Hush Street is tracking what’s changing in Homecrest.
Twenty years ago, the city deliberately drew a line through this neighborhood: preserve the low-rise side streets, but keep a handful of corridors open to real apartment-building density. Every project in this Tracker sits inside that line.
Homecrest takes its name from a 19th-century real-estate marketing label, layered onto farmland that stayed rural well into Brooklyn’s consolidation. Its build-out came in waves — mostly finished by World War II, with pockets of small-scale semi-detached construction continuing into the 1980s.
The neighborhood is bounded roughly by Coney Island Avenue, Kings Highway, Ocean Avenue, and Avenue S, reaching a Kings Highway B/Q express stop at East 16th Street. Commercial activity concentrates on Kings Highway and Avenue U.
Homecrest counted 44,316 residents at the 2010 census, a population that’s part of the same Syrian Sephardic Jewish corridor stretching through Gravesend, Midwood, and Madison since Syrian Jewish families began moving into the wider Ocean Parkway area in the 1960s — alongside a growing Central Asian and South Asian presence in more recent decades.
In 2006, the Department of City Planning downzoned roughly 70 blocks here — a direct response to what the agency itself called “out-of-scale apartment buildings up to seven stories high” that R6 zoning’s community-facility bonus had been allowing on otherwise low-rise blocks. Most of the neighborhood was rezoned to R4-1 and R5B, capping new construction at 35 feet.
But the 2006 plan didn’t touch everywhere. It deliberately preserved higher-density zoning along Ocean Avenue, Kings Highway, and — critically — “side streets near the subway station.” City Planning capped new construction on Ocean Avenue and Kings Highway itself at 80 feet with a 65-foot street wall, roughly matching the six-story apartment-house character already standing there, and it went further on two blocks of Coney Island Avenue north and south of Kings Highway, allowing entirely new 80-foot apartment buildings on a corridor that previously had none.
Every project below sits inside one of those preserved corridors, not the protected low-rise interior.
Where a claim comes from a developer, agency press office, or community source rather than independent reporting, we say so.
| Project | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 11417 Avenue U | Ave. U, near E. 14th St. | Approved |
| 21663 East 18th Street | E. 18th St., near Kings Hwy. | Filed |
| 31688 East 18th Street | E. 18th St., near Kings Hwy. | Under Construction |
Building Inside the Lines a 2006 Rezoning Drew
Homecrest’s low-rise interior has stayed almost untouched since a 2006 contextual downzoning capped it at 35 feet. What’s actually moving is confined to the corridors that rezoning deliberately kept open: Avenue U’s commercial strip and the side streets flanking the Kings Highway subway station.
1
1417 Avenue U
A Discount Store’s Site, Rezoned for Housing
The site previously held a Lot Stop 99! department store and a Duane Reade pharmacy — ordinary Avenue U retail, not a distressed or vacant lot. 1417 Avenue U Holding LLC, led by Xiao Jun Chen, bought the property for $4.6 million in 2023 and flipped it into a $7.68 million acquisition for the current ownership entity in May 2024, immediately ahead of filing for rezoning.
Of the 76 planned apartments, between 19 and 23 units will be permanently affordable at 60% of area median income under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rules — a meaningful affordability commitment for a project this size on a commercial corridor.
This is the largest project in this Tracker’s current lineup by unit count, and the only one that required an actual rezoning rather than proceeding as-of-right. Planned amenities include a rooftop terrace, on-site parking, central air conditioning, and in-unit washer/dryers — market-rate finishes on a building nearly a third income-restricted.
Corridor Redevelopment, Not Spot Rezoning
Avenue U’s commercial strip is exactly the kind of corridor the city’s own zoning history in this neighborhood has treated differently from its residential interior — the same “preserve the corridor, protect the side streets” logic that shaped the 2006 downzoning two decades earlier.
That history also explains why a much older, smaller filing a short walk south — a six-story commercial building at 2077 Coney Island Avenue, first filed in 2020 with community-facility and retail space — sits on one of the same two blocks the 2006 rezoning specifically carved out for new apartment buildings on Coney Island Avenue. It’s not included as an anchor here given its age and the lack of any confirmed recent activity, but it’s a useful marker of how long this corridor has already been absorbing the density the rezoning allowed.
Sources: Commercial Observer (July 2025); BLDUP
2
1663 East 18th Street
A Repeat Team, One Neighborhood Over
Owner Oleg Krasnitskiy and architect Yuriy Menzak are the same pair behind 2124 Avenue P, the largest project in Hush Street’s Midwood Tracker — a real example of one small ownership/design team assembling sites across neighboring Community District 15’s edge with Midwood’s Community District 14.
At 115 feet, this is the tallest project in this Tracker’s lineup, on a block the 2006 rezoning specifically preserved as one of the “side streets near the subway station” allowed to keep apartment-building density rather than being downzoned with most of the surrounding blocks.
No demolition permit had been filed for whatever currently occupies the site as of this Tracker, and no completion date has been announced.
Sources: New York YIMBY (July 2026)
3
1688 East 18th Street
Two Blocks Apart, Three Years Apart
A correction: this project isn’t stalled. The original filing is from August 2023, but direct DOB records show real, continuous progress since — support-of-excavation and foundation work signed off in September/October 2023, sprinkler and mechanical systems signed off the same month, and a construction fence and sidewalk shed installed. The new-building permit itself was renewed and remains active (issued March 2024). Most tellingly, DOB approved a suspended-scaffold permit specifically for facade work on February 13, 2026 — meaning the building has moved well past foundation work and is now in active facade construction, current as of this correction.
This project sits on the same East 18th Street corridor as 1663 East 18th Street, two blocks from the Kings Highway station, whose own July 2026 filing is newer — so both projects on this block are now actively moving, not one paused and one starting.
Sources: New York YIMBY (Aug. 2023); NYC DOB NOW: Build Approved Permits (accessed Sept. 2026)
What We’re Watching Next
1688 East 18th Street, once an open question about whether its three-year-old permits would ever lead anywhere, is now confirmed under active construction (facade work as of February 2026) — the clearer open question now is simply when it finishes.
It’s also worth watching whether 1417 Avenue U’s approval draws more rezoning applications along Avenue U’s commercial strip, the way 534 Coney Island Avenue’s approval in neighboring Kensington has already drawn public calls for a corridor-wide approach rather than one-lot-at-a-time rezonings.
Homecrest borders Midwood to the north, Sheepshead Bay to the south and east, Gravesend to the west, and Marine Park to the southeast. One boundary-adjacent project was deliberately kept out of this Tracker despite being flagged during research for Hush Street’s Midwood Tracker: an affordable-housing lottery building at 2892 Nostrand Avenue. Sources disagree sharply on its actual neighborhood — New York YIMBY’s own March 2026 lottery coverage places it in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn Paper and Brownstoner both call it Midwood, and only StreetEasy’s listing data points toward Homecrest. Nostrand Avenue itself also sits well east of Homecrest’s own official Department of City Planning boundary, which runs along Coney Island and Ocean Avenues. Given that three-way disagreement and the geographic mismatch, it’s excluded here rather than force-included on the strength of one prior registry note.
Taken together, these three projects describe a neighborhood whose current growth is happening almost entirely inside the corridors a 20-year-old rezoning chose to protect — Avenue U’s commercial strip and the blocks flanking the Kings Highway station — while the low-rise interior the same rezoning was built to preserve remains, by design, mostly untouched.
By Hush Street Editorial Updated Built from city filings and published reporting. About Hush Street
