Inside the years long legal fight over a $134M apartment project

A yearslong fight over a proposed apartment building on the border of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has ramped up. The campus has four pending lawsuits against various city entities related to the project, two of which were filed this year. All four cases also list the companies behind the proposed McCarley Gardens apartment tower as co-defendants. “The previous (Brown) administration wanted to push this through, unfortunately," said Matt Enstice, president and CEO of the medical campus. “We support the affordable housing, built on their property, and all we’re looking for is transparency and for the appropriate process to be followed.” A spokesperson for Brooklyn-based developer BFC Partners, which is spearheading the effort to build the apartments, declined to comment.

The office of Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan issued the following statement in response to a request for comment: "It is very disappointing that the city has had to squander a portion of our limited resources fighting claims from the medical campus in their effort to prevent affordable housing from being built."

It's a battle that's lasted almost five years — one that's focused on about 400 feet of road. The story so far Several years ago, BFC, St. John Baptist Church and Sinatra and Co. Real Estate partnered to renovate the existing 149 apartment units at McCarley Gardens, 172 Goodell St. That $57 million project started in 2022 and wrapped up the following year. Meanwhile, BFC and St. John Baptist started advancing plans for a six-story, mixed-use building with 220 apartments and commercial space at 635 Virginia St., a vacant parcel at the northwest corner of McCarley Gardens. The estimated construction cost is $134 million. Directly south of that parcel, across North Oak Street, is a parking lot owned by the BNMC. Enstice said the BNMC doesn't have a problem with the developers building on the existing lot; it's the plans for North Oak Street that raised concern. Currently, North Oak Street runs north from Goodell Street, then veers to the west, connecting to Ellicott Street and separating the proposed development site from the BNMC's lot. BFC and St. John Baptist want to reroute North Oak Street so that it no longer curves but instead connects to Virginia Street, which runs parallel to Goodell. That would mean the construction site and the BNMC parking lot would no longer be separated by a road. The developer has proposed buying the affected stretch of road, rerouting it, then selling the road back to the city. The city would be paid for a portion of the land that would be added to the project site. The elimination of street frontage on the medical campus' property, Enstice said, would reduce the property's value by about $3 million. And if the BNMC decided to build on the parking lot — something called for in its 2010 strategic plan — having an apartment building right on the border of the property would make that much more difficult.

"If we ever develop there, how is that sustainable development?" he asked. "It just doesn't make sense from our perspective." Enstice said the medical campus suggested an alternative design — a taller building on the existing land that would not require rerouting the street — but the BFC and St. John Baptist team rejected that idea for cost reasons. Showdowns in court The city Planning Board approved the McCarley Gardens project's environmental review in 2022, but the BNMC sued, arguing members did not do their due diligence. State Supreme Court Judge Dennis Ward in May denied the campus' petition. Although he criticized some of the Planning Board's decision making, he ruled that the board ultimately acted lawfully. The BNMC is appealing Ward's ruling. In July, the Planning Board granted site plan approval for the project. The medical campus has filed three other lawsuits against city entities to stop or slow the project: A lawsuit filed in August argued the Planning Board should not have granted site plan approval because the developer had not secured control over the city-owned land necessary for the project. In its response to the court, the city said a tentative agreement to sell the city-owned land was already in place and that it is standard practice not to sell city-owned property to a developer until a site plan is approved.

In January, the BNMC sued the city Common Council, challenging a December vote that approved the land deal. The BNMC argues that several procedural steps were not followed, as the city did not include full records and materials related to the deal in the publicly available meeting agenda packet. In February, the BNMC sued the city appraisal review board, alleging the board violated the Open Meetings Law by not notifying the public of a Nov. 20 meeting at which the land deal was discussed. The city has yet to respond to the two most recent suits. In 2025, representatives from BFC said the project would move forward regardless of ongoing legal challenges, though the land deal still needs to be finalized and the team is still seeking financing from the state office of Homes and Community Renewal. Enstice said he doesn't know how the lawsuits will pan out.

"I just know, hopefully, we can have a rational conversation about this," he said. "As you can see from everything we've been doing, we've been trying for four years, and for some reason, it's not happening."