Photo: Brodsky Organization
Brooklyn Crossing in Prospect Heights offers tenants some decent perks. The 51-story high-rise at 18 Sixth Avenue has a rooftop pool with views of the Manhattan skyline. There’s a 5,200-square-foot fitness center, a nondescript screening room, and an oversize vending machine where a person paying close to $4,000 a month for a studio can rent a Dyson or pick up a late-night pint of Ben and Jerry’s. And it now appears signing a lease can also get you an allowance.
“In today’s world, human connection has become the hottest new amenity,” reads a press release advertising the Brodsky Organization’s Neighborly Events programming. Across a number of the developer’s roughly 50 rental properties, tenants can get Visa gift cards to partially reimburse a game night or costume party attended by their neighbors — as long as they’re willing to post about their event on the Building Link messaging system; take a minimum of “five quality photos” of, say, Lisa from the 16th floor munching on Doritos; and, of course, provide itemized receipts. So far, per a Brodsky spokesperson, the company’s priciest compensation has been somewhere around $500.
This all seems like another iteration of the forced-fun activities Brodsky and other developers have been folding into their leasing packages, ranging from end-of-summer aperitivo gatherings (Lantern House) to floral classes (The Set in Hudson Yards). Brodsky has organized field trips for tenants to go to the North Fork for lunch and wine tastings or apple picking upstate to the tune of $70 a head. (A personal chef who has worked a few of these types of events in Soho and on the Upper East Side described them to my colleague Bridget Read as “camp for rich people.”) But for those who view driving two and a half hours to Warwick to bring home a bag of Macouns as too much commitment, Brodsky will now toss off a few hundred bucks to bankroll their building-wide Friendsgiving.
It’s a marketing tactic that takes as given that … people these days are weird and sometimes struggle to connect with others in real life. (Or that they are optimization types all too happy to outsource the challenge of making friends to other parties.) For the moneyed-ish city dwellers who still work from home multiple days a week and may have few social ties in their neighborhood, an activities budget could be what sells them on a particular property over any of the other nearly identically amenitized towers rising across Brooklyn. An edge is an edge, I guess.
