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Construction is now underway for Sol on Park, 229 affordable senior units being built on open space at NYCHA’s Morris Houses campus. Many of the apartments are earmarked for current public housing residents and formerly homeless seniors.
On Tuesday, several city officials and development groups, along with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), broke ground on a 229-apartment affordable senior housing development, to be constructed on open space at Morris Houses, a public housing campus in the Bronx.
The $214 million project represents the largest use to date of a program called Transfer of Assistance—a financing tool that allows the city to use public land, such as areas NYCHA owns, to create new, permanently affordable housing. The program also helps free up public housing apartments for future tenants, by giving current residents opportunities to move into the newly constructed homes.
Every unit in the new senior housing development, called Sol on Park, will be affordable, according to the city’s plans. Of those, 69 apartments are reserved for formerly homeless seniors; 79 homes will be available through the Housing Connect lottery for low- and middle-income seniors; and 80 new apartments will be reserved for seniors who live in Morris Houses.
Getting 80 apartments reserved for current public housing residents on the campus, according to Regina Carter, the development’s tenant association president, was a deal the “tenant association was able to negotiate very well with the developers.”
“I’m so excited to see this building go up,” Carter told City Limits. “Senior housing is very important, and now we will have one right in the heart of Morris Houses.”
Developers for the project include The NRP Group, a real estate developer, Selfhelp Realty Group and Foxy Management. Jonathan Gertman, the senior vice president of development at The NRP Group, described its role as the lead developer, “responsible for helping finance the project, getting it closed, and going to build.”
The real estate group, which builds affordable and market rate housing, has developed more than 33,000 residential units across the country, with several in Westchester and further upstate. The new senior building will be its first project in New York City.
“This is our first experience with NYCHA,” Gertman told City Limits. “There’s so many homes and buildings that are at the time where they’re ready for redevelopment, so we hope to continue to be a part of that.”
Money the new affordable housing building generates will likely not be used to help pay for expenses or operations at Morris Houses, Gertman said, but some amenities at the new building will be available to public housing residents. That includes more than 8,000 square feet of community space, including a meeting room for the Morris Houses resident association, and a federally qualified health center (a federally funded nonprofit that provides preventative health and dental services).
“The tenant association has not had an office for a long time, and they’ll get a brand new office,” Gertman explained.
Anderson Gomez, who serves as secretary of the Morris Houses’ tenant association, described the new room as “a more centralized position” between the two sides of the public housing complex, Morris I and Morris II, “so we could have access to all the residents and they could have access to us.”
Their current space, Gomez told City Limits, is small and “can’t have more than 15 people at a time because it’s a safety hazard.”
“We needed a space where we could store stuff for weekend giveaways, events like Christmas, Thanksgiving,” Gomez said. “It’s an important step to have a space to unite.”
Teams from the new health center, which will be run by Union Community Health Center, have been “reaching out to us in order to get our input on how they will make the space look,” he added. “They also want to inform the residents about the services before they arrive and settle in the building.” The healthcare facility will be open to anyone in the community.
Goldman Sachs’ urban investment group served as the “sole private investor and lender” backing the project, according to Managing Director Scott Maxfield.
“These public-private partnerships are critical to driving the creation of more affordable housing and economic progress, and we look forward to many more of them,” Maxfield said.
In his housing plan released in May, Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to increase the city’s use of the Transfer of Assistance program.
Sol on Park is the latest example of his administration’s efforts to buil new housing on publicly owned land. It’s among the sites identified by the city’s new Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) Task Force, which Mamdani launched on his first day in office to survey publicly owned sites where housing could be developed.
The administration launched a tracker in July that documents the task force’s progress, highlighting 100 sites officials say could accommodate more than 50,000 new apartments.
“Sol on Park shows what is possible when we invest in NYCHA and use every tool available to build affordable homes,” Mamdani said in a statement about the plans. “This project will give current NYCHA residents and low-income seniors the opportunity to move into new, high-quality homes while strengthening the Morris Houses community.”
Pre-leasing and move-ins at Sol on Park are expected to begin in early 2029.
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