It doesn’t look like much now: a few garages and an empty parking lot. But if things progress as planned, in a few years’ time the site at 516 Bergen in Prospect Heights will be home to what’s billed as a five-story, 100% affordable housing complex. 

However, critics say it’s not as affordable as it sounds.

The building, dubbed Bergen Green and developed as a joint venture by Apex Building Group, Bridge Street Development Corporation and New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, is part of a larger rezoning taking place in Prospect Heights. 

The Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use Plan encompasses roughly 13 blocks along Atlantic Avenue and will change the zoning designation of the area from “light manufacturing” to “mixed-use residential.” This will allow developers to build a projected 4,600 homes, and add roughly 2,800 jobs to the area, according to the Department of City Planning. 

The rezoning started its public review process this month and comes at a critical time for Prospect Heights, whose housing stock has been unable to keep up with the large influx of residents that has moved to the neighborhood over the past decade.

With this influx comes displacement, primarily of low-income people of color: City Council District 35, which comprises part of the Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use Plan’s land area, has lost one in five black residents in the last decade alone according to census data. Proponents of rezoning say the rezoning will mitigate the problem. Critics, however, are not so sure.

Sage Dumont is an urban planner who studied an earlier neighborhood rezoning effort by the city in East New York in 2014.

“We have seen an increase in folks who make higher wages,” she said. “They’re households who are making higher amounts of money, which can be an indicator that the next level of gentrification will come.”

The Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use Plan could follow the same trend.

‘Distasteful, Disrespectful’

Of the 4,600 new homes in the larger development plan, just over a quarter are expected to be income-restricted affordable housing, which includes the units at Bergen Green.

The complex is part of the Department of Housing and Preservation’s ELLA, or Extremely Low and Low-Income Affordability, program, which allowed developers to take out an HPD loan to finance construction of the building, and put Bergen Green among the complexes supposedly serving the neediest New Yorkers. But city-touted affordable housing fails, by many metrics, to help the lowest-income individuals with the highest levels of need.

Jamell Henderson, a member of Community Board 8 and New York City Regional Board Chair for Citizen Action of New York, was at the Oct. 3 meeting when plans for Bergen Green were brought to the community for review. He was surprised to find the project had 39 units that were reserved for families making at least 80% the area’s median income.

“I really thought that it was very distasteful, disrespectful to present that project in a way that supposedly is extremely low and low affordable,” he said.

The national Department of Housing and Urban Development uses the area’s median income to determine income thresholds for affordable housing. The median income in New York in 2024, according to HUD calculations, is $139,800 for a three-person family. So a family making 80% AMI, or $111,840, would be considered low-income, and would pay $2,796 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

But apartments at that price point are not in high demand. A 2021 Housing Vacancy Survey showed a 12.64% vacancy rate for apartments asking more than $2,300, versus a 4.5% rate citywide. And yet Bergen Green offers over a third of its apartments at comparable prices, while only 10% of its units are reserved for “extremely low income” tenants who would pay cheaper rents.

In order to keep a building profitable, developers say they must subsidize lower-priced units using higher-priced ones. Apex claims this is the best mix of prices they can afford as a for-profit developer. 

For this reason, Dumont says private real estate developers shouldn’t be the city’s main supplier for low-cost housing.

“If we’re just relying on private real-estate developers to create affordable housing, they don’t want to be creating affordable housing,” she said. “They want to be making money.”