NYC City Planning Department and their urbanish declaration of independence from communities

 

 Cityland

On October 17, 2022, the Department of City Planning will host an information session regarding the proposed “City of Yes” zoning text amendments. The “City of Yes” amendments, announced in June, aim to resolve obstacles that prevent the creation of more housing, remove certain zoning limitations to encourage economic growth, and support sustainability.

Earlier this summer, CityLand published a series of articles regarding the three proposed text amendments. While the Department of City Planning has yet to release a draft of the text of the amendment, the agency has updated its website recently with some more information.

The Zoning for Zero Carbon amendment would amend zoning regulations that place restrictions on the placement of electric vehicle charging infrastructure and limits on the amount of rooftop that can be used for solar panels, and increases energy efficiency requirements. For more information from the City’s webpage, click here.

The Zoning for Economic Opportunity amendment will remove restrictions and limitations on what types of business are allowed in commercial districts; removing restrictions on dancing in bars and restaurants in line with the City’s 2017 repeal of the Cabaret Law; support for the reuse of existing buildings for other purposes; and provide more flexibility for small-scale production spaces among other things. For more information from the City’s webpage, click here.

The Zoning for Housing Opportunity amendment will address the City’s housing shortage. The proposed amendment will increase opportunities to use different housing models, including two-family houses, accessory dwelling units, small apartment buildings, and shared housing models. The amendment will also expand opportunities to build affordable and supportive housing and reduce certain parking requirements. The amendment will also make it easier to convert obsolete buildings into housing and make it easier for home and property owners to alter and update their buildings. For more information from the City’s webpage, click here.

 

After the floods, home insurance premiums rise above sea level

THE CITY

 Premiums will be going up for most of the 53,000 New York City property owners covered by the federal flood insurance system, government stats reviewed by THE CITY show.

The National Flood Insurance Program rates that took effect Oct. 1 for new policyholders — and will hit in April for existing ones — have homeowners like Brooklyn’s Carly Baker-Rice facing new stress, on top of the toll of recent storms.

Baker-Rice and her husband bought their house in Red Hook last June in a move from Fort Greene, even though they predicted they’d eventually be “up to their knees in sewage” due to flooding in their new place, she said.

Just over a year into homeownership, that happened sooner than she thought. In August, Tropical Storm Henri flooded their basement and on Sept. 1, the deadly remnants of Hurricane Ida sent water splashing in through the front door.

Baker-Rice is still dealing with the damage and waiting for her insurance claims to go through — and she hasn’t been able to obtain a quote from her broker yet about how a new federal flood insurance policy might make her premium go up.

 “It makes my heart race, and I’m already somewhat crippled by the amount of stress that I’ve been under for the last month,” said Baker-Rice, 38, who works as a corporate training consultant. “It’s incredibly frightening to not know what it’s going to go up by, knowing what some of the existing rates out there are.”

Prices will go up for at least 62% of flood insurance policies in New York City. More than 53,000 properties, including 19,440 single-family homes, are insured by FEMA’s program in the five boroughs, an analysis by THE CITY found. Nationally, more homeowners will be taking bigger hits: FEMA estimates 75% will see increases, which could be as much as 18% per year.

In the city’s 10 poorest ZIP codes, 38% of premiums will increase and 62% will decrease. The figures are roughly the same for the city’s 10 wealthiest ZIP codes.

Due for an increase: about 75% of covered properties in Queens, 65% in Brooklyn, 59% in Staten Island, 46% in The Bronx and 43% in Manhattan.

 

Ida homeowner victims getting desperate and organized

Three weeks after the remnants of Hurricane Ida unleashed torrential rains that wrecked portions of their homes, a group of Queens homeowners are accusing the city of failing to address decades-long complaints about flooding issues that have rendered their properties worthless.

On Tuesday, roughly 20 homeowners who live on three blocks in a low-lying section of Hollis assembled a protest in front of Queens Borough Hall. They argued that climate change, coupled with the marshy environment of southeast Queens, had created a massive infrastructure challenge that demands higher expertise in the form of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Even then, they conceded, their problems with flooding dates back decades and may ultimately not be solvable through even the best engineering fixes. In 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed nearly $2 billion in sewer improvements to alleviate flooding in southeast Queens. But many homeowners were skeptical of how long it would be before they felt the impact of those ongoing projects. One by one, they took turns telling horror stories of water damage they had suffered over the years. When it rains, neighbors collectively rush outside to clear the gutters. Most own their own sump pumps.

