Housing Starts:Developers Bet on SoBro I Luxury Workforce Housing I Housing Group Looks Past Budget

April 17th 2015

Image Credit: City&State

  1. Developers Bet on SoBro Developers and investors are pouring an increasing amount of capital into commercial and residential real estate projects in the Bronx, looking beyond the portions of Brooklyn and Queens where prices have skyrocketed, to gamble on what some hope is the next outerborough hot spot. With easy commutes to Manhattan, lower prices than other boroughs, and development sites ripe for the picking, sources said “frontier” neighborhoods like Mott Haven, Hunts Point and Port Morris are generating new interest at all levels from developers, as well as hoteliers, retailers and restaurateurs looking to tap new markets. [The Real Deal – 04/16/15]
  2. ‘Luxury Workforce’ Housing Coming to New York Suburb Atlantic Development Group LLC and Kenwood Equities LLC are billing their new apartment tower in a struggling city near New York as ‘luxury workforce’ housing. That might sound like a contradiction. But when completed early next year, 203 Gramatan Avenue, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., will include a host of amenities often found in luxury buildings, even though it will house families and individuals who qualify for affordable housing, which in this case is defined as households with incomes no more than 60% of the area’s median income. [Wall Street Journal – 04/14/15]
  3. Key Housing Group Looking Past the Budget It isn’t that housing policy fared badly in the state budget approved earlier this month, said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York Housing Conference. It’s that the money the governor and legislators earmarked for housing—while substantial—doesn’t match the scale of the problem. ‘We ended up with a decent budget for affordable housing but given that there was $5.4 billion in bank settlement surplus and none went to affordable housing it feels a little disappointing,’ Fee said in a video interview conducted by City Limits for City & State TV. ‘Given the extent of our affordability crisis, we would really like to see the state commit more.’ [City Limits – 04/15/15]
  4. Millennials Expected to Push NYC Property Sales to Over $65B in 2015 Ken McCarthy, senior managing director and regional research director for the Tri-State New York region at Cushman & Wakefield offered 500,000 reasons for rising property prices in New York. ‘We have now added more jobs in this cycle, between 2009 and 2015, than we ever have in any up cycle before,’ said McCarthy during the company’s first quarter recap breakfast at Michael’s Restaurant yesterday (Tuesday). ‘This is what’s driving the urban demand for real estate right now.’ [Real Estate Weekly – 04/14/15]
  5. Hudson City Minority Loans Faces Probe as M&T Deal Idles Hudson City Bancorp faces a U.S. government investigation into discriminatory lending practices, according to two people familiar with the matter, posing a potential new hurdle in the bank’s long-delayed sale to M&T Bank Corp. The Justice Department and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining whether 147-year-old Hudson City violated the Fair Housing Act, the people said. A preliminary CFPB review concluded that the firm denied loans to people in minority communities, including those in the New York area, the people said. [Bloomberg – 04/15/15]
  6. Busting 3 Myths About Public Housing City success story? Or grim urban disaster? When it comes to the lens through which Americans view public housing, conventional wisdom heavily favors the latter. Yet new research reveals the many successes of public housing both large (New York City) and small (the thousands of small housing authorities that provide public housing without incident). Most recently, Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy attempts to break down assumptions further about America’s most maligned safety net program in 11 essays. [Next City – 04/16/15]
  7. 2 Brooklyn Landlords Accused of Making Units Unlivable Are Arrested Two Brooklyn landlords accused by tenants of trying to drive them out by making their buildings uninhabitable have been arrested, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said Thursday. The landlords, the brothers Joel and Aaron Israel, were scheduled to be arraigned in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Thursday morning. Prosecutors did not immediately disclose the charges, but planned to speak about them in the afternoon outside a building owned by Joel Israel, 98 Linden Street in Bushwick. Longtime tenants in several buildings owned by the Israels have complained of hazardous conditions they believe are an effort to force them to leave, so their units could be rented out at much higher rates. [New York Times – 04/16/15]
  8. City Looking to Bring New Retail and Free WiFi to Jamaica Under $153M Plan The city is looking to revitalize Jamaica by developing vacant spaces and replacing them with new housing and retail stores and creating more job training opportunities for local youth under its long-awaited ‘action plan.’ The plan consists of about two dozens ‘actions,’ developed over the past 10 months with community input, most of which are scheduled to be implemented within the next 3 years, the city said. [DNAinfo – 04/15/15]
  9. Where Can the Average New Yorker Afford a Studio Apartment? Believe it or not, there are still a few reasonably priced neighborhoods in New York City. And some are even in Manhattan. With news that New Yorkers need to earn $107,000 just to afford renting the average Manhattan studio, DNAinfo set out in search of neighborhoods where the average Joe or Jane can snag a pad without breaking the bank. DNAinfo crunched data from StreetEasy on the median asking price for studio apartments in 2014 and compared it with the city’s median salary of $52,259 in order to find places where New Yorkers would be able to rent a place without spending more than 30 percent of their income. [DNAinfo – 04/16/15]
  10. Assessing Resilience Planning: Is the City Preparing Smartly for the Rising Risks of Climate Change? At one of many such meetings now taking place throughout the city’s waterfront, residents of Red Hook, Brooklyn, gathered recently at a local community center to hear about the dramatic expansion of federal flood zones in their area and what the new designation would cost them. As in other coastal neighborhoods, Red Hook struggles with a variety of flooding-related issues. Area homes, businesses and public housing developments suffered heavy damage from a five-foot storm surge during Superstorm Sandy. [Gotham Gazette – 04/16/15]
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