Elizabeth Street Garden deal saves green space, shifts affordable housing to Suffolk Street
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Affordable senior housing will not be built on the site of a Nolita community garden. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is expected to reach a settlement with developers that cancels the Haven Green project, a 123-unit rental for low-income seniors on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden, in exchange for a new affordable development on a vacant Lower East Side lot. On Wednesday, Mamdani said the actions of former Mayor Eric Adams, who designated the city-owned site as parkland last year, requiring state legislature approval for development, made it “nearly impossible” to move ahead with the housing project.
The Elizabeth Street Garden was formerly a vacant public lot that Allan Reiver, who had leased it from the city beginning in 1991, turned into one of the city’s most unique spaces. Reiver, who died in 2021, added items he found at estate sales, like a gazebo, a 20th-century balustrade, and lion sculptures.
In 2013, the city unveiled Haven Green, a 123-unit rental for extremely low-, very low-, and low-income seniors with a 16,000-square-foot public garden. The City Council approved the project in 2019.
As 6sqft previously reported, Reiver did not make the garden open to the public until 2013 to rally support to save the space. “The only thing to do was to open it to the public,” Reiver told 6sqft. “Let the public defend it. Let the public fall in love with it.”
Lawsuits filed by the nonprofit tenant that operates the garden delayed the project for years; the garden was even served eviction notices but was never officially kicked out of the site.
Adams, who had supported Haven Green, reversed course in June 2025 and canceled the development. Just before the general election last November, Adams’ first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, announced plans to transfer the city-owned site to the Parks Department, making its new designation as parkland an even bigger hurdle for the city to jump.
Before being elected, Mamdani said he would close the garden during his first year in office to build the affordable housing. But after Adams’ parkland designation, Mamdani acknowledged the development would be “nearly impossible.”
In response to Adams’ actions, the developers of Haven Green, Pennrose Properties, Habitat for Humanity, and RiseBoro Community Partnerships, sued the city last November.
As first reported by Gothamist, the settlement will allow the developers to formally acquire the city-owned site at 22 Suffolk Street and build 180 affordable homes there. Other projects that will move forward include 100 Gold Street, which will turn a city office building into over 1,000 apartments.
“While we are working to resolve the lawsuit with the developers who are set to build on that site, we continue to believe in the importance of building more affordable housing,” Mamdani said during an unrelated press conference on Wednesday. “That is why we are going to be building more than 180 homes at 22 Suffolk Street and more at 100 Gold as well.”
Despite the promise of affordable housing elsewhere, housing advocates say this decision sets a bad precedent for future developments that have gone through the city’s land use review process and received full approval.
“The Adams administration used the machinery of city government, in bad faith, to kill 123 homes for low-income seniors that had survived every legal and public review thrown at them,” Annemarie Gray, executive director of Open New York, said in a statement. “More than a decade has been lost. Seniors who should have been living in these homes years ago have died waiting. That is the deep injustice at the center of this story, and no settlement erases it.”
Gray added: “It should worry anyone who cares about how this city works that a project can make it through ULURP, through litigation, through years of process, and still be undone by wealthy and connected people.”
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