Greenpoint's Waterfront Boom: Building the Future, Together with Resilience

A Transformative Project for Greenpoint

The New York City Council has cleared the way for Monitor Point, a major rezoning on the Greenpoint waterfront that will bring three towers, as tall as 56 stories, and well over 1,300 apartments to a mostly public site at 40-56 Quay Street. Roughly half of those units are slated to be affordable, including homes for seniors and formerly homeless New Yorkers, and the deal comes with real community benefits: park funding, subway accessibility upgrades, and a new home for the Greenpoint Monitor Museum.

As someone who manages residential buildings across Brooklyn and Manhattan, I'm genuinely encouraged by projects like this. New York's housing shortage is real, and Monitor Point represents exactly the kind of transit-adjacent, mixed-income density this city needs more of. It's a strong step forward for Greenpoint.

The Next Opportunity: Resilience Beyond the Property Line

Here's where I think we have an opportunity.

 This stretch of waterfront sits close to the East River and will always carry some exposure to tidal flooding and storm surge. The developer has already built in real climate-resiliency measures: a new bulkhead, flood-proofing systems, green roofs, and stormwater infrastructure, and that's a genuinely encouraging start. The next step, and the one I'd love to see the industry lean into collaboratively, is making sure the surrounding sewer and drainage systems feeding this corridor are modernized alongside the new towers, not just around them.

Why Infrastructure Matters for Insurance

There's a practical reason this matters beyond resiliency itself: insurance. Flood zone designations and claims history increasingly drive premiums for waterfront buildings, and insurers are paying close attention to infrastructure quality, not just a building's own floodproofing. Boards and owners in flood-prone corridors are already seeing this reflected in renewal costs. The upside is that every dollar invested in modern stormwater capacity and updated plumbing infrastructure tends to pay itself back in lower premiums, fewer claims, and buildings that simply perform better when a storm hits.

A Shared Responsibility—and a Shared Opportunity

This is where developers, the city, and property managers can genuinely work together. Rezonings like this move fast, and infrastructure upgrades sometimes lag behind — that's normal in any growing neighborhood. But there's a real opportunity here for the city to pair projects like Monitor Point with accelerated investment in the surrounding stormwater and sewer network, so the resiliency built into new towers extends to the blocks around them too. That kind of coordination is good for residents, good for insurers, and good for the long-term value of the neighborhood.

Building a Truly Climate-Ready Waterfront

I'd love to see future waterfront approvals include a clear, funded timeline for those surrounding infrastructure upgrades, alongside the building-level measures already in place. It's a win for everyone: developers get smoother approvals, residents get safer buildings and more predictable insurance costs, and the city gets a genuinely climate-ready waterfront rather than a collection of well-protected islands in an aging system.

Greenpoint has the housing vision right. With the same energy applied to infrastructure, this waterfront can be a model for how New York grows responsibly.

Curious to hear from others in property management and development — what's worked well in your experience getting infrastructure and new construction moving in step?

— Luca Burato, Co-Founding Partner, VPM NYC