Plans have been scrapped for Haven Green, a 123-unit affordable senior housing development at the Elizabeth Street Garden in Nolita, Manhattan, under a legal settlement that shifts the project to a city-owned lot on the Lower East Side. The agreement ends the November 2025 lawsuit brought against the city by developers Pennrose, RiseBoro Community Partnership, and Habitat for Humanity New York City and Westchester, which formally discontinued the case on Thursday. Under the settlement, the development team will acquire the 15,500-square-foot city-owned lot at 22 Suffolk Street and build more than 180 affordable homes. The Elizabeth Street Garden will remain preserved as parkland on its 20,000-square-foot parcel between Prince and Spring Streets.
Rendering of Haven Green, via Haven Green Development Team.
According to City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach, 120 of the Suffolk Street rentals will be reserved for low-income seniors, with the remainder set aside for other low-income households, and the land use review process is expected to begin in the middle of next year. The vacant parcel sits at the northeast corner of Suffolk and Grand Streets, within the former Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, and had been reserved until 2023 as a school site that the School Construction Authority never funded.
Rendering of Haven Green, via Haven Green Development Team.
Designed by Curtis + Ginsberg Architects with Paul A. Castrucci Architect, Haven Green was approved by the City Council in June 2019 as a seven-story Passive House building with 100 percent of units affordable to seniors at or below 60 percent of area median income, including 37 apartments for formerly homeless seniors. The estimated $88 million project would have also included 8,400 square feet of public open space, ground-floor retail, and a new headquarters for Habitat for Humanity, and survived a decade of litigation that culminated in a June 2024 Court of Appeals ruling and an eviction warrant against the garden’s nonprofit tenant.
Rendering of Haven Green, via Haven Green Development Team.
The settlement leaves the other components of the 2025 agreement in motion. At 100 Gold Street, GFP Real Estate is planning approximately 3,700 mixed-income units with at least 25 percent permanently affordable, a 40,000-square-foot public open space, and a new older adult center, with land use review anticipated in 2027. The status of the third site, a seven-lot assemblage at 156-166 Bowery slated for at least 123 affordable senior units in partnership with Kinsmen Property Group, has yet to be announced.
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