Housing Starts: Dumbo Roars | More Poor Doors | Boosting City Housing Plan

September 23rd 2014

Construction in Queens (Photo Credit: Mark Lennihan, AP)

  1. City Controller Scott Stringer Suggests Battery Park City Authority Send Extra Cash to NYCHA The Battery Park City Authority ends each year with a fat budget surplus, while NYCHA comes up short year after year. City Controller Scott Stringer has a novel idea: Have the Battery Park City Authority send that extra cash to the agency that runs public housing. In a letter to BPCA Chairman Dennis Mehiel, Stringer estimated Battery Park will accumulate a $400 million in over the next 10 years. [New York Daily News – 09/20/14]
  2. Dumbo Roars Not all that long ago, before the Brooklyn waterfront became a must-do on seemingly every tourist’s list, Dumbo’s converted warehouses and Belgian-block streets were inhabited by artists and young families, drawn by cheap rents, postindustrial architecture and relative isolation. But over the last decade, Dumbo’s once desolate landscape has transformed to a teeming waterfront playground. [New York Times – 09/19/14]
  3. De Blasio Officials Tout Progress in Sandy Repairs Nearly two years after Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has ramped up reconstruction in its Build It Back program and on Thursday announced plans to quadruple its efforts to rebuild homes destroyed by the storm. ‘We want to be able to have four times the capacity,’ said Amy Peterson, the city’s director of the Office of Housing Recovery. ‘What we’re hearing lately is that we’re making progress but we have a lot more people we need to help.’ Peterson did not say how much money or how many new contractors would be involved in the expansion. [Capital New York – 09/18/14]
  4. Piece Talks: As a Brooklyn Tower Sits Unfinished, the Debate Over Modular Construction Rises Real estate giant Forest City Ratner is more bullish than ever on modular construction, even as its plans for the world’s tallest modular building are stalled. Forest City CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin came to a Massey Knakal real estate summit at the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesday to dispel the widely held notion that her company’s dispute with the developer Skanska is some sort of referendum on the future of prefabricated construction. Each side has blamed the other for cost overruns and alleged design flaws at the Barclays Center site. [New York Daily News – 09/19/14]
  5. Astoria Cove a Gauge of Mayor’s Housing Plan Later this month, the City Planning Commission will give its imprimatur to the Astoria Cove project in Queens and send it on to the City Council, where its final shape will be hammered out, setting the benchmarks for the mayor’s affordable-housing plan. The key issues to watch are the percentage of affordable housing required, whether there will be a city subsidy (and, if so, what kind), and if union labor will be mandated. [Crain’s New York Business – 09/21/14]
  6. With Other ‘Poor Doors’ on the Way, City Looks to Mitigate Effects From the looks of the real estate projects in the city’s pipeline, though, the “poor door” controversy won’t be exiting the public discourse anytime soon: a source at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) said there are at least 3 Riverside-like developments that are due up for approval in the coming months. Each of them ask for the same things: a segmented building, separate entrances, and a 421a (affordable housing) tax abatement. And, given the legal framework, it seems the administration will eventually have to approve them, “poor door” and all. [Gotham Gazette – 09/21/14]
  7. Landlords Getting Loans for Affordable Housing Units Neglect to Fix Violations, Audit Finds A city program that provides millions of dollars annually in low-interest loans for private landlords to rehabilitate affordable housing units rarely bothered to verify if those landlords repaired building violations that their loan arrangements required them to fix, an audit by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli has found. In one case, two Harlem buildings with just 31 units got nearly $1 million from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in 2011 for major repairs. In return, the property manager for the buildings was supposed to fix all housing violations within a year. [New York Daily News – 09/19/14]
  8. City’s Plan for Housing Gets a Boost New York City’s housing plan just got a small boost from an unexpected source, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. The firm upgraded the rating on one of the main funds the city uses to issue bonds and raise money to make loans to build affordable housing from AA to AA+. [Wall Street Journal – 09/21/14]
  9. De Blasio’s Climate Plan to Impact City’s Real Estate New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an ambitious plan today that would slash Gotham’s greenhouse gas emissions primarily by retrofitting public and private buildings. The plan, One City, Built to Last: Transforming New York City’s Buildings for a Low-Carbon Future, would ensure New York’s carbon emissions were reduced by 80 percent over 2005 levels by 2050. [Commercial Observer – 09/22/14]
  10. Are We Building Too Many Single-Family Homes? What? Too much new single-family construction? It sounds hard to believe, with only 618,000 single-family housing starts in 2013, heading toward 622,000 in 2014 – far below the pre-bubble average of 1.1 million per year in the 1990s. Even when adding in multi-unit building, which is booming, construction remains a laggard in the housing recovery and is contributing less than it should to employment and economic growth. [Trulia Trends – 09/17/14]
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