60% sales mark reached at affordable condominium.

Site 6 Development Associates, L.P., a limited partnership of Bainbridge Partners, Inc., MFA Construction, Inc. and WPG Acquisition Co., Inc., recently announced that Bainbridge Mews, a 60-unit affordable condominium development had its first closing in late December and is now 75 percent closed. Most of the purchasers having already taken occupancy.

The project is sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development under its Small Building Rehab and Sale Program. Bainbridge Mews is the first project of its kind to actually reach closing.

Richard Bobrow, the managing partner of the project, said that its success was due to the cooperative efforts of Site 6, HPD, The Community Preservation Corporation, which was the construction lender for the project, and the manner in which New York City law firm, Shereff Friedman Hoffman & Goodman, handled the complicated offering plan and closings for first time home buyers.

The Rehab and Sale program is structured to allow middle- income New Yorkers to purchase their condominiums at lower than market prices through the use of a New York City subsidy. The subsidy is paid back by the buyers through a percentage of the profit made by a buyer upon the subsequent sale of his or her condominium unit. The program is designed to create homeownership opportunities in neighborhoods where it was difficult, if not impossible, to do so before. The particular area in which these condominiums are located was suffering from the blight of building abandonment. Now, 12 buildings that were months away from collapse contain one-, two- and three-bedroom newly renovated condominiums.