A few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Financial District, there is a nine-storey municipal building built in the 1960s which houses several offices in the city, including the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. New York wants to replace it with a residential complex of almost 4 thousand apartments.
The project covers 100 Gold Street, at the intersection with Frankfort Street. Tuesday the city announced the start of the process of public revision and has increased of about 300 units the size of the plan: from the 3,700 houses previewed initially it has gone to about 4 thousand. Of these, about a thousand will be permanently affordable and rent-stabilized.
The project was not born with the administration of Zohran Mamdani. The transformation of 100 Gold Street had been proposed during the administration of Eric Adams and in December 2025 the city had chosen through a GFP Real Estate race as a developer. The version announced then included about 3,700 apartments, at least 25 percent of which permanently affordable.
The novelty is that the plan became larger and began the long path needed before being built. According to the new programme presented by NYCEDC, the next month will be a target audience, the passage with which the topics to be analyzed in the environmental evaluation are defined. The project should then enter the Uniform Land Use Review Procedures, or ULURP, in 2027, when it will be formally examined by Community Board, Borough President, City Planning Commission and City Council.
This means that renderings spread by the city do not show a project already approved. Dimensions, features and times can still change during the review.
In addition to the apartments, the new complex should include about 40 thousand square feet of public spaces, just over 3,700 square meters, and a fitness center of the same size accessible to the public. It will also be rebuilt the center for the elderly managed by Hamilton-Madison House, which is already at 100 Gold Street and will continue to work in a temporary seat during the work.
Municipal offices in the building, including HPD, will be transferred elsewhere.
One particular aspect concerns financing. According to the city plan, municipal direct funding should not be required to build the approximately thousand affordable houses. The market-priced apartment component should help finance regulated rent and transfer of public agencies. However, it is still a financial forecast of the project, which must be verified while the plan proceeds towards approval.
The amount of affordable housing is significant especially for the neighborhood. According to NYCEDC, the approximately one thousand units of 100 Gold Street would be almost twice as large as all permanently affordable housing built in the entire Manhattan Community District 1 in the last ten years.
Lower Manhattan has changed a lot in recent decades. The Financial District has long been mainly an area of offices, but after September 11 and even more after the pandemic several commercial buildings have been converted into homes. The same GFP has realized a short distance the transformation of 25 Water Street, indicated by the city as the largest conversion from offices to apartments made so far in the United States.
100 Gold Street is a different operation, because it starts from a public property and provides for the replacement of the existing building. But it is part of the same transformation of Lower Manhattan from a neighborhood built mainly to work in the area where a growing number of people live.
It is also part of a wider strategy of the city: use municipal properties that today host offices, parking spaces or under-utilized structures to build houses. Through the new Land Inventory Fast Track, the city has identified more than one hundred public properties on which estimates that over 50 thousand houses could be realized altogether.
100 Gold Street is one of the biggest cases.
L’articolo What New York wants to do at 100 Gold Street proviene da IlNewyorkese.
