NYC Real Estate News

A trio of longtime Brooklyn real estate executives is launching a firm that aims to bring 10,000 new housing units to the city over the next five years.

Ofer Cohen, chairman of Brooklyn-focused brokerage TerraCRG, along with Tucker Reed and Vivian Liao, principals at Brooklyn-focused developer Totem, have joined forces to create the platform, called Ailanthus. It will focus on developing projects at sites that are not shovel-ready and may need to go through the city's often-lengthy and contentious rezoning process in an effort to dispute the assumption that such projects are riskier bets to support.

"Unless you have a shovel-ready site, meaning a site that's ready to go, capital markets aren't able to really mobilize," said Cohen, "and that's a fundamental problem in solving the acute housing crisis."

Real estate projects in the city that require rezonings virtually always need the support of their local City Council member to move forward. This often translates to tense negotiations over issues like affordability levels that can occasionally kill the projects outright.

The Ailanthus team plans to focus on strong engagement with community members and elected officials over such issues to help ensure its housing pushes are successful.

"Not only do we happen to think it's the right thing to do—it also makes better developments," Liao said.

The company already has roughly 1,500 units of housing in its pipeline through Totem projects, such as a 456-unit building at 1057 Atlantic Ave. in Crown Heights and a 187-unit project at 737 Fourth Ave. in Sunset Park. It plans to take advantage of the new tax breaks and policy reforms in the state budget's housing package as well, and it will donate at least 1% of its profits to Brooklyn Org., a philanthropic organization that distributes funding to local nonprofits.

Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have both laid out ambitious targets for boosting housing production, with Adams calling for 500,000 new homes in the city and Hochul calling for 800,000 new homes in the state over the next decade. The state budget package includes several policies the Adams administration supports in pursuit of this goal, such as raising the city's residential density cap and a pilot program to legalize basement apartments.

Adams officials are now pursuing their own policy changes through the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity initiative, which aims to increase the city's housing supply through measures including eliminating parking mandates and allowing backyard apartments.

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed a much-anticipated bill that will empower New York City to set its own speed limits below the state minimum of 25 mph.

Albany lawmakers passed Sammy’s Law last month as part of the state budget following a multi-year campaign pushed by street safety advocates. The bill is named for 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who in 2013 was fatally struck by a motorist in Park Slope, Brooklyn. How the law reshapes city speed limits will play out as implementation begins this summer.

Ydanis Rodriguez, the city’s transportation commissioner, said this week that his agency doesn’t have a list of streets to target for speed limit changes when the law takes effect on June 19. Identifying streets will come down to “following the data” on crashes, speeding tickets and other metrics, he said. Major thoroughfares that currently have a speed limit of 25 mph and have a violent history of crashes include Second Avenue, which runs the length of Manhattan; Broadway in Brooklyn; and East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx.

The law empowers the Department of Transportation to lower speed limits on a street-by-street basis without the City Council — so long as the local community board is given a 60-day notice. DOT says it intends to work with communities on speed limit changes and obstacles to implementation include time to manufacture and post new speed limit signs, recalibrate traffic signals and adjust speed cameras. A second possibility is lowering the speed limit citywide, but the council would need to introduce and approve such a measure, according to council spokeswoman Mara Davis.

Yes, there are some exceptions. It can’t apply to roads that have three lanes or more going in one direction outside of Manhattan.

The legislation is modeled after research showing that people hit by cars traveling less than 25 mph are less likely to die or be seriously injured. At an impact speed of 25 mph, an estimated 30% of pedestrians sustain severe, critical or fatal injuries, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Sammy Eckstein was struck by a motorist traveling at 25 mph.

Street safety advocates have pushed for Sammy’s Law for several years. The measure nearly made it into last year’s budget but was left out at the eleventh hour.

“Lower speed limits save lives,” said Amy Cohen, co-founder of Families for Safe Streets and Sammy’s mother, during Thursday’s bill signing. “That protective shield for our loved ones is really a communal responsibility and requires laws and policies, such as this one.”

The earliest possible changes could take effect on June 19, and even then the political process will likely drag out for weeks if not months longer. So until this summer at the earliest, Sammy’s Law won’t change how drivers cruise through the city’s streets.

