Jay Group Lands Construction Loan for Inwood Project

The Jay Group has fueled up for its gas station redevelopment in Inwood.

The company, along with Jacob Aini, landed a $92 million construction loan from Bank Hapoalim to build a multifamily rental development at 401 West 207th Street.

Jay Group filed permits in 2022 for a 17-story building with 270 rental units and 20,000 square feet of commercial space at the ground level. According to New York Yimby, 25 percent of the rental units are expected to be affordable, meeting the requirements of city law for rezoned areas. Work is projected to wrap up in 2025, a year before the 421a tax break construction deadline.

The project is part of Jay Group’s redevelopment of five former gas stations that it bought in 2022. The company paid $52.4 million for the lots, all previously owned by gas station chain Speedway. The other four are in East New York, Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In 2018 the de Blasio administration rezoned Inwood, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood. The rezoning allows developers to replace gas stations, warehouses, auto shops and the more industrial areas of the neighborhood with large residential towers, to alleviate the city’s housing shortage and activate moribund streets.

The rezoning faced a legal challenge in 2019 as locals claimed the resulting development would drive up housing costs — the opposite of what economists expect new supply to do — and push out long-time residents.

Advocates were briefly successful when the New York Supreme Court overturned the rezoning, but the Appellate Division reversed the decision in 2020. All of the city’s neighborhood rezonings have withstood legal scrutiny.

Since then, developers have flocked to the northern Manhattan neighborhood with plans for residential towers.

Jay Group has been busy with multifamily development. In May the company refinanced its construction debt on a 28-story rental development in Washington Heights. At the end of 2021 it bought a site in Downtown Brooklyn and secured a $130 million loan to construct a multifamily building. In 2021, it sold a multifamily development in Harlem for $105 million.

Jay Group could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.