Four Stalled Projects Come Back from the Dead

500 West 23rd Street, New York

Chicago-based Equity Residential CEO David Neithercut recently told Multifamily Executive that in the second or third quarter of this year, the firm plans to break ground on the West Chelsea plot of land it purchased in December 2009 from struggling developer Shaya Boymelgreen. Equity’s plans to revive the stalled rental project on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 23rd Street call for 111 market-rate apartments and 10,000 square feet of retail. Equity paid $750,000 for the land and $11.25 million for the ground lease; Boymelgreen paid $23.15 million for the ground lease in 2005. “That’s about a 50 percent haircut from the amount Shaya Boymelgreen spent on buying the land, and I’m sure he spent a lot more money between then and now getting the property entitled, etc.,” says Ben Thypin, a senior market analyst at New York-based research firm Real Capital Analytics. “It was especially valuable for Equity to be able to buy this site at a very cheap price but also have it approved to build something already.”