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Williamsburg Office 'Tech Hub' Gains Ground as Rezoning Passes City Council

By Gwynne Hogan | July 14, 2016 5:21pm
 Renderings of an 8 story office, retail and manufacturing building coming to 25 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg. 
25 Kent Ave.
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WILLIAMSBURG — The City Council has approved plans for a sprawling office complex near the waterfront, the last hurdle it needed to pass in the city's complex land use process. 

25 Kent Avenue, an eight-story office building with two public plazas, a promenade, ground-floor retail, office space and light manufacturing space, backed by developer Rubenstein Partners and Toby Moskovits of Heritage Equities Partners, was unanimously approved by the council Thursday afternoon.

"We finally got it," said Moskovits, who first began hatching ideas for 25 Kent years ago, she said. In the next month they'll begin prepping the site for construction.

"We think it's an amazing [initiative] for the neighborhood, for the borough and for the city."

In exchange for not having to build community facilities as required by current zoning rules, some of the floor area will be reserved for light manufacturing uses.

The project is one of the first office buildings planned for construction in Brooklyn in decades and marks an increasing appetite for that type of space in the area.

The city had first tried to rezone a 15-block area around 25 Kent Ave. as part of the proposal, but that part of the plan got nixed during the land use process following community outcry that it was too much of an experiment.

Editors Note: An earlier version of this story stated that the rezoning still needed mayoral approval but it does not.