Brooklyn's $4 Billion Greenpoint Landing Nears Completion, Remaking the Waterfront Forever

On a stretch of the East River waterfront in North Brooklyn that for most of the twentieth century smelled of oil and the memory of industrial failure, a city is being built. Greenpoint Landing — a 22-tower, 5,500-unit residential development stretching across 22 acres of former Exxon and BP remediation sites — is now more than half complete, with six towers occupied, four more under construction, and a developer, Park Tower Group, that says the last building will top out by 2030.

The project, which carries a total development cost now estimated at $4.1 billion, is the largest ground-up residential development in Brooklyn's history and one of the largest in New York City since the 1960s. From across the river in Long Island City, it already dominates the skyline: a wall of glass towers that rises where, a decade ago, there was nothing but chain-link fence and contaminated earth.

For the city's housing advocates, Greenpoint Landing has always been a case study in the compromises embedded in large-scale private development. The project's 2013 rezoning agreement requires that 25 percent of its units — roughly 1,400 apartments — be set aside as affordable housing, at rents calibrated to between 30 and 80 percent of the area median income. As of Friday, 680 of those affordable units are occupied, with an additional 420 under construction.

"The affordable housing is real and it matters," said Maritza Rivera, executive director of the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning, one of the community groups that negotiated the 2013 agreement. "But the market-rate towers have also changed the neighborhood in ways that are harder to measure and harder to celebrate. The Polish bakeries and the Puerto Rican social clubs that were here — a lot of them are gone, and no rezoning agreement brings them back."

The market-rate units, which range from studios asking $3,200 a month to four-bedroom penthouses listed above $12,000, have attracted a demographic that bears little resemblance to the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood that surrounded the site. A 2025 census analysis of the occupied towers found that more than 70 percent of market-rate tenants were white and had household incomes above $200,000 — figures that sit in stark contrast to the 40 percent minority population of the surrounding ZIP code.

Park Tower Group disputes the characterization that the development has accelerated displacement. In a statement, the company pointed to its affordable-housing compliance record and to the $120 million in public open space — a continuous waterfront esplanade, two parks, and a public kayak launch — included in the project. "Greenpoint Landing has created neighborhood assets that are open to everyone," the company said. "We are proud of what has been built here."

What has been built is, by any architectural measure, formidable. The tallest completed tower, a 40-story all-glass building designed by Hill West Architects, anchors the southern end of the site and has become a recognizable feature of the Brooklyn skyline. The esplanade that runs in front of it offers unobstructed views of Manhattan that, on a clear day, stretch from the tip of the Financial District to the George Washington Bridge.

City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick, in an interview, said Greenpoint Landing represented both the best and hardest truths of how New York grows. "We need density. We need housing. We need waterfront access. This project delivers all of that," he said. "Whether the balance is exactly right — that is a legitimate debate, and it is one we are still having, and should be having, for every project that comes after this one."