Hush Street is tracking what’s changing in Williamsburg — a neighborhood too large and too different block to block to just repeat what worked in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens. Those two neighborhoods are landmarked and largely built out; their development stories run almost entirely on renovation. Williamsburg has almost no historic-district footprint at all, and it shows: this pass found 56 land-use actions touching its community district since 2019, several of them moving right now, against zero in each of the last two neighborhoods we’ve covered.

The waterfront alone tells three different stories — one megaproject nearly finished, one approved five years ago and still unbuilt, and one substantially built with almost no press attention. Inland, a fifteen-year fight over affordable housing at Broadway Triangle is now visibly under construction, and a quiet wave of institutional building in South Williamsburg doesn’t show up in a single news article. We also found real estate marketed as “Williamsburg” that press coverage and city block data consistently place in East Williamsburg instead — we explain those calls below rather than quietly including or dropping them.

Project	Location	Status
1Domino’s Last Tower Is Finally Rising	280 Kent Avenue	Under Construction
2River Ring	River Street	Approved / Not Started
3Williamsburg Wharf	470 Kent Avenue	Phase I Done / Phase II Building
4Bushwick Inlet Park	North 9th St. to Quay St.	Partial / Active
5Broadway Triangle	Walton, Harrison, Gerry & Union Sts.	Active / Multi-Site
6The Kent Avenue Rezoning Wave	289 & 200 Kent Avenue	In Public Review
7UJO’s New Headquarters	498 Bedford Avenue	Under Construction
8South Williamsburg’s Institutional Building Wave	Neighborhood-wide	Active / Ongoing
9McCarren Park’s Overhaul	Williamsburg/Greenpoint border	Active / Multi-Project
10Grand, Metropolitan & Morgan Safety Redesign	Grand St. to Morgan Ave.	Study / Proposal Stage
11159 Broadway	159 Broadway	Sold / New Plans Filed
12The Leonard Library	81 Devoe Street	Completed
13P.S. 414K Repairs	325 South 3rd Street	Under Construction

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

Two Trees redeveloped the old Domino Sugar Refinery site in phases starting in the 2010s. The Refinery building itself — the one with the giant yellow sign — has been converted to office and retail space, and is now roughly 90% leased. Domino Park opened in 2018, and a final public plaza, Domino Square, opened in 2024.

The last unbuilt parcel, known as Site B, is where the project’s final residential towers are now under construction: twin buildings roughly 50 to 53 stories tall, around 591 feet, totaling about 1.17 million square feet. Most reporting puts the unit count at 1,262, with 315 affordable units built on-site and another 105 built off-site.

What Changed in the Redesign

In October 2025, City Council approved a modification to the approved plan. A planned pedestrian skybridge was dropped. So was a planned public elementary school that had been part of the building’s podium — a real, notable loss worth stating plainly. In exchange, the design picked up balconies, facade changes, and roughly 100 additional units under the city’s newer City of Yes housing rules.

Foundation work was progressing as of December 2025. Two Trees is targeting completion around 2028 to 2029.

Sources: Brooklyn Paper; Brownstoner; Hoodline; New York YIMBY; NYC Planning ZAP/ULURP records

A Lot of Approval, Not Much Construction

City Council approved River Ring in 2021. The plan is ambitious: two towers at 710 feet and 560 feet, somewhere between 1,050 and 1,200 units with roughly 30% priced below market, a new YMCA, a public park and beach, and a circular boardwalk along the East River.

Five years later, none of it has been built. NYC Planning’s own land-use tracking still lists the project’s status as on hold. This is exactly the kind of case our own freshness rules exist for — most of what you’ll find searching for River Ring is 2021-through-2024 approval coverage that reads like an active construction story. It isn’t one.

A Tax Break Written for One Project

In this year’s New York State budget, Two Trees secured a narrowly written extension of the expired 421-a tax program specifically for River Ring, after the site missed the original 2031 completion deadline the program required. Two Trees now projects the first tower won’t be finished until 2033 — twelve years after approval.

Sources: Gothamist; Brownstoner; 6sqft; Wikipedia; NYC Planning ZAP/ULURP records

A Five-Tower Complex, Built Mostly Under the Radar

This 3.75-acre site is planned for five 22-story towers when complete — roughly 1 million square feet, with a 525-foot public esplanade along the East River. The first phase is already more than 90% leased across 500-plus rental apartments, and about 30% of its condo units are sold.

Compared to Domino, Williamsburg Wharf has drawn surprisingly little general-audience press given its scale. A $374.35 million refinancing closed in May 2026 for the completed phase.

