No gas boilers. No cooling towers. 1 Java Street, an 834-unit, two-tower rental complex on the Greenpoint waterfront, runs its heating, cooling, and hot water off the ground beneath it. When it finishes this year it’ll be the largest residential geothermal building in New York State, according to NYSERDA, and among the largest geothermal residential projects in the country.
The system is a vertical closed-loop geo-exchange field. In winter it pulls heat from the earth; in summer it dumps heat back into it. Lendlease, which developed and built the project with Aware Super, says the setup cuts heating-and-cooling carbon emissions by about 53% against a typical residential building.
Why a developer goes all-electric here
Geothermal isn’t cheap to drill, so the economics need a push. In New York City, the push is regulatory. Local Law 97 caps building emissions and starts biting with penalties, and the city’s gas ban on new construction closes off the easy fossil path for fresh multifamily. For an 834-unit project that has to comply for decades, an all-electric ground-source system stops looking like a green flourish and starts looking like the cheapest way to stay legal.
What’s actually getting built
Designed by Marvel Architects, the two towers top out at 37 stories and 402 feet on the taller side. Thirty percent of the units are affordable under the Affordable New York program, so this isn’t a luxury-only showpiece for the technology. The project topped out in 2024 and is completing through 2026.
The carbon math here rhymes with the materials side of decarbonization, where products like low-carbon cement are chipping at embodied emissions while geothermal goes after the operational kind. Drilling 800-plus wells under a waterfront site is expensive and slow. The reason a developer does it anyway is the part worth watching: when the rules make all-electric the default, the question stops being whether to electrify and becomes how. Lendlease’s release has the specs.