A bitter, decade-long dispute over the future of a city-owned lot turned popular-community greenspace may finally, officially be coming to an end – roughly 14 months after then-Mayor Eric Adams abruptly canceled a plan to build low-income senior housing there in June 2025.
The saga over the fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden has played out in community protests, pro-housing demonstrations and a series of lawsuits dating back to at least 2017, when the city selected a trio of developers – the company Pennrose and nonprofits Habitat for Humanity and Riseboro – to build 123 units of affordable housing for low income seniors on the lot.
City officials defended the development plan for years before Adams’ sudden reversal. The three developers sued the city in November, adding yet another skirmish in the long, drawn-out war over the garden.
Now, according to court filings, the city and the spurned development team may be on the verge of an “amicable resolution” to settle the dispute. City lawyers and attorneys for the developers are due back in court on Thursday after requesting an extension to negotiate a settlement.
City attorney Derek Segars asked the judge last month to give the sides another four weeks to reach a deal, “with the expectation that the matter will be amicably resolved before the proposed return date” of Aug. 13.
The two sides have declined to say what a settlement might entail. But three people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be named so as not to derail negotiations, say the city and developers are working on a deal that would allow the developers to formally take over a city-owned lot at 22 Suffolk Street. The narrow, nearly block-long parcel at the corner of Grand Street once considered a potential site for a new school.
The lot has been presented as a peace offering before.
In the final days of the Adams administration, top deputy Randy Mastro had issued a letter to the developers offering to give them the rights to the lot in exchange for dropping their lawsuit. The development team rejected the bid before current Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office days later.
Mamdani said during his campaign that he supported building housing on the Elizabeth Street site, but so far he has not challenged his predecessors’ move to designate the lot as parkland.
“As part of our commitment to building the affordable housing New Yorkers urgently need, we are moving forward to deliver over 180 affordable homes at 22 Suffolk Street,” said City Hall spokesperson Matthew Rauschenbach. “At the same time, we are continuing to work toward a resolution of the lawsuit initiated under the previous administration concerning the Elizabeth Street Garden site.”
In a written statement, Pennrose Acquisitions President Dylan Salmons said the company “is committed to delivering affordable housing to New Yorkers who need it most, and we continue to look for opportunities to partner with the City to deliver on this mission.”
A spokesperson for Habitat for Humanity and RiseBoro declined to comment.
22 Suffolk St. in Manhattan
Pennrose and the other members of the development team filed a scathing complaint in state Supreme Court in November 2025, charging Adams and Mastro of using “executive fiat” to reverse a decision to build the new housing after a robust public review process.
Killing the project, known as Haven Green, would “establish dangerous precedents” that could allow future mayors to overturn plans that had gone through the city’s lengthy land-use procedure and been approved by the City Council, they wrote.
But supporters of the Elizabeth Street Garden, including the group that has maintained it for years, celebrated Adams’ decision. The garden began after the owner of an outdoor sculpture business next to the lot used it to store and display pieces under a lease with the city and later opened it to the public. The city’s housing agency planned to evict the nonprofit running the space before Mastro intervened last year.
The group, Elizabeth Street Garden Inc., intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of the city earlier this year. Its attorney Norman Siegel told Gothamist he has not received any “specific information on a settlement” ahead of this week’s scheduled appearance.
Adams and Mastro asserted that stopping the plan allowed them to win concessions from local Councilmember Christopher Marte to back new housing projects at three other locations, including 22 Suffolk St., 156-166 Bowery and 100 Gold St. They said the three locations would one day result in even more affordable units than the 123 planned for the Elizabeth Street site.
The building at 100 Gold St. is the current headquarters of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and was already planned for redevelopment before the announcement last June.
In an interview last June, Mastro said he expected development to begin quickly on at least one of the locations without specifying which lot. “There’s going to be shovels in the ground at the end of the year on that or certainly by early 2026,” he told Gothamist.
Work has yet to begin at any of the locations the Adams administration proposed.
Mastro on Monday blamed the Mamdani administration for the projects not yet starting and he called the developers’ lawsuit “frivolous” because the city had deemed the Elizabeth Street Garden site parkland.
“The ability of developers to advance projects depends upon the city’s full cooperation in facilitating their projects. Our administration was providing that,” Mastro said. “I can’t say the same about the new administration.”
Barika Williams, the executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, said it was never realistic that the alternate sites could begin construction so quickly because they require public reviews and design approvals.
Williams, whose group represents nonprofit developers, said the city and developers appear likely to reach an agreement for “an alternative site,” but that the lot will be far from “shovel ready,” unlike the Elizabeth Street site.
She said she worries the “ad hoc” way the city nixed the Elizabeth Street plan could have lasting consequences.
“When we have a political entity that can come and set that aside and overturn it, it really creates a tremendous amount of instability, uncertainty and lack of fairness and clarity for the developer and the community,” she said.