Phase Two Is Already Underway

The second phase, 80 Wharf Way, is under construction now: 362 condo units across two more high-rise buildings, backed by $525 million in secured financing. Exact final unit-count totals for the complex vary slightly across sources; we’re reporting what’s confirmed per phase rather than asserting one precise development-wide number.

Sources: New York YIMBY; Brooklyn Paper; Bisnow; Multi-Housing News

A Park Promised Two Decades Ago

Bushwick Inlet Park was conceived alongside the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning, and it straddles the boundary between the two neighborhoods almost exactly at the inlet itself. Only 3 of the 6 parcels planned for its full 27.8 acres are complete — roughly a third of what was promised.

The most recent parcel to open, Motiva (1.66 acres), followed a $9.8 million remediation and construction project and opened in spring 2026.

What’s Still Not There

Two sites remain unbuilt, and one of them isn’t close. The former Bayside Fuel Oil Depot has been city-owned since 2016 and was demolished in 2019, but it’s still working through state environmental permitting — a March 2025 notice shows no redevelopment timeline yet. The CitiStorage North and South sites both still need major environmental remediation before park construction can even start.

This is a legitimately shared story between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and we’ll cover it from both sides — the way we’ve already covered the Court Street reconstruction from both Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.

Sources: NYC Parks; Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park; Brooklyn Eagle; NYS DEC

A Decade of Litigation Before a Single Foundation Was Poured

Broadway Triangle was rezoned in 2017, after a legal fight over how its affordable housing would be allocated ran for more than a decade. That history is inseparable from what’s happening on the ground here today.

The site itself sits on the literal border between South Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant — we’re covering it here because the rezoning and legal record are part of Williamsburg’s own land-use story, not because every acre of it reads as unambiguously “Williamsburg” on a map.

What’s Actually Under Construction Now

Rabsky Group’s roughly 1,000-unit, eight-building complex continues to lease up. The newest phase, 11 Gerry Street, is a 10-story fully affordable building; a housing lottery for it ran through March 4, 2026, with rents starting at $812 a month.

Separately, HPD’s own affordable phase — Bartlett Crossing, 78 units at up to 80% of area median income — broke ground in July 2026.

Between the scale, the multi-decade legal history, and the number of active parcels involved, Broadway Triangle is the strongest candidate we’ve found for a future standalone Hush Street Spotlight — not built out here, but on our list.

Sources: Brownstoner; 6sqft; Greenpointers; Brooklyn Paper; NYC HPD; NYC Planning ZAP/ULURP records; NYC DOB permit records

The Former VICE Media Building, Reimagined

289 Kent Avenue was VICE Media’s headquarters. It’s now the subject of a rezoning application for a 17-story, 280-unit mixed-use building with 70 affordable units and about 301,000 square feet, filed with City Planning in October 2025 and certified for public review in April 2026.

Two blocks away, a nearly identical rezoning at 200 Kent Avenue followed the same path — filed the same month, certified for public review in March 2026. Its specific building program hasn’t been reported publicly; only its filing and certification dates are confirmed through city land-use records.

A Complication Worth Flagging

The 289 Kent Avenue site carries a real tension we’re not going to smooth over: CTBC Bank filed a foreclosure action in late 2025, alleging a default on a $25 million loan secured by the property. That means an active rezoning application and an active foreclosure proceeding are running on the same site at the same time. Neither a rezoning outcome nor a resolution to the foreclosure was confirmed as of this update.

Sources: New York YIMBY; Crain’s New York Business; Hoodline; NYC Planning ZAP/ULURP records

Owning a Building for the First Time

UJO of Williamsburg and North Brooklyn provides social services to a client base the organization describes as roughly 75,000 residents. For decades it has operated out of leased space. That changes with this project: a five-story, $9.3 million building at 498 Bedford Avenue that will be the organization’s first-ever owned headquarters.

Groundbreaking took place August 13, 2025. It’s a small project by dollar value next to the neighborhood’s waterfront towers, but it’s a real, well-documented piece of the same broader pattern of institutional building described in the next section.

Sources: The Jewish Press; Goldstein Hall; News 12 Brooklyn

A Pattern the Headlines Miss

Alongside UJO’s new headquarters, a direct pull of city building-permit records turned up a pattern of substantial institutional construction in South Williamsburg that doesn’t show up in general-audience press at all. It only becomes visible when you look at the permits directly, address by address.

A $5.43 million extension of a yeshiva building at 177 Harrison Avenue, filed by the United Talmudical Academy. A combined $10.4 million garage and plaza rehabilitation across two buildings at 50 and 60 Division Avenue, filed by Division Housing Corp., a residential cooperative. Two commercial-to-community-facility conversions — $4.5 million at 303 Wythe Avenue and $4.49 million at 228 North 7th Street — both filed by the same ownership entity, 1428 Putnam Towers LLC.