Transportation advocates contend that lowering the speed limit is not in conflict with the expected late-June launch of congestion pricing. The tolling program will charge most drivers $15 to enter Manhattan’s core.

City data shows that the average speed of traffic in Manhattan’s Central Business District is roughly 7 mph due to the glut of car traffic. Congestion pricing might free up more space for drivers and allow for faster speeds.

“This won’t stop people from being able to get around,” said Rachel Fauss, senior policy advisor for Reinvent Albany. “It’s about people being able to get around more safely.”

While supportive of making drivers slow down, Mayor Eric Adams indicated at Thursday’s bill signing that he’s wary of a blanket speed limit reduction. "All streets are not the same and we should not have speed limits within the entire city based on the makeup of one belief or one philosophy," Adams said.

A biotech firm launched by the self-proclaimed inventor of the Star Trek Holodeck raised $16 million last week to build holographic medical devices to detect and treat cancer.

Holobeam Technologies, a startup based in Nassau County, was founded in 2018 to build medical devices that it says can teletransport energy to tumors and kill cancer. Founder Gene Dolgoff launched the company with a mission to “eradicate cancer deaths,” and has spent the last six years developing medical devices.

The recent funding was led by a single, undisclosed investor. Prior to its $16 million-fundraise, Holobeam raised $100,000 in 2018 from a group of investors including Dr. Kenneth Hall, a surgeon who sits on its board, and Jeff Studley, the founder of CPR MultiMedia Solutions, a Gaithersburg, Maryland-based event management company, according to data from PitchBook. The company was valued at $5.1 million at its launch.

The funds will enable the firm to continue building three different types of medical devices – one that aims to create 3D medical images, and two to provide imaging and cancer treatment, Dolgoff told Crain’s.

He also intends to use $1.5 million of those funds to pay himself, according to federal documents. When asked by Crain’s about the compensation, Dolgoff said the money would be used to pay the salaries of Holobeam’s five full-time employees.

Dolgoff, a physicist who has studied holograms since 1964, said that he’s aiming to kill cancer cells with holographic technology without harming healthy tissue along the way – and is borrowing from the sci-fi concept of teleportation to do it.

It wouldn’t be the first time Dolgoff has tried to merge his scientific and fictional work, he says. The physicist says he gave Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry the idea for the Holodeck, the fictional concept that allowed characters to travel between realms.

Now, Dolgoff has patented the concept of holographic energy teleportation, which he says can kill cancer cells without damaging healthy ones. Current cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation blast toxic radiation to the site of a tumor to kill cancer, but damage healthy skin, muscle tissue and nerves too, Dolgoff said.

That technology was successful in killing off cancer cells for good in mice and dogs, he said. The company hasn’t yet proved that it will work in humans. 

State lawmakers have granted $6 million to build a health and wellness hub in Bedford-Stuyvesant, aiming to expand emergency health services and maternal care in central Brooklyn.

The health facility, which will be built at 727 Greene Ave., will include space for emergency services, maternal care and gun violence prevention efforts, said Assemblywoman Stefani Zinerman, who represents Brooklyn neighborhoods including Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. 

The hub will become the new home of the Bed-Stuy Volunteer Ambulance Corp., a fleet of volunteer EMTs and paramedics that has served Central Brooklyn for the last 30 years, Zinerman said. The group, which emerged in the 1980s to provide emergency services during the crack epidemic, has since been operating out of trailers, she added. The new funding will create a dedicated space where it can train workers and park its three ambulances.

The hub will also include offices for the Kings Against Violence Initiative, a Downtown Brooklyn-based nonprofit that provides youth violence prevention services, as well as a birthing center run by the Bed-Stuy birth justice group AncientSong, Inc. Preliminary design plans for the birthing center include between four to six birthing suites, as well as space to train doulas.

Zinerman said she has tried to include more funding in the state budget for birthing centers in Central Brooklyn in an effort to address high maternal morbidity and mortality among Black New Yorkers. Earlier this year, 30-year-old mother Christine Fields died after bleeding out during childbirth at New York City Health + Hospitals/Woodhull, drawing attention to stark racial inequities in maternal and infant health.

