NYC's 1st Electric Apartment Tower Will Join Brooklyn Development

BOERUM HILL, BROOKLYN — One building in the controversial 80 Flatbush Ave. development that is coming to the border of Boerum Hill and Fort Greene will be the first 100-percent electric apartment building in the city, developers announced this week.

Alloy Development said Thursday that one of three new buildings they will construct on the plot of land between Flatbush Avenue, Third Avenue and State Street will use electricity for all of the functions typically run by natural gas, including its heating and air conditioning, cooktops and dryers.

The building, at 100 Flatbush Ave., will be the first 100-percent electric residential building of its kind in New York City, developers said.

“As developers, we should be doing everything can to plan for the future,” Alloy CEO Jared Della Valle said. “In the same way that we aren’t running copper phone lines to each apartment anymore, we don’t think running gas lines makes sense either...We encourage others to move away from fossil fuel technologies and toward renewable, healthy environments, and to do it now.”

The electric tower, standing 38 stories tall, is one of the buildings neighbors worried about when they filed a lawsuit against the project earlier this year. The lawsuit claimed the towers would ruin the quiet brownstone neighborhood, but was ultimately settled in October.

100 Flatbush Ave. will include 256 residential units, 100,000 square feet of office space and 30,000 square feet of retail space. It will be designed by Alloy.

It is one of three new buildings included in the project, which will also renovate two existing buildings on the property.

Developers also said that two schools that will be housed on the development will be built in an environmentally-friendly way.

Both schools — an elementary school and a new space for the property's Khalil Gibran International Academy — will be the first in New York City to reach the "Passive House" standard, or a rigorous standard for energy efficiency during construction. They will be designed by the Architecture Research Office, developers said.

The two schools, along with the 100 Flatbush tower, will likely be done by 2023, developers said.

The second phase of the project, which will include a 69-story residential, office, and retail tower and the rehabilitation of the existing buildings, will follow by 2026.