A Plan to Bring Affordable Housing to One of Brooklyn’s Priciest Neighborhoods

By Michael Gonik

A decade since they were offloaded by Jehovah’s Witnesses (along with the vast majority of their local holdings), a developer has presented a plan for the rebirth of the former Watchtower buildings in Brooklyn Heights, with affordable housing baked into the blueprint.

The massive former world headquarters for The Witnesses (with 700,000 square feet of floor plan across five interconnected buildings) is the proposed site for a new residential project from the CIM Group, which bought the buildings from the devout door-knockers in 2016, when the Witnesses relinquished all of their properties in the neighborhood and shipped out to upstate New York. Their initial scheme was to convert the Columbia Street Waterfront complex into offices and a film studio called Panorama, according to Curbed.

That didn’t take. But now, CIM is pivoting to a residential concept that would bring 165 units of affordable housing to one of the city’s priciest neighborhoods (it’s the third most expensive part of our borough, behind Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill). The plan calls for the addition of stories to two of the five buildings—one floor to 30 Columbia Heights and five to 25 Columbia Heights—expanding the square footage to over 800,000, and making room for 661 total units of housing, a quarter of which would be designated affordable, while the lower and ground floors would be mixed-use for commercial and retail.

You might ask what’s next in the process, and you’d be right to. CIM, which has worked on other former Jehovah’s Witness properties in the borough (see 85 Jay Street in Dumbo), formally began the process of requesting site-specific rezoning from the city via the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure last month. From there, the City Planning Commission takes the reins with a scoping hearing. It will then evaluate the environmental-impact statement before CIM presents to other arms of city government for review, including the City Council, community boards, and the mayor. Rezoning typically takes about seven months from the time of application, and only after its approval will CIM be able to begin building anything on the property.

And while we can’t know what “affordable” actually means in a neighborhood where the median sale price of a home was $1.53 million in 2025, we can only hope its definition is grounded in some semblance of decency and empathy for the city’s residents, who, according to a recent report, are having a harder time than ever.