Developer sued over debts at Downtown penthouse, Hamptons mansion

UPDATED Sept. 7, 2022, 4:09 p.m.: A decade ago, developer Lela Goren helped lead the conversion of a handsome pre-war apartment building in Greenwich Village to 17 luxury condominiums.

Now, she’s at odds with the building’s board over water damage to her recently renovated apartment.

Goren, a former executive at WeWork and longtime associate of Gary Barnett’s Extell Development, has withheld $45,000 in common charges at 31 West 11th Street, where she owns a penthouse as well as multiple ground-floor units, according to three lawsuits filed by the building’s condo board.

The board claims the delinquencies give it the right to foreclose on the units and sell them to recoup the money Goren owes. But Goren told The Real Deal she put her common charges into escrow in an effort to get the board to deal with a subcontractor whose window cleaning went awry.

The most valuable apartment at stake is Goren’s triplex penthouse, which features a glass-walled pavilion that opens onto a roof deck surrounded by 30-foot-tall birch trees.

“The apartment is luxurious, but without a whiff of opulence or any gratuitous design flourishes,” Curbed gushed in 2014.

Goren has not yet responded to the lawsuits in court.

While some wealthy Manhattanites may flee to the Hamptons to escape their urban troubles, Goren hasn’t found much peace there, either: She’s being sued for nearly $90,000 in allegedly unpaid debts at a Water Mill mansion she rented during the pandemic.

That case centers around a six-bedroom home at 1127 Noyac Path, which Goren leased starting in 2020. She agreed to pay $300,000 to stay at the property from May to October 2020, then continued renting it on a month-to-month basis, according to court filings.

But the home’s former owner, Brown Harris Stevens agent Christopher Burnside, claims Goren skipped rent payments from October 2020 to May 2021, when she moved out, owing $56,000 in back rent. Burnside further alleges that Goren left the home in need of nearly $30,000 worth of repairs, but the complaint does not go into detail.

Alleged damages notwithstanding, Burnside sold the property for $6.1 million in July of last year, and filed the complaint three months later, public records show.

In the suit, which has stalled in Suffolk County Supreme Court since January, Goren, who now runs her own development firm, responded that she had an agreement with the owner to make improvements to the property. She claims she was never compensated for the work and has evidence disproving the claim that she owes any money on the property. Goren has not yet submitted that evidence to the court, though, according to filings. The property ownership LLC was scheduled for a deposition in March, but a transcript has not been posted to the court docket.

Read more

Los Angeles

Former WeWork investor enters Chapter 11 for DTLA “metaverse hub”

New York

Sandeep Mathrani succeeds Marcelo Claure as WeWork chairman

Named developer of the year in 2016 by the Women Builders Council, Goren worked with Extell for 10 years and later served as a vice chair at WeWork, according to a bio on her company’s website. She struck out on her own to found the Lela Goren Group, which bills itself as a developer focused on social change and was a part of the effort to redevelop a former all-female prison in Chelsea into “the Women’s Building” to provide services for formerly incarcerated women. Goren’s firm is also converting a vacant power plant in Yonkers into a hub for businesses and researchers aiming to tackle climate change.

Goren is involved in an ongoing lawsuit against Barnett and Extell Development, which she sued in 2019 for alleged breach of fiduciary duty and fraud in connection to a regional center Extell had set up to pool EB-5 investments.

Goren, who served as the regional center’s director and allegedly held a 20 percent stake in the entity, sought $65 million in damages. Barnett moved to dismiss the suit in July, court filings show, and Goren has until Sept. 21 to respond.

Goren’s lawyer in the Hamptons suit, Matthew Hearle, did not respond to a request for comment.

This article has been updated with a response from Lela Goren.