Fulton Mall Proposed for Downtown Brooklyn Mega-BID

Downtown Brooklyn is consolidating its beautification and branding efforts across three commercial hubs under a new proposal to combine business improvement districts that surround the long-neglected Fulton Mall retail corridor.

The pitch, filed by Christine Paglialunga, chief operating officer of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, aims to merge an existing BID around MetroTech with another that spans nearby Court, Livingston and Schermerhorn streets, creating a newly dubbed Downtown Brooklyn Business Improvement District. The area has added more than 25,000 housing units since it was rezoned in 2004, including some of Brooklyn’s major developments at City Point and Brooklyn Tower. BIDs are largely tasked with convening local business owners to manage shared costs related to sanitation, public safety, marketing and serve as a liaison to local government.

Council member Lincoln Restler, whose district encompasses the proposed mega-BID, considers the proposal more of a formality and hoped that the expansion could have gone further to include blocks on the peripheries that would benefit from its services.

“I had thought that they would be able to modify their boundary during this process and add a few stray blocks in the Downtown Brooklyn area,” Restler said. “The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership does such a great job that you can tell which blocks they do not maintain and clean.”

Despite a banner year for Downtown Brooklyn housing development in 2025, retail and commercial developments have gone less smoothly. Downtown Brooklyn’s retail vacancy rate is around 22 percent, driven primarily by lower post-Covid foot traffic, according to the proposal filing, compared to an 11 percent citywide rate.

Some 212 national and regional retail chain stores sit within the expanded district, alongside small businesses dotting the streetscape along Fulton and Livingston. Upper floors of many Fulton Mall storefronts are underutilized, leaving windows boarded up across several buildings with street-level retail tenants.

That aging midrise stretch along Fulton is overdue for a more comprehensive revamp, Albert Laboz of United American Land recently told The Real Deal. Laboz is turning a former Macy’s into a retail entertainment complex dubbed BKX.

“We have too many retail vacancies across the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s catchment area,” Restler said. “Fulton Mall has long been one of the most successful commercial corridors in all of New York City […] as the area has gentrified intensely over the last couple decades, the mix of businesses on Fulton Street has shifted.”

Commercial leasing has also struggled as demand was still catching up with an oversupply of office space built in the previous two decades. Brooklyn’s full-year leasing volume totaled 930,000 square feet in 2025, a 31 percent drop from the previous year. About 18 percent of the borough’s 47 million square feet of office space was built within the past 20-year period.

Proposed improvements include more sidewalk foliage and better signage, lighting and seating, fairly typical features of nearby groupings like Merchants of Smith Street or the Atlantic Avenue BID.

The mega-BID would allocate more than $12 million to improvements across four sub-districts during its first year, according to the proposal filing. MetroTech North would receive the most at $4.9 million, while Fulton Mall stands to receive $4 million once its special assessment district becomes part of the BID. Allocations of $1.1 million for sanitation and $811,679 for security would be the biggest budget lines for Fulton Mall.

The Court-Livingston-Schermerhorn subsection would receive up to $2.4 million in the first year, while MetroTech South has the lowest allocation at $1 million. In all, improvements during the entire contract of the proposed BID won’t exceed $123 million.