Housing Starts: Middle Class Goes Inland | Fight Over Public-Private Park |NYCHA Head Visits Tenants

1. Affordable Housing Draws Middle Class to Inland Cities Americans have never hesitated to pack up the U-Haul in search of the big time, a better job or just warmer weather. But these days, domestic migrants are increasingly driven by the quest for cheaper housing. The country’s fastest-growing cities are now those where housing is more affordable than average, a decisive reversal from the early years of the millennium, when easy credit allowed cities to grow without regard to housing cost and when the fastest-growing cities had housing that was less affordable than the national average. Among people who have moved long distances, the number of those who cite housing as their primary motivation for doing so has more than doubled since 2007. [New York Times – 08/04/14]
2. Apartments in New Developments are Getting Smaller Apartments in new developments in Queens are shrinking. Seven years ago, when building in Long Island City was heating up, a new glass tower known as the View at East Coast offered spacious one-bedroom condos with 21-foot-long living rooms facing the Manhattan skyline. A few months ago, the Madison LIC, a much smaller development a mile away near Queens Plaza, went on the market with one-bedroom condos with balconies, but with a difference: The layout and the living room were more than 25% smaller than those at the View. Cost pressures and cost-conscious buyers are prodding developers to reduce the size of apartments in Long Island City, just as the size of the typical Manhattan rental apartment shrank gradually over the past few decades, brokers said. [Wall Street Journal – 08/04/14]
3. The Battle of Brooklyn Bridge Park The internal message board of the One Brooklyn Bridge Park luxury condominium is generally used to post “babysitter wanted” notes or to remind residents to pick up their dry cleaning. Last spring, residents used it to air their dirty laundry. When city officials said they were ready to solicit requests for proposals to develop two parcels of land north of Atlantic Avenue and directly south of the building, they altered a 2006 plan so that it would include affordable housing, for moderate- to middle-income residents. Some condo owners reacted with unfiltered fury. [New York Times – 08/03/14]
4. Key to Hitting Housing Goals is Who’s Counting To some real estate observers, the city’s latest affordable-housing numbers don’t seem to add up. The controversy arose late last month, when de Blasio administration officials proudly called the 8,700 units of affordable apartments that had received financing in the first six months of the year “a significant down payment” on achieving their goal to build or preserve 200,000 such units over the next decade. One problem: The Bloomberg administration had already counted those same units as the final installment payment on its 2005 pledge of 165,000 affordable apartments. [Crain’s New York Business – 08/04/14]
5. Can a Baltimore Neighborhood Avoid the Pitfalls of Gentrification? Greenmount West’s transformation comes at a cost. Greenmount West’s median home price rose from $10,000 in 2002 to $184,900 in 2013, when 19 housing units were sold. Property taxes have increased as people with higher incomes have moved in and rehabbed older or vacant buildings. The City of Baltimore considers Greenmount West a “community development cluster,” a designation meant to encourage developers capable of renovating entire blocks of vacant houses. As a result, an uptick in housing code enforcement has also troubled many of Greenmount West’s legacy residents — the ones who have been there for 30 years or more — who rely on sub-standard or subsidized housing to keep on living in their neighborhood [Next City – 08/04/14]
6. The Amazingly Rapid Suburbanization of Poverty Once upon a time (specifically, the 1990s), the US was making remarkably fast progress against concentrated poverty. During that decade, the number of poor people living in poor neighborhoods fell by 24 percent. That progress has entirely reversed, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. The share of people living in neighborhoods with 40 percent or higher poverty grew by 76 percent between 2000 and the 2008-12 period. And that concentration is growing in suburban neighborhoods in particular. [Vox – 08/03/14]
7. Queens Beep Disapproves Astoria Cove Queens Borough President Melinda Katz disapproved of the 2.2-million-square-foot Astoria Cove proposal in a non-binding ruling announced earlier today.The Queens Beep recommended that a group of developers including Alma Realty Corp. should devote more of the complex’s 1,723 units to affordable housing, do more to address the lack of public transportation from the site overlooking Pot Cove and pay prevailing wage to construction workers on the property, along with living wage for permanent employees. [Commercial Observer – 07/31/14]
8. Freddie Sells $659 Million of Debt in First Soured-Mortgage Deal Freddie Mac (FMCC), the government-backed mortgage giant, sold $659 million of “deeply” delinquent home loans in its first offering of such debt.Twenty-two potential buyers participated in the auction, which was conducted by affiliates of Bank of America Corp., the McLean, Virginia-based company said today in an statement. It didn’t disclose the price, and won’t be naming the buyer, according to Tom Fitzgerald, a spokesman. The loan sale comes as investment firms such as Lone Star Funds, One William Street Capital Management LP and Ellington Management Group LLC seek to gobble up bad home loans as the housing market recovers, pushing up prices. [Bloomberg – 08/01/14]
9. Broadway Slow Zone Begins Monday Drivers will have to take it easy on one of Manhattan’s busiest streets starting this Monday. An 8.3-mile stretch of Broadway will be transformed into one of the city’s slow zones with the speed limit cut from 30 mph to 25 mph. The slow zone, which was announced in May as part of the Vision Zero traffic safety initiative, will run from 59th to 220th streets.This will be the city’s fourth major street to be transformed into a slow zone. Atlantic Avenue and McGuiness Boulevard in Brooklyn and the Grand Concourse in The Bronx have already undergone the change, all chosen because of their high number of traffic fatalities. [DNA Info – 08/01/14]
10. A Matter of Building Trust Shola Olatoye, the newly appointed head of the New York City Housing Authority, got off to a difficult start with a tenant group at an East Side public-housing complex. She was an hour late for their meeting. Ms. Olatoye found herself delayed because she stopped to visit 93-year-old Mary Hladek, who had told the NYCHA chairwoman and chief executive that she wanted to move to a smaller apartment so she could be closer to the bathroom. Ms. Olatoye apologized several times, and the meeting at the First Houses complex covered topics ranging from tenants’ concerns about security to their desire to allow people who want smaller apartments to swap with those who want larger ones.The episode illustrates the seemingly endless number of conflicting demands placed on Ms. Olatoye as she works to remake the authority’s relationship with some 600,000 residents. That relationship has deteriorated in the past few years over complaints about long waits for repairs and a plan to allow private development on NYCHA sites that residents said they felt was pursued without their input [Wall Street Journal – 08/01/14]