Housing Starts: Shaming Bully Landlords | New Neighborhood in the Bronx | Atlantic Yards Idles

A once-planned park in Brooklyn still sits as a vacant lot (Photo Credit: Adi Talwar/City Limits)

1. City Council Approves Bill to Create Public Registry of Bully Landlords The city is adopting a new way to punish nightmare landlords: shaming them. The City Council approved a bill Tuesday that would create a public registry of landlords who bully tenants. The legislation, which passed 49-0, also would double the maximum fine for harassing tenants, to $10,000. [New York Daily News – 09/24/14]
2. Housing Plan Targets Vacant Lots; Some Neighbors Leery Michael Bloomberg built big, building or preserving 165,000 units of affordable housing over 11 years. His successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, wants to go even bigger: He has an ambitious plan to add or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade. But de Blasio also wants to go smaller: His plan calls for placing new housing on tiny, city-owned lots that the last administration ignored. [City Limits – 09/24/14]
3. The Bronx is Getting a Brand New Neighborhood The Department of City Planning gave the Daily News an inside look, and a private tour, of the 57-block valley between the Grand Concourse and Highbridge that could soon be known as ‘Cromwell-Jerome.’ The area, over-burdened with auto shops, parking lots and self-storage facilities, is ripe for retail and residential development, according to a new study unveiled by the city on Tuesday. [New York Daily News – 09/23/14]
4. New York City’s Landlord Loan Program Is a Mess, According to This Damning Audit But an audit from the New York State Comptroller has found some significant troubles in the 8-A program over the past few years. While landlords were perfectly happy to take the cash—multi-million dollar loans, with interest rates of as little as 1 percent—some of them have been neglecting agreed-upon repairs. For years, in fact. Agreeing to take care of things like faulty fire escapes and heat problems is supposed to be a prerequisite for receiving the loans in the first place. Nevertheless, 415 violations weren’t addressed in the contractually-mandated timeframe. That figure includes 93 “Class C” violations—the most serious category—defined as those that present an ‘immediate hazardous condition. [The Village Voice – 09/23/14]
5. A Tower Will Rise Next to, and Over, a Paint-Spattered Landmark Planned to be the tallest residential structure in the hemisphere, the tower belongs to a new class of buildings — most clustered in the area directly south of Central Park — so extravagantly vertical that a new term has been coined for them: not just tall but hypertall. Its top story will be higher than the top floor of 1 World Trade Center (but lower than its needle). [New York Times – 09/22/14]
6. High Line gets three new developments from LI developer With Related’s Abington House on one side and the AVA High Line on the other, a trio of new buildings will bring another 374 rentals along West Chelsea’s newly expanded elevated park. Long Island-based Lalezarian Properties is aiming for an early 2016 completion date for the three rental buildings it is developing between 28th and 29th streets, just west of 10th Avenue. [The Real Deal – 09/24/14]
7. Skanska Cancels Atlantic Yards Contract Skanska USA Building canceled its contract Tuesday for the much-anticipated yet long-delayed modular apartment building at Forest City Ratner Cos.’ 22-acre Atlantic Yards project, which was recently rebranded Pacific Park—though the long-running legal dispute is far from over. ‘We could not continue to incur millions of dollars in extra costs with little hope that Forest City would take responsibility for fixing the significant commercial and design issues on the project,’ Richard Kennedy, co-chief operating officer at Skanska USA Building, a subsidiary of Swedish construction company Skanska, said in a statement. [Crain’s New York Business – 09/23/14]
8. The Housing Bubble Also Left Our Neighborhoods More Segregated The collapse of the housing market in 2008 and the credit crunch that followed it continues to disproportionately affect minorities. Black homeowners in the United States are so likely today to return to renter status that the gains made by blacks in homeownership since the 1970s have been effectively wiped out. Black and Hispanic households have largely been frozen out of the recovery, suggesting those gains may be one-sided. [Atlantic CityLab – 09/23/14]
9. U.S. New Home Sales at Six-Year High, But Outlook Challenging Sales of new U.S. single-family homes surged in August to their highest level in more than six years, a sign the housing recovery remains on course. The recovery, however, will likely remain gradual against a backdrop of relatively high unemployment and sluggish wage growth, which are sidelining first-time buyers and keeping many young adults from seeking their own accommodation. [Reuters – 09/24/14]
10. Can New York Create Affordable Housing That’s Also Environmentally Sustainable? The plan would link green building projects to the broader agenda of controlling housing costs: less energy consumption means lower utility bills, which ‘will make it easier for people to afford to live in New York City’ and ‘invest in other capital upgrades to improve the quality of our housing stock.’ But the plan doesn’t spell out exactly how the city will push the private sector to invest in efficiency and renewables. [The Nation – 09/24/14]