Ailanthus Files Plans for 400-Unit Gowanus Tower

A joint venture between TerraCRG’s Ofer Cohen and Totem’s Vivian Liao and Tucker Reed has filed plans for a 400-unit Gowanus tower, The Real Deal reported. The venture, called Ailanthus, signed a ground lease with owner Two Trees Management for the site at 424 Hoyt Street in Brooklyn, though terms weren’t disclosed. The filing calls for a 17-story, 175-foot-tall building.

How It Started

Cohen, Liao, and Reed launched Ailanthus in May 2024 with a goal of adding 10,000 housing units over five years, targeting sites that aren’t shovel-ready and may require the city’s rezoning process rather than shovel-ready parcels. That approach trades a longer entitlement timeline for access to underused land in neighborhoods already in demand. The firm entered with roughly 1,500 units already in its pipeline, including two Totem projects: a 456-unit building at 1057 Atlantic Avenue in Crown Heights and a 181-unit building at 737 Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park.

Two Trees, which bought the Hoyt Street site nearly 20 years ago for $7.7 million, declined to comment to Commercial Observer, which first reported the filing. Holding an undeveloped parcel that long is a familiar pattern among Brooklyn landowners waiting for rezonings to unlock higher-value uses.

The Details

The proposed building would include 100 to 120 affordable housing units, a 46,000-square-foot public school, and 14,000 square feet of retail space. It would replace a one-story car repair shop and vehicle storage facility currently on the site, which sits just blocks from the Gowanus Canal in one of the neighborhood’s most actively rezoned stretches.

An Ailanthus spokesperson pointed to a recent report from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration that identified Gowanus as a target for additional affordable housing, a signal the firm may be leaning on to help move the project through city review.

Zooming Out

Gowanus has drawn steady development interest since a major rezoning and the ongoing environmental cleanup of the neighborhood’s namesake canal made new construction feasible. In June, Charney Companies, Tavros Capital, and Incoco Capital landed $785 million in financing for 175 Third Street, part of the larger Gowanus Wharf campus, a 27-story, 1.1-million-square-foot project with 1,100 units, a quarter of them affordable.

The Gowanus Wharf financing and the Ailanthus filing arrive within months of each other, suggesting developers see enough opportunity in the corridor to keep committing capital even as financing for ground-up multifamily construction remains harder to come by citywide. That momentum fits a broader pattern CRE Daily has tracked as apartment construction has climbed across New York City.

Why It Matters

The filing shows developers continuing to bet on Gowanus even as the broader city grapples with a housing shortage that has made rezoned, entitlement-friendly neighborhoods increasingly valuable. Ground leases like the one Ailanthus signed with Two Trees also let landowners capture upside from new construction without selling outright, a structure likely to recur as more legacy owners sit on rezoned sites.

Including 100 to 120 affordable units also positions the project to compete for the incentives and zoning bonuses New York offers developers who build below-market housing, a trade-off increasingly central to how large Brooklyn projects get financed and approved.

That dynamic lines up with what CRE Daily has reported as multifamily construction in New York continues to outpace other major U.S. markets.

What’s Next

The project will need to clear the city’s land use review process before construction can begin, a path Ailanthus says it plans to navigate by engaging early with local elected officials and community members.

With roughly 1,900 units now across its combined pipeline, Ailanthus’s progress on entitlements at Hoyt Street will be an early test of whether its community-engagement approach can speed up delivery in a notoriously slow rezoning environment.