Housing Starts: Requiring More Affordable Units | Public Housing Quality | Poll: Renting or Buying?

A residential street in St. Albans (Wall Street Journal Photo/Claudio Papapietro)

1. St. Albans: Suburban Homes, Signs of Rebound New York Police Department statistics for the precinct that includes St. Albans show a significant reduction in most types of violent crime since 2001, though some types of felonies, including assaults and burglaries, haven’t decreased as much as in the larger Queens South patrol area. Neighborhood leaders say the area’s local real-estate market is also improving. In 2009, at the peak of the foreclosure crisis, there were 2,136 notices of foreclosure in the Queens community district that includes St. Albans, according to statistics from the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. In 2013 there were 1,662. [Wall Street Journal – 09/05/14]
2. New York Will Require More Builders to Add Affordable Units The next time a New York City developer seeks permission to replace a derelict factory with a shimmering condo tower, the heated swimming pool and sky-lit roof lounge will have to be accompanied by another amenity: affordable housing. In the most forceful remarks yet of an administration determined to reshape the cityscape, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top planning official declared on Friday that affordable units will be a requirement for any future real estate project requiring a zoning change from the city [New York Times – 09/05/14]
3. Public Housing Getting Worse, Report Says In spite of growing prosperity in inner city neighborhoods and rising real estate prices, the city’s public housing projects have deteriorated badly over the last decade. That’s according to a report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer. His office compared common complaints like peeling paint and heating outages across public housing, rent-regulated apartments, market-rate apartments, and owner-occupied dwellings. [WNYC – 09/08/14]
4. Half of New York [Metro Area] Homes Sold for Cash in 2014 When it comes to purchasing a home in the Lower Hudson Valley, an increasing number of buyers are skipping the lengthy mortgage process and paying with cash. Downsizing baby boomers, the wealthy and investors bought almost half the homes sold in the New York metro area in the first half of 2014 with cash, including a $27.5 million all-cash deal for the Armonk home of Hollywood actor Ron Howard, which closed this summer. [The Journal News lohud – 09/07/14]
5. The Killer Flaw of de Blasio’s Housing Plan Mayor de Blasio’s affordable-housing plan has two big flaws. First, it uses bad data to describe the size of the problem. Worse, his solution is unlikely to put a dent in the number of “severely rent-burdened” New Yorkers. “Housing New York,” the mayor’s bid to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, says the city faces a special “crisis of affordability,” with 600,000 households — more than 30 percent of the total — who pay over 50 percent of income in rent. [New York Post – 09/07/14]
6. NYC’s Hudson Yards Project Will Be an Entire City - On Stilts The jinx is over. Now sprouting over the site is a project that dwarfs even Zeckendorf’s ambitions—the Hudson Yards, a city-within-a-city that’s the largest real estate development in U.S. history. In its gigantic scale, the Hudson Yards exceeds even the Freedom Tower and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center as a symbol of the real estate revival in New York City. For all of its fame, here’s what’s not well appreciated: the Hudson Yards is a city being built not on land, but on elevated platforms. It will sit on a gigantic roof fully covering one of the world’s busiest railroad yards, and the trains will keep running, uninterrupted, below the new mini-metropolis just as they have for decades. Building this city on stilts is the most challenging engineering project in the annals of Manhattan real estate since the construction of Grand Central Terminal at the dawn of the 20th century, and one of the most advanced in all of U.S. commercial real estate development. [Fortune – 09/04/14]
7. Affordable Housing Stock in the Bronx Gets a $22.8 Million Boost Long-needed repairs are in store for more than 100 affordable apartments in the Bronx. The city announced a $22.8 million deal Wednesday to fix up three buildings in the borough through a partnership between Enterprise Community Investment, Inc. and several city agencies. ‘These are the kind of affordable units we need to invest in to assist our moderate income New Yorkers,’ Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation Executive Director John Reilly said. [NY Daily News – 09/04/14]
8. Broken Windows (Real Ones) Surge in Public Housing The broken window has long had a particular hold on the New York City psyche; at turns an emblem of disrepair and an inspiration for the policing strategy that has helped guide the New York Police Department for more than 20 years. Now, according to a report from the New York City comptroller’s office, windows across the city’s public housing complexes have fallen into a degree of disrepair that seems drawn from generations past. [New York Times – 09/08/14]
9. It’s Tough Out There for Renters, But Most Americans Still Want More Options to Buy a Home Few Americans today like their chances when it comes to renting an apartment. Chalk it up to the housing crisis or the credit crunch or the slow recovery. Blame it on the Google buses in the cities or rising poverty in the suburbs. Wherever you look, you’re bound to find frustrated renters. Yet it also appears that hardly anyone wants to do the thing that might alleviate rental stress: build more apartments. While more apartment buildings might give renters a wider range of housing options to suit their immediate needs, Americans are largely holding out to buy homes, according to respondents in the Atlantic Media/Siemens State of the City poll. [Atlantic CityLab – 09/04/14]
10. Coney Island Houses Gets $108M in Sandy Aid A Sandy-ravaged housing project in Coney Island will get $108 million in federal money to repair and fortify the buildings, New York officials announced Friday. If federal officials follow the same funding formula for other city public housing projects affected by the 2012 superstorm, the city could get $1 billion, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. ‘Out of the tragedy of Sandy comes something that is pretty darn good,’ Schumer said outside the five-building complex, which abuts the boardwalk. [Newsday – 09/05/14]