Hush Street is tracking what’s changing in Coney Island — a neighborhood whose current development story is not really about the amusement district that made it famous, but about the residential blocks just inland from it.
Coney Island’s modern building boom traces to a 2009 rezoning of the neighborhood’s core, which has since catalyzed more than 3,400 new homes and roughly $750 million in public investment along Surf Avenue. That rezoning deliberately split the neighborhood into subdistricts — a protected 27-acre amusement and entertainment core along the boardwalk (“Coney East”), and separate residential/retail zones to its north and west (“Coney North” and “Coney West”) where towers, not rides, were meant to go. Every housing project in this Tracker sits within that residential half of the 2009 plan, which is exactly why Coney Island’s rollercoasters and its apartment towers have expanded in parallel over the past 15 years rather than competing for the same land.
What’s active right now looks less like one master plan and more like several separate, overlapping efforts on the same few blocks: the city using its own leftover parking lots to build below-market housing, a longtime private developer finishing off a nearly billion-dollar all-affordable pipeline it started a decade ago, a market-rate developer quietly expanding an existing residential campus at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, and a shoreline — boardwalk included — still waiting on public investment that was promised years before any of the housing broke ground.
We treat Coney Island as its own development geography, distinct from neighboring Brighton Beach, and note explicitly where the two overlap or where a project’s neighborhood classification is genuinely ambiguous rather than assume either direction.
| Project | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1Tilyou Towers | Surf Ave. bet. W. 21st & W. 22nd Sts. | Permits Filed |
| 21709 Surf Avenue | 1709 Surf Avenue | Topped Out |
| 3Shorecrest Towers Infill | 3030 Ocean Pkwy. & 400 Neptune Ave. | Rezoning Filed |
| 42015 Boardwalk West Towers | 2015 Boardwalk West | Site Sold |
| 5Unity Towers | 2007 Surf Avenue | Design-Build Team Selected |
| 6Riegelmann Boardwalk | 2.7-mile shoreline, Coney Island & Brighton Beach | RFQ Released, Team TBD |
Housing Arriving From Four Directions at Once
Six anchors: the city’s own parking-lot-to-housing project, a private developer capping off a decade-long affordable pipeline, a market-rate rezoning expanding an existing tower complex, a boardwalk-front two-tower site that just changed hands for the first time since its own permits were approved, an existing NYCHA tower being modernized rather than replaced under the city’s Public Housing Preservation Trust, and the shared boardwalk whose own first procurement step just landed.
1
Tilyou Towers
The City’s Own Land, the First Phase of a Larger Plan
Tilyou Towers — named for Coney Island amusement pioneer George Tilyou, whose Steeplechase Park once anchored the neighborhood a few blocks away — is Phase 1 of “Coney Island West,” a roughly 1,500-unit initiative the city first previewed in Mayor Adams’ January 2025 State of the City address and formally announced that February. Unlike the private rezonings elsewhere in this Tracker, the underlying land here is already city-owned: Parcel A has functioned mainly as a surface parking lot, and NYCEDC ran a competitive RFP for it rather than negotiating with an existing site owner, ultimately selecting Rybak Development in October 2025. At 24% of units reserved as affordable (122 of 505), the project sits below the roughly 25% figure cited in the city’s own initial framing — worth noting as a minor, likely rounding-level gap between announcement and filed plan rather than a substantive one.
Permits filed with the Department of Buildings in July 2026 give the clearest architectural picture yet: an 11-story podium supporting two residential towers rising to 28 stories each, still within the previously reported 505-unit, $350 million scope.
What Comes With It
Beyond housing, the plan includes 160 parking spaces maintained through construction, a 3,000-square-foot landscaped public plaza, and ground-floor retail intended to extend Surf Avenue’s commercial strip west toward the amusement core. It’s one piece of a larger public commitment that also includes the Riegelmann Boardwalk reconstruction and a $42 million renovation of the nearby Abe Stark Sports Center — covered together below.
Sources: Commercial Observer; The Real Deal; 6sqft; NYC Mayor’s Office
2
1709 Surf Avenue
Not the Same Project as “Coney Island West”
It’s worth being precise here: 1709 Surf Avenue, sometimes referred to informally as “Coney Island III,” is the third and final phase of BFC Partners’ own long-running affordable housing pipeline along Surf Avenue — a separate effort from NYCEDC’s officially branded “Coney Island West” initiative covered above, even though both sit within a few blocks of each other and both get described in press coverage as part of Coney Island’s broader transformation. BFC’s first two phases are already online, bringing 822 affordable units to the corridor; this third phase’s 420 units bring the total to 1,242, on top of roughly $694 million already invested before this phase’s $250 million construction loan — pushing the full three-phase investment close to $1 billion. Every unit across all three phases is 100% affordable, a meaningfully deeper commitment than the blended affordability at Tilyou Towers a few blocks away.
