Housing Starts: Debt Inheritance | De Blasio, Cuomo Clash on Housing Voucher | New RGB

March 27th 2014

  1. Pitfalls of reverse mortgages may pass to borrower’s heirs. Isabel Santos, 61, along with a growing number of baby boomers, is confronting a bitter inheritance: The same loans that were supposed to help their elderly parents stay in their houses are now pushing their children out. ‘My dad had nothing when he came here from Cuba and worked so hard to buy this house,’ Ms. Santos said, her voice quivering. Similar scenes are being played out throughout an aging America, where the children of elderly borrowers are learning that their parents’ reverse mortgages are now threatening their own inheritances. Reverse mortgages, which allow homeowners 62 and older to borrow money against the value of their homes that need not be paid back until they move out or die, have long posed pitfalls for older borrowers.” [New York Times – 03/26/14]
  2. De Blasio announces new Rent Guidelines Board members morning of the first meeting. Mayor Bill de Blasio this morning announced a reshuffling of the Rent Guidelines Board, which determines rent increases for more than one million city residents living in rent-subsidized units, less than two hours before their first public meeting. [New York Observer – 03/26/14]
  3. The cities where even 3 minimum wage jobs won’t pay the rent. Inequality has risen across America. Once high-paying middle class jobs have disappeared, as the job market has cleaved into high-wage knowledge and professional jobs and an even larger number of low-pay, low skill service positions. The result of this cleaving has been increasingly un-affordable housing, especially in the high-priced cities supposedly suffering least in the wake of the recession. [The Atlantic Cities – 03/26/14]
  4. Cuomo and de Blasio clash again, this time over homelessness. Faced with a stream of news reports on his conflicts with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo - over tax increases to pay for prekindergarten, charter schools and raising the minimum wage - Mayor Bill de Blasio often pushes back, arguing that he and Mr. Cuomo agree on more issues than they disagree on. But it is getting harder and harder to point to common ground. [New York Times – 03/25/14]
  5. What the media gets wrong about San Francisco’s gentrification battles.  Over the past few months, stories about San Francisco have become ubiquitous in the national media. Everyone wants to weigh in on what’s being called the San Francisco ‘culture war.’ Last week, PBS News Hour became the latest outlet to report on a city facing extreme income inequality, a dearth of affordable housing and an increasingly intense dispute over how the local government should react to the influx of tech companies and tech workers. The conduit for telling this story was everyone’s favorite symbol: the Google bus. [The Nation – 03/27/14]
  6. Proposed housing bill would create a co-op of mortgage lenders. Yet another proposal for winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and overhauling the nation’s housing finance system will be put before Congress on Thursday, this one by Representative Maxine Waters of California, the ranking Democratic member of the Financial Services Committee. The major distinction of Ms. Waters’s proposal is that it would make the mortgage lending system more like a public utility, by creating a co-op of lenders that would be the sole issuer of mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the government. Such a system would significantly differ from those proposed by the major bills in the Senate, which would allow banks and bond guarantors to participate independently in the market. Both Ms. Waters’s proposal and the Senate ones would establish a new federal regulator. [New York Times – 03/26/14]
  7. Garodnick, citing de Blasio, predicts Midtown upzone in 2015. If Mayor de Blasio keeps his promise to come up with a new plan for a taller Midtown East by the end of this year, that plan should win approval by mid-2015, according to Councilman Dan Garodnick. It was a decision last year by Garodnick, who represents Midtown East, to oppose the previous mayor’s plan to upzone the area that played a crucial role in sinking that plan. Now he’s trying to restart the process. [Capital New York – 03/26/14]
  8. Manufacturing in New York City isn’t dead after all: study shows sector has stabilized.  IceStone, a Brooklyn based manufacturer of kitchen counters from recycled materials just added three workers and is about to tap seven more. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, bustling with distilleries, woodworkers, and tech-driven manufacturers, has gone from 3,600 jobs in 2001 to nearly 7,000 jobs today. Industry City, an industrial building in Sunset Park that’s courting a new wave of manufacturing tenants, current houses 2,400 jobs and looks to have 15,000 over the next ten years. Manufacturing in New York City isn’t dead after all. [New York Daily News – 03/27/14]
  9. NYC housing goals go beyond 200,000 affordable units, says commissioner. With the new administration, New York City has set some very ambitious housing goals, and those go far beyond the number of affordable housing units, says the new Housing commissioner. “I hope we don’t get too caught up in the 200,000 number and forget a lot of other things we have to achieve,” said Vicki Been, Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner. At the fourth annual Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development conference, March 10, Been joked that to achieve that number, she needed to preserve one unit every six hours, and was already behind. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 200,000 unit goal over the next decade includes preserving units, but that still means building or creating almost 9,000 more every year. [The Epoch Times – 03/22/14]
  10. New York schools suffer from worse racial segregation of any U.S. state, city classes get poor marks for diversity: report. Schools in New York suffer from the worst racial segregation of any U.S. state, and city schools also earn depressingly dismal marks for diversity, a damning report released Wednesday said. Many black and Hispanic kids in New York attend schools with almost no white classmates, according to the paper from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. City charter schools showed even higher segregation rates, with less than 1% white enrollment at 73% of charters.‘To create a whole new system that’s even worse than what you’ve got really takes some effort,’ said Gary Orfield, an author of the report. [New York Daily News – 03/27/14]
« Previous | The Stoop | Next »