Charney Companies and Tavros break ground on 27-story Gowanus tower

Charney Companies and Tavros have broken ground on 175 Third St., a 27-story mixed-use tower in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with more than 1,000 apartments, roughly 250 of them affordable. Bjarke Ingels Group and dencityworks designed the building, and Field Operations drew the 28,000-square-foot public waterfront esplanade that comes with it. The tower is the fifth development the co-developers have started in the neighborhood and the newest piece of Gowanus Wharf, which the coverage says brings 2,200 total units to the area.

Five groundbreakings in one Brooklyn pocket concentrates construction and lease-up risk in a single submarket, and the coverage does not say how any of it is capitalized — no land basis, no equity split, no construction lender. A 27-story tower takes years to build, so the underwriting is a view on the neighborhood's rents well past the current cycle.

Ground-up starts have taken a larger share of private real estate capital as new supply has thinned, a shift this publication has argued makes development the new acquisition. On that reading, 175 Third St. is less a bet on today's rents than on the conditions that will exist when it opens, and the equity behind it is buying exposure to a future supply shortfall. That is also the exposure. Five projects in one submarket means a single lease-up market clearing five rent rolls at once.

The affordable tranche is worth sizing in absolute terms: roughly 250 income-restricted units is a set-aside that will shape how the building performs when the market softens, and it makes the tower's economics lean harder on the market-rate apartments than the headline unit count implies. The coverage does not say what those rents are projected to be, or when the first leases are expected.

Brooklyn's comparable pricing has been setting itself in granular increments — the commercial pieces of Williamsburg's Dime building sold for $28.5 million in September, at $145 a square foot for a landmark hall and $216 for an office base, per this publication's reporting — but an apartment rent roll in Gowanus is a different exercise, and the source material leaves the yield on this one unstated.

What to watch is delivery. A 27-story tower breaking ground now would most likely arrive in 2028 or 2029, the window in which the construction freeze of the past two years shows up as scarcity rather than as another fall in starts.