Residents of 1601 Dekalb – new affordable housing in Bushwick built as a collaboration between Camber Property Group and RiseBoro Community Partnership – have in-house access to free services like counseling, career counseling, school placement help and more, reports News 12 Brooklyn. 

“I tell them all the time to take the opportunity. Take all the opportunity you need, all the resources you require. Utilize it here. The goal is to support you, but to help you to grow and to become independent,” said RiseBoro early childhood clinician Angelika Heard.

A 1930s Manhattan building designed by the same architects behind the Empire State Building is getting a renovation that incorporates its pasts as landing spot and then prison.

Opposite the basketball courts and driving ranges of Chelsea Piers, in a Manhattan neighborhood increasingly associated with affluence, stands a remnant of the working waterfront of a century ago.

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building, designed the Seamen’s House and brought the same streamlined Art Deco styling to the smaller structure — and threw in nautical motifs like terra-cotta anchors and lighthouses in keeping with the seafaring theme.

After the state acquired the properties in 1967, it first used them for a residential drug treatment center. In 1974, the joined buildings were reclassified as a correctional facility.

The fact that the building was not a purpose-built prison may have contributed to some of the problems documented in a series of reports beginning in 1985, said Konstantin Yelisavetskiy, a partner at the law firm Slater Slater Schulman, which has brought over 300 cases on behalf of former inmates. (None of the cases have been settled.)

“There was abuse in a slop-sink closet, bathrooms, mess-hall freezers — plenty of opportunity for guards to engage in this behavior,” he added.

It was Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that shut down what was then the Bayview Correctional Facility. Inmates were evacuated in advance of the storm, which brought 14 feet of flooding, knocking out boilers and corroding electrical equipment.

Repairs were made, but the building remained empty, as if frozen in time.

Empire State Development made earlier attempts to repurpose it. A developer and a philanthropic group affiliated with a son of Warren Buffett had once planned an office conversion for nonprofit groups working on women’s issues.

But by 2019, the initiative had foundered, and in the intervening years the housing shortage across New York worsened. When the state issued a new request for proposals in 2023, it called for affordable and supportive housing instead of commercial use.

On Friday, September 4, the Bronx River Addition community attended a Farewell to Summer Sundae Social, planned in collaboration with Housing Opportunities Unlimited.