The demolition will be carried out in phases so the hospital can continue to provide services to patients. The outpatient facility will be torn down first and replaced with a 16- or 17-story building offering about 400,000 square feet. The inpatient services center will follow, with a similarly tall tower and equivalent footprint to be built, Terrinoni said.
The inpatient center will focus on acute and critical care, obstetrics and gynecology, cardiology, neonatal intensive care and surgical procedures. The outpatient center will expand offerings in cancer treatment, dialysis and imaging. The expanded centers are expected to provide an additional 20% capacity across all service offerings, Terrinoni said.
The hospital plans to offer space in its outpatient center to private developers for mixed-use or residential development to help fund construction. These could include a school, offices or housing built on top of or around the center. The plan is to include approximately 1,000 units of affordable housing, Terrinoni said, adding that the inpatient tower will not be available for private development.
About $800 million for the project will come from private developers; the hospital will pay the remaining $200 million, which could be financed by undertaking debt, he said. The team will begin discussions with developers in the next 12 to 18 months, he added.
Leveraging private development also will allow the hospital to create an endowment fund for future needs, he said.
In 2018 the Brooklyn Hospital Center sold a parcel of land adjacent to the campus for $95 million for residential development, and it will continue to assess all avenues of financing the project, Terrinoni said.
The certificate-of-need application was filed Sept. 19 with the state Department of Health, and the team said it anticipates an acknowledgment soon. The review process with the public health council could take a year, and a response could be expected in early 2022—which would allow construction to break ground by the end of that year, Terrinoni said.
Construction of both buildings could take about nine years, he said.
“As Downtown Brooklyn grows, our hope is to bring our hospital into the modern age to meet the needs of the local community,” he said.
Brooklyn Hospital Center reported total revenue of $420 million in 2018, according to its most recent Internal Revenue Service filing.