The funds for the new hub, announced by Zinerman and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie on Friday, will support construction. The building is currently in the design phase, which is being led by architect Rodney Leon. Zinerman said that she hopes the design will be complete at the end of this summer and expects to begin contracting for developers before the end of the year. 

BUDGET HEARING: The City Council will hold executive budget hearings for the city Health Department and New York City Health + Hospitals today, where lawmakers plan to question city health officials on their upcoming fiscal plans before the final budget is adopted in July. The committees on health and mental health, disabilities and addiction will hold a hearing at 9:30 a.m. and the committee on hospitals will hold a hearing at noon.

POVERTY GRANTS: The Robin Hood Foundation, a Union Square-based philanthropy organization, awarded $35 million in grants to organizations aiming to reduce poverty and improve economic mobility across New York this year, the organization announced Friday. Top grant-making areas included child care and early childhood education, artificial intelligence and mental and physical health. The foundation awards $130 million in grants annually.

CYBER ATTACK FALLOUT: Kenneth Raske, president and CEO of the Greater New York Hospital Association, sent a letter to UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty Friday urging him to provide financial relief to providers that were harmed by the cyberattack on Change Healthcare. Raske urged the executive to waive deadlines for appealing insurance claims, offer free, no-interest loans and honor good faith actions during the shutdown such as approving prescriptions without confirming eligibility. 

Ariel Katz, the founder of H1, broke into the world of health care startups in a very Zuckerberg-like fashion: from his college dorm room. As a junior at SUNY Binghamton, he and his friends launched The Research Connection, a site that scraped information from university websites to connect students with professors looking for grantees and mentees. Katz noticed that pharmaceutical companies were using The Research Connection to “spam” the professors.

“I was not smart enough at the time to be like, ‘I'm going to charge Pfizer money,” Katz said. “I was just like, ‘Get off of our product. You're annoying our users.’”

Katz sold The Research Connection after college, but the experience taught him an important lesson about how to scale for new uses. He used that knowledge to launch the firm H1 in 2017. Its mission is to charge companies that want to connect with medical professionals – or, as Katz said, to “connect the world to the right doctor.” In other words, H1 serves as a “LinkedIn meets ZoomInfo” for the medical community; it has grown to amass more than 10 million profiles since 2017.

About 250 company clients use the platform to find physicians, Katz said. The vast majority are life science and pharmaceutical firms that pay for the platform at rates based on the country and therapeutic area they’re interested in, he added. Katz declined to share specific rates.

“We solve three problems for them. One is, who's the right doctor that I should work with for research? Which doctor should work on my clinical trial? Pharma spent $60 billion a year answering that question. So that’s one use case,” Katz said. H1 also aims to connect companies to doctors that aren’t yet educated on their drugs and physicians who can help treat specific types of diseases and cancers.

H1 has exploded since 2017, raising just over $200 million, including a Series C extension funding round in 2022. The company counts Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator and Flatiron District-based Lux Capital among its investors.

The funding has helped the company explore new ways to connect physicians and organizations. In April it launched H1 Connect, a platform that matches physicians searching for medical mission trips with the nongovernmental organizations that offer them. Miles Kirwin, the startup’s senior director of operations, said the idea for the initiative was born after war erupted in Israel and Gaza last October. The conflict left gaping holes in the workforce of doctors available to treat injuries and medical conditions, and physicians who were part of H1’s platform stepped up, Katz said.

“We found we had a lot of people that were willing to do that, and that's really one of the most difficult things to volunteer for,” Kirwin added.

As Kirwin traveled and listened to nongovernmental organizations’ leaders in the aftermath of the conflict, he learned that many don’t have reserves of doctors to respond when a crisis occurs. If they do, they don’t share their rosters with other organizations, he said. H1 Connect seeks to build a roster of physicians who are ready to travel and volunteer and ensure they’re ready for deployment. The company does not charge nongovernmental organizations to use the platform.

H1 Connect represents his company’s first step in making its mission global, Katz said. In the seven years since he started it, H1 has made tremendous progress, but he said there is still work to be done, including helping more patients connect with doctors. He emphasized that he wants to ensure H1 represents a diverse set of physicians who are ready to respond to crises.

“These people are in real need of doctors who want to help,” he said. “We thought, OK, great. This is something big. This is our mission.”