FC Partners, a full-service New York residential developer, is adding some green to downtown Brooklyn with Toren, its 38-story condominium, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. This 240-unit condo, at 150 Myrtle Avenue, features its own cogeneration plant for heat and power, a green roof, and ecofriendly fixtures and finishes to complement the luxury amenities. It is striving for LEED Gold.

BFC started out doing affordable housing and renovations in the East Village in the early 1980s, then moved to East Harlem, where they acquired properties for affordable housing, as well as market-rate condominiums, single-family homes, and rental buildings through the late ’90s. BFC then began focusing on single large-scale projects, when it took on 350-unit Schaefer Landing on the Brooklyn waterfront, the first residential development in Williamsburg that had been rezoned from industrial. Toren, Dutch for “tower,” is one of the first residential buildings to emerge under the new zoning in downtown Brooklyn, and is about 50 percent sold. BFC’s three equal partners, Don Capoccia, Joe Ferrara, and Brandon Baron, are hands-on owner/builders. New York House caught up with Capoccia to learn more.

What is the vision for BFC Partners?

The whole formula for success here is to control the construction—that’s the most important aspect of executing on these deals.

We’ve been pretty successful in identifying emerging neighborhoods that other people have overlooked. [We went] from the East Village to East Harlem to Williamsburg, to downtown Brooklyn. We’re building a job in Staten Island now. These are all areas that could not have been considered anything other than one-off locations when they were done. Many of these are now really high market demand areas that have seen an enormous amount of development over the years. I’m happy to say that we’re one of the first ones in there in almost every instance.

What are you doing in Staten Island?

We’re building 105 units of affordable senior housing on the north shore of Stapleton and another 162 units of middle-income rental housing. We consider Staten Island the last frontier in New York. We got an opportunity through DHCR’s Homes for Working Families program to do a project that would be limited to 55 years and older, so these are working seniors. As it turns out, the demand for this type of housing in Staten Island is very significant.

How do the three of you partners divide up the jobs?

We all look at sites together. Once we settle on a site, we go through the acquisition. I focus on the underwriting of the financing, with the help of my partners. Joe Ferrara and I, depending upon the job, will follow the design process through with our construction executive staff. Then we’re all involved in the execution, the construction. You can’t have enough eyes on a construction site. All of us are all over the sites.

How difficult is financing these days?

We had a hell of a time getting this Staten Island project closed, even though there was significant government support. They’re all difficult to close but this was more difficult than any I had ever seen. In general, the credit markets are very, very quiet, if not dormant, at this point for new construction, new development jobs.

Jobs where we’ve got no government subsidy whatsoever, we’re putting on hold right now. There isn’t any access to available capital for development deals.

Do you have deals in the wings?

No. That’s another aspect of our business plan. While everybody else in the last three to five years has taken on a lot of development deals, acquired a lot of properties—everybody was anticipating a never-ending market—we changed our business plan so we were focusing on one large-scale job at a time, and we were not out there tying up countless development sites. We have one high-profile Midtown site that we’re expecting to reposition for another use, but that’s really about it.

How important is sustainability to BFC Partners?

We made a big commitment to it in Toren. We’re hoping to have a gold certification there. We’ve made a very significant investment in green components, predominantly the cogeneration plant. That probably added maybe $5 million to the project so it was about a 5 percent bump-up. That will allow our buyers, our commercial tenants, to stay off of the Con Edison grid. We pay a reduced energy cost, have a much-reduced carbon footprint. It contributes significantly to our LEED certification, along with a pretty substantial curtain wall that keeps the building climatically isolated. We’ve got an air-changing system in all the apartments. It’s a great project and I don’t know if anybody’s done as much as we’ve done in a residential job to not only qualify for LEED but to have people really experience a green living environment.

Is sustainability a key selling point?

I think it is. It contributes very significantly to a buyer’s decision-making matrix and the purchase of an apartment. There’s going to be a line drawn at some point. Things are going to be either pre-LEED or post-LEED, where people in the resale market—I don’t know whether it’s five or 10 years from now—are going to want to know that they’re buying a building that was designed to be sustainable.

It’s not just the original buyer, but the resale market as well.

Yes, I’m speculating. We haven’t really seen this yet. In fact, appraisers at this point still do not give any weight to a green building. Apparently they haven’t seen enough of this yet to make a statement that there is value in it. One of the big selling points of [Toren] was telling buyers when there’s a brownout or a blackout in New York, our building stands with electric and elevator service and lights and air conditioning. That’s pretty rare, especially in a high-rise building.

How affordable is Toren?

Our units are on average $750 a foot. Twenty percent of our units are affordable to households making 195 percent of AMI. That’s around $150,000 a year. Those units probably are in the $500-$600-a-foot range. We have eight floors of penthouses there that are probably in the $850-$1,000-a-foot range. They’re in the 1,200-2,000-square-foot range.

Have you had to cut any deals?

No. We’ve not tried any deals. We’ve had five price increases, and we’re still selling at either our book price or our increases on the five increases we had. We still believe that we valued this at the right number last year, and we still think that this will be the right number as we get this project wrapped up over the next year or so.

Resource LIst

Developer
BFC Partners, (718) 422-9999, bfcnyc.com

Architect
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), (212) 298-9300, som.com

LEED Consultant
e4, inc., (212) 922.1965, e4inc.com

Refrigerators
Liebherr, liebherr-appliances.com

Wall ovens, cooktops
Electrolux, electroluxusa.com

Washers/Dryers
aSko, askousa.com

Showers, bathtubs
Zuma, zumacollection.com

Bathroom sinks
Villeroy and Boch, villeroy-boch.com

Toilets
Duravit, duravit.us

Custom cabinets
Wells Woodworking, (301) 864-2111