Gentrification a Good Thing? | De Blasio’s Ambitious Housing Plan | Metro North Comes to Co-op City

Compass Residences Development will be the largest housing development built in the Bronx in decades.

1. Gentrification may actually be a boon to longtime residents.  Bobby Foster Jr.‘s neighborhood is gentrifying. That’s been a dirty word for 30 years, since the middle and upper classes began returning to many urban cores across the U.S. It brings up images of neighbors forced out of their homes. But a new series of studies are now showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well—and that those residents may not be moving out after all. [NPR – 01/22/14]
2. Massive Bronx project to break ground. A group of developers is set to break ground Thursday on the first portion of one of the largest housing developments in the Bronx in decades, years after the project navigated the city’s thorny public review process. [Crain’s New York – 01/22/14]
3. De Blasio sets ambitious goal for affordable apartments. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made the shortage of housing for lower-income New Yorkers a top campaign issue, is promising to build or preserve 200,000 affordable units over 10 years. In setting such a goal, Mr. de Blasio is seeking to do more than either Mr. Koch, whose effort yielded more than 190,000 units over 13 years, or Mr. Bloomberg, whose push saved or added 165,000 units over 12 years. [New York TImes – 01/23/14]
4. City Council committee chairs named. Committee chairmanships for the newly elected City Council were announced Wednesday, with a lawmaker viewed as a relative moderate winning the coveted Land Use Committee, which approves development projects. The committee (the full list of assignments is below) went to Brooklyn Councilman David Greenfield. He has not had many major development projects in his Borough Park-based district since assuming office in 2010, but real estate industry officials said they expected him to listen to their concerns. [Crain’s New York – 01/22/14]
5. Cuomo, Schneiderman to split initial JPMorgan funds. The intense battle between New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Governor Andrew Cuomo over the state’s payout from a settlement with JPMorgan Chase has been resolved-for now. Housing advocates were concerned that funds under Cuomo’s control would not reach troubled homeowners in the state, and for now those concerns seem to have been addressed-the $81.5 million under the governor’s discretion will be used for housing-related program. [The Nation – 01/22/14]
6. Once high-flying investment duo parts ways. Borrowing heavily and investing big, Robert Rosania and Laurence Gluck made a killing during the last real estate boom-only to get battered by the recession. The pair are now trying for an amicable divorce amid separate comebacks. [Crain’s New York – 01/22/14]
7. Foreclosure settlement still failing 700,000 families one year later. One year after federal bank regulators pledged that a nearly $10 billion legal settlement would quickly deliver cash to foreclosure abuse victims, hundreds of thousands of people are still checking their mailboxes each day, only to find them empty. As of January, 732,000 settlement checks had not been cashed, according to data shared with The Huffington Post by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—a number that exceeds the entire population of Baltimore. [Huffington Post – 01/23/14]
8. Proposed Metro-North link could wake up sleepy Co-op City. It is quiet in Co-op City, the nation’s largest housing cooperative, even though some 50,000 people live there. The middle income development, with 35 high rises and clusters of townhouses, is isolated from the rest of the northeast Bronx by two expressways and the Hutchinson River. The nearest subway stop is a local bus ride or a 20-minute walk away. With its own shopping center and schools, it is self-contained, so much so that some residents say it has been years since they have been to Manhattan. A plan is afoot that might shift all that. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in his State of the State address last week, revived a transportation proposal that has long been discussed: the creation of a new Metro-North rail spur that would link the New Haven line with Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, with stops in Co-op City and three other eastern Bronx communities along the way. [New York Times – 01/16/14]
9. Boro builders bought more air rights in 2013. Builders in Queens looked toward the sky in 2013 as they increasingly put unused development rights to work in order to push their out-sized construction projects past the city’s zoning limits, though the market for the assets remains up in the air on prices. All told, 127,420 square feet of development rights were transferred in Queens last year, an increase of about 3 percent from 2012, a Times Ledger Newspapers analysis of property records found. [Times Ledger – 01/16/14]
10. Drop Dead, Detroit! The suburban kingpin who is thriving off the city’s decline. For the past twenty-one years, L. Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit. Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan. Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Clair, at the mouth of the Detroit River, for a party on a yacht. Patterson sat in the front passenger seat. Over his shoulder, he said, ‘Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough shit. [New Yorker – 01/27/14]