Housing Starts: Mayor’s War on Homelessness | Unlikely Housing Allies | Outer Boroughs’ Growth

August 22nd 2014

The Roosevelt Savings Bank built in 1907 (Photo: Google Street View)

  1. Unions, Activists Align on Affordable Housing The unions say they will begin supporting a call for 50% of the new units to be set aside for lower- and middle-income residents, a key tenet of the housing advocates’ agenda and a departure from past practice in the city. Unions are also willing to make an unusual concession, accepting wages that are 40% lower than normal union pay on affordable-housing projects in certain neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and upper Manhattan for a new class of workers with less experience than existing members, many of them drawn from local communities. [Wall Street Journal – 08/19/14]
  2. Gonzalez: East Harlem Luxury Tower Plan is Becoming Bill de Blasio’s Affordable Housing Test In East Harlem, many are aghast at the sheer size of the towers, which they say will overwhelm a neighborhood made up largely of brownstones, walkup apartment buildings and narrow side streets. ‘We fought to maintain our cobblestone street and the quiet cul-de-sac we have on E. 118th St.,’ said Robert Anazagasti, who has owned a brownstone on the block for the past 20 years. ‘The mall developers never talked about residential towers on top of the mall,’ Anazagasti said. ‘Now they’ve pulled a fast one and want to make 118th the entrance plaza to their towers.’ [New York Daily News – 08/20/14]
  3. Here’s a Map of NYC Nonprofits Turning into Luxury Housing If there’s one thing that has become clear during the current luxury residential building boom, it’s that Manhattan is no longer a place to not make a profit. Nonprofit organizations (the ones there are lucky enough to own their own properties, that is) are selling en masse, getting huge sums of money from eager developers of high-end housing. [Curbed NY – 08/19/14]
  4. Millenials Going to Kansas City, to Live and Work The shift has coincided with $5.5 billion in public and private projects, including the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the Sprint Center arena and the Power & Light District entertainment area, which features clubs, restaurants and — possibly the holy grail of all downtown additions — a full-service grocery store. The number of people living in the central business district has increased about 50 percent, to 20,000, since 2000, according to the Downtown Council of Kansas City. Apartment developers added more than 6,130 units from 2002 through 2012, and occupancy is above 95 percent, according to the Kansas City office of Cassidy Turley, a real estate brokerage firm. [New York Times – 08/19/14]
  5. Bed-Stuy’s Beautiful Beaux-Arts Bank to Become Apartments Given all you have read, do you believe that New York’s affordable-housing crisis is more severe than in other large cities, and do you believe it is getting worse here at a faster pace than it is elsewhere? Your answer is probably yes. But the correct answer is no, according to new research from the Citizens Budget Commission that does something usually missing from housing debates: comparative analysis. [Curbed NY – 08/20/14]
  6. Landlords Push Back on Affordable-Housing Plan The city is currently contemplating a series of neighborhood-wide rezonings that would require affordable housing to be built as part of any new construction. The coalition, called Real Affordability for All, will march to urge Mr. de Blasio to require at least 50% of new units in these areas be affordable for a range of income levels. The administration, meanwhile,  is currently formulating its plan, and recently reached out to the private sector for help. [Crain’s New York Business – 08/20/14]
  7. The Mayor Begins His War on Homelessness In a sense, nothing has changed, but everything has changed. For the past seven months, the de Blasio administration has quietly launched initiatives and snuck expenditures for preventive services into the budget that, without a doubt, show a complete departure from the latter years of the prior administration. Yet, while lacking the drama of politics, the homelessness issue has been drowned out by the noise of police reform, the teachers contract, universal pre-K, and several controversies of varying sizes. But even if our attention may have diverted, it is now clear that Mayor de Blasio’s War on Homelessness has officially begun. [Gotham Gazette – 08/20/14]
  8. Outer Edges of Outer Boroughs to See Lion’s Share of New Rentals: Report For example, in Brooklyn, there are roughly 21,500 rental units in the development pipeline. Of them, more than 8,500 units are in core Brooklyn – defined by Packes as Brooklyn Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Dumbo. But another 13,025 units are being developed in non-core areas. Two notable examples of the trend: Park Tower Group’s Greenpoint Landing, a 3,200-unit rental project and Read Property’s plans for a 977-unit at the old Rheingold Brewery in Bushwick. [New York Real Estate News – 08/20/14]
  9. Brooklyn’s Largest Affordable Housing Co-Op Mired in Mismanagement, Corruption: Petition One of the few bright spots amidst a city-wide housing crisis, Mitchell-Lama co-ops like Linsday Park–a sprawling network of modest high rises–are able to provide a rare opportunity for lower and middle-income residents to not simply rent, but own affordable units in an increasingly expensive city (through a combination of eminent domain and tax abatements to developers). But new Mitchell-Lama projects came to a halt long ago (and more have reverted to market-rate), and so with the existing apartments increasingly coveted, the management of the entire complex has fallen into cronyism, critics claim. [Brooklyn Brief – 08/20/14]
  10. Where Cash Buys Are Hitting the Housing Market Hardest In six metro areas—Las Vegas, Detroit, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York—almost half the new single-family and condo sales were all-cash sales. Which is incredible. Cash buyers are picking up homes at the high and low ends of the spectrum. They account for nearly half the luxury homes sold, but also well more than half of homes sold for under six figures. [The Atlantic CityLab – 08/19/14]
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