Jamie Courville and her husband, Chris Reynolds, moved to Gowanus in 2009, exactly a year before the federal government designated the neighborhood’s infamous canal a Superfund site and kicked off a massive, complex cleanup process. As filmmakers, they were initially drawn to the raw, unvarnished beauty of the desolate postindustrial landscape. Courville recalls that you could not take a bad photograph of the area. Beyond the visual stimulation, the neighborhood’s old warehouses and defunct factories offered expansive, affordable studio spaces. While housing options were sparse outside of the nearby NYCHA public housing projects, apartments were relatively cheap and spacious, even if they required a bit of handiwork.
The couple rented an expansive 1,100-square-foot apartment in an older residential building for roughly $2,000 a month, using a portion of it for their work. At a time when neighboring industrial enclaves like Williamsburg and Long Island City were rapidly transforming into shinier, more generic versions of their former selves, Gowanus retained a distinct sense of mystery and possibility. Courville notes that a great deal was happening behind closed doors, creating an atmosphere that felt uniquely feral, gritty, hopeful, and free.
Of course, there was a very practical reason why Gowanus had managed to remain a haven for artists in 2009 while surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods gentrified at breakneck speed: the noxious, flood-prone canal running directly through its center. The waterway was choked with raw sewage, toxic industrial sludge, and virtually every imaginable pathogen. Karen Gibbons, an artist who moved to the neighborhood in the early 1980s, once remarked that she used to swear she would never raise children there. Yet, she and her husband ultimately raised three children alongside numerous cats and dogs. As is often the case with major life decisions in New York City, real estate was the driving factor. They secured two sprawling lofts—one protected under the city’s loft law and another utilized as a shared studio space—and, much like Courville and Reynolds, had fallen under the spell of the neighborhood’s eccentric charm.
In almost any other context, a federal Superfund designation would have sent real estate investors running for the hills. In Gowanus, however, it signaled open season. To developers, the federal intervention meant the government would soon clean up the century-old cesspool that had previously thwarted speculative development schemes. Momentum built quickly. Whole Foods announced plans to open a massive retail store featuring a rooftop greenhouse on a bleak, windswept corner of Third Avenue and Third Street. Trendy businesses followed suit: Lavender Lake, a popular bar with an expansive outdoor patio serving local craft beer and kale Caesar salads, opened in 2011, followed by Dinosaur Bar-B-Q in 2013 and the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in 2014. Real estate developers, who had been quietly acquiring parcels of land for decades, began lining up to apply for spot rezonings to pave the way for luxury housing.
Brad Lander, who served as the local city councilmember at the time, argued that if the community did not proactively get ahead of these sweeping changes, it would completely lose the power to shape them or secure any public benefits. Drawing on his background as a community organizer and urban planner, Lander envisioned an alternative future for Gowanus. He painted a picture of a thriving, economically diverse neighborhood featuring thousands of newly created affordable apartments, permanently stabilized artists’ studios, freshly renovated public housing complexes, and a continuous public esplanade lining the banks of the canal. In essence, he argued the neighborhood could be rebuilt from the remediated soil upward to serve everyday New Yorkers rather than acting as a playground for the ultra-wealthy. Lander insisted that the impending rezoning did not have to mirror the trajectory of Williamsburg or, worse yet, Hudson Yards. In 2016, he spearheaded a five-year legislative process to rezone the industrial corridor, permitting a massive influx of new residential construction while locking in a comprehensive package of community benefits far more substantial than those seen in previous city rezonings.
Courville and Reynolds began documenting the neighborhood on film in 2013, shortly after a redbrick building around the corner on Douglas and Third Streets was demolished. Over the years, they captured the relentless cycle of demolition and new construction, workers hauling toxic sludge out of the canal on heavy barges, and the spirited public meetings, political rallies, and neighborhood parties leading up to the pivotal 2021 rezoning vote. Their archive eventually expanded to more than 400 hours of footage, culminating in their documentary, Gowanus Current. Reflecting on the transformation, Courville notes that what occurred was profoundly complex. While many casually label it standard gentrification, she argues it was something more absolute: the old neighborhood was essentially demolished, and an entirely new one was erected in its place.