What This Is, and Isn’t

Together, these five identified filings alone total more than $23 million in declared construction value since January 2023. We’re presenting this as illustrative, not exhaustive — these are the largest filings we found fitting this pattern, not a claim that we’ve counted every institutional or religious-community construction project in South Williamsburg. No independent press coverage exists for any of these five projects individually; each is real and permit-confirmed, but we haven’t independently verified scope or timeline with the institutions themselves.

Sources: NYC DOB permit records (DOB NOW: Build)

Several Projects, All Moving at Once

McCarren Park sits almost exactly on the line between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and several separate, funded capital projects are underway there right now. Correction, September 2026: an earlier version of this section described a $50 million pool/bathhouse renovation as a current project alongside these others. That $50 million figure is historical — it funded the 2012 restoration that reopened the long-shuttered pool, not a project underway today. The real current bathhouse work is a separately funded $11.7 million reconstruction of its roof and exterior walls, announced in 2022 and now under construction after pandemic-era procurement delays.

A $14.7 million project will convert an asphalt parking lot into green space, including a stormwater retention tank; its design is headed to Community Board 1 later in 2026. Separately, reconstruction of Ballfield 3 began in March 2024, with completion now pushed back to November 2026.

This is a legitimately shared Williamsburg-Greenpoint story. Hush Street’s Greenpoint tracker doesn’t yet cover it from that side — worth a cross-link once it does.

Sources: Brooklyn Paper; Greenpointers; NYC Parks capital-project tracker

Fourteen Deaths Behind a Traffic Study

DOT is studying one-way conversions and protected bike lanes for the Grand Street-Metropolitan Avenue-Morgan Avenue corridor, driven by a count of 14 fatalities and 54 serious injuries between 2016 and 2023. Nothing has been adopted yet — a public feedback period was still open as of August 2026.

The corridor itself runs beyond Williamsburg’s core into East Williamsburg near Morgan Avenue, and most coverage frames it as an East Williamsburg project. We’re including it here because its western end, near Havemeyer Street, sits squarely in Williamsburg and would be directly affected by whatever DOT ultimately proposes.

A Smaller, Already-Finished Fix Nearby

Separately — and already done, not proposed — DOT fixed the long-notorious bike-path “bump” where the Williamsburg Bridge’s bike ramp meets Delancey Street on the Manhattan side, in January 2026, as part of a $70 million Delancey Street redesign. It’s not part of this corridor study, but it’s a second, verifiably current piece of the same broader story about DOT attention to Williamsburg-area cycling infrastructure this year.

Sources: Gothamist; News 12 Brooklyn

From a 26-Story Hotel Tower to Something Much Smaller

This site’s original plan was a 26-story, 235-key hotel and condo tower. It collapsed along with its developer, Cornell Realty, which went bankrupt in 2020. Madison Realty Capital picked up the site in 2022 but never built anything.

Joyland Management bought it for $30 million in January 2026 and filed new plans the same day — a 12-story, 99-unit mixed-use building. It’s a major scale-down from the original tower, but a real, active project on a site that sat dormant for years.

Part of a Wider Pattern

This isn’t an isolated case. Two other long-stalled Williamsburg sites are moving again around the same window: 174 Wythe Avenue, stalled more than 10 years, is now resumed, and 402 Union Avenue, stalled since the 2008 crash, topped out in 2025. Not every old stalled site is coming back, though — 80 Ainslie Street remained stalled as of the most recent information we found, in May 2025.

Sources: Commercial Observer; The Real Deal; Crain’s New York Business

Not Every Story Here Is a Fight

The Leonard Library, at roughly 120 years old, went through a $4.8 million DDC-managed restoration: laylight restoration, a new roof, energy-efficient HVAC, and fire-safety upgrades. It reopened in August 2025.

We’re including it deliberately as a finished, uncontroversial public investment — the kind of project worth recording even without an ongoing dispute attached to it.

Sources: Brooklyn Public Library

A Real Project With No Public Announcement

City building-permit records show the NYC School Construction Authority as owner of record on a combined $10.5 million in General Construction and Structural permits at P.S. 414K. We found no press coverage of the project’s exact scope — the permit record alone confirms real, current, SCA-funded construction at a neighborhood public school.

Sources: NYC DOB permit records (DOB NOW: Build)

Have a tip on a Williamsburg project we should be tracking? Let us know.

By Hush Street Editorial · Updated October 17, 2026 · Built from city filings and published reporting. About Hush Street