For years, Joseph McDonnell and his partner at Cirrus Real Estate watched the drama at Pacific Park unfold from afar.
They weren’t alone. Anyone working in New York City real estate knows the outline of the project’s two decades of problems: how a development once described as a “Garden of Eden” got bogged down by opposition, financial problems and politics. By late 2022, the developer was in default on $350 million in loans tied to the megadevelopment, and a year later the lender moved to foreclose on the site.
It was hard to imagine who’d want to jump in and finish the job. Anyone replacing the developer, Greenland USA, a subsidiary of Shanghai-based Greenland Holdings, would have to lay out a new vision, get state approval, negotiate hefty fines and set new deadlines.
But Cirrus’ executives saw a salvage operation, and they purchased the debt.
“We thought it was a no-brainer,” McDonnell said during a recent interview in Cirrus’ Midtown office.
Cirrus, which McDonnell runs with Anthony Tufariello, seemed a less obvious choice to others.
As a company, Cirrus hasn’t built anything from the ground up and lacks the name recognition of Related Companies, another firm that toyed with taking over Pacific Park. Still, the pair has overseen $150 billion in real estate finance transactions, $10 billion in real estate equity investments and more than 10,000 multifamily units.
Now, by relying on deep industry connections and experience from a long list of projects, McDonnell and Tufariello have positioned their firm as a backer of major projects that could deliver New York City thousands of affordable housing units after decades of delay, not just a quiet provider of rescue capital.
At Pacific Park, Cirrus brought on an experienced multifamily developer, LCOR, which oversees a portfolio of 10,000 residential units across the U.S. Then, the city tapped the two firms to build 3,000 housing units at a defunct airport in Flushing, Queens.
Another substantial project materialized in May 2025, when Cirrus formed a joint venture with Resorts World New York City to build up to 50,000 housing units across the five boroughs, a promise that sweetened the latter’s bid to expand its slot parlor in Queens into a full-blown casino. In December, Resorts World clinched one of three licenses awarded by the state.
But Cirrus’ visibility wasn’t quite as sudden as it seemed. The principals had gradually built a public profile. In March 2024, the company reached an agreement with Mayor Eric Adams and the Building and Construction Trades Council, signing a memorandum of understanding to raise money from the construction union pension funds to finance workforce housing throughout the city.
Initially, $100 million was raised, but the fund is expected to cap out at $400 million, according to McDonnell.
The idea, which isn’t unheard-of, is to invest in union-built, ground-up housing projects that are affordable to moderate-income residents. In other words, the workers whose pension funds are financing the construction can ultimately live in the buildings. All of Cirrus’ proposed housing projects would be built this way.
But they are making their plans in a state with a raging debate about mandating union labor in housing production, especially affordable housing. Cirrus and the unions would like to prove that financing such projects with union pension funds is the solution, and one that can be scaled up to address the affordability crisis.
Though Cirrus’ proposed unit count is in the tens of thousands, success in these projects still doesn’t guarantee that other developers, on other kinds of projects, would flock to the model.
“This is proof of concept,” Gary LaBarbera, head of the city and state chapters of the Building and Construction Trades Council, said.
Of course, it’s only proof if it’s built.
Origin story
Before joining forces, McDonnell and Tufariello were rivals.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the two competed for restructuring and rescue-capital deals — McDonnell at BlueMountain Capital and Tufariello at Fortress Investment Group.
The pair decided to leave their larger firms at about the same time, in 2017, and learned from industry scuttlebutt about each other’s departure. They began working together informally and eventually registered as an investment advisor in January 2020. The timing was not ideal.
“I don’t think I would start a business just before Covid again,” McDonnell said.
Without being able to travel and network, the pair leaned on investor relationships they’d built over the course of their careers, even as other firms struggled to raise capital.
Tufariello, who has a home in Boca Raton, toured properties in Florida.
“How fast can this approach be ramped up to meet the demand?”
