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One of the city’s most contentious development battles has come to an end. Plans to turn the Elizabeth Street Garden in Nolita into affordable housing for seniors have been halted in a deal announced by Mayor Eric Adams on Monday. According to the mayor, Council Member Christopher Marte will now support the rezoning of three sites in his district to allow for 623 new affordable homes in exchange for preserving the one-acre community garden, ending a decade-long fight over the site.
As first reported by CBS, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro on Monday announced the administration’s decision to cancel the Haven Green project, which would have brought 123 rentals for extremely low-, very low-, and low-income seniors, as well as housing for formerly homeless seniors, a 16,000-square-foot public garden, and a new headquarters for Habitat for Humanity.
The project was first announced over 10 years ago and approved by the City Council in 2019. Lawsuits filed by the nonprofit tenant that operates the garden delayed the project for years; the garden was served a second eviction notice in March, but was never officially kicked out of the site.
As part of the agreement, Marte will support rezoning efforts in Council District 1. These include 156-166 Bowery, which consists of seven contiguous multiblock lots between Broome and Kenmare totaling 15,000 square feet. The site will be rezoned to permit 123 units of affordable housing for seniors on top of planned housing.
The city will also look to rezone a city-owned lot at 22 Suffolk Street to create 200 units of 100 percent affordable housing. These sites will require a uniform land use review procedure (ULURP), which typically takes over a year to complete.
Marte also agreed to support 100 Gold Street, a plan Adams first announced in January. This past March, the city released a request for proposals to raze and replace the Financial District office tower with a 1,000-unit mixed-use tower, with 300 affordable units. Marte “previously expressed reservations” about the project, but said he is “now committing to supporting the administration’s conversion of 100 Gold Street.”
Adams has long supported the Haven Green project as a way to build affordable housing in the city at a time when the rental vacancy rate remains 1.4 percent, the lowest ever recorded. But Mastro, who took over as Adams’ first deputy in March, asked the city to stand down from the project as early as April, as the New York Times reported, and the mayor seems to have agreed.
“The best way to tackle our city’s housing crisis is to build as much affordable housing as we can. The agreement announced today will help us meet that mission by creating more than five times the affordable housing originally planned while preserving a beloved local public space and expanding access to it,” Adams said in a statement.
“This is what smart, responsible leadership looks like: bringing people together to reach common sense solutions that create more housing and protect green space.”
As part of the deal, the city will require the Elizabeth Street Garden to be home from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.
According to the mayor, the “city reserves the right to build housing on the site in the future if the rezonings that create the agreed-upon hundreds of additional housing units across these three locations do not occur.”
The Elizabeth Street Garden is a city-owned site leased by Allan Reiver, who operated a gallery next to the space. Reiver, who died in 2021, turned the vacant lot into a unique green space with items he found at estate sales, like a gazebo, a 20th-century balustrade, lion sculptures, and more, as 6sqft reported.
The garden was not officially open to the public until 2013, when plans to build affordable housing were announced. “The only thing to do was to open it to the public,” Reiver said in a 2019 interview with 6sqft. “Let the public defend it. Let the public fall in love with it.”
Joseph Reiver, son of Allan and executive director of the garden, said the garden has been “misunderstood by those who believe it must be sacrificed to meet housing needs.”
“My father sowed the foundation of the Garden, which, even through more than a decade of duress, has grown into an iconic sanctuary treasured by people from across the city and the world,” Reiver said in a statement.
“It’s been a profound honor to expand upon that legacy, to trust in the path, and to listen to the Garden as my guide. With the City now embracing our proposal, we remain fully devoted to ensuring that Elizabeth Street Garden is preserved in its entirety, with all of its enduring magic as we know and love in perpetuity.”
Housing advocacy group Open New York criticized Adams, calling the decision to cancel the housing project shameful.
“If there was any doubt already, the official policy of the Adams Administration is that elite comfort is more important than sufficient homes for vulnerable elderly people. It’s fitting that this would happen on the hottest day of the year,” Annemarie Gray, executive director of Open New York, said in a statement.
“After a dozen years of work from two administrations in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity, Eric Adams and Randy Mastro have decided to throw that all away. The cancellation of affordable senior housing at Haven Green is shameful, and only reflects the corruption, dysfunction, and incompetence of this administration.”
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