NYC Co-ops Undertaxed | More Households Doubling Up | Bike Lanes in Brownsville

Brownsville, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, welcomes bike lanes

1. The perverse effects of rent regulation. What would happen if Manhattan were completely free of rent regulations and other forms of housing subsidies? According to several housing analysts, it would quickly become an island occupied solely by middle class and rich people. [New York Times – ]
2. New York City co-ops still scandalously undertaxed, Furman Center finds. It’s a story that pops up every few years: New York City’s co-operative apartments—especially those on the Upper East and West Sides and in the wealthiest neighborhoods in brownstone Brooklyn—pay next to nothing in property taxes, leaving massive tax burdens for poorer renters. [New York Observer – ]
3. More Americans living in others’ homes. The number of Americans living in someone else’s home for economic reasons rose in the past year despite an improving labor market, posing a challenge for the housing market and the broader recovery. The number of so-called missing households—representing adults who would be owning or renting their own home if household formation had stayed at normal rates since the recession—has increased 4% over the past year, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal. [Wall Street Journal – ]
4. Housing recovery increasingly prices out first-time buyers. First-time home buyers, long a key underpinning of the housing market, are increasingly left behind in the real-estate recovery. Such buyers have accounted for about 30% of home sales over the past year compared to 40% on average over the past 30 years. [Wall Street Journal – ]
5. Public housing residents worry about future at hearing. Hundreds of public housing residents waited in long lines to attend a hearing on the future of their developments. Among their chief concerns was a plan to develop luxury housing within eight New York City Housing Authority properties. [WNYC – ]
6. Number of people waiting for public housing now exceeds total amount of public housing in New York. There are more people languishing on the waiting list for public housing then there are total public housing units in New York City, as the number of people on the waiting list soared this year to 270,000 people. The total amount of public housing units in New York City (which are all occupied) is 178,900. [Gothamist – ]
7. Madison Square Garden is told to move. The New York City Council notified Madison Square Garden that it has 10 years to vacate its 45-year-old premises and find a new home, the Garden’s fifth since it opened in 1879. By a vote of 47 to 1, the Council voted to extend the Garden’s special operating permit for merely a decade - not in perpetuity, as the owners of the Garden requested, for 15 years, as the Bloomberg administration intended. [New York Times – ]
8. A very different reception for bike lanes in Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhood. A new stretch of bike lanes debuted in Brooklyn this week, but this time they’re not being met with outrage or protests. The physical distance between a famously contested Prospect Park West bike lane in Brooklyn’s upscale Park Slope neighborhood and the city’s newest lane, on Brownsville’s Mother Gaston Boulevard, is only about three and a half miles. But the economic gap is huge. Brownsville remains one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City, with a stubbornly high crime rate. [The Atlantic Cities – ]
9. Fear fuels Hamptons mid-range home sales. The tide of mid-range buyers—by gilded Hamptons standards—is rising in the Hamptons. Sales of homes valued at between a mere $1 million and $5 million soared 43.9% year-over-year through the second quarter, according to data released Wednesday by Douglas Elliman. Meanwhile, sales of homes valued at more than $5 million, the starting point of the high end in the city’s favorite summer sand-and-surf retreat, were off by 13% year-over-year, in part because of a huge spike in the sales of pricey homes that occurred in the final quarter of last year as people rushed to complete sales ahead of expected tax increases. [Crain’s New York Business – ]
10. Housing coalition talks crisis with mayoral candidates. Characterizing the lack of quality, affordable housing in New York City as a “crisis,” a housing advocacy coalition is sending a message of urgency to the mayoral candidates. [The Epoch Times – ]