Early deals included providing a $90 million inventory loan to the developers of the Zaha Hadid-designed One Thousand Museum condo tower in Miami. The team, led by Louis Birdman, Kevin Venger, Gregg Covin, Gilberto Bomeny and Todd Michael Glaser, were fending off foreclosure. An entity tied to Reuben Brothers had bought out Fortress’ stake in the property in February 2021 and soon after filed a lawsuit to foreclose on the remaining 15 unsold condo units. The developers paid off the inventory loan that December.
Cirrus worked with the developers on two more deals, providing financing for development sites in Edgewater in Florida.
“Whenever we’re taking down land, initially, they always have first look because they are just easy to deal with, very reasonable guys, who know the market well,” Kevin Venger, co-founder of One Thousand Group, said.
At the beginning, McDonnell and Tufariello grew their credit business in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with some work in Chicago and Washington, D.C. They recently created a joint venue to issue construction loans, though McDonnell wouldn’t name the firm’s partner on that.
Since branching out to become developers, they have focused on New York, with plans to invest in Philadelphia, Boston and New Jersey. They say they’ll announce a solo ground-up project in the coming months. Everything else is with partners.
For now, the firm works out of a temporary space on the sixth floor of Savanna’s 106 West 56th Street; it bought a note secured by the office building in November 2023. On a January morning, employees filled cubicles in six-desk rows, though the space had the feeling of not being fully set up, with computer monitors propped up against empty bright white walls.
The principals named the company after cirrus clouds, the wisps that form at very high altitudes. McDonnell evoked the lofty feeling, leaning on the word “elevate” when discussing the firm’s interactions with investors, partners and residents.
He also takes the name literally.
“When you look at where Cirrus invests generally, it tends to be really only the top four or five markets in the U.S., where buildings tend to be taller,” McDonnell said.
The union connect
The deal to build with union labor and pension funds came together with the help of Kevin Gallagher, who’d known LaBarbera for 20 years and introduced him to McDonnell and Tufariello.
Gallagher, a veteran of both the union and workforce housing scenes, then joined Cirrus in 2024 as head of origination and structuring for Cirrus’ workforce housing fund.
In 2006, as director of housing for the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, he helped lead the union’s charge to raise $4 billion to bid on Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, an effort that failed when Tishman Speyer agreed to pay $5.4 billion for the complex.
He later made a similar play for Starrett City with former associates, with whom he is locked in a bitter legal fight.
In 2015, he sued John Crotty, John Warren and John Fitzgerald, accusing them of closing him out of a lucrative partnership between their company, Workforce Housing Advisors, and JPMorgan. The trio, which now runs a separate company called Workforce Housing Group, argue that they worked with Gallagher through limited partnerships tied to individual projects, not as a formal company. According to their responses to the lawsuit, the agreement didn’t prevent them from pursuing opportunities without Gallagher, whom their attorney describes in court filings as “greedy.”
“Kevin has demonstrated a total disregard for affordable housing in his actions with us,” Crotty said in an interview. “Him presenting himself as an affordable-housing person to the people of Brooklyn is laugh-out-loud funny.”
A spokesperson for Cirrus declined to comment on the litigation but said Kevin was proud of his work on Stuyvesant Town and Starrett City, which he believed brought more attention to affordable housing: “He is overjoyed that today’s political landscape has finally caught up with those priorities.”
Litigation aside, Gallagher’s model at Cirrus has some elements of his earlier workforce housing ventures. Then, he targeted overleveraged multifamily buildings, bought up the notes on underperforming loans and, in cases where the owner couldn’t pay up, foreclosed and submitted a credit bid to take control of the property. Partners would then secure permanent financing, with the goal of “moving properties out of the cycle of bad investment into responsible, long-term ownership,” according to an investor deck for one of the previous company’s funds, which was filed with court documents.
Though Cirrus still buys overleveraged loans and takes over properties, McDonnell said he doesn’t consider Cirrus to be in the business of “distressed debt,” and that the company prefers to work out solutions for borrowers. This has resulted in repeat customers.
“We’re brought into these situations, usually when it’s very strong real estate, but it’s a complex situation,” he said.
