Housing Starts: Tenant Displacement Fears | Airbnb Effects Housing Market | de Blasio OK with Height

1. After decades at a walk-up, tenants fear losing a home. To hop a snowdrift and push through the dented door to 78 St. Marks Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is to walk into a beehive, the tenants so intertwined as to call to mind a single family. Dominican and Puerto Rican, these families lived in this walk-up for decades. There are two carpenters, a cabdriver, a home health aide, a school counselor and a factory laborer. They do their own repairs. Their children sleep two and three to a bedroom and ramble up and down the ramshackle stairs. [New York Times – 02/18/14]
2. Sky’s the limit: Mayor de Blasio says he would OK affordable housing buildings at any size. Mayor de Blasio told a closed-door meeting of real estate barons on Wednesday that he has no ‘hangup’ about allowing them to supersize their developments if it means creating more affordable housing. ‘I’m deadly serious about 200,000 units of affordable housing,’ de Blasio said. [New York Daily News – 02/20/14]
3. New push for banks to monitor building conditions. In a city dominated by renters, bad landlords get their share of bad press in New York. In the 1970s, the Village Voice began running an annual list of the 10 worst. Bill de Blasio, during his time as public advocate, maintained an even longer list. Every day in housing court, tenants and landlords battle over rent and repairs. But behind every landlord is a bank - whose lending enables the landlord to purchase or refinance a property where other people live. Housing advocates have for decades pressed banks to take a more active role in making sure landlords adhere to the ‘good repair’ clauses that are part of a mortgage boilerplate. Now, there is a new push for more accountability by banks. [City Limits – 02/19/14]
4. Why gentrification is so hard to stop. A spate of mainstream articles, books, and policy papers published in the last decade have warned civic leaders about this “new” form of urbanization. However, gentrification isn’t new—it’s actually baked into the economic forces that have been driving urban development since the 1950s. If we want to address gentrification’s ills, we need to address this force that undergirds it. [Atlantic Cities – 02/17/14]
5. More guests, empty houses. This utopian vision of regular people helping each other out (and making a little money along the way) is a cornerstone of Airbnb’s PR strategy: ‘It’s like the United Nations at every kitchen table. It’s very powerful,’ Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky told attendees at a hospitality conference last year. ‘For us to win, no one has to lose.’ But that’s a more contentious claim than it might seem. Recent years have shown there are plenty of profits to be made in the short-term-rental world - and big profits tend to produce both winners and losers. [Slate – 02/13/14]
6. Loan complaints by homeowners rise once more. A growing number of homeowners trying to avert foreclosure are confronting problems on a new front as the mortgage industry undergoes a seismic shift. Shoddy paperwork, erroneous fees and wrongful evictions—the same abuses that dogged the nation’s largest banks and led to a $26 billion settlement with federal authorities in 2012—are now cropping up among the specialty firms that collect mortgage payments, according to dozens of foreclosure lawsuits and interviews with borrowers, federal and state regulators and houing lawyers. [New York Times – 02/19/14]
7. Is Manhattan for everyone? The pied-a-terre and the ‘poor door.’ Seven years ago, when the Westside mega-development known as Hudson Yards was but a twinkle in the collective eye of real estate moguls and Bloomberg officiates, grumbling had already begun about inequality among the neighborhood’s residents. Those residents, of course, had yet to arrive. And the complaints seemed stranger still given that Hudson Yards had, in a sense, been designed to incorporate inequality-intermingling housing for middle and lower earners with homes for the wealthy. [New York Observer – 02/19/14]
8. Study finds greater income inequality in nation’s thriving cities. If you want to live in a more equal community, it might mean living in a more moribund economy. That is one of the implications of a new study of local income trends by the Brookings Institution, the Washington research group. It found that inequality is sharly higher in economically vibrant cities like New York and San Fransisco than in less dynamic ones like Columbus, Ohio and Wichita, Kansas. [New York Times – 02/20/14]
9. Tenants and management clash at Bronx buildings in foreclosure. Plywood with “out of order” is blocking the broken elevators at 2401 Davidson Ave. - even though tenants were hit with rent hikes that the building’s owners had said were necessary to pay for the elevators’ overhaul.Such is life at three of 42 apartment buildings in a real estate portfolio on the cusp of foreclosure in the Bronx, Brooklyn and northern Manhattan. This foreclosure is one of the biggest in recent New York City history,affecting more than 1,500 households. [The New York World – 02/20/14]
10. Failure of inclusionary zoning. Mayor Michael Bloomberg left office claiming his plan to build or preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing was on track to meet the goal this year. New mayor Bill de Blasio plans to junk the centerpiece of the Bloomberg plan-called inclusionary zoning-because he says it hasn’t worked. Who is right? The new mayor wins this debate. [Crain’s New York Business – 02/18/14]