A Decade of Incremental Delivery
BFC broke ground on this final phase in July 2025 and topped it out less than a year later, in June 2026 — fast by the standard of large affordable developments, and a sign of how mature this particular pipeline has become after two completed phases working out the financing structure (a partnership among HPD, HDC, Citi, and Goldman Sachs repeated across all three buildings). BFC’s own framing describes this milestone as “capping off” its transformation of this stretch of Surf Avenue — worth watching whether that means the company’s Coney Island footprint is now complete, or whether a fourth phase eventually follows the way NYCEDC’s own Coney Island West plan is expected to add later phases beyond Tilyou Towers.
Sources: New York YIMBY; NYC Housing Development Corporation; Multi-Housing News; PR Newswire
3
Shorecrest Towers Infill
A Boundary Worth Naming Honestly
This one sits close enough to the Coney Island-Brighton Beach line that we want to be transparent about it: the existing Shorecrest Towers at 2940-3000 Ocean Parkway are sometimes marketed and described in real estate coverage as Brighton Beach, since Ocean Parkway itself functions informally as the dividing line between the two neighborhoods. We’re covering this infill rezoning here rather than in Hush Street’s Brighton Beach Tracker because one of the two new towers, 400 Neptune Avenue, sits unambiguously on Coney Island’s side of that line, and because the project was not covered in that Tracker’s own research. Readers researching the Shorecrest campus specifically should treat the boundary as genuinely blurred rather than assume either neighborhood has exclusive claim to it.
Infill on an Existing Campus, Not New Ground
Unlike Tilyou Towers or 1709 Surf Avenue, this project isn’t rising on vacant or city-owned land — it’s filling in the surface parking lots of an already-dense, decades-old residential campus. The two new towers would collectively add 703 units next to the existing 23-story Shorecrest buildings, with affordability set at roughly 20% for 3030 Ocean Parkway and a wider 20-30% range disclosed for 400 Neptune Avenue, still pending final review. Both buildings include multi-story parking garages (386 and 298 spaces respectively) rather than eliminating parking capacity outright, and 3030 Ocean Parkway adds ground-floor commercial space and a sixth-floor community facility. At a projected 2034 completion, this is the furthest-out timeline of any project in this Tracker.
Sources: Commercial Observer; New York YIMBY; NY State DEC Environmental Notice Bulletin
4
2015 Boardwalk West Towers
A Genuine Gap: Two Boardwalk-Front Towers, Permits Already in Place
This one had gone uncovered entirely — a real find via bounded editorial discovery, not a manufactured addition. Municipal permits filed against 2015 Boardwalk West already call for a 23-story, 202-unit residential tower, and an adjacent parcel already carries approval for a similar 23-story, 205-unit building — together pointing to a coordinated, roughly 407-unit, two-tower project directly on the ocean, distinct from every other project in this Tracker in actually fronting the boardwalk itself rather than sitting a block or more inland.
A Site That Doubled in Value Before Construction Started
Bath Site LLC, an affiliate of Safehold Inc., bought the lot for $10.4 million in July 2024 and sold it to Nalcorp and Clipper Equity for $20 million in September 2026 — TerraCRG, whose CEO Dan Marks and partner Daniel Lebor represented the seller, brokered the deal. No construction start date has been confirmed as of this update; the permits and adjacent-parcel approval establish real development capacity, but this remains an early-stage entry, disclosed as such rather than implied to be under construction.
Sources: Hoodline
5
Unity Towers
A Fourth Mechanism, Not Just a Fourth Project
Every other housing project in this Tracker involves either a city-owned parking lot, a private affordable-housing pipeline, or ordinary market-rate infill. Unity Towers is a different mechanism entirely: an existing NYCHA development transitioning into the Public Housing Preservation Trust model, where the property stays 100% publicly owned while shifting to the federally funded Project-Based Section 8 program to unlock capital for the renovation.
Residents voted to join the Trust program in August 2024. Procurement followed the same Request for Qualifications/Request for Proposals pattern seen elsewhere in this Tracker, with the RFP going out in October 2025 and the design-build team selected eight months later.
Renovation, Not Replacement
The scope is entirely about bringing an existing building up to a livable standard, not adding units: new kitchens and bathrooms, replaced windows, facade repairs, mechanical-system upgrades, and remediation of environmental hazards and pests. The building remains 193 units throughout — no unit count is being added or removed, distinguishing this from every ground-up or rezoning project elsewhere on this page.
Residents shaped the final scope of work through workshops and ongoing engagement before the design-build team was selected, according to the Trust’s own announcement.
Sources: New York YIMBY (June 2026)
6
Riegelmann Boardwalk
A Shared Project, Already Documented
The Riegelmann Boardwalk is the one project in this Tracker that belongs equally to Coney Island and Brighton Beach, and Hush Street already reports on it in depth as part of the Brighton Beach Tracker — including the severe, safety-hazard-level plank deterioration Parks Department crews have been addressing board-by-board through 2026, and the October 2026 release of the project’s first real procurement milestone, a Request for Qualifications for a progressive design-build team. We’re not duplicating that reporting here; readers wanting the full detail should see that Tracker’s own boardwalk section.
