Inside Bankside, Brookfield's Billion-Dollar Bet On The South Bronx

After two high-profile PR blunders, an ownership change and five years of construction, the seven-tower, game-changing development rising in the South Bronx overlooking the Hudson River is nearly finished, providing more than 1,300 housing units, new retail and community space to an area of the city that has long suffered from disinvestment and a strained relationship between landlords and the community.

Brookfield’s massive purchase of the Mott Haven development site that would become Bankside made waves in 2018 as the largest major private investment in the borough’s history. The company’s decision to spend $165M on two parcels at 2401 Third Ave. and 101 Lincoln Ave. — and nearly $1B more on construction — gave it control over a long stretch of disused waterfront property and a delicate path to navigate.

“I think development is a four-letter word in a lot of ways in the public discourse today,” Brookfield Vice President Charlie Howe said. “We try to be a responsible developer everywhere, and I think that's only heightened in a place, you know, that has a history of some controversy.”

When Bisnow toured the project last week, scaffolding was still up and construction workers were finishing putting down a new driveway outside the Lincoln at Bankside, the project’s second phase, overlooked by building staff manning the brand-new front desk and the pristine, freshly unveiled lobby. After delivering the first phase of the project, the three-tower Third at Bankside, last year, work progressed quickly on Lincoln, which spans four, 26-story towers and contains 921 apartments, 277 of which are rent-stabilized.

This part of the project has a 40K SF amenity complex, complete with a full basketball court, a two-story fitness center, a 60-foot lap pool, a roof deck, a children’s room and a reservable gourmet kitchen, and it started welcoming resident move-ins over the past week. Third at Bankside features three towers between 17 and 25 stories and has 458 units. In all, the $950M Bankside project is adding 1,379 apartments, 30% of which are income-restricted, to the Mott Haven neighborhood.

The priciest units are asking roughly $7K per month, and the affordable units will be available through the city lottery system. Roughly 16,000 people applied for the 134 rent-stabilized units at Third at Bankside, a Brookfield spokesperson said.

Brookfield says the first phase of the property is 85% leased, and it has more than twice as many to fill at Lincoln.

“It's fair to say that their initial investment in that South Bronx location was very well received — not only by the neighborhood there, but by other players,” Ariel Property Advisors founding partner Victor Sozio said. “That said, they are still proving out the market. This is a very large development, so I think it should be expected that the initial absorption is going to take time.”

The lease-up is certainly not the first challenge faced in the creation of the project, which straddles the Third Avenue Bridge that connects the South Bronx and upper Manhattan. It had already undergone New York’s famously laborious rezoning process to allow 1.3M SF of development when Brookfield purchased the site from Chetrit Group and Keith Rubenstein’s Somerset Partners.

But those developers' attempts to drum up support for the area had put the local community on edge, sparking scorn and anger. An attempt to rename Mott Haven the Piano District for starters — with a 2015 billboard at the intersection of Bruckner Boulevard and the Third Avenue Bridge — spurred a bevy of incredulous headlines and local blowback.

That same year, the developers held a “Bronx is Burning”-themed party on the site, complete with decorative trash-can fires and Dom Pérignon.

“The South Bronx deserves respect — not a tasteless party that reduces Mott Haven and Port Morris to a sad caricature of urban blight,” then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito told The New York Times, saying the “out-of-touch” developers should apologize.

By 2017, the Piano District moniker was dropped from marketing. Brookfield became the new owner a year later and gave the project its Bankside moniker. Rubenstein said the idea was about attracting people to the borough, per the Times.

“I don't think it's any secret to anyone that there was some community resistance to ideas like the Piano District or things that maybe felt a little bit foreign,” Howe told Bisnow.

Brookfield’s decision to engage the community after it took over the project, Howe said, was done voluntarily, not because of any zoning-requirement demand. In the construction of both phases of the building, the private equity giant partnered with Building Skills NY to focus on local hiring and construction skills training.

The arrangement, the firm says, created new jobs for previously unemployed locals — and 80 Bronx residents are now trained to work on other sites across the city.

“It can be huge and out of your control, to see a big building go up in your neighborhood and not really know what's going on,” Howe said. “But if you're able to get a job and work on the site … that's a great way to make development work for you.”

Bankside is also the new home of the Empowerment Center, a workforce development community center backed by Brookfield and run by the Mott Haven Historic District Association. The center hosts job training workshops and community events and offers office space to local small businesses. Mott Haven local Samuel Brooks, who runs the center, said the idea was to make sure locals can visit the development.

“We just wanted to have an entire full calendar of events that are community-driven and also to let [locals] know that although you're looking at these full-service buildings, you're part of the community because you've been here before they came,” he said. “But you're still welcome to come in.”

Locals can get training in areas that many South Bronx locals have never been able to learn about — acquiring a property, securing financing and how to dress for a job interview, he said. 