That assessment feels remarkably accurate. Over the past few years, dozens of new rental buildings have risen across the skyline, with dozens more actively under construction. The Gowanus rezoning zone spans 82 blocks, and nearly every single one features a newly completed tower, an active construction site, or a vacant lot awaiting development. By the end of the decade, the neighborhood is projected to absorb roughly 9,000 new residential units.
While boosters and some development executives have fancifully imagined that Gowanus might evolve into a mini Copenhagen complete with a swimmable canal, many local residents remain deeply skeptical. New York City rarely experiences urban transformations that unfold smoothly or sanely; instead, public benefits must be persistently, messily negotiated out of private developers through convoluted bureaucratic channels. Furthermore, the neighborhood remains a fragmented patchwork of brownfields laden with legacy coal tar and volatile chemical solvents. The prospect of unearthing, carting away, and capping toxic industrial muck while thousands of new residents move into the immediate vicinity raises serious questions. Artists may have embraced the old Gowanus, complete with its reeking green waterway, but the viability of commanding luxury rents in the newly scrubbed iteration remains a subject of intense debate.
One of the earliest residential towers to debut following the 2021 rezoning was a luxury rental building located at 544 Carroll Street, right on the corner of Fourth Avenue. Brian Ezra, a founding partner of Avery Hall and the developer behind the project, explained that the move was practically preordained. Gowanus is tightly wedged against Park Slope on one side and Carroll Gardens on the other, making its eventual development inevitable. The only real question facing developers was the specific tier of luxury renter they should target. Fourth Avenue, which serves as the neighborhood’s eastern boundary with Park Slope, was already commanding up to $5.5 million for high-end condominiums. Avery Hall aimed high, outfitting apartments with high-end Bosch appliances, panelized refrigerators, and marble countertops. A typical two-bedroom unit commands nearly $8,000 a month, while the building’s duplex penthouse made local headlines when it hit the rental market for an eye-watering $25,000 a month.
Andrea Parker, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, an environmental stewardship organization, acknowledges that leaving the neighborhood untouched was never a viable option. Gentrification was already taking root, manifesting as axe-throwing venues and self-storage facilities housed in former industrial spaces. Without a formal rezoning, Parker asserts, the neighborhood would have seen more of the same uncoordinated luxury housing and trendy recreation with virtually no corresponding infrastructure upgrades or public amenities. She points to Lightstone Development’s 360 Bond complex—a luxury rental project approved in 2016 via a site-specific rezoning—where the most prominent concession to the public is a narrow strip of grass that primarily functions as a neighborhood dog run.
Lander and Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the nonprofit developer Fifth Avenue Committee and a city planning commissioner, viewed the municipal rezoning as an unprecedented leverage point to demand much more than the standard fraction of affordable housing. They spent years cultivating a robust community coalition. The resulting agreement introduced several notable firsts: it marked the first city rezoning to allocate direct funding for NYCHA public housing repairs, securing $200 million, and the first to conduct a comprehensive racial-impact study assessing how the demographic makeup of the neighborhood would shift, ultimately concluding it would reduce the area’s proportion of white residents.
The plan also instituted Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rules, requiring any residential project built under its framework to set aside 25 percent of its units as affordable housing for households earning between 40 and 80 percent of the area median income. Additionally, the framework laid out stringent remediation guidelines. Individual developers are held directly responsible for overseeing environmental cleanups at their specific construction sites, with the overarching costs for canal and brownfield remediation assigned to the original corporate polluters whenever feasible. In theory, the canal would not only be thoroughly cleaned, but it would also serve as the neighborhood’s crowning jewel, flanked by continuous public esplanades designed by landscape architecture firm SCAPE and lined with restaurants, cafes, boutiques, and public seating—fulfilling local activist Salvatore "Buddy" Scotto’s turn-of-the-century vision of Gowanus as the "Venice of Brooklyn."
