Douglaston Development Files for 100 Units in East Flatbush

East Flatbush is reaching new heights.

Jeff Levine’s Douglaston Development filed plans Wednesday for a new apartment building, rising potentially 10 stories at 680 Winthrop Street. It’s a small sign of what’s to come for the largely low-scale Brooklyn neighborhood.

The proposed 109,817-square-foot project would create 107 units on a 7.2-acre plot between Clarkson, Albany and Utica avenues that is already home to two men’s shelters run by Kingsborough and the Salvation Army, as well as several Kingsboro Psychiatric Center facilities.

The filing represents the first of nearly 900 apartments proposed for the site, all part of a $400 million redevelopment approved by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to reimagine the Kingsboro campus.

State funding announced in 2017 will go to affordable housing, supermarkets, urban farming and public green spaces.

Some of the $400 million set aside for the Kingsboro campus project will also be utilized to build two “state-of-the-art” homeless shelters from the ground up, replacing the aging shelters on the lot, according to project renderings.

The money comes from the state’s $1.4 billion Vital Brooklyn program, which also funded the 400-acre Shirley Chisholm State Park on a former landfill near Jamaica Bay. Another $39 million went to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s The Hart, a 57-unit affordable housing complex developed by CAMBA Housing Ventures. It is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2024.

Among the developers initially approved to work on the Kingsboro campus are Almat Urban, Breaking Ground and Douglaston.

Just a block from the Winthrop Street site are Kings County Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical, the latter of which is the city’s only SUNY medical center and has turned the neighborhood into a hotspot for medical students and residents.

That hasn’t been lost on developers, who have seized opportunities to build up the area in recent years. Projects include a 27-story residential tower at 123 Linden Boulevard by The Moinian Group, Solomon Feder and Israel Neiman.
A smattering of smaller developments have also sprung up around the neighborhood, including a seven-story, mixed-use building at 333 Linden Boulevard developed by Charles Wurzberger, a six-story, mixed-use project at 1463 New York Avenue by Balanced Living Development and a six-story residence at 3308 Glenwood Road by Kay Builders.