As downtown Brooklyn teems with new construction, developers and community groups are criticizing a city plan to reopen a jail that sits on a full block of prime real estate.

The city wants to double the capacity of the facility, which has been closed since 2003, and surround it with condominiums and retail to make the site more palatable to neighbors.

With a community meeting scheduled on the issue tonight, project opponents are promising a fight, as they say the reopened jail would weight down land values and could go to far better uses if opened to private development instead.

“God knows you have to have a jail — that goes with society’s territory — but I don’t think you need to have a jail smack in the middle of a neighborhood,” the president of the community group Brooklyn Vision, Heloise Gruneberg, said.

Given the site’s prominent position by the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, Ms. Gruneberg said a new development could become an icon for the borough. “With all of this talk about Brooklyn being an up-and-coming place, why would we want to have a jail to be the entrance to our world?”

The Brooklyn House of Detention was shuttered by the Bloomberg administration in 2003 as the mayor sought to trim costs and concentrate inmates at Rikers Island. For years, the 10-story, grey monolith on Atlantic Avenue was far removed from the vibrancy of downtown, though in the past decade, a whole community of new apartment buildings has risen around the jail, propelled by rising land values in the borough.

The same soaring real-estate market that fuels the arguments of project opponents allows the city’s vision to be feasible, supporters say, as the draw of downtown Brooklyn is so strong that developers believe people will be willing to buy apartments on the same site as a jail.

The city’s Department of Corrections, which is currently taking preliminary site proposals from developers, is pushing to reopen the facility as part of a broader restructuring of their system. The city wants to decrease its population at Rikers Island from 17,400 to 13,400 by 2012, in an effort to close aging facilities and move some of its inmate population adjacent to courthouses and closer to rehabilitation services, a spokesman for the department, Stephen Morello, said.

“We’re spending a lot of employee time and gasoline and using a significant amount of resources driving inmates” to and from the courts, Mr. Morello said.

While there are not yet any specifics for how the 1,400-bed facility across from the Kings County criminal court would relate to the surrounding residential and commercial development, Mr. Morello said the uses will be entirely separate, and prison cells will likely be soundproofed and contain windows that are not transparent.

Numerous community leaders have signed on to the proposal for the jail, saying that the city seems intent on its plans, and a jail masked by mixed-use development is far better than one without.

“The Department of Corrections, regardless of what I or our local officials say, are going to move ahead with this,” Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz said.

By cooperating with the city, Mr. Markowitz added, muchneeded retail can be added to the now-desolate block along Atlantic Avenue, knitting the neighborhood together.

The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union representing prison workers that opposes a new jail in the Bronx, also supports the project because the expansion investment would be relatively modest compared with creating a new facility, a spokesman said.

But opponents say the city should look to areas that have less high land values, as reopening the jail could dampen the revitalization of the area.

“I think Brooklyn right now is in the middle of a great renaissance and we should not do anything to hurt it,” the CEO of the Red Apple Group and a downtown Brooklyn landowner, John Catsimatidis, said. “You’re doing good, but why would you want throw cold water on it?”

Crime is down from a few years ago, the president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association, Sandy Balboza, said, adding that she sees reopening a facility that was recently closed as wasteful.

“They made a decision to move everybody to Rikers, and now they’re saying they need to make a different decision — I don’t see the justification.”