Major Multifamily Foreclosure | Resistance to de Blasio | East Midtown Plan Scrapped

1. Loan woes buffet apartment group. A portfolio of roughly 1,700 below-market-rate apartments across three boroughs is in foreclosure proceedings, in what could be the biggest blow to New York City’s low-cost housing stock since several huge apartment groups ran into money problems immediately after the financial crisis. [Wall Street Journal – 11/13/13]
2. Housing advocates gather under one roof, in a tent. The talk at the new Talking Transition tent in Duarte Square on Monday afternoon was about “A Path to ‘Real’ Affordable Housing.” The session paired personal testimonials with analysis from policy experts to explore the best way forward for the next administration to focus on low-income housing. [The Villager – 11/14/13]
3. End of proposal to raise skyline on the East side. Opposition in the City Council and an incoming mayor intent on imposing a more liberal vision have dealt a fatal blow to the Bloomberg administration’s final plan to recast the New York City skyline with a new crop of office towers in East Midtown that would rise higher than the Chrysler Building [New York Times – 11/13/13]
4. New way to spur affordable housing mulled.  New York State’s incentives for building affordable housing are better suited to Manhattan than they are to large areas of Brooklyn and other outer boroughs, panelists noted Tuesday at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s quarterly Real Estate Roundtable. [Crain’s New York Business – 11/13/13]
5. Public housing tenants sue over NYCHA’s plan for luxury high-rises. Tenants at five public housing developments are suing the New York City Housing Authority over the cash-strapped agency’s plan to let developers build luxury apartments on public land. [DNAInfo – 11/12/13]
6. Blighted cities prefer razing to rebuilding. Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. And on the corner a few weeks ago, a pair of houses that were damaged by fire collapsed. The city bulldozed those and two others, leaving scavengers to pick through the debris for bits of metal and copper wire. [New York Times – 11/12/13]
7. Where home values have plummeted the most since the recession. Since the start of the recession, median home values have dropped across America’s largest cities: in New York (by about $40,400), in Los Angeles ($124,100), in Phoenix ($80,400) and Miami ($94,300). Thirty-five of the 50 largest cities in the country saw a significant decline, comparing the American Community Survey data from 2010-2012 to the 2007-2009 stretch encompassing the recession. [Atlantic Cities – 11/14/13]
8. The resistance Bill de Blasio will face on his affordable housing plan. Despite being a long shot candidate when the New York City mayoral race began, Bill de Blasio won the election in a landslide. He won not only by talking about the problems of everyday people that so many politicians ignore, but also by proposing some very specific solutions. As a candidate, de Blasio focused on issues like curbing the abuses of stop-and-frisk and enacting universal pre-K. Once he enters into office, he’ll need to show the voters that it was more than just empty talk. The biggest challenge for de Blasio, however, will be containing the astronomical rise of the city’s rents. [Huffington Post – 11/12/13]
9. Sandy recovery aid for New York City grows by $104 million. The feds are bumping up a $1.34 billion grant to New York City for Hurricane Sandy recovery after a push by local lawmakers. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has agreed to provide $104 million more to repair low-income housing in the city, law makers said. ‘It’s great news for public housing residents,’ said Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan.) [New York Daily News – 11/13/13]
10. Future unclear for towers on the East side. The demise of a sweeping rezoning plan for the city’s premier office district, centered on Grand Central Terminal, quickly provoked alarming pronouncements from the Bloomberg administration and real estate lobbyists that it would bring many projects to a halt, costing the area, in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s words, ‘tens of thousands of jobs’ and ‘$1 billion in additional tax revenue.’ Not exactly. [New York Times – 11/14/13]