Housing Starts: de Blasio and Rents | NYCHA buildings and pre-K seats | Queens Skyline to Change

(credit: Queens Development Group)

1. Can de Blasio make the rents less damn high? Several government programs try to relieve that pressure, including public housing, Section 8 and the city ‘s twenty-eight-year commitment to subsidizing the construction and renovation of affordable housing. All are vital, but none really offer much resistance to the insatiable beast that is the New York City real estate market. The only weapon that really does is rent stabilization. More than 987,000 apartments in New York-nearly half of all rental units-are rent-stabilized, meaning annual changes in rent are set by a body called the Rent Guidelines Board, or RGB. [City Limits – 01/27/14]
2. Libraries, NYCHA buildings among possible sites for new pre-K seats: city. Mayor Bill de Blasio could potentially use space in New York Public Library branches and New York City Housing Authority buildings to meet his goal of providing full-day universal pre-K to all city students by fall 2015, the mayor’s office said Monday as de Blasio headed to Albany to make the case for his plan. [DNAinfo – 01/27/14]
3. Queens skyline to change with several mega-developments on tap. Destined to become Queens’ tallest residential building when its completed in 2016, a 500-foot-tall skyscraper being helmed by Rockrose Development will stand side by side the Citibank Building in Long Island City. At 658 feet tall, that 24-year-old skyscraper - officially known as 1 Court Square - was erected in 1990 amidst what real estate professionals at the time predicted would be a major building boom in Queens. That boom never came. [New York Daily News – 01/24/14]
4. The particular challenge of helping homeless LGBTQ youth. What little data has been gathered nationally suggests that LGBTQ kids make up a disproportionate number of homeless young people. According to one study, done in 2009 by the National Coalition for the Homeless, as many as 20 percent of homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender. Cunningham says some estimates run as high as 40 percent. [The Atlantic Cities – 01/27/14]
5. London dreams much bigger than New York on housing. How do the housing goals of Johnson, a conservative, stack up against those of New York’s great white progressive hope, newly inaugurated Mayor Bill de Blasio? Both cities are struggling with how to ease their widening affordability problems and how to grow productive urban centers in an equitable way. They’re also similar in size, desirability and economic strength, making for an easy comparison. [Next City – 01/27/14]
6. Dark Days: going underground with New York’s tunnel-dwellers. These houses were ramshackle constructions built out of scrap metal, bits of plastic, and furniture rescued from skips. Their residents were mostly men - runaways from abusive parents, divorcees, crack addicts. Grief and demons dogged them: Dee, a woman in her 50s, retreated into the darkness after an apartment fire killed her two children; Ralph was tormented by the knowledge that his five-year-old daughter had been raped and mutilated while he was serving a prison sentence. Here, amid the smell, the rats and the poor sanitation, they had carved out another existence - some for decades. [The Guardian – 01/26/14]
7. Changes worry US public housing residents.  Vouchers make up the US’ largest affordable housing programme, but their results have been modest. Vouchers are supposed to reduce segregation by allowing low-income tenants to move into better neighbourhoods. Their value is determined by the user’s income and maximum subsidy levels set by local housing authorities. In Chicago, the CHA makes exceptions to these limits for units in’opportunity areas.’ One study headed by University of Chicago professor Robert Chaskin found that the city’s voucher holders were ‘more racially segregated than those in traditional public housing developments’. In Chicago, ‘the overall pattern appears to be one of relocation within high-poverty and predominantly African-American neighbourhoods’, consistent with the national picture. [Al Jazeera – 01/16/14]
8. New York state rejiggers 80/20 program. A tweak in New York State’s implementation of its 80/20 program aims to give affordable housing developments a boost, and balance demand for tax-exempt bonds issued by the state division of Homes and Community Renewal.The plan, starting in January, is to spread a smaller subsidy amount over more projects. Up until now, developers were able to finance more than 50 percent of an 80/20 building via the program, which offers cheaper financing and qualifies a project for lucrative tax credits. Now, only the 20 percent of affordable units in a development will be eligible. [The Real Deal – 01/27/14]
9. NYU expansion opponents say school should go back to the drawing board. New York University should go back to the drawing board after a State Supreme Court decision blocked most of the school’s controversial expansion plan, elected officials and preservationists urged at a meeting Friday. The community leaders - joined by actor John Leguizamo - gathered at the 11th Street headquarters of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to strategize in the wake of the court ruling, aiming to prevent NYU from appealing it. [The Huffington Post – 01/25/14]
10. The housing recovery continues despite a drop in the new home sales. Monthly data out this morning show sales of new homes fell 7 percent in December, to an annualized rate of 414,000, which was below the estimates of all 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Sales are up 35 percent since the bottom of the market in 2011, but as Calculated Risk notes, they are still basically at or below the levels seen during the bottom of every previous recession [Bloomberg Businessweek – 01/27/14]