Workforce housing for NYC
New York City has many housing initiatives but few for the “missing middle,” Cirrus’ audience.
Cirrus’ plan to finance and build these units made sense to LaBarbera, who met with the Cirrus executives.
About the same time, LaBarbera was talking with Mayor Adams, he recalled. “We got to a point where [Adams] loved the concept. I said to him, ‘Look, give us a year.’”
They got individual union pension funds on board and raised the initial $100 million. The mayor traveled to the buildings trades’ conference in Florida to sign the MOU. Since then, they have pooled pension funds from more than a dozen construction unions.
The fund will take equity positions in Pacific Park, as well as at the Flushing airport site. Some have questioned whether the deal with the city gave Cirrus an edge in the competition for the latter site. Cirrus and LCOR were one of seven teams that bid on the project, according to a response provided to The Real Deal following a freedom of information request. Cirrus’ proposal called for more housing units than most of the other proposals. One team pitched constructing a cement alternative factory on the site.
Still, Andrew Esposito of Apex Development, one of the bidders, said that “given the challenges presented at the site, … we query how the selected group with a glaringly absent track record of completing development projects will address these real issues, while also incorporating promises of extensive union involvement.”
Unions have struggled to increase their market share of affordable housing projects in New York City, and attempts to legislate such growth have been met with resistance from developers. For example, the property break 485x sets a construction wage floor for all projects with 100 or more units, and even higher for projects above 150. Developers have avoided these mandates by capping units at 99.
It remains to be seen what level of public subsidy these projects will require, even with the union pension fund investments. Cirrus is seeking the property tax break 485x at the airport site, and McDonnell has said that the final housing plan for Pacific Park will rely on what city and state subsidies are available.
LaBarbera, however, believes that the city signing on to the model indicates that projects will pencil out.
“There was always this position of the real estate industry that this couldn’t be done, that you can’t build residential, affordable, workforce housing under a union model,” he said. “We have just disproved that.”
Behind the scenes at Pacific Park
Greenland USA’s lender on the Pacific Park sites was Nick Mastroianni’s U.S. Immigration Fund, which had raised capital through the cash-for-visas EB-5 program.
Cirrus then took over $200 million in Greenland’s outstanding debt across the U.S., and was in a position to also take on the more than $350 million attached to six sites at Pacific Park, which USIF had provided; Fortress also owned a stake in the debt.
“That was a very difficult and challenging deal to do,” Mastroianni said. “I’d been negotiating with Greenland for five years, I couldn’t get them to move.”
In early 2025, Mastroianni and McDonnell got lunch at Cipriani’s on Fifth Avenue.
They disagree on who asked whom but align on the subject of the meeting: what to do about Pacific Park.
“I said, listen you’re willing, let’s put it together,” Mastroianni recalled.
The two had previously worked together at The Bryant, HFZ Capital Group’s luxury condo hotel on West 40th Street, which Cirrus recapitalized, providing a loan to USIF, after HFZ collapsed.
Cirrus’ principals had previous run-ins with the defunct real estate firm. Through the Versant Group, Tufariello invested in commercial lender Allegiant Capital in 2017, alongside HFZ executives Ziel Feldman and Nir Meir. An October filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists Tufariello as a chair of the company, as well as an indirect owner alongside Feldman and Meir. Both Feldman and Meir have previously claimed to own significant stakes in Versant, according to court filings.
Representatives for Cirrus said the filing was an error and that Tufariello hasn’t been involved with Allegiant since 2019. They indicated that Tufariello didn’t have a relationship with HFZ.
Mastroianni credits Cirrus’ purchase of most of Greenland’s debt for moving the megadevelopment forward. Related Companies was in talks for the project in 2024, but ultimately decided against sticking around.
Cirrus’ ability to absorb the rail yard sites, as well as a separate property across from the Barclays Center, likely played in its favor. At the very least, the fact that the company could incorporate the site into its broader plans strengthened its pitch to state officials, who needed to approve the development team replacing Greenland.
