Nearly 90,000 applications for affordable apartments at City Point in Downtown Brooklyn

Eye On Real Estate

March 16, 2016 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Welcome to Downtown Brooklyn's City Point, where affordable units at apartment tower 7 DeKalb Ave. (seen in the center of this photo) are in big demand. Eagle photos by Rob Abruzzese

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If you wonder about how intense the demand for affordable housing really is in Brooklyn, consider this: There were 87,754 applications for the 200 affordable apartments at 7 DeKalb Ave.

That sky-high number comes courtesy of Aron Gooblar, vice president of Washington Square Partners, one of the firms that owns the newly constructed apartment tower at City Point, a mixed-use mega-development in Downtown Brooklyn.

Eighty percent of the 250 apartments in this rental building are affordable units. The tower was constructed through the Mixed Income Program of the New York City Housing Development Corp.

As the Brooklyn Eagle reported last year, the developers increased the number of affordable apartments at 7 DeKalb at the request of the de Blasio Administration.

Tenants are being selected through a city-run lottery. Applicants whose names are chosen in the lottery and who seem qualified must undergo interviews.

The application deadline for the 7 DeKalb apartments was this past September. The interview process started in December, Gooblar said. At this moment, tenants have been approved for nine affordable units.

The building has affordable studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments.

According to an online posting by NYC Housing Connect, 50 apartments will be rented to low-income tenants with annual incomes from $18,515 for one person to a total of $43,150 for four people. Monthly rents for the low-income units range from $500 for studios to $849 for two-bedroom apartments.

The other 150 units are for middle-income tenants with annual incomes from $56,949 for one person to a total of $142,395 for four people. Monthly rents for the middle-income units range from $1,621 for studios to $2,455 for two-bedroom apartments.