Brooks has lived in Mott Haven since arriving from Honduras as a child in 1975, and for the past decade has been working to preserve some of the historic parts of the borough, steadily working to have the Landmarks Preservation Society take interest in preserving and designating the buildings in the area.

“The South Bronx was literally burning down, there was no investment, there was no interest,” he said of his childhood there. “We had a lot of fires and a lot of crime, you name it. No one as far as developers are concerned wanted to erect new buildings, even though there were vast, open parcels of land.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of locals were displaced by arson in the borough. Today, Mott Haven has 41,000 residents, 68% of whom identify as Hispanic or Latinx, 27% of whom are African American, 3% of whom are white and 2% some other race. Nearly 29% of residents are foreign-born, largely from the Dominican Republic and Central America, in addition to a small but growing West African immigrant population, according to New York City data.

“Housing is crucial … and the Brookfield development really moves to address that,” said Michael Brady, the senior vice president of economic development and policy at the Bronx Chamber of Commerce.

Brady pointed to the lack of workforce housing as a longstanding problem for the area, because people who grew up in the Bronx and move away for college to pursue careers historically don’t come back. Public housing, Mitchell-Lama housing and income-restricted homes have come to the area, but they alone aren’t enough to create a prosperous borough, he said.

“We're seeing market-rate development, and then we have emerging now with infill properties and with some new developments that are coming online — including the Brookfield property — we're seeing diverse affordable housing rates from that that can meet incomes where they are,” he added. “The Bronx is for everyone, and everyone in the community deserves good-quality housing, great amenities and an amazing community to live in.”

Liz Neumark runs catering company Great Performances out of a building at 2147 Third Ave., a few blocks from Bankside. She moved to the location in 2019 after running the business for decades at the corner of Spring and Hudson streets in Manhattan. Her building sold to Disney as part of its massive campus purchase in Hudson Square.

Priced out of Manhattan, she toured around looking for space in other parts of the city. She fell in love with the Mott Haven building, she said, with its architectural style similar to Great Performances’ previous address, the quick commute to Manhattan and the trucking access to the rest of the city and its surroundings.

“A couple of people thought I’d lost my mind,” she told Bisnow. “You go from this really red-hot, chic Hudson Square to the South Bronx and all the images that conjures up for people who really don't know the neighborhood.”

Neumark is part of a group forming an association focused entirely on Third Avenue, she said. She’s focused on what Mott Haven needs, which led her to open Mae Mae Cafe + Plant Shop — which sells both plants and plant-based foods from a Latin-inspired menu — at the base of Great Performances’ building. Neumark expects it and other local small businesses to benefit from Bankside’s presence.

“I think it's great for the café, but it's great for the street culture,” Neumark said. “It's great for getting some focus on what this neighborhood needs, which is a little more for attention and respect. We need more city services, we need better traffic lights, we need our stop signs, we need lights under the overpass, we need sanitation services from the city. This is a neighborhood that if no one is living here, then no one's asking for the right kind of treatment that neighborhoods deserve." 

Another new neighborhood addition is the DREAM Charter High School, which opened a location in a formerly abandoned building at 20 Bruckner St. a few blocks away. The lottery for seats at DREAM, which was founded in the early 1990s in East Harlem, preferences children in public housing, so the school doesn’t expect to have many Bankside residents as students, a school official told Bisnow.

However, DREAM and Brookfield are in regular communication, as the school hopes the developer’s focus on improving street safety and local infrastructure will be the start of a strong neighborhood collaboration.

"We go into it with the expectation that Brookfield wants Mott Haven to be a great place for families to live and grow," DREAM co-founder Rich Berlin said. "The same thing exists for DREAM. Just because neighbors will have different income levels, that's hardly an unusual thing in New York City. And it's up to all of us to work really hard together to make sure it's a great place to live and grow, no matter what your income bracket is, and so far Brookfield has has proven to be a good partner in that respect."

The Bronx’s median household income in 2021 was $45,640, according to New York University’s Furman Center, 37% lower than the citywide median of $72,150. The poverty rate in New York was 18% compared to 26% in the Bronx, and 34% of renter households in the borough were severely rent-burdened in 2021, the center notes.

“The long-term question is, what will the ripples be into the working class affordable neighborhood of Mott Haven?” Neumark said. “Will the population and the political leadership take those lessons of the impact of gentrification, and how will that influence what gets built?”

Bankside is on pace to be completely finished by the end of the year, Howe said, which is consistent with the timeline the developer committed to when it started development. The 46K SF waterfront public park, which provides access to the Harlem River that has never been available to the public, is expected to open before the end of the year.

“I think we built something really beautiful here, and I think people recognize that and hopefully can feel proud,” Howe said, standing in the nearly ready park. “Not just as tenants, but as Bronxites.”

CLARIFICATION, JUNE 30, 11:15 A.M ET: This story was updated to more clearly reflect that Brookfield purchased the Bankside development site after its rezoning process and initial marketing campaign.