Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan and Cultural Growth Strategy

JLP+D President James Lima led the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s comprehensive district-wide development planning initiative for new office, residential, retail, parks, and cultural uses in Downtown Brooklyn and its Cultural District. This district planning process involved many stakeholders, including public agencies and private entities, in facilitating an ambitious next wave of growth for Downtown Brooklyn, an important NYC job center and home to 57,000 college and university students. The Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan included new public open spaces, pedestrian and transit improvements, commitments of $100 million of public capital funding, and a series of zoning and street mappings changes that have fostered a multi-use urban environment to serve the residents, businesses, academic institutions and cultural institutions of Downtown Brooklyn and its surrounding communities.

The Redevelopment Plan has spurred the creation of an extraordinary amount of new housing and retail and, more recently, fostered expanded office, academic, and cultural facilities while greatly enhancing overall quality of life downtown. Since 2006, an astonishing $10.3 billion in private investment has been made in Downtown Brooklyn, yielding over 17,500 residential units, 2,215 hotel rooms, 2,000,000 square feet of retail space, 1,000,000 square feet of office space, The Theater for a New Audience, and other new cultural facilities. Attracted to transformation in the area, New York University is in the midst of an over 600,000 square foot campus expansion in the neighborhood focused on engineering, applied science, and digital technology. In total, more than 26 million square feet of new development has been added to Downtown Brooklyn.

Approval and implementation of the Plan required intensive and broad community outreach, creating and communicating a compelling logic for significant public and private investment, and determining the scale and character of new development necessary to make the Plan economically viable. The Plan also involved the consolidation management of three distinct but adjacent Business Improvement Districts under a newly formed local development corporation, The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

The plan set the framework from which the Brooklyn Tech Triangle emerged. The Brooklyn Tech Triangle — encompassing Downtown Brooklyn and the DUMBO and Brooklyn Navy Yard districts — has attracted more than 1,350 tech and innovation companies and has established Brooklyn as widely noted hub for technology and creative production. The plan also furthered transformative investments in the Brooklyn Cultural District, anchored by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).