Cirrus and LCOR officially took over the train sites in October, through a foreclosure auction and with the blessing of Empire State Development and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Anthony Tortora, co-chief investment officer at LCOR, said he was introduced to the Cirrus leaders through a mutual friend at Plaza Construction. The skill sets of the two companies complemented each other, he said. Cirrus brought extensive capital markets experience and a good relationship with the unions to the table, while LCOR had a history in multifamily development, as well as its work at another rail yard in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The companies also shared a commitment to building workforce housing.
“There’s a lot of alignment in terms of how we think about the world,” he said.
“There was always this position of the real estate industry that this couldn’t be done, that you can’t build residential, affordable, workforce housing under a union model. We have just disproved that.”
Pacific Park, originally called Atlantic Yards, was first announced in 2003, and has since been held up by various forces, including litigation, construction defects, the departure of developers and in the case of Greenland, the financial woes of its parent company in China.
Over the past two decades, nine buildings (including the Barclays Center) have been completed, with more than 3,200 apartments built by Forest City Ratner, Greenland USA and other developers who, over the years, have taken over individual sites.
Cirrus and LCOR have pitched what they’ve called “contours of a plan” for the remaining sites. This vision would result in taller towers than previously planned and would ultimately net 9,000 units instead of 6,430.
McDonnell is the most public-facing of the Cirrus executives. Soft-spoken and measured at public meetings, he has described the vision he and his partners have devised so far as what is “feasible” but not final.
“We’ve tried to bring a very realistic and transparent approach to this,” he said.
He also has emphasized the “mission-driven” nature of the workforce housing fund, and that Cirrus’ plan is guided by wanting to build as much housing as quickly as possible, and to make it affordable to a range of incomes. For that reason, Cirrus and LCOR are considering not building on one of the six rail yard sites and instead shifting density there to the other planned towers.
The affordable units would target moderate to middle-income residents, capping rent at levels affordable to those earning 130 percent of the area median income.
That threshold has already drawn criticism from advocates who have long followed the project, arguing that more units need to be accessible to very low-income earners.
Future looking
A number of the company’s projects are in transition. In December, Cirrus won a bankruptcy auction for a Miami redevelopment site with a $77 million credit bid. The company had moved to foreclose after the developer Gilberto Bomeny defaulted on a $70 million loan tied to the property. A judge, however, ordered a new auction, in which Cirrus ultimately won with a $95 million bid. Cirrus’ plans for the site are unclear.
A judge, however, ordered a new auction, finding that “constant changes and irregularities” prevented other bidders from competing. Cirrus’ plans for the site, should they ultimately hold onto it, are unclear.
In New York, the board charged with reviewing applications for state casino licenses urged gaming officials to closely track all commitments made by the three winning teams — including the housing pledge made by Resorts World, which it described as vague. McDonnell said no sites have been selected yet as part of its partnership with Resorts World.
At Pacific Park, Cirrus and LCOR must ink a memorandum of understanding outlining the project by July 31, 2026. Otherwise, the state could renew fines against the firm that were supposed to kick in in June 2025, a previous deadline for completing the project’s affordable housing units that Greenland failed to meet.
It’s been nearly two years since the agreement was reached with the city and the construction unions, and Cirrus also must work with a new administration. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that he wants to build 200,000 affordable housing units in the next decade, exclusively with union labor. He hasn’t specified how he is going to do that nor if he’s planning to lean on the model employed by Cirrus. (Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by contrast, cited Cirrus by name in his housing plan.)
McDonnell sees a potential champion in Leila Bozorg, deputy mayor of housing and planning, who formerly served in the Adams administration and was involved in the agreement with the union pension funds.
In an interview, she said she is committed to work with the building trades to develop more workforce housing models and is working with the city and state comptrollers to explore other pension fund investments into housing.
Lou Coletti, a senior advisor with government relations firm Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron and former president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, which represents general contractors, said the model could be difficult to replicate on a grand scale, given that the individual board of trustees for each pension fund has to sign off on investing.
“It’s quite a lengthy process,” he said. “How fast can this approach be ramped up to meet the demand?”