Almost immediately after the rezoning passed in late 2021, developers rushed to break ground. This construction frenzy was heavily accelerated by the impending expiration of 421-a, a lucrative affordable housing tax exemption that lapsed the following June. Developers scrambled to put shovels in the ground to qualify for the expiring tax break, sparking a building boom that made the Williamsburg development wave of the early 2000s look remarkably sluggish. According to data from Marketproof, roughly 46 projects comprising 5,000 housing units were either completed or under construction by last year, with plans for another 43 projects formally filed. Deborah Rieders, a veteran Corcoran broker specializing in Brooklyn new development, notes that while Williamsburg evolved over two decades, Gowanus developed at breakneck speed because multiple developers had been sitting on land parcels and initiated construction simultaneously.
However, the environmental cleanup has lagged significantly behind the pace of vertical construction. Only the first of three designated sections of the 1.8-mile canal has been successfully dredged and capped, while total projected costs have ballooned from an initial estimate of $500 million to a staggering $1.5 billion. Combined sewage overflow tanks designed to prevent raw sewage from spilling into the waterway are not slated for completion until 2029—a staggering seven-year delay that experts warn could necessitate re-dredging sections of the canal to clear newly accumulated contamination.
Meanwhile, while private luxury towers shoot up at a rapid clip, public-interest projects have faced severe friction. Gowanus Green, a planned 957-unit, 100 percent affordable housing complex slated for a former manufactured gas plant site at Fifth and Smith Streets, has been stalled for years amid protracted disputes between local residents, developers, regulatory bodies, and National Grid over acceptable cleanup standards. The state Department of Environmental Conservation recently approved a phased remediation application filed by the developers and National Grid, potentially clearing the path for construction to finally commence. These administrative delays are largely attributable to the labyrinthine oversight of multiple state and federal agencies operating concurrently.
Despite the fact that the waterway continues to experience contamination challenges, developers have aggressively leaned into waterfront marketing. Jason Hill, marketing director at the Domain Companies, led a tour of 420 Carroll, the rezoning’s first completed residential building, highlighting its native-plant landscaping and pointing toward an unmanicured, weed-choked area at the property’s southern edge. That uncultivated patch, he explained, would eventually be dredged, granting the property dual waterfront exposures. When questioned if a view of an industrial turn basin was genuinely an asset, Hill responded affirmatively, noting that the building had achieved 50 percent leasing within just six months.
Developers routinely invoke nautical branding even for properties situated blocks away from the water. Tavros Capital and Charney Companies’ expansive Gowanus Wharf initiative encompasses projects such as Union Channel, Nevins Landing North and South, Douglass Port, and the recently approved 1,000-unit development at 175 Third Street designed by Bjarke Ingels Group. Notably, only Nevins Landing and 175 Third Street are directly adjacent to the canal. This aggressive maritime marketing stands in stark contrast to 2016, when Lightstone’s 365 Bond luxury complex—dubbed "Paris-on-the-Gowanus"—was widely mocked for idealized renderings depicting residents cavorting along the polluted waterway. Today, that vision has largely materialized; the canal reflects a gray-green hue under the sunlight, and residents regularly walk dogs and relax on benches along the completed esplanades.
Living through the industrial remediation process has been a trying experience for long-term residents. Complaints regarding foul odors, headaches, and nausea stemming from coal tar dredging have been widespread. State health officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have noted that naphthalene—an active ingredient found in mothballs present in the canal’s dredged sludge—can trigger such physical symptoms even at low concentrations. During particularly warm summer months, the stench became so overpowering that municipal officials resorted to deploying tarps, odor-suppressing foam, and misting the surrounding streets with pine- and cinnamon-scented masking agents, a tactic that some residents complained only exacerbated the unpleasantness.
