Developers Mull Property-Tax-Break Legal Challenge | NYC Promises 1200 Affordable Units in East NY

July 7th 2015

Photo Credit: Buck Ennis

  1. WeWork Brooklyn Project Gets Backing From Big Developers “Boston Properties Inc. and Rudin Management Co. plan a 675,000-square-foot (63,000-square-meter) property that will offer unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline, to be built on a strip of land jutting into Wallabout Bay between two dry docks. The $380 million project, set to be unveiled Monday, will be the first in Brooklyn for both Boston Properties, the largest U.S. office real estate investment trust, and Rudin, a family-owned company that’s marking its 110th year in business. The foray by the developers is a testament to Brooklyn’s strength as an emerging office market, with growing demand from young media and technology companies whose employees largely live in the borough. The project would extend a New York leasing spree for WeWork, a five-year-old provider of collaborative workspace that raised financing last month at a $10 billion valuation.” [Bloomberg Business – 07/06/15]
  2. Developers Mulling Legal Challenge to Controversial Property-Tax-Break Deal “Top developers in the city are questioning the legality of the deal to revamp the 421-a tax exemption program for housing, notably a provision empowering the Real Estate Board of New York and the building trades to negotiate the new law’s wage mandate for construction workers. Many are taking a wait-and-see approach, but real estate insiders are already predicting court challenges to the program, which was renewed in June after contentious negotiations between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and leaders of the Assembly and Senate.” [Crain’s New York Business – 07/02/15]
  3. Less Parking = More Affordable Housing! “As part of Mayor de Blasio’s 200,000-unit affordable housing plan, the Department of City Planning has proposed welcomed changes to zoning regulations to make it easier to build and preserve affordable housing. This includes eliminating parking requirements for affordable and senior housing in transit zones, most of which are within a half-mile of subways. The New York Housing Conference, an affordable policy and advocacy organization, enthusiastically supports this change, which will save $1 million in every new 100-unit building, which is the cost to build the 25 parking spots currently required by local law as underground parking.  With one in three New York City renters paying more than 50 percent of their income on rent and many in desperate need of affordable options, resources should be invested in more housing not more parking.” [City Limits – 07/06/15]
  4. Trickle-Down Economics Doesn’t Work in These American Suburbs “The bigger the metropolitan area, the more wealth inequality. Inequality between the wealthiest and poorest American neighborhoods grew most substantially in the largest commuting zones between 1990 and 2010, according to a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy group. (Commuter zones are defined by the Census Bureau as urban areas where people work and live.) “High wealth and income in big commuting zones do not trickle down,” says Rolf Pendall, director at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and lead author of the report. For the most part, the wealthiest areas in cities such as Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore are located outside city limits, he says. Often they have low housing and population densities and occupy wide swaths of suburbs, exurbs and rural countryside.” [MarketWatch – 07/06/15]
  5. Affordable Housing, Always “Not long ago, inner cities were riddled with crime and blight and affluent white residents high-tailed it to the suburbs, seeking better schools, safer streets, and, in some cases, fewer minority neighbors. But today, as affluent white residents return to center cities, people who have lived there for years are finding they can’t afford to stay. […] “It’s a very bitter pill to swallow for families to be priced out as it becomes a desirable neighborhood,” Mark Rogers, the executive director of the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC), told me. Rogers is developing community land trusts, through which a local nonprofit acquires a parcel of land and pledges to use it for purposes that benefit the neighborhood, whether that be food production or affordable housing.” [The Atlantic – 07/06/15]
  6. City Promises 1,200 Affordable Apartments in East New York in the Next Two Years “The de Blasio administration pledged to build 1,200 affordable apartments in East New York over the next two years, city officials said at a planning meeting in the Brooklyn neighborhood Wednesday night. “This is affordable housing targeted to what we’ve seen and heard from this community,” a mayoral spokesman said. “And delivered in real time so that families will feel it benefits [them] in the here and now.” The units will be built on private and public sites, and financed through various city and state programs. More than three-quarters of the units will be rentals geared toward families making at or below 60% of a metric called the area median income. So, for example, monthly rents for a two-bedroom apartment would top out at $1,748, but would be hundreds of dollars cheaper for most of the other similarly sized units.” [Crain’s New York Business – 07/02/15]
  7. Upper East Side Homes Worth More Than All The Bronx, Study Says “The neighborhood’s residential property values — totaling about $96 billion — not only beat every other neighborhood in the city and the two outer boroughs in home prices, it’s worth more than North and South Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska, according to real estate data enthusiast and entrepreneur Max Galka, who runs a real estate data business called Revaluate. For the Upper East Side, such a small area — roughly less than a square mile — to generate so much in property value, is striking, Galka said. “A small portion of the world is wealthy enough to buy these things,” he said. All Bronx homes, priced at $95 billion, come close to the Upper East Side’s valuation and Staten Island generates $72 billion in property values.” [DNAinfo – 07/01/15]
  8. Europe Cracks Down on Airbnb, Other Room-Sharing Sites “As the summer tourist season heats up in Europe, officials are cracking down on Airbnb and other online room-sharing services. While popular tourist destinations like London and Amsterdam have embraced room-sharing, other European cities like Paris and Berlin are moving to stop out-of-towners from overrunning neighborhoods and displacing local residents. In Paris, government inspectors are enforcing a ban on short-term stays in investment properties booked through San Francisco-based Airbnb and similar websites. “If Parisians want to rent out their home when they go on holiday, that is not really a problem,” said Ian Brossat, Paris’ deputy mayor in charge of housing. ‘What concerns us is when someone purchases one or more properties with the aim to turn them into tourist rentals. We don’t have enough properties to house Parisians.’” [USA Today – 07/06/15]
  9. Chicago’s Chinatown Plans for Successful Future “The Chinatown Community Vision Plan, which debuted in May at the Pui Tak Community Center, was two years in the making. It was spearheaded by a partnership of Alderman Danny Solis, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and the Coalition for a Better Chinese American City (CBCAC). […] Fueled by a technical assistance grant and initiated by the community itself, rather than the city, the planning effort combined bilingual outreach efforts and confidential interviews to reach a total of 1,800 residents and stakeholders and create an authentic portrait of how Chicago Chinatown can thrive in the future — not simply as a tourist attraction, but as a home. “Some might think of Chinatown as fairly homogenous, but [planners] did a good job getting input from newer immigrants, people who own businesses, more established residents … seniors — a lot of different kinds of people,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak center.” [Next City – 07/06/15]
  10. Cannabis Construction: Entrepreneurs Use Hemp in Home Building “Now that the forbidden plant is enjoying mainstream acceptance, Mr. Savage is hoping to put hemp to use not in joints but between joists. His first project has been his own 1850s farmhouse, though he says he believes hemp-based building materials could transform both agriculture and construction throughout New York. While cannabis has had a long history as a fiber used in ropes, sails and paper products — Presidents Washington and Jefferson both grew it — Mr. Savage is among a small number of entrepreneurs have instead turned to a novel application known as hempcrete. Hempcrete is made using the woody, balsa-like interior of the Cannabis sativa plant (the fiber for textiles comes from the outer portion of the stalk) combined with lime and water. Though it lacks the structural stability its name might suggest, hempcrete does provide natural insulation that is airtight yet breathable and flexible. It is free from toxins, impervious to mold and pests and virtually fireproof.” [New York Times – 07/06/15]
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