It’s a small stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn that’s been plagued with vacant commercial space for decades – even as the rest of the strip welcomed Barclays Center and other key developments in recent years.
But now Downtown Brooklyn officials are showing some love to the neglected, six blocks of mostly run-down buildings on and around Flatbush Avenue, bookended north by the Fulton Mall at DeKalb Avenue and south at Lafayette Avenue by the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cultural District.
The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is offering the section’s roughly 75 property owners a chance to apply for $25,000 in matching funds to spruce up their buildings to meet a demand from small businesses desperately seeking office space.
“We think this is a great spot for small, start-up tech companies working out of living rooms or incubator space to graduate to if they’re not yet ready to take on 20,000 square feet at Metro Tech,” said Tucker Reed, president of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
“This area’s physical appearance has made it difficult [to market], but it’s at the crux of a lot key attractions here for us, linking the mall’s retail corridor to a growing cultural district and Barclays Center.”
Although the city’s 2004 rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn helped spur a wave of apartment towers that has brought nearly 5,300 units of housing with another 4,000-plus in the pipeline, it’s fallen well short of delivering a similar wave of new office space that officials once envisioned.
But Reed says there’s 56,000 square feet of vacant space on upper-level floors along the neglected stretch that could be converted to thriving office space.
Local landlords have long failed to maintain these floors, instead limiting their resources to maintaining and renting ground-floor retail space.
Start-up companies seeking to expand are crossing their fingers that the Partnership’s plan will bring the Downtown new office space.
“We need more space, and having an office in Downtown Brooklyn would be perfect for us because it’s centrally located, and all our employees are from Brooklyn,” said Kelly Carlin, chief operating officer of the taxi-sharing app Weeels, whose eight staffers work out of the New York University-Polytechnic Institute “incubator” in Hudson Square.
The three-year-old company, which is being rebranded as “Bandwagon,” also is eyeing Downtown Brooklyn because rental rates are much cheaper there than existing tech hubs in nearby Manhattan and DUMBO, Carlin said.
Landlords applying for the state grant money secured by the Partnership have until Friday to submit their plans and must agree to complete their projects by August 2014.