Selling NYC Air Rights | Housing Vouchers & Crime | Brooklyn’s Buildings Block by Block

This interactive map, created by BKLYNR, explores buildling history in Brooklyn.

1. Office tower’s owners may profit from plan to allow sale of landmarks’ air rights. “Despite its modest size, the Lever House, a slim, blue-green glass tower that seems to hover over Park Avenue, created a sensation when it opened in 1952 as a modernist symbol of corporate America.Six decades later, the 21-story office building, which commands some of the highest rents in Manhattan, is a potential windfall beneficiary of the Bloomberg administration’s plan to allow bigger, taller new skyscrapers in the area surrounding Grand Central Terminal.” [New York Times – 08/01/13]
2. Tensions at Brooklyn coop reflect Mitchell-Lama woes. “There’s resistance at a Williamsburg co-op to hikes in service charges and other moves by co-op management and the city. But the development’s leaders and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development say the changes at Lindsay Park merely reflect an effort to protect a foothold of affordability in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.” [Brooklyn Bureau – 08/05/13]
3. Building ‘more resilient’ in the Rockaways. “The fortunes of Rockaway Beach have always risen and fallen like the tide, but never so dramatically as with superstorm Sandy, which wrenched much of its boardwalk out of place-just one example of the destruction in the area.A mere nine months later, Rockaway is sporting a new face, with much of the boardwalk reopened and studded with surprisingly sleek infrastructure.” [Wall Street Journal – 08/04/13]
4. Midtown East Rezoning, revised. “In response to criticism of his plans for a revamped Midtown East business district, Mayor Bloomberg has added more housing and public space to the proposal for taller office buildings.  Laura Kusisto, Wall Street Journal reporter covering economic development in New York, including housing, jobs, hospitals and city planning, talks about the prospects of the plan.” [Brian Lehrer Show—WNYC – 08/05/13]
5. Hard data that proves housing vouchers don’t cause crime. “‘Crime and violence-based fear is something that’s certainly been used very, very effectively for decades in this country,” says Michael Lens, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA. “And many of our cities are certainly the worse for it in terms of land use and equitable neighborhood opportunity.’ ...A growing stack of research now supports the hypothesis that housing vouchers do not in fact lead to crime. Lens has just added another study to that literature, published in the journal Urban Studies. ” [Atlantic Cities – 08/05/13]
6. Homeownership: where single women prevail. “The number of single people buying homes has dipped in the last few years, but single women remain better represented among buyers than single men. Today they are buying at roughly twice the rate.According to the National Association of Realtors, single women accounted for 16 percent of home buyers last year, lower than their long-term average of 20 percent. Yet they were still well ahead of single men, who accounted for only 9 percent.” [New York Times – 08/03/13]
7. In Bushwick, artists try to rewrite gentrification’s usual story. “The progression is clear: Artists move into a neighborhood where they can afford space to work but then get priced out when restaurants, retailers and real-estate developers follow. But in Bushwick, a group of artists is pushing back, taking a page from the developers’ playbooks as they attempt to buy property in the neighborhood.” [Wall Street Journal – 08/01/13]
8. How the rental market changed in Manhattan, Brooklyn in July. “Rents have been rising steadily in recent months. The latest Manhattan andBrooklyn market reports from brokerage MNS dig down for some more neighborhood-specific rental data. (The report has Manhattan rents overall dropping by about 0.53 percent between June and July but rising 2.86 percent so far this year.) A few highlights: Lower East Side rents fell 3.98 percent in June (and by larger amounts for doorman studios and two-bedrooms). In Harlem, rents rose 4.41 percent last month.” [Curbed New York – 08/05/13]
9. NJ program aims to help homebuyers after Sandy “New Jersey is launching a program aimed at helping low- and moderate-income families buy homes in the counties hit hard by Superstorm Sandy.Under a program announced Monday, applicants can receive up to $50,000 in interest-free mortgages from the state..” [Bloomberg Businessweek – 08/05/13]
10. Block by block, Brooklyn’s Past & Present “The borough’s a patchwork of the old and new, but traces of its history aren’t spread evenly. There are 320,000-odd buildings in Brooklyn, and I’ve plotted and shaded each of them according to its year of construction. The result is a snapshot of Brooklyn’s evolution, revealing how development has rippled across certain neighborhoods while leaving some pockets unchanged for decades, even centuries.” [BKLYNR – 08/01/13]