Between the high-rise apartment buildings and the remnants of Brooklyn’s industrial past that dot the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, the nutrient-rich water from the East River’s sole tidal estuary fosters a rare bird habitat. It sits along the shore of Bushwick Inlet Park, which is still unfinished despite being one of the central promises of the waterfront’s 2005 rezoning.

The 2005 rezoning, which paved the way for a wall of shorefront apartment towers in North Brooklyn over the next two decades, apportioned a 27-acre parcel of land to become a public green space. However, in 2026, the park remains half-realized and underfunded. 

Meanwhile, a massive housing development, known as Monitor Point, is planned to abut the park. The project’s developer, Gotham Organization, proposes to build three apartment towers—21, 41 and 56 stories tall, with a total of 1,150 units—on the site of an MTA washing facility at 40 Quay St. It has promised that 40% of the units would be “permanently affordable.” The project would also house the Monitor Point Museum at 56 Quay St. to commemorate the site where the U.S.S. Monitor—the Navy’s first ironclad warship, which stopped the Confederacy from breaking the Union blockade with its own ironclad vessel—was built in 1862. 

Greenpoint and Williamsburg gained 26,232 new housing units between 2010 and 2024—the largest increase in any New York City neighborhood, according to a March 2025 report from the state comptroller’s office. For both critics and supporters of Monitor Point, the project is a key test case for whether the imperative to increase the housing supply will be balanced by environmental concerns and the need for more infrastructure (such as roads, transit, and schools) to absorb that growth. 

“This plan would introduce about 1,200 largely luxury units into an already overbuilt area, with more towers on the way and no meaningful infrastructure improvements,” Greenpoint resident Laura Treciokas said at a Brooklyn Community Board 1 meeting March 11. “After two decades of waiting for the completion of Bushwick Inlet Park, this project would overshadow the inlet and turn public space into an amenity for luxury tenants.” 

Speakers at public hearings have also expressed numerous concerns about the environmental impacts of Monitor Point. According to the city Department of City Planning, it would be built in a vulnerable flood zone along the East River. 

Katherine Conkling Thompson, president of Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, recalls the flooding in 2012, when the surge from Superstorm Sandy brought ocean waters to her front door in Greenpoint. She also notes that Monitor Point would be located on top of the historic Bushwick Creek. Although the creek was filled in over a century ago, its underground flow can still exacerbate in-land flooding. 

“The creek still manifests itself whenever there is [rainfall] or any kind of rain event. You can see it floods all the way up to McCarren Park,” Conkling Thompson said.

While the Gotham Organization has maintained that they will address resiliency and flood-protection concerns by erecting a bulkhead and integrating wet floodproofing, dry floodproofing, and green infrastructure into the complex, opponents of the development are not convinced. 

Sarah Roberts of Greenpoint, an educator with the Wild Bird Fund, worries that the bulkhead would require Gotham to build on a platform “and create, essentially, a trophy platform” for its residents. Roberts is also wary of the development’s size in relation to the park. “Realistically, I don’t see how something the size of the Whitney is gonna exist there,” she says. 

And as an avid watcher of the diverse bird species at Bushwick Inlet Park, she believes that the development’s sheer height will be detrimental to the flight patterns of migratory birds that pass through. The inlet is one of the green spaces in the city depended on by birds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway—one of the four main avian migratory corridors in North America, from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean. 

Similarly, Ronald Shiffman, cofounder of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, says Monitor Point is a serious misstep. He calls the development “a big wall along the water’s edge.” 

“It’s on the flight path for birds entering the city of New York,” Shiffman told The Indypendent. “There have been literally dozens of species of birds cited there in springtime or and in the fall, because it’s along that flight path.” 

He also underscored Roberts’ sense of apprehension towards the project’s ecological repercussions.

“Before we even think about developing the site, one has to really look at the environmental issues that are of concern there,” Shiffman said. “From a good planning perspective, we have to keep some of that open. We can’t develop it all.”

In the 1990s, Shiffman was involved in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg 197-A plan, which involved community participation to reimagine the waterfront. He says that they designated the Bushwick Inlet area to remain open space, in part, because of the environmental concerns being raised today. 

“I think [it] is wrong. I think the reason we left the site for what it was, was the environmental issues and the historic-preservation issues,” Shiffman said. “For a while, people vigorously fought for taking the site and keeping it as a natural resource and as a historic resource. I don’t think we should just blindly give that away to more private development.”