The neighborhood’s rezoning has also unmasked historical pollution that remained hidden for over a century. In late 2023, public records obtained through a freedom of information request filed by the local activist group Voice of Gowanus revealed that toxic trichloroethylene (TCE) vapors were migrating upward through the basements of several local buildings, including the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club and a public school. State environmental testers discovered that TCE levels inside the shuffleboard club were 20 times higher than allowable state guidelines, and up to 10,000 times higher directly beneath the structure. TCE is a volatile industrial solvent widely used throughout the 20th century for dry cleaning, oil extraction, and degreasing in local paint factories; it is a recognized carcinogen linked to birth defects and Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, chair of environmental health at Columbia University, notes that exposure during pregnancy and early childhood carries severe risks of long-latency illnesses such as kidney and liver cancers.
When dumped directly onto the ground—a common disposal practice in past decades—TCE sinks into the soil, mingling with groundwater and vaporizing. While these vapors dissipate harmlessly in open air, they can infiltrate structural cracks in building basements, accumulating to dangerous concentrations indoors. Subsequent testing across the canal at a former box factory at 543 Union Street, which had been converted into artist studios, also revealed unsafe vapor levels. This discovery highlighted the troubling possibility of an expansive underground vapor plume stretching beneath multiple properties rather than isolated, easily capped contamination sites.
While real estate developers are legally mandated to perform environmental testing prior to new construction, owners of existing buildings retain the option to voluntarily participate in state testing or decline entirely. Unsurprisingly, a vast majority have opted out. Between 2024 and 2025, the DEC reached out to 1,604 property owners in the area, yet only 258 properties—roughly 16 percent—agreed to be sampled. Property owners whose buildings are found to contain dangerous levels of TCE are legally obligated to disclose the findings to tenants, creating a strong financial disincentive for voluntary testing and obscuring the true scale of the environmental hazard. Because current regulations do not penalize owners for refusing to test, and environmental agencies cannot compel private property owners or disclose specific property data without explicit consent, tenants often remain in the dark.
This regulatory gap has fueled ongoing friction between local environmental activists, neighborhood residents, and government officials. Public information sessions, such as one held at the Children’s School—a public facility that itself recorded soil vapor intrusion issues—have frequently grown contentious as attendees question the adequacy of state oversight and the low voluntary testing participation rates.
Ultimately, a prospective resident’s willingness to move to Gowanus often hinges on how they interpret these environmental risks. Parsing acceptable scientific thresholds versus personal safety can be exceptionally difficult for laypeople, particularly when managing the anxiety associated with chronic chemical exposure. Managing subsurface gas and chemical contamination requires continuous, diligent monitoring and mechanical mitigation systems. Such systems require constant upkeep; officials temporarily relocated classes from the basement of the Children’s School annex after discovering that a vapor mitigation system was underperforming.
Despite ongoing remediation efforts, the high-end Brooklyn rental market remains intensely competitive, driving a steady stream of affluent tenants into Gowanus. Rental inventory in established adjacent neighborhoods like Park Slope is severely restricted, pushing families toward newly constructed buildings in Gowanus that offer modern amenities such as central air conditioning, fitness centers, and children’s playrooms at price points that remain somewhat more palatable than neighboring brownstone upgrades. Tenants moving into these newer towers occupy units perched above concrete slabs, engineered vapor barriers, and sophisticated mechanical ventilation systems designed to seal out lingering subterranean contaminants.
While architectural critics and former residents note that the proliferation of uniform luxury towers represents a profound cultural shift that has swept away the eccentric randomness of the old industrial waterfront, the neighborhood continues to retain pockets of its creative identity. Organizations like Arts Gowanus successfully negotiated for the inclusion of more than 100 affordable art studios within new residential developments, featuring rent increases capped at two percent annually to ensure local artists can maintain a foothold in the community. Independent cultural venues like the music space Public Records and the fabrication hub Powerhouse Arts have likewise established roots in the neighborhood, signaling that a semblance of the area’s experimental spirit may endure amidst the high-rise landscape.