"If they can't fix it, buy out the homeowners. I don't think anybody would have a problem with that," said Amit Shivprasad, whose family owns a home on 183rd Street near 90th Avenue where two tenants, a woman and her son, drowned in the basement.

A buyout would not be unprecedented. In 2013, following Hurricane Sandy, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a program to buy out flood-prone homes, mostly in Staten Island. The state has gone on to spend $655 million in federal relief aid to buy more than 600 homes.

Shivprasad said part of the cost of owning homes vulnerable to flooding is the constant stress.

"You cannot go on a vacation. You cannot sleep at night when it rains. This is how sad it has become," he said.

Current mayor and Senate Majority Leader attend impromptu West Indian Day parade for NYC's ruling class, then go to Woodside to survey flood damages to homes later on

NY Post
 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave Mayor Bill de Blasio a pass for failing to warn New Yorkers about the fatal storm that lashed the city last week — preferring to pin the blame on climate change — but her Queens constituents slammed Hizzoner and other city officials for their lack of preparedness.

“I don’t blame climate change, I blame the mayor,” Danette Rivera, 47, told The Post outside her Woodside home Monday morning after de Blasio, AOC, Sen. Charles Schumer and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell toured her block.

“There was absolutely no warning. I wasn’t expecting water from my own drain to be the one that’s going to kill me,” Rivera said, her voice shaking with emotion.

Rivera’s arms and stomach were still bruised from when her son had to yank her out through a basement window as it filled with water that bubbled up from her drains Wednesday night.

“This is a nightmare. A disaster,” Rivera said, noting that her home also flooded in 2008. She said city officials told her at the time that they’d make sure it never happened again.

“Fix the sewer system,” fumed Rivera’s neighbor, Julia Nieves, 77.

“The catch basins don’t get cleaned often enough. The last time I saw them cleaned was five years ago,” Nieves, a retired Off Track Betting clerk, told The Post from her Woodside basement where the paneling had been ripped off to reveal spots of black mold. 

 NY Post  

Mayor Bill de Blasio and a slew of local politicians marched in a scaled down, discreetly organized version of the West Indian Day Parade Monday — infuriating locals who thought the annual Labor Day blowout was scrapped entirely following Hizzoner’s announcement last week.

The parade kicked off at 9 a.m. in Crown Heights and lasted about an hour — featuring two floats with DJs pumping out music, dozens of dignitaries and more than 500 flag-toting marchers and colorfully dressed revelers.

Some parade perennials — like Terry Owens — were outraged that a smaller celebration of West Indian culture took place even after de Blasio nixed the parade altogether for the second straight year due to COVID-19 concerns.

“I am disappointed because I brought my family up here that wanted to see it. They came all the way from Alabama,” Owens, 59, griped, adding that he just happened upon the parade while out for a walk.

“It makes me angry, too, because they could have been out here. They are home sleeping,” Owens continued. “I come every year. I was talking about it and I wanted them to come see it. I said, ‘You all need to come,’ so I was looking forward to coming. I kept asking, I kept hearing, ‘No, it’s canceled, it’s canceled,’ so I am doing my morning walk and I saw it and I said, ‘Wow, it’s here.’”

 

A year after the sludge deluge, city still leaves South Ozone Park homeowners hanging out to dry

Mayor de Blasio and NYC's First Lady will only pay less than $9,000 in property taxes for their two homes next year

Patch

 A sneak peek at Mayor Bill de Blasio's anticipated property taxes next year has hizzoner's online critics wondering: "How is it that @NYCMayor only pays $4493.33 on a $1.76 Million dollar Park Slope home, when other NY'ers are taxed through the roof?" 

Twitter user @odonnell_r posed this question along with a photo of de Blasio's and his wife Chirlane McCray's notice of property tax for their 11th Street property. The Jan. 15 notice and the amount has been confirmed by Patch through public Department of Finance record


But it doesn't tell the whole story — a twisty tale of multiple homes and New York City's antiquated tax system that many, including the mayor himself, have criticized as unfair and due for change.

For one, it's not de Blasio's and McCray's only high-dollar Park Slope property on 11th Street — they own a $1.88 million home also with an estimated $4,493.33 in upcoming taxes.
That's about $9,000 in expected taxes on just shy of $4 million worth of property, for the math-averse.

It's not a secret de Blasio and McCray own homes in Park Slope. The houses gained attention in 2017 when one went up for rent to nonsmokers without pets at $1,825 a month, Politico reported.