A Neighborhood Divided

Monitor Point, however, also has the strong support of affordable-housing advocates and some community organizations, such as the nonprofit St. Nicks Alliance, due to Gotham’s expressed commitment to including mixed-income housing. 

Roberts argues Gotham has misled the community into blindly accepting the development by framing it as an issue between community groups advocating for open space, and the developers and their supporters promoting affordable housing.

“There are groups and partners for affordable housing and in this community [who support Monitor Point] that do incredible work,” she said. But she also speculated why they would “approve housing for potentially economically disadvantaged people or resource-restricted individuals in a blue flood zone?” 

As the land-use review process has steadily progressed, Conkling Thompson has witnessed the growing division in the neighborhood. 

“We’ve had the BQE, we’ve had waste-transfer stations. We have very little open space, and this is stuff we’ve all kind of worked together on,” Conkling Thompson said. “Now you get this [proposal] and it has divided [the neighborhood]. I think the developers purposefully have inserted a narrative that we are against poor people.” 

According to Gotham’s presentation to Community Board 1, around 460 of the 1,150 units (or 40%) will be “affordable.” The developer has proposed that 200 of those units will be located in the easternmost tower and will be priced for households with an income between 40% and 60% of the metropolitan Area Median Income, following the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines: $45,360 to $68,040 for a single person, $72,900 to $87,480 for a family of three. Most of the market-rate luxury units will be in the western towers. Monitor Point supporters say it’s an opportunity to provide more affordable housing to Greenpoint and Williamsburg, including for those who have been priced out of the neighborhood.

“These developments are a crucial part of allowing low-income residents to stay in North Brooklyn as rents have escalated out of control,” Frank Lang, the director of affordable-housing policy and advocacy at St. Nicks Alliance, said at the March Community Board 1 hearing. “We continue to work with tenants who are displaced and whose families are displaced, and they strongly support this project.”

Critics of the plan are skeptical of Gotham’s claim that it will create truly affordable housing. Rents for the “affordable” units would be around $1,135 to $1,700 for a studio and $1,460 to $2,190 for a two-bedroom apartment.

Shiffman points out that the Area Median Income is not based on averages within a neighborhood or citywide, but on the entire metropolitan statistical area, including Long Island and Westchester County. As of 2025, the AMI for the New York City region was $145,800 for a three-person family. 

He argues that this method of measuring affordability results in supposedly affordable units being “calculated for affordability higher than the income of many of the people who [live] in the surrounding neighborhood.” 

Shiffman also says the use of distorted AMI metrics within a large-scale cross-subsidized housing project has the potential to reinforce displacement pressures in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, as higher housing costs also push up the general cost of living in the area.

“It really has a ripple effect, because all of a sudden, all the restaurants charge more,” he says. “All of these food stores are charging more, because it’s a slightly different level of products that are brought into the areas, and the rents have changed, and the stores have to deal with the new higher rents.”

A Councilmember’s Dilemma

As Monitor Point winds its way through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), it has been approved by Community Board 1 and received conditional approval from Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso—who called on Gotham to increase the number of affordable units to at least 50%—while noting that “this application has become a proxy for the continued outcomes of the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning.” 

While Reynoso recommends that Gotham “improve building resilience, especially in response to ongoing threats of wave attenuation, wind impacts, and flooding risk,” he does not address the ecological hazards that critics say the development poses. 

The Monitor Point proposal is now being reviewed by the City Planning Commission which has until May 17 to make a decision. If it votes in favor, the proposal would then go to the City Council, which almost always follows the lead of the member from the affected district. 

That Councilmember, Lincoln Restler, says he supports Reynoso’s call for more affordable units at Monitor Point. 

“I hope that the MTA and the developer heed the guidance from the borough president and from my community. We must see more affordable housing on this site or it’s not going to move forward,” Restler told The Indy. “We do not want this neighborhood to become a place where only the very, very rich can afford to live. When it comes to publicly owned land, we have to have a much higher threshold for affordable housing.”

“I do believe that development projects can be designed to strengthen resiliency,” Restler said. However, he added that he shares the concerns “that members of my community have articulated about the potential risk of building at such an ecologically sensitive location.”

“I learned a long time ago,” Restler said, “that you can never make everybody happy, but I hope that there’s a path forward here where our community finally has a guarantee that Bushwick Inlet Park will be fully funded and built, and that we’re able to secure the affordable housing that we so desperately need. 

“But if that doesn’t come together, then I will oppose the project.”

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