Peter Fine, once the city’s biggest affordable housing developer, is looking to sell one of his South Bronx buildings for $70 million.
Fine’s Atlantic Development Group has put the 419-unit building at 105 Willis Avenue in Mott Haven up for sale.
The 476,000-square-foot building is “located at the cornerstone of the rapidly evolving Mott Haven submarket, a neighborhood defined by a historic surge in large-scale residential development, trendy waterfront parks, and an expanding retail landscape,” according to a listing at Ariel Property Advisors.
Of the 419 apartments, 141 are backed by housing vouchers, and the property has an agreement (known as Section 610 of the state’s Private Housing Finance Law) that allows the owner to collect the full amount of government housing vouchers above the apartment’s legal rent.
It also has 420c tax exemptions limiting taxes until 2048, and an assumable mortgage at 3.84 percent.
Fine did not respond to a request for comment.
Fine, who grew up in Queens public housing and started his career as a social worker, completed the building in 2009 — the tail end of his heyday as the city’s top affordable housing developer. His Atlantic Development built some 12,000 units and Fine perfected the system of the city’s 421a certificates program, which allowed affordable housing developers to finance their projects by selling tax-abatement certificates to market-rate developers like Donald Trump and Sheldon Solow in other neighborhoods.
That program ended in 2008.
“The new system won’t have as much fluidity,” Fine told the New York Times then. “It will take longer to get deals done, because of extra layers of bureaucracy.”
Fine’s development business trailed off and he fell into some regulatory issues. In 2020 he settled a pair of Fair Housing Act cases with the U.S. Attorney’s Office over accessibility at his buildings.
In recent years Fine’s been busy in South Florida building luxury homes in Miami Beach.
Fine has rarely sold any of his affordable housing buildings. In New York, his Atlantic Development sold a development site in 2024 at 350 Grand Concourse in Mott Haven for $28.5 million, and another one at 3041 Webster Avenue for $7 million.
It’s not clear why Fine is looking to cash out now on the 105 Willis Avenue building.
But on The Broker Bunch podcast a year ago, he said he owns a portfolio of 7,000 units in New York City and it’s getting to the time where he has to think about estate planning.
“I didn’t know this when I started: If you own real estate over time, you’re creating a tax issue for yourself,” he said. “And you have to start planning — estate planning and trust planning — or else you could really damage your children if something happens to you if you don’t plan appropriately.”
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