Brooklyn's Starrett City, With Trump as Investor, Finds a Buyer

(Bloomberg) -- The owners of Starrett City, a Brooklyn affordable-housing complex that counts President Donald Trump as an investor, have reached an agreement to sell the property for about $850 million.

The buyer is a joint venture led by Brooksville Co., according to a statement Wednesday from Brooksville and Starrett City Associates, the partnership that has owned the complex for more than 40 years.

The deal is subject to approval by state and federal regulators, the companies said in the statement. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers rent and mortgage subsidy programs that benefit the complex, is overseen by Ben Carson, a Trump appointee.

Trump is a limited partner in Starrett City Associates, with a 4 percent stake, according to a financial disclosure-filing made in June with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. He received more than $5 million in income from the property in the past year.

Starrett City -- now renamed Spring Creek Towers -- is home to 15,000 residents living in 5,881 apartments in 46 buildings spanning Pennsylvania Avenue just north of the Belt Parkway. Every apartment is subsidized to maintain affordability.

A 2009 refinancing of the development requires that the apartments remain affordable until 2039, according to the statement. Sixty percent of the apartments fall under HUD’s Section 8 rental-assistance program, and the rest are under the department’s Section 236 interest-rate reduction or New York State’s Mitchell-Lama program.

To contact the reporters on this story: Oshrat Carmiel in New York at ocarmiel1@bloomberg.net, Sarah Mulholland in New York at smulholland3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman