaled back Eichner’s proposal to reduce shadows on the Garden.
In exchange for lower building heights, Council member Crystal Hudson let Continuum use the “workforce housing” option in the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program, which allowed for higher rents. Continuum also reduced the project’s slope from its initial proposal, allowing more sunlight to reach the Garden’s plant nursery and other areas. The Council approved the rezoning in November.
The road to consensus was long and rough. Eichner bought the site in 2017 for $33 million and had sought to build two 39-story towers with more than 1,500 apartments on a site that also included 960 Franklin Avenue. Roughly half of the units would have been set aside as affordable.
That bid never made it far, largely because of opposition from the Garden. The 960 Franklin site was then sold for $43 million in 2022 to Isaac Hager and Daryl Hagler, who in turn sold it to another developer, Yitzchok Schwartz, for $64 million. Schwartz plans 300 condo units across seven stories and 240,000 square feet, which he can build without political approval. (It’s unclear whether Isaac Schwartz, who bought the adjacent 970 Franklin, is the same as this Yitzchok Shwartz, given Yitzchok is the Hebrew version of the name Isaac.)
Eichner pushed ahead with his remaining portion of the site and filed a new application to rezone it. The City Planning Commission shortened the towers to reduce the shadow impact to roughly half an hour per day, only to have Eichner deem that financially infeasible and threaten to withdraw the application.
But he didn’t, and now Schwartz will decide whether to proceed with Eichner’s project. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
A lawyer for Continuum declined to comment. Eichner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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