Housing Starts: TDR Report | Brooklyn Home Prices Up | The Cost of Poor Land Use

Crowds in Brooklyn Bridge Park (Photo Credit: Etienne Frossard/New York Daily News)

1. Up in the Air: Development Rights of New York City Landmark A city report found that many landmarks had no available sites to transfer their rights to, while developers were put off by the formal city review, which includes extensive public review and City Council approval. Meanwhile, hundreds of other development-rights transfers not involving landmark air rights, took place—most under far less stringent rules. The Furman Center at New York University found 361 transfers from 2003 to 2011. Two went through the landmark program. [Wall Street Journal – 04/05/15]
2. Generation Why: Well-Heeled Manhattan Millennials Opt to Rent Instead of Buy With their increasingly mobile jobs and lifestyles, successful New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s are shying away from making a commitment to one city, let alone one apartment. And despite Manhattan’s astronomical rents, it’s costlier still to buy here, with the average Manhattan apartment now going for $1.73 million, a record high, according to Halstead Property. ‘Buying doesn’t make sense for me, and most people like me are saying the exact same thing,’ said Mr. Beasley, 31, co-founder of a marketing startup, The Strategy Collective, and a calendar app called Cannonball. [New York Observer – 04/01/15]
3. Who Wants to Move vs. Who Ends Up Actually Moving Which leads us to the eye-opening results: 11.2 million households, or nearly 10 percent of all U.S. households, desired to move in 2010. And yet fewer than 20 percent of those potential movers (2.2 million households) ended up doing so by 2011. The study also finds that there are disturbing socioeconomic and racial gaps between the people who want to move and do, and the people who want to move and don’t. [Atlantic CityLab – 04/03/15]
4. Home Prices in Hot Brooklyn Neighborhoods Eclipse Manhattan, Reports Say In the fanciest parts of Brooklyn — from Greenpoint and Williamsburg to Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Prospect Heights — the median sales price hit $972,000, spiking more than 15 percent since last year, according to a report released Wednesday from Ideal Properties Group, which focused on first-quarter sales for North and Brownstone Brooklyn. That was higher than in Manhattan, where the median price was $900,000, according to the first-quarter report from Compass, which encompasses the whole island from the toniest areas (like TriBeCa where the median is $3.1 million) to its most affordable (Inwood’s median was $351,369) [DNAinfo New York – 04/01/15]
5. Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Finances Are Being Put Under the Microscope Five Years After Initial Opening Some activists say the park project, which is funded by the revenues from real estate developments within the project footprint, may already be producing enough money to be self-sustaining — without additional construction. Specifically, a group of grass-roots community activists is taking aim at the final two proposed towers that will comprise 430 apartments, including 30% subsidized units, at the southern end of the 1.3 mile-long green ribbon along the East River from Brooklyn Heights to Dumbo. [New York Daily News – 03/26/15]
6. JPMorgan Chase on Track to Pay $4 billion to Homeowners as Part of Settlement JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) is on track to meet its mandate to provide billions of dollars in consumer relief to struggling homeowners as part of a settlement it reached over bad residential mortgage-backed securities it sold before the financial crisis, an independent monitor said on Thursday. Joseph Smith, the monitor overseeing the settlement the largest U.S. bank reached in 2013 with the federal government and five states, credited Chase $2.2 billion out of the $4 billion goal it is required to provide to consumers by 2017 [Reuters – 04/02/15]
7. Poor Land Use in the World’s Greatest Cities Carries a Huge Cost What drives prices skyward is a collision between rampant demand and limited supply in the great metropolises like London, Mumbai and New York. In the past ten years real prices in Hong Kong have risen by 150%. Residential property in Mayfair, in central London, can go for as much as $82,000 per square metre. A square mile of Manhattan residential property costs $16.5 billion. [The Economist – 04/04/15]
8. The Incredible Shrinking Megacity: How Los Angeles Engineered a Housing Crisis The Los Angeles-Santa Ana-Long Beach Metro Area is now, by one measure, the most expensive big-city region in the country in which to buy a home; the average home price is nine times the average income. The vacancy rate for apartments in Los Angeles County, with 10 million people the nation’s largest, is now 3.3 percent — lower than in New York City. The tightest of these concentric circles, the City of Los Angeles, is about to hit its development limit. According to planner Greg Morrow, the city is now zoned to house at most 4.2 million people. The current population is 3.9 million. [Salon – 04/05/15]
9. Chris Christie’s Loud, Expensive and Very Controversial Urban Agenda One out of every 553 homes in the state of New Jersey is in foreclosure. That’s more than double the national rate of foreclosure of one in every 1,126 homes and 172 percent higher than the rate just a few highway exits away in Pennsylvania, where one of every 1,504 homes is in foreclosure. It’s a grim picture that has not improved much even as other states make progress in their recoveries. While foreclosure rates nationally are on the decline, New Jersey was also one of only nine states in which the overall foreclosure rate increased in the first half of 2014, according to RealtyTrac. [NextCity – 04/06/15]
10. Mixed Showing for Housing in State Budget There was more money for NYCHA but no sign of a significant new commitment to supportive housing. Homeless programs received more funding but a bid to direct billions in bank settlements to housing initiatives fell short. With a multifaceted housing crisis playing out in the city that holds nearly half the state’s population, the fiscal 2016 state budget offered modest improvement in some areas and disappointment in others, according to reaction by housing advocates over the past days. [City Limits – 04/03/15]