Douglaston Development

Douglaston Development is a New York City multifamily developer working across market-rate, mixed-income and affordable housing. The firm is part of a vertically integrated group that includes the general contractor Levine Builders and the property manager Clinton Management, an arrangement that lets it control construction and operations on its own projects rather than bidding them out. Its portfolio is concentrated in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, and it has been an active participant in New York State and City subsidy programs. Douglaston is developing Sparrow Square in East Flatbush with the nonprofit Breaking Ground, a $242 million first phase of 262 units on the former Kingsboro Psychiatric Center site under the Vital Brooklyn Initiative.

The through-line of Douglaston’s portfolio starts in the South Bronx. In 1977, after President Carter’s Charlotte Street visit and Howard Cosell’s on-air line about the Bronx burning, Jeffrey Levine began rehabilitating burned-out building shells with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and its Vacant Building Program, producing roughly 600 units of affordable housing. Levine Builders followed with about 230 homes through the NYC Housing Partnership’s New Homes Programs. Levine Builders itself was founded in 1979 with two people and has since grown past 200 employees. Clinton Management was added in 2002 to run the completed portfolio.

The projects between then and now read as a map of where New York was about to change. The Renaissance on 116th Street, completed in 2001, was the city’s first large-scale low-equity co-op, and its success gave lenders a comparable that justified further investment in Central Harlem. Levine Builders restored the facade of 90 West Street, the 1906 Cass Gilbert building damaged by falling World Trade Center debris, and repositioned it from offices into Financial District housing. The 36-story, 386-unit Ohm went up in West Chelsea in 2010, ahead of the 7 line extension and Hudson Yards. On the Williamsburg waterfront, a rezoning worked through with the City Planning Commission produced a 2,000-unit multi-phase project with an esplanade park and ferry landings. The three-phase, 425-unit Crossroads complex in the Bronx added Universal Pre-K space, child services and a 20,000-square-foot public plaza. In 2019 came 3Eleven, 60 stories and 938 units near the High Line. In 2022 the firm closed two 99-year ground leases with the New York Botanical Garden on adjacent Webster Avenue and Bedford Park Boulevard sites for a 450-unit affordable development in Bronx Community District 7.

What the firm brings alongside capital is process, and most of it sits in-house. Teams handle site evaluation and zoning analysis, structure acquisitions from fee ownership through ground leases and non-profit nominee partnerships, underwrite for conventional, bond and tax-credit financing, carry projects through ULURP, represent the owner during construction against budget and benchmark dates, oversee lease-up and full tenant fit-outs on retail and community facility space, and manage assets through refinancing, capital improvements and repositioning. The office is at 7 Penn Plaza.