School-Driven Development | Tenants Call on Council to Renew Preservation Pledge | Strong Mayors

March 20th 2014

  1. Reading, writing, and renewal (the urban kind.) A new public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in East Baltimore wants to challenge the blueprint. Designed by Rob Rogers, of Rogers Partners in New York, Henderson-Hopkins, as it’s called, aspires to be a campus for the whole area - with a community center, library, auditorium and gym - as well as a hub for economic renewal. [New York Times – 03/18/14]
  2. Tenants ask city to aid in rescue of troubled apartments. City Council members and tenants rallied Tuesday on the steps of City Hall against the owners of 42 buildings, with an unlikely proposition: they want the buildings to go into foreclosure.The apartments - which have accumulated thousands of housing code violations for conditions that include frigid temperatures and leaking pipes - are owned by a consortium of private equity investors who are delinquent on a $133 million mortgage. They are now seeking to refinance the properties. [New York World – 03/20/14]
  3. City, Related agree on wages. Related Cos. has struck a deal with the city to pay workers higher wages at its Hudson Yards development, rolling back an important agreement made with the developer under the prior administration. The new agreement allows Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned on strengthening living-wage laws and cutting tougher deals with developers, to put his stamp on one of the city’s most high-profile projects. [Wall Street Journal – 03/19/14]
  4. Why cities work, even when Washington doesn’t: The case for strong mayors. During the eras of Michael Bloomberg in New York, Thomas Menino in Boston, and Richard Daley and now Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, everyone has recognized the power of major-city mayors to announce big plans and to carry them out, for better or worse. Illustrations of the better, from my personal perspective: Bloomberg’s insistence that restaurant menus show calorie counts, Menino’s development of Boston’s waterfront and new industrial zones. Illustration of the worse: Daley’s midnight dispatch of bulldozers to destroy the runway at the lakefront Meigs Field in 2003, stranding airplanes that had landed and leaving the FAA to fume impotently about the loss of an airport the federal government had spent millions to help operate. But even with their excesses, our big-city mayors have been, like Mussolini, the people who could get things done, while presidents and legislators seem ever more pathetically hamstrung. [The Atlantic – 03/19/14]
  5. De Blasio zeros in on landmarks appointment. Mayor Bill de Blasio is close to filling another hole in his administration: chair of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Several names are on the short list, two of whom are Ward Dennis, a partner at Higgins Quasebarth and Partners, LLC, a historic preservation consultant firm; and Kate Daly, the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s current executive director. Neither could be reached for comment. [Crain’s New York Business – 03/19/14]
  6. How de Blasio toughened an affordability formula. Unlike in the era of his predecessor, de Blasio administration planning head Carl Weisbrod will no longer allow developers to exempt commercial space above the ground floor (office space, community facilities like gyms, etc.) when applying for inclusionary housing bonuses that reward developers for building affordable housing in their otherwise market-rate developments. This means in effect that developers will have to create a greater proportion of “affordable” units in a given building than they currently do in order to get permission to make that building bigger. [Capital New York – 03/18/14]
  7. All that is solid melts into condos. Already, a great many liberals are ready to expect big change down the pike, pushing aside his appointment of former Giuliani top cop Bill Bratton as police commissioner as a mere concession to law-and-order critics. In fact, de Blasio appeared to be the knight in shining armor when he halted real estate scion Jed Walentas’s proposal to develop the site of the iconic Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg because his plan for a commercial and residential behemoth didn’t include enough affordable housing. But it is the deal that was eventually reached between the city and Walentas that may give some insight into what this city is going to look like under de Blasio’s tenure. As one housing activist likes to note, real estate is to New York City as oil is to Texas. No matter how big of a liberal sits in City Hall, it seems, those titans are going to call the economic shots. [Jacobin – 03/20/14]
  8. Wells Fargo foreclosure manual under fire. Wells Fargo created an elaborate guide for how to produce missing documents to foreclose on homeowners, according to a lawsuit that has caught the attention of state and federal regulators. The bank denies wrongdoing, but the allegations rekindle claims that lenders, including Wells Fargo, used forged and shoddy paperwork during the recession to quickly foreclose on struggling homeowners, a practice known as ‘robo-signing.’ Those charges led to a $25 billion national mortgage settlement that was supposed to put an end to such abusive practices, but bankruptcy lawyer Linda Tirelli says nothing has changed. [Washington Post – 03/19/14]
  9. The cold, hard lessons of Mobile Home U. ‘Don’t get too hung up on appearances,’ Frank Rolfe reminded us as our tour bus made its way to the first of several trailer parks we would visit on a bright Saturday afternoon in Southern California. ‘Remember, you don’t have to live in these homes.’ It was Day 2 of Mobile Home University, an intensive, three-day course on how to strike it rich in the trailer-park business. [New York Times – 03/16/14]
  10. Plan for affordable housing in Philadelphia. As many cities look for ways to house their neediest residents, officials here on Monday announced a plan to increase this city’s stock of affordable housing by using tax incentives and bond proceeds to redevelop 1,500 vacant, city-owned properties over the next two to three years. [New York Times – 03/20/14]
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