NYC’s Too High Rents | Forthcoming FEMA Funds | Subprime Returns

Jimmy McMillan’s Mayoral Campaign Message is Clear: “The Rents Are Too Damn High” (Image: AnimalNewYork)

1. Why The Rent Is So High in New York I asked N.Y.U.‘s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy to look into whether the share of homes in New York that are not primary residences has risen in the last few years. It has: In New York City over all, about 8.8 of every 1,000 housing units (or 0.88 percent) were for seasonal/recreational/occasional use in 2000, versus 18.8 out of 1,000 homes (1.88 percent) in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available. [New York Times – 04/26/13]
2. FEMA-Subsidized Housing to End For Some Sandy Victims Six months after Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of low-income New Yorkers are facing homelessness. They’ve been living in FEMA-subsidized hotel rooms since the storm. But that funding is about to run out. Advocates say there isn’t enough public and low-income housing to accommodate them all. [NPR – 04/29/13]
3. Hardest-hit Communities Receive Funding to Rebuild Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, approved a New York recovery plan that will allot $1.7 billion in aid to help households and communities rebuild from the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. [Housing Wire – 04/26/13]
4. De Blasio: City Is In Dire Need Of More Affordable Housing The de Blasio proposal calls for about an even split between newly-built affordable housing and preserved units. He said the core difference in his plan up against the Bloomberg approach is that his would mandate the creation of affordable housing in large developments, and end the tax breaks now in place for keeping vacant land off the market so that vacant land would be made available for more development. [CBS New York – 04/28/13]
5. Lenders Venturing Back into Subprime Market Today’s high-risk lenders differ from those during the housing boom in key ways. These lenders say the new subprime mortgages are actually old school - the kind of loans made in the 1980s and 1990s. In other words, a borrower’s collateral matters, down payments matter, income and ability to pay matter. [LA Times – 04/27/13]
6. Wall Street Betting Billions on Single-family Homes in Distressed Markets Real estate executives say institutional investors - who in some cases are bidding on hundreds of homes a day - account for as much as 70 percent of sales in some Florida markets. Over the past two years, analysts say, they also have accounted for a majority of purchases in other parts of the country where housing prices are rebounding sharply. [Washington Post – 04/21/13]
7. Rockaways: Buying Up, Vacancies Remain A wave of buying: “New Yorkers who fell in love with the Rockaways’ resiliency and spirit after the hurricane - not to mention its average 30 percent drop in property prices - are buying homes in the ravaged neighborhood, while others are looking for summer beach rentals. [New York Post – 04/29/13]
8. Seattle: Critics of Micro-apartments Calling for a Moratorium Some contain as many as 64 units, but because they’re in dense neighborhoods served by transit, they aren’t required to provide any parking. And because the city only counts kitchens, not sleeping units, for the purposes of development regulations, the housing avoids design and environmental review and notice to neighbors that usually is required for big, multifamily projects. [Seattle Times – 04/25/13]
9. How Gross Is the Air of the NYC Subway, Really? The study, to be published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, reports that the air inside the stations, in microbiological terms, is remarkably similar to that above ground. [Atlantic Cities – 04/26/13]