SoHo Was Rezoned for More Housing. The New Apartments Are Going Up on Canal Street, and Some Lofts Are Becoming Single-Family Homes

In September 2026, a 25-story rental building topped out on Lafayette Street between Howard and Canal. It has exactly 99 apartments. A few blocks west, 142 Greene Street is going the other way. The five-story building of more than 25,000 square feet once held multiple artist live/work lofts, and it is being converted into a single-family home.

The 2021 SoHo/NoHo rezoning made both projects possible. One adds apartments at the edge of the neighborhood, and the other removes homes from the middle of it. Together they show what the rezoning is producing so far. The new units are rentals on the southern and eastern borders. Inside the cast-iron blocks, buildings are being reworked into fewer, larger homes. For anyone shopping for a SoHo loft or condo, that means the set of comparable sales will stay mostly resale for years.

Every project in the pipeline is near Canal or Lafayette

The City Council approved the rezoning in December 2021, so its fifth anniversary is about two months away. In a May 2026 update, Village Preservation, the preservation group that opposed the plan, said zero units of housing had been built under it. In November 2025 testimony to Community Board 2, reported by The Village View, the group's executive director, Andrew Berman, noted that the city had projected 1,829 new units within 10 years of the rezoning.

These are the projects that are actually moving:

All three sit along the Canal and Lafayette edges, and none is in the interior blocks between Houston and Grand. The earliest move-in date is late 2027, and that building is a rental. 277 Canal is the only project that could add condos. The Real Deal reported in July that the developer, Al Laboz, said it is "probably going to be a mix of condominiums and rentals," adding, "We're still figuring things out."

The edge sites can work because they can be made big. United American Land is paying $10 million for a new elevator at the Canal Street N, Q and R station, which has none. In return it gets a density bonus through the city's Zoning for Accessibility program. Laboz told The Real Deal the program fits much larger buildings, and he made it work at 277 Canal by buying air rights and merging zoning lots. A typical interior SoHo lot can't put a deal like that together.

Why 99 matters in the pipeline

The Marq's unit count follows from a tax incentive. Under 485-x, the state program that replaced 421-a in 2024, rental projects of 100 or more units must pay construction workers a minimum wage. The statute set it at $40 an hour with a 2.5% annual increase. The NYC Comptroller's schedule puts the rate at $42.03 an hour as of July 1, 2026. As THE CITY reported in May, the tiers break down like this:

• Under 100 units: no construction wage minimum, and 20% of apartments must be affordable and permanently rent-stabilized.
• 100 to 149 units: the wage floor applies, and the affordable share rises to 25%.
• 150 or more units in certain areas, including Lower Manhattan: higher wage requirements, and a quarter of units affordable at a lower income level.

The same article counted permits filed for 154 buildings with exactly 99 apartments citywide between April 2024 and April 2026. The Lafayette site was eligible for more. In June 2025, after Trammell Crow paid $14.7 million for the site's 99-year ground lease, The Real Deal calculated that the parcel's zoning floor area, plus air rights bought from a neighbor, allowed about 115 units. It framed the choice as 99 units built open shop or roughly 115 with the higher wage scale. The building that topped out has 99.

When a building is capped at 99 units, the extra floor area doesn't go unused. It goes into larger apartments. John Woelfling, a partner at Dattner Architects, told THE CITY that "for a bigger building at the edge of 99, you can goose the unit count down by combining the units. So you're not providing more housing, you're just providing bigger units." The Marq's layouts run from studios to three-bedroom penthouses.

In the interior, the incentives push toward fewer homes

A different threshold applies on the cast-iron blocks. Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the city's affordable-housing requirement in rezoned areas, covers new buildings, enlargements and conversions of more than 10 units or more than 12,500 square feet. A project avoids it only if it stays at or under both limits. The SoHo/NoHo special district text changes how the square-footage limit is calculated for certain existing lots. It also exempts conversions of artist live/work lofts to regular residences from that MIH provision.

The results show up in three interior projects that Village Preservation has tracked:

1. 40 Wooster Street. A six-story commercial building is being turned into four luxury homes, including full-floor and duplex apartments. According to Berman's testimony, the ground-floor retail the new zoning requires keeps the residential floor area just under the size that would trigger affordable units.
2. 142 Greene Street. A building that held several artist live/work lofts is becoming one house. Village Preservation says the old zoning would not have allowed this.
3. 144 Spring Street. Plans filed for a vacant lot call for a retail building, on a site where the rezoning analysis had projected four to six affordable units.

All three come from an advocacy group that opposed the rezoning, and its read on intent is its own. The addresses, unit counts and filings are public. Taken together, the interior is gaining floor area for large homes and stores, not more homes.

What this means for a SoHo buyer's comparable sales

New development is usually what loosens a tight neighborhood market. A new condo building adds supply, sets a fresh price per square foot, and gives a buyer an alternative to a resale loft that needs work. Manhattan as a whole is short on that right now. In Q3 2026, new-development listings fell nearly 40% from a year earlier. At the end of August the borough had about 2,800 new condos, the lowest count since 2014, according to Marketproof data cited by The Real Deal. The new-development median sale price rose 14% year over year to just under $2 million in Q3 2026. Across all Manhattan co-ops and condos, the Q3 2026 median was $1.25 million. That ties the second quarter's record and is up about 6% from Q3 2025.

SoHo has almost nothing to add to that new-condo count. Its only possible condo project is 277 Canal, where construction is targeted for late 2027 and the condo/rental mix is still undecided. Through the end of this decade, SoHo buyers will most likely be comparing existing lofts and condos with each other. Pricing then depends on building-by-building details: whether a loft has already been converted out of artist-only use, how much the building's history adds to the price, and what renovation it needs. A new building down the block won't set the benchmark.

Demand in SoHo was slower this past quarter, too. Brick Underground's roundup of Q3 2026 reports listed SoHo among the Manhattan neighborhoods with the smallest increases in pending sales. With little new supply and slow contract activity, pricing a loft against its true comparable sales matters more than any Manhattan-wide headline.

Renters face the tightest version of this. Manhattan's median rent for new market-rate leases was $4,900 in September 2026, about 8% higher than a year earlier, according to The Real Deal. September listings were nearly 23% below last year, and Brick Underground put the vacancy rate near 1.5%. The Marq's 99 apartments are the first new rentals SoHo's rezoning will deliver, and they won't open before late 2027.

A few common questions

Does the rezoning make a SoHo loft more valuable as a development site? On large lots at the edges, the 277 Canal and Lafayette Street deals show it can. On a typical interior lot, the threshold math and landmarks review point toward fewer, larger homes or retail. That is a different kind of upside than a higher unit count.

Will 277 Canal be condos? The developer told The Real Deal in July 2026 that it will probably be a mix of condos and rentals and that the decision isn't final. City Planning still has to approve the transit bonus, which the developer expects to take about a year.

Is 40 Wooster finished? As of this writing, no public report confirms that it is complete or that sales have launched.

If you're pricing a SoHo loft against resale comparables, or deciding whether the Canal Street pipeline should affect when you buy, Danielle Sells NYC can walk you through the building-level numbers. Book a market consultation and bring the address.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.