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Muss Development LLC |
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PERSPECTIVES
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To draw a mirthless chuckle from the developer Joshua L. Muss it is only necessary to describe him as a man of patience. ''To be a successful developer in New York,'' he says dryly, ''you have to have patience.''
It took 13 years before all the conditions essential for construction -- zoning, leasing, financing -- were in place to start the $240 million Renaissance Plaza office and hotel project in downtown Brooklyn in 1996. Completion came two years later.
It has taken 32 years to get to the point where the infrastructure, market and regulatory conditions are such that construction can start on a residential project on 18 acres of land in the Princes Bay section of Staten Island. The Muss family has held the property all that time, and now is ready to start building 400 housing units, mainly town houses and condominiums, under the name Princes Point.
And Mr. Muss has been holding a 15-acre development site off College Point Boulevard in Flushing, Queens, since 1983, awaiting proper zoning and market conditions. Eventually it is likely to become the largest mixed-use development of its era in Queens, with one million square feet of retail and office space and 1,200 apartments. The initial building would have 200,000 square feet of commercial and office space and a 300-unit residential tower above.
With all this planning and waiting, the satisfaction of a groundbreaking is especially sweet. It came for Mr. Muss this summer in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. The family-owned Muss Development Company, based in Forest Hills, Queens, broke ground for Oceana at Brighton Beach, the largest conventionally financed waterfront residential project to be undertaken in Brooklyn in at least a generation.
Oceana will have 850 apartments in a series of midrise buildings, plus a 20,000-square-foot clubhouse with an indoor and outdoor pool, built on a beachfront site of 15 acres long occupied by the Brighton Beach Baths. The site is between Coney Island Avenue and Seacoast Terrace off Brighton Beach Avenue.
The developer expects completion in five years, at a total development cost of about $250 million. The first four buildings, condominiums near the boardwalk with a total of 206 apartments, are already in construction, and sales are scheduled to begin from a pavilion on the site within days.
The apartments are on the large side, and initial prices for standard units range from $224 a square foot to $380 a square foot, or $280,000 to $475,000. For the 30 special apartments that were given the best waterfront views -- and are to offer over 2,000 square feet of space -- there is a special price structure: $600,000 to $900,000. Initial prices are expected to be in the same $600,000-to-$900,000 range for 16 penthouses, all with 750-square-foot terraces, when they go on sale. The penthouses are in two sizes -- a 1,775-square-foot flat and a 1,975-square-foot duplex.
The penthouses became part of the design when top floors belatedly had to be shrunk to conform with height limitations in the city's waterfront zoning. ''We discovered after all the engineering planning was completed that we couldn't provide the ceiling heights we wanted without scaling back to a smaller footprint on the top floors,'' Mr. Muss said.
The consequent redesign was the final touch in a replanning exercise that took two years to complete after the company contracted to buy the land in 1997. With participation and support from the Department of City Planning, the redesign went successfully through a new land-use review process.
The replanning saga has been an instructive episode on adapting city-approved but outdated longterm development plans to new conditions. Flexibility in these plans after a long public approval process is not easy to come by. In Brighton Beach the revised plan had to conform to the city's 1993 waterfront zoning ordinance and its 1996 seismic code. And it had to take account of community interest in preserving and restoring a dilapidated 100-year-old structure on the site, once Coney Island's lively ''West Brighton Carousel.''
With an architectural assist from the Manhattan firm of Platt Byard Dovell, the carousel is to be dismantled and stored -- and possibly re-used by the New York Aquarium on Surf Avenue at West Eighth Street in Coney Island as a grand new entrance, with a visitors' center and classrooms. The proposal is to be taken by the aquarium management to its governing body, the Wildlife Conservation Society.
THE biggest change that the replanning has brought is in the scale of the project. The former owner was Stephen Muss, Joshua's cousin, president of Alexander Muss & Sons in Miami Beach, which had held a lease on the Brighton Beach Baths site since 1955 and bought it outright in 1980. Nine years later it set about to win city approval of a development plan.
The approval that Alexander Muss & Sons won three years later was for a third, and scaled down, version of its plan. Nevertheless, it called for 1,600 apartments in four towers of 24 and 30 stories, twice the size of the project as now planned. But in the mid-90's the market was too weak for any new conventionally financed multifamily construction, let alone expensive high-rise buildings with 400 apartments to sell or rent out.
Joshua Muss's notions of the proper development for the property are more in keeping with traditional Brooklyn housing. ''We wanted larger, family-oriented apartments,'' he said -- and fewer of them per building, so that the project can be built in phases and adjustments made, within the zoning envelope, to fit the housing type to market demand, or delay construction if the market turns cold. ''We had no desire to finance 400 apartments in one swoop,'' Mr. Muss said.
The current plan is for 16 buildings, two of which can be as high as 12 stories. Most buildings will be no more than seven stories, as are the four now in construction. There will also be on-site parking, mainly underground, for 1,200 cars, and gated entrances, the main one on Brighton Beach Avenue.
The architectural team consists of Sandy & Babcock of San Francisco, Stanley M. Krebushevski of Dongan Hills, Staten Island, and the Manhattan firm of Schuman Lichtenstein Claman & Efron. Mr. Krebushevski had the job of placing the buildings so that view corridors from existing streets through the site to the water would be preserved, as the waterfront zoning requires.
This key concept of waterfront zoning, so appropriate in the street grid of Manhattan's West Side, is awkward applied to many other locations in the city, including Brighton Beach, developers say. Existing streets come into Brighton Beach Avenue, the land's northern boundary, at an angle. To conform literally to the rule on the site corridors would have made the development of a planned community of multifamily buildings impractical, Mr. Muss said.
Fortunately for the developer, a few existing structures on the water side of Brighton Beach Avenue, but outside the development site, already obscure the sight lines from the existing streets. In this situation the law gives the Planning Department discretion on how views should be maintained.
''There's a lifeguard station at the beach that obscures the view from Beach 13th Street,'' Mr. Muss said. ''It was pure luck.''
At Oceana, outsiders will be able to look directly through the center of the project -- up a slight grade toward the boardwalk, and through a clubhouse divided into two sections at grade level to preserve the view from Brighton Beach Avenue.
Most of the floors at the project will have 10 apartments -- four two-bedrooms of about 1,250 square feet; one three-bedroom of 1,550 square feet; one 1,050-square-foot one-bedroom with a den, and four duplexes. The duplexes, with 1,376 square feet, are designed to have a living room, dining room and den on the upper floor and two bedrooms downstairs.
Mr. Muss, 58, is a third-generation builder. His grandfather, Isaac, arrived in the United States in 1906 from Russia via South Africa, where he built barracks for the British during the Boer War. He became a contractor in Brooklyn, and had 11 children. One son, Joshua's father, Hyman, built over 4,000 homes and apartments, mainly in Queens and Staten Island, from the 50's through the 80's. Hyman Muss died in 1994. Now Joshua's sons, Joseph and Jason, are in the business.
Like other longterm building companies, Muss Development has an experienced team of professionals in construction, marketing, finance and other phases of development on staff. Lately Mr. Muss has been using the consulting services of Harvey W. Schultz, a former New York City Commissioner of Environmental Protection. Mr. Schultz may eventually join the company and take a ''hands-on role in the development process,'' Mr. Muss said.
''After a while you want someone to share that role with you,'' he said. ''Doing it all myself is counterproductive to the enjoyment of the business.''