City Hall Expands Lower Manhattan Project Size, But Sticks to Bare Minimum on Affordability
The administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Tuesday that it is expanding the scope of a new residential development on publicly owned land at 100 Gold Street, alongside the Brooklyn Bridge. The revised proposal calls for approximately 4,000 homes at the two-acre site, roughly 1,000 of which will be affordable – up from 3,700 apartments (with 925 affordable units) under the previous version.
“New York’s housing crisis demands that we build more, and that we use every tool we have to do it,” Mr. Mamdani said. “That means looking at land the City already owns and asking how it can serve New Yorkers better. At 100 Gold Street, we have an opportunity to turn an aging government building into nearly 4,000 new homes, including approximately 1,000 that will remain permanently affordable, while delivering new spaces for the community.”
Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg added, “the redevelopment of 100 Gold will be a major step forward in creating the housing New Yorkers need… at no cost to the City.”
This appears to simplify the terms of a transaction that are, in fact, considerably more complicated. The developer, GFP, is paying the City for the privilege of developing the site. (The exact amount that GFP has offered to pay the City’s Economic Development Corporation, or EDC, has been redacted from official documents outlining the agreement.)
As Martine Johannessen, the Urban Planning and Land Use Consultant for Community Board 1 explained at a July 13 meeting of the panel’s Land Use, Zoning & Economic Development Committee, “there was a proposal to do 35 percent affordable units and pay EDC less for that, but it seems like that’s probably been dropped.”
In New York City real estate transactions, a developer’s bid for a publicly owned site is generally set lower if the plan includes affordable homes. In this dynamic, a project with no affordability mandates would likely attract the highest bids, while one with maximal affordability demands could be expected to elicit more modest terms. If this were not the case, the City could simply demand that such a project consist entirely of affordable homes, especially amid a chronic local shortage of moderately priced dwellings.
The gap between high and low offers (meaning the City’s willingness to accept lower bids) amounts to an imputed subsidy for affordable housing. That is the “cost” that the City is willing to bear.
In this case, the Mamdani administration has hewed to the minimum legal requirement established by the 485-x tax abatement program, which mandates that 25 percent of units be set aside as affordable in projects such as 100 Gold. In exchange, developers receive a tax exemption on such projects for 40 years.
In recent years, a succession of mayoral administrations has announced half a dozen residential projects on publicly owned land throughout the five boroughs that feature 100 percent affordability. But no government-sponsored project in Lower Manhattan has featured complete affordability since the 1970s, when Independence Plaza opened in Tribeca. The only recent exception to this trend did not involve government: In January, Trinity Church, the oldest, largest, and most prolific philanthropic organization in Lower Manhattan, announced plans to build a 100-percent affordable housing development on a vacant lot it owns in the Seaport neighborhood. Adjacent to Southbridge Towers and the St. Margaret’s House senior living facility (also developed by Trinity Church), the vacant parcel is located at 50-58 Cliff Street, near the corner of Beekman Street, and steps away from 100 Gold Street. It is slated to host a 24-story tower that will include 120 apartments.
In 2023, the administration of then-Mayor Eric Adams designated Lower Manhattan as one of 12 communities across the five boroughs where affordable housing is sufficiently scarce to qualify for a new program called the Mixed Income Market Initiative, created to spur the development of multi-family rental projects that would be 30 percent market rate and 70 percent affordable. In the end, however, Mr. Adams designated GFP as the developer for 100 Gold in December 2025, and settled for 25 percent affordability.
The 1,000 affordable units slated to be built at 100 Gold might be welcome news for local affordable housing advocates, but their enthusiasm may be tempered by a recent analysis from the nonprofit Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. ANHD’s 2026 edition of its annual “Housing Risk Map” identifies Community District 1 (which encompasses Lower Manhattan) as one of the five most threatened among the 59 such zones throughout the five boroughs, when measured by the number of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units that will expire between now and 2030. LIHTC is a federal program that confers income-tax credits upon housing developers in exchange for a promise to set aside a subset of the units they create as rent-restricted apartments for lower-income households. By law, LIHTC benefits expire after 30 years.
ANHD’s report says 1,153 such units will lapse out of LIHTC protections within Community District 1 by 2030. This total will absorb the entirety of the 1,000 affordable units planned for 100 Gold Street , and leave an additional local deficit of 153 affordable homes. Moreover, construction at 100 Gold Street is not expected to begin before 2030 (assuming the current schedule does not slip), and is likely to require between three and five years once ground has been broken. This means, in the most optimistic scenario, that Lower Manhattan is slated to lose more than 1,000 affordable homes several years before any of them are replaced.