Amid bid to save Elizabeth St. Garden, Adams aide Randy Mastro finds a plan B for housing

Yahoo

13-05-2025

Randy Mastro, Mayor Adams' top deputy at City Hall, is seriously exploring a proposal to spare Manhattan's Elizabeth Street Garden from an affordable housing development by instead building the apartments on a nearby lot once reserved for a public school, according to multiple sources familiar with his efforts.
Mastro first ordered the Elizabeth Street Garden redevelopment paused shortly after becoming Adams' first deputy mayor last month, saying he wanted to review it. The move drew pushback as Adams' administration had been expected to get started in April on the long-delayed effort to build housing for senior citizens in the garden, a plan a group of A-list celebrities and other politically-influential individuals have for years sought to block in court.
The revelation that Mastro's looking into the possibility of moving the housing development, known as 'Haven Green,' to an entirely new location — especially one local residents hoped would become a school — is triggering another round of outrage.
Open New York Executive Director Annemarie Gray, whose group advocates for affordable housing development, said such a move would require an entirely new land use application for the alternative site — a process that could take years.
'You'd be starting from scratch,' she said, noting the Elizabeth Street Garden is finally cleared for building the 123 rent-restricted units for seniors proposed under the Haven Green blueprint after nearly a decade of delays.
'Will the Adams administration listen to a few rich people with Randy Mastro's cell phone number, or the majority of New Yorkers struggling to afford housing?'
Adams spokesman William Fowler didn't deny Mastro has looked into moving Haven Green to the other site, but said administration officials haven't discussed any such idea with the private developers picked to build the senior housing. Fowler maintained Adams still supports the project and said his administration is 'always exploring additional locations to build affordable housing.'
'No one location is going to solve the housing crisis on its own, which is why we are exploring multiple locations for housing development both in this area and across the city,' Fowler said.
The Lower East Side lot Mastro has been eyeing as a potential plan B for Haven Green is on the corner of Suffolk Street, nearly a mile from the Elizabeth Street Garden, sources inside and outside Adams' administration told the Daily News.
Overgrown with weeds and surrounded by a chain-link fence, the 22 Suffolk St. lot is larger than the garden. Like the garden, 22 Suffolk is owned by the city government.
The Essex Crossing rezoning plan, first announced in 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, put a hold on 22 Suffolk reserving the lot for constructing a pre-K-through-eighth grade public school. The thinking at the time was that a school would become needed as the area's population grew amid increased housing development facilitated by the rezoning.
But the hold on 22 Suffolk expired in 2023 without the city ever building a school, leaving the lot without a specific designation. The School Construction Authority, the Department of Education's development arm, has argued against the need for a new school, pointing to declining local enrollment rates.
It's against that backdrop that Mastro recently directed city officials to start looking into what it would take to have 22 Suffolk become the site for Haven Green, according to the sources. The sources said officials at City Hall, the School Construction Authority, the Department of City Planning and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development have been looped in on efforts to evaluate 22 Suffolk for the Haven Green project.
Noah Harlan, president of a local Community Education Council involved in talks about building a 22 Suffolk school, acknowledged enrollment in the area has recently dropped.
But he argued there's still a need for a new local school, as existing ones are 'falling apart,' with some being nearly a century old. Harlan also noted the state's new class size law — which have put stricter limits on how many students can be in each class — will necessitate more school space citywide.
'The idea of turning down a brand new [school] just seems crazy,' he said. 'If they want to take this land instead of the community garden to build housing, put the housing on top of the school and solve two problems at once.'
Before Mastro intervened, Adams' administration was expected to evict the nonprofit running the garden as early as March in order to get shovels in the ground on the housing.
A number of celebrities, including Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, have long opposed housing in the garden, arguing it'd deprive Manhattanites of a cherished green space. As first reported by The News, lawyer Frank Carone, Adams' ex-chief of staff and political confidant who's also close with Mastro, has recently provided pro bono advice to the housing opponents.
Meantime, Mastro's garden redevelopment pause is coming up against a critical timeline, according to an Adams administration source. The city would need about seven months of preparation before construction inside the garden could begin, the source explained. If Adams is unsucessful in his re-election bid, a new mayor — who might be against the project – might be in a position to stop it.
Haven Green was first proposed in 2017 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration.
With Cayla Bamberger