Housing Starts: Affordable Housing, New Design I Home Shrunken Home I NYC Too Slow with Sandy Funds

Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in Crown Heights (Photo Credit: DNAinfo/Rachel Holliday Smith)

1. City Aims for More Affordable, Less Ugly Housing The city released a sweeping proposal Friday that would dramatically alter the way buildings look in New York City, possibly ushering in a new generation of buildings that look more like the varied structures of yore while making it easier and cheaper to create affordable housing units. The changes will allow developers to build several stories taller than current norms in some cases, as long as the overall square footage is held steady. In others, the new rules would give developers more flexibility with the shape of a property’s façade, all while maintaining existing square-footage limits. The proposal, which must go through the labyrinthine public review process, is one of the biggest shifts to zoning laws that govern the shape of buildings since 1987, when the code was last updated. [Crain’s New York Business – 02/20/15]
2. Home Shrunken Home For most single New Yorkers, the tyranny of living in a small space, or worse, a shared space, is all too familiar. And with the number of single New Yorkers growing, the demand for more of these spaces is inevitable. Enter My Micro NY, the city’s first micro-apartment complex, at 335 East 27th Street, with 55 units ranging from 260 to 360 square feet. The building will begin leasing studios this summer for around $2,000 to $3,000 a month. [New York Times – 02/20/15]
3. New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant District Enjoys Real Estate Revival A decade ago, when New York City was in the grip of its last real estate boom, Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighbourhood blighted by crime and neglect for many years, began showing signs of gentrification. Young, urban professionals, priced out of Manhattan, started to buy and renovate the district’s stately brownstone homes. Yet when the housing boom began to falter in late 2007, few pockets of the city’s property market sank lower. While housing values across New York flattened, in Bedford-Stuyvesant they crashed, falling more than 40 per cent from their 2006 highs, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate at New York University. [Financial Times – 02/20/15]
4. De Blasio Moving with Plan to Convert Queens Rail Yard into Affordable Housing Despite Cuomo’s Opposition Despite opposition from Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio is going full steam ahead with his plan to convert a Queens rail yard into affordable housing. The city on Friday asked for consultants to bid on conducting a “feasibility study” on the Sunnyside Yards project. De Blasio — who has vowed to create 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years — wants to build a Stuyvesant Town-style affordable housing complex on the roughly 200-acre site. It would be a mix of city, state and Amtrak-owned land, with 11,250 units. [New York Daily News – 02/21/15]
5. City Housing Rules Examined From Bedford-Stuyvesant to the South Bronx, politicians have sold new housing to communities with the expectation that half of the lower-rent units would be set aside for local residents. Now that practice is drawing scrutiny from the federal government, raising fears among advocates and developers that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable-housing agenda will be undermined. Officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they were reviewing whether the preference violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which precludes developments or agencies that receive federal money from discrimination based on race or national origin. [Wall Street Journal – 02/19/15]
6. HUD Warns NYC It’s Too Slow with Sandy Funds Federal housing officials have warned the de Blasio administration that, despite progress on its recovery program, it has not been drawing down Sandy aid quickly enough and risks losing a part of it. The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded New York City a total of $4.4 billion in Community Development Block Grants for long-term recovery and rebuilding. The first $425 million was obligated Aug. 16, 2013, with the stipulation that the money had to be claimed within two years. [WNYC – 02/23/15]
7. Judge Evicts Rent-Stabilized Airbnb Host in Landmark Decision In a decision that could make it easier for landlords to crack down on rent-stabilized tenants who are renting out their discounted apartments on Airbnb, a Manhattan Housing Court judge evicted a man who was renting out his luxury apartment in a Related Companies building. The ruling is the first to outright evict a tenant benefiting from rent controls for using Airbnb without giving them a second chance, according to Frank Ricci of the Rent Stabilization Association. While the decision does not count as precedential case law, it can be cited in future rulings to help take down Airbnb hosts, the New York Post reported. [The Real Deal – 02/20/15]
8. City Offers Tax Break to Brooklyn Landlord to Keep 700 Units Rent-Regulated Officials described the move as “a huge victory” after months of back-and-forth with Alma, which this fall began issuing market-rate leases to tenants who had previously lived at the Crown Heights complex under rent-regulated leases. Soon afterwards, elected officials used approval for Alma’s Astoria Cove project in Queens as a bargaining chip in the negotiation. Mosley, however, said Alma was “always willing” to come to an agreement. “They’ve always wanted to find a solution, understanding that we had thousands of residents who could have seen themselves possibly on the streets looking for somewhere else to live,” he said. [DNAInfo – 02/20/15]
9. U.S. Existing Home Sales Hit Nine-Month Low, Supply Weak U.S. home resales fell sharply to their lowest level in nine months in January amid a shortage of properties on the market, a setback that could temper expectations for an acceleration in housing activity this year.  The National Association of Realtors said on Monday existing home sales declined 4.9 percent to an annual rate of 4.82 million units, the lowest level since April last year. December’s sales pace was revised up to 5.07 million units from a previously reported 5.04 million units. [Reuters – 02/23/15]
10. New York’s Forecast: Rising Seas, Continual Heat Waves, and a Little Hope How would the city’s housing stock respond, though, to a weather “event” in the near future, before we all installed triple-glazed windows — something like Hurricane Sandy or approximating it, causing power failures — during a period not of moderate temperatures, but of extreme cold or heat? What if electrical supplies had shut down during a week like this one? Not long after Hurricane Sandy, the Urban Green Council, an organization focused on sustainable building, set out to study those questions and found that few buildings of the kind that populate the city would fare well. [New York Times – 02/20/15]