Defining “Affordable” | NY AG Schneiderman to Sue Wells Fargo | U.S. Shutdown Threatens Housing

October 4th 2013

Seaport City: A residential complex would be built on Berms in the East River.

  1. Have we reached peak sprawl? Several real estate researchers met in Atlanta on Wednesday to announce a milestone nearly as significant, they believe, as when historian Fredrick Jackson Turner declared the closing of America’s frontier after the 1890 census. Metropolitan Atlanta, long a symbol of car-dependent American sprawl, has recently passed a threshold where a majority of its new construction spending is now focused in high-density, “walkable” parts of town. [Atlantic Cities – 10/03/13]
  2. The last of Bloombergville. History will record that in the waning days of Michael Bloomberg’s empire, rebels massed and developers erected fortifications. At last Monday’s meeting of the City Planning Commission, the projects advanced one after another, like trains to the front: a thousand-foot luxury tower near the South Street Seaport; a dozen buildings on the Greenpoint waterfront; the residential redevelopment of Bushwick’s old Rheingold brewery. When Commissioner Anna Levin lamented the fuzzy details of a rezoning proposal designed to add new skyscrapers to midtown’s East Side, Chairwoman Amanda Burden said it was “as much as we could shape now.” With time running short, the supersizing plan was moved to a vote, scheduled for this week. [NY Mag – 09/29/13]
  3. How affordable is affordable housing? Average monthly rental rates in New York City recently topped the $3,000 mark, according to the Wall Street Journal, and affordable housing has been a hot topic on the campaign trail this election season.  What does the phrase really mean - and what can politicians do about it? “There isn’t one definition of affordable housing and it’s actually been quite controversial over the last few years,” said Becky Koepnick, director of the Moelis Institute for Affordable Housing Policy at New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy [Metrofocus – 10/03/13]
  4. Manhattan real-estate market as insane as ever. Buyers hoping the real-estate industry got served a dose of hardscrabble reality this summer - for being the untenably competitive, frothy market that it has become - will be disappointed. Manhattan’s market is hotter than ever, according to third-quarter reports for the borough released today by the city’s biggest real-estate firms. In fact, it’s the briskest it has ever been, with 3,837 done deals, a 30 percent climb from this time last year and the most sales transactions since the pre-Lehman Brothers days of 2007 and the second highest in the last 24 years, per the Douglas Elliman survey. [NY Mag – 10/02/13]
  5. New York to sue Wells Fargo over mortgage settlement. Fielding complaints from borrowers struggling to save their homes, New York’s top prosecutor is preparing a lawsuit against Wells Fargo, accusing the bank, the nation’s largest home lender, of flouting the terms of a multibillion-dollar settlement aimed at stanching foreclosure abuses. [NY Times – 10/02/13]
  6. Miami: Where luxury real estate meets dirty money. You fly into Miami International Airport and drive east toward the city and north on Interstate 95, you bypass South Beach and midtown and in about thirty minutes reach the 163rd Street exit. Heading east toward the ocean leads you past several miles of strip malls filled with convenience stores, pawn shops, bodegas, gas stations, chain restaurants, nail salons and an occasional yoga center. Then rising unexpectedly in the distance is a row of condominium skyscrapers so baroque and unattractive that they conjure up the name of only one man: Donald Trump. [The Nation – 10/03/13]
  7. Water world! Seaport City is mayor’s post-Sandy vision. Mayor Bloomberg wants to build a new New Amsterdam in the East River to protect Lower Manhattan from future superstorms - so naturally, he’s going Dutch. City Hall has just selected Arcadis, an Amsterdam-based engineering firm, to study whether Hizzoner’s so-called “Seaport City” is even doable. [NY Daily News – 10/01/13]
  8. No one wants a homeless shelter next door, so why should East New York? On a recent afternoon, Christopher Banks, a young, trim neighborhood activist and one-time candidate for City Council, walked swiftly down New Lots Avenue, in his native East New York. Despite having lost the Democratic primary for outgoing Councilman Charles Barron’s seat just weeks before, Banks, who is president of the East New York Coalition, appeared to still be in campaign mode, doing his daily canvass of the neighborhood. With a photographer and myself in tow, he was pointing out the neighborhood’s homeless shelters, an incessant source of exasperation for the district’s residents [BKLYNR – 10/03/13]
  9. A microcosm of New York’s ‘affordablity’ debate in Greenpoint. A team developing two luxury high-rises on the Greenpoint waterfront has agreed to include 200 affordable units in the development. Or, more accurately, “affordable.” “They are not affordable to the average resident of the neighborhood,” said Moses Gates, who handles affordable housing development policy issues for the Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development. [Capital New York – 10/02/13]
  10. U.S. government shutdown threatening housing recovery A U.S. government shutdown will immediately slow approval of thousands of mortgages. If it lasts more than a week, it threatens housing and the broader economic recovery. Congress forced the first partial government closure in 17 years after failing to pass a budget, meaning borrowers in the process of obtaining home loans could be delayed as lenders are blocked from verifying Social Security numbers and accessing Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts. [Bloomberg – 10/02/13]
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