The homes' taxes at that time about $3,600 each, according to records.

So when the mayor received notices dated Jan. 15, 2020 about his expected upcoming property taxes he actually learned his taxes would go up.


Several Twitter users expressed surprise at de Blasio's taxes.

"I pay 4900 for my home in Staten Island , it's worth is about 550,000. How does he do it," wrote @Joeyjoe15090312.

"I pay double that on an attached house in queens. Doubled since this fool took office. This has to change and fast," wrote @Onivasa316.

de Blasio sent homeless families to live in squalid homes in New Jersey that were run by slumlords

NY Post

Homeless New Yorkers moved to New Jersey under a controversial city program were left living in squalor at the mercy of exploitative landlords, a damning new report from the Department of Investigation says.

It’s the latest blow suffered by City Hall’s controversial Special One-Time Assistance program, which provides families in New York’s maligned shelter system a year’s worth of rent if they relocate outside of the five boroughs.
“The SOTA program was designed to help New York families break the cycle of homelessness and set them on the path to achieve stable, affordable housing,” said DOI Commissioner Margaret Garnett. 

“However, DOI’s investigation has found the promise of the program is not being fulfilled.
“Instead, because of a lack of proper oversight and poorly designed paperwork, our investigation showed some SOTA families placed in housing outside of New York City were living in squalor under the roofs of unscrupulous landlords.”
The laundry list of hardships SOTA participants found themselves facing suggests some went from the frying pan to the fire.
One apartment’s temperature was a chilly 42.6 degrees thanks to a defective boiler.
Another home was infested with insects and vermin — and also lacked heat.
A third property was deemed suitable despite having 52 open violations in 2018.
But the owners of those properties, the report found, “collected tens-of-thousands of dollars in rental payments upfront from the City to provide these sub-par conditions with little risk of accountability for their actions.”

The de Blasio administration has spent $89 million since the SOTA program’s inception to relocate roughly 5,000 families, according to an investigation published by the New York Post in October. Nearly 1,200 of the families landed in Newark, which is New Jersey’s largest city and among its poorest.
Officials in the city filed a lawsuit in federal court there Monday, accusing New York City Hall of dumping the Big Apple’s homeless on the other side of the Hudson River and asking a court to stop the practice.

Developers are using racism to eradicate home ownership (but not how you would expect)

NYC Gentrification Watch


You know, just as I think that Big Development couldn’t sink any lower, along comes an even worse new low. It’s the type of low that has me now certain that there has got to be a Big Development think tank cooking up talking points and then disseminating them to dopes in the media too dumb to question what they’re told and too eager to virtue signal what wonderful progressives they are.

There’s no question in my mind that this is what’s happening now when it comes to gentrification. I say that because funny how every so often, a talking point having absolutely no basis in reality will seem to have popped up out nowhere and get repeated among several media and social media outlets.

Especially interesting about it is how it never has any clear origins. It’s just this mysterious thing that emerged out of the blue one day, yet keeps getting stated as if it’s this long established, self-evident, indisputable fact that everyone has known for ages.

Take this talking point, for example–single-family houses/single-family house zoning is racist against blacks and therefore should be eliminated for their benefit. This is one that’s been been picking up steam over the past 4-5 years, to the point where now it’s spurring legislation. As of 2018, municipalities across the country have begun pushing for or have actually gone ahead with banning single-family housing in an attempt to “free” po’ black folks from the racial oppression that is single-family home ownership.

Try to do research on where this talking point originated and like every other suspicious talking point of unknown origins, there isn’t a specific person or entity we can trace it back to. It’s as if it came out of thin air just a few years ago. But of course it’s as if it came out of thin air.  The reason why is that this “single-family houses are racist” talking point is bullshit–Grade A, top of the line nonsense that was cooked up and then surreptitiously disseminated to the public, courtesy of useful idiots in social and mass media. But before I expose this cynically crafted talking point for the manure that it is, let’s play Devil’s Advocate by explaining the “logic” behind it.

The logic is that single-family houses and single-family house zoning were invented as a form of racist segregation. For example, say the racist white guard in the town of Shelbyville are getting nervous that blacks are beginning to move into middle class, lily white neighborhoods. How to keep the darkies in their place? No problem-o: zone the areas you want to “keep white” by designating certain areas of Shelbyville as exclusively single-family house zones. The idea is that since houses are too cost-prohibitive for blacks but affordable to whites, they will have no choice but to live in segregated neighborhoods outside of these zones.