The Public-Realm Side of the Same Story
What’s specific to this Tracker is how the boardwalk’s slow timeline compares with the housing above: Tilyou Towers, 1709 Surf Avenue, the Shorecrest infill, and now 2015 Boardwalk West are all either under construction, financed, permitted, or newly sold, while the shoreline infrastructure promised alongside them is still years from breaking ground. The same December 2025 announcement that funded the boardwalk also included a $42 million renovation of the nearby Abe Stark Sports Center — a new boardwalk-facing entrance, an upgraded ice rink, and a half-acre public plaza just north of the building, designed by TenBerke with Consigli Construction, selected in February 2026. An earlier city rezoning study had actually proposed demolishing and replacing Abe Stark entirely; community opposition saved the building, redirecting the project toward renovation instead — construction itself had not started as of this update. Together, the boardwalk and Abe Stark are the clearest evidence that Coney Island’s public-realm investment is proceeding on a slower, more uncertain timeline than its private and public-land housing pipeline.
Sources: Hush Street’s Brighton Beach Tracker; The Architect’s Newspaper; NYCEDC
What We’re Watching Next
The clearest open question is whether Tilyou Towers’ 2027 construction start holds now that permits are filed, and whether the Riegelmann Boardwalk’s design-build team is actually selected by the spring 2027 date the city now projects. It’s also worth revisiting whether BFC Partners pursues a fourth Surf Avenue phase now that Coney Island III has topped out, whether the Shorecrest infill’s affordability percentages firm up as its environmental review proceeds toward an eventual City Council vote, whether Nalcorp and Clipper Equity move 2015 Boardwalk West’s already-permitted towers toward an actual construction start now that the site has changed hands, and whether Unity Towers’ design-build phase stays on track for its end-of-2028 target.
Two exclusions worth disclosing: Sea Breeze Tower (221 Sea Breeze Avenue, Rybak Development, 20 stories — sources differ on 112 versus 114 units, not resolved here) is now complete and actively leasing, so it isn’t covered here as a current construction story, despite sitting just east of this Tracker’s core geography and sharing a developer with Tilyou Towers. And the roughly 3,400 homes and $750 million in public investment Coney Island’s 2009 rezoning has already catalyzed are treated as the historical baseline this Tracker builds on, not as current projects in their own right.
Taken together, the six projects above tell a more granular story than “Coney Island is booming” — they show distinct mechanisms doing the work at once. Public land gets developed through a competitive RFP (Tilyou Towers); an established affordable-housing developer keeps building out a pipeline it committed to a decade ago, phase by phase, regardless of what else is happening nearby (1709 Surf Avenue); ordinary market-rate infill proceeds on private land at the neighborhood’s edges without any of the public-benefit negotiation the other two require (Shorecrest); a boardwalk-front site with permits already in place changes private hands for nearly double its price two years earlier (2015 Boardwalk West); and an existing NYCHA tower gets modernized rather than replaced through the city’s Public Housing Preservation Trust (Unity Towers), a fifth mechanism distinct from all the others. None of those needs the others to succeed, which is also why there’s no single completion date to watch for — 2028, 2030, and 2034 for the three most advanced housing projects, plus Unity Towers’ own end-of-2028 target — and why the boardwalk’s spring 2027 team-selection milestone sits in the middle of all of them rather than anchoring a single unified timeline.
Capital & Transactions
Money Moving in Coney Island
A curated look at recent property sales and financing that help explain who’s buying, building, and lending in Coney Island right now. Drawn from New York City’s public ACRIS property records, not a complete log of every filing — we include only transactions that say something real about the neighborhood’s direction, and leave out routine paperwork, internal transfers, and deals we can’t explain responsibly.
2015 Boardwalk WestAug. 2026
This Tracker already covers the $20 million September 2026 sale of this boardwalk-front site (above) but has no financing detail. This ACRIS record adds the acquisition lender and loan amount, on top of the already-reported sale price.
2900-2968 Ocean ParkwayAug. 2026
The Diocese of Brooklyn sold this parcel — land next to, not including, the Guardian Angel church building itself — to developer BWH Group, which recorded an $8.5 million acquisition loan the same day.
Bay View AvenueJul. 2026
A larger refinancing of a vacant, air-rights-heavy development site — recorded roughly two months before the owner filed plans for a 10-building, 989-unit project here, one of the largest proposals in the neighborhood and not yet in this Tracker.
Source: New York City’s public ACRIS property records. This module is reviewed and curated by Hush Street editors, not an automated feed, and will be updated as new, meaningful filings are confirmed.
Coney Island borders Brighton Beach to the east across a genuinely blurred Ocean Parkway boundary, addressed directly above rather than assumed in either direction.
By Hush Street Editorial Updated Built from city filings and published reporting. About Hush Street
