A luxury condominium tower, a rental building with some “affordable” units, and a retail complex that will include a Whole Foods grocery store are coming to Lower Manhattan in 2007.

The development, a 90,565-square-foot site built by Edward J. Minskoff Equities, will be the first to receive some of the $50 million the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. was allocated to finance affordable housing downtown.

The development at 270 Greenwich St. will have between 240 and 265 luxury condominiums in a 201-foot-tall tower facing West and Warren streets, while the rental building will have 162 units and face Greenwich and Murray streets. The complex also will include some luxury townhouses facing Warren Street adjacent to the condominium tower, Mr. Minskoff said.

The development, which has not yet been named, will also include a two-level parking garage for 400 cars. The 170,000-square-foot retail space, taking up two floors, is also to include a bank on Murray and Greenwich Streets, and a restaurant on West and Warren streets. The developers also hope to woo a bookstore into an 85,000-square-foot retail area on the second floor.

Construction has not yet begun, but after two years in the approval process, the project has been modified to allay concerns of community groups and city regulators. The architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the gray granite and aluminum building with a sandstone base. Mr. Minskoff, an art collector, will install two paintings by Roy Lichtenstein in the lobby of the condominium tower, he said.The building will be set back from Greenwich Street to create space for a 25,000-square-foot landscaped plaza.

It will not be known how many of the 162 rental units will be in the “affordable” category, for low- and middle-income tenants, until the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. – a joint state city entity controlled by the governor and the mayor – and city officials decide how much of the $50 million to allocate to the Minskoff project. Mr. Minskoff told The New York Sun that for his project to continue on schedule, he would need to hear from the development corporation and the city, which is spearheading the spending of the $50 million, by June or July at the latest.

“It is just as costly to build affordable housing in Lower Manhattan as it is to build luxury housing, because it is high-rise construction, we have to use union labor, and it is in a highly trafficked area,” the chief financial officer for Edward J. Minskoff Equities, Ben McGrath, said. He said the only way to finance the affordable units would be with funds from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

In 2003, the development corporation planned to hand over the entire $50 million allocation to the site at 270 Greenwich to build 300 units of affordable housing. That plan was scrapped last year after a period for public comment, in which some community groups complained that devoting the whole sum to a single project would not create enough affordable-housing units.

The deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel Doctoroff, told the Sun last week that one option is to give the Minskoff development 25% of the $50 million, or $12.5 million, for the affordable-housing units. A spokeswoman for the development corporation, Joanna Rose, said it was one of several options on the table. Mr. Mc-Grath said officials of the city and the development corporation have never mentioned to him contributing $12.5 million in financing for the project.

“We have constant conversations with them where we discuss plans for the development, and sometimes the allocation of the funds, but it is up to them. We are just a passive party,” Mr. McGrath said of his conversations with the development corporation and city officials.

Mr. Doctoroff and City Council Member Alan Gerson signed an agreement last September that any of the $50 million not used for the Minskoff development would be put toward the preservation and development of affordable housing in Lower Manhattan.

The development corporation and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which both need to approve any allocation of the funds, were not notified of the agreement between Mr. Doctoroff and Mr. Gerson.

“It isn’t their fault that they haven’t been notified,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “We still need to work through the details.”

“We need to find the right balance between preserving affordable housing and creating new affordable units,” he added.

The involvement of Mr. Gerson, who represents Lower Manhattan on the council, has some community groups and policy experts concerned, because he has tended to place more emphasis on preserving existing affordable housing than building new housing.

“This $50 million isn’t so much money, and it will create far fewer affordable-housing units than it will preserve,” Mr. Gerson’s legislative director, Solomon Turkel, told the Sun.

Mr. Gerson is sponsor of a bill to allow residents of Mitchell Lama and Section 8 housing, much of which is at the Lower East Side and not near the World Trade Center site, to buy their buildings to maintain the apartments’ affordability.

“I don’t buy this idea that we should be preserving affordable housing rather than creating new housing units, because then you end up ghettoizing New York,” a senior fellow at the nonprofit think tank Fiscal Policy Institute, David Kallick, said.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation issued a partial action plan last year when it allocated the full $50 million to Mr. Minskoff’s development at 270 Greenwich. The corporation will need to issue an amendment, which would be open for public comment, when it makes final the share of the money that will go toward Mr. Minskoff’s development and what will be done with the remaining funds.

“We will disclose everything to the public as soon as we decide how to allocate the money, and the public will have a chance to comment on it,” Mr. Doctoroff said of the $50 million.