How do we know that single-family housing is racist? Why, look at the decades of redlining against blacks when they tried buying houses! Look at the decades of all sorts of other chicanery designed to prevent blacks from owning property! Isn’t that more proof than you need that single-family house zones are racist and need to be abolished? Hell, they’re so racist, let’s not even call them “single-family house zones” anymore. Call them what they really are–exclusionary zoning. So, let’s save black people from exclusionary zoning. Let’s get rid of single-family house zones today!

Sounds logical, doesn’t it? Except there’s a problem. The problem is that it’s based on a gross oversimplification of the complex relationship between housing and racism in the United States. It’s about as dumb as claiming that trees are racist because blacks used to be lynched from them.

The city will pay for sidewalk damage caused by full grown trees

Eyewitness News


New York City officials are getting at the root of the problem when it comes to cracked sidewalks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that the city will now pick up the tab to repair sidewalks damaged by city-owned trees, and the city will also ramp up sidewalk repairs under the "Trees and Sidewalks" program to address 5,500 priority sites over the next three years.

Previously, homeowners were responsible for fixing the damage under threat of fines.

"We're not just fixing broken sidewalks, we're fixing a broken system," de Blasio said. "We tripled funding for tree related sidewalk repair, but homeowners were still on the hook for problems they didn't create. As a homeowner, I know how frustrating that is. Now, if a street tree causes damage, we're taking care of it."
 

The city will stop imposing liens on one-, two- and three-family properties that have sidewalk damage caused solely by city trees, and while the DOT and the Parks Department will still inspect for dangerous sidewalk conditions, the city -- not the homeowner -- will be responsible for fixing them if they are exclusively tree related.

After judge's decision, the city is still trying to disenfranchise Brooklyn homeowners

Kings County Politics

With millions of dollars of intergenerational black and brown community wealth on the line, the city argued in federal court filings yesterday, that its Third Party Transfer (TPT) program passes U.S. Constitution muster, and that property owners who have had their fully paid off properties taken with no compensation should be denied recourse in their effort to certify a class action lawsuit.

Under the TPT program – the subject of an ongoing KCP investigative series – the city seizes properties they deem “distressed,” and give them to the public/private non-profit Neighborhood Restore, who in turn give the property for a nominal fee to a qualified non-profit or for-profit developer. The program was created in the late 1970s, when the city had a large number of abandoned and neglected buildings.

However, with gentrification, these properties, and others in the same program, are now worth millions of dollars in market value. Almost all were completely paid for with no mortgage and located in traditionally black and brown neighborhoods, which are becoming increasingly gentrified.

In early March, three of the property owners, McConnell Dorce, Cecilia Jones and Sherlivia Thomas-Murchinson, filed papers in the U.S. Southern District of New York Federal District Court alleging their properties were unconstitutionally confiscated under the in rem foreclosure process.
Their filing was to seek certification to pursue a class action lawsuit, which if successful, could cost the city tens of millions of dollars and the return of dozens of property.

 Their suit was bolstered in late March, when Kings County Supreme Court Judge Mark Partnow ordered the city to give six Central Brooklyn property owners their property back, restoring millions of dollars of intergenerational wealth in the black and Latino community.

Another report on how unaffordable it is to buy a home in New York City

Patch

Many New Yorkers may dream of buying a home, whether it's a Brooklyn Heights brownstone or an almost suburban house in eastern Queens. But a new report suggests housing is unaffordable for the typical worker in all five boroughs.

In the report published Thursday, ATTOM Data Solutions crunched housing and wage numbers for 473 of the nation's more than 3,000 counties nationwide. It determined affordability by assuming a 28 percent maximum "front-end" debt-to-income ratio. That means a buyer purchasing an affordable home would not be spending more than 28 percent of their income on house payments including insurance, mortgage and property taxes.

Every New York City borough is considered unaffordable, meaning median home prices in the first quarter of this year were too expensive for average wage earners. That was the case in 71 percent of the counties that were analyzed.

 The city's highest shares of income needed to purchase a median home were seen in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where a buyer needs 115.9 and 115 percent of the average annual earnings, respectively, the report shows.

Things weren't as bad — though still pretty dismal — on Staten Island, where the costs of buying a home eats up 72.4 percent of the average annual wages of $51,337, according to the report.


ATTOM's affordability index took median home prices from public sales deed data. Average wage figures came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In all, 231 million people live in the counties analyzed by the company.

 Here's what the researchers found for each New York City borough.
Manhattan

• Affordability index (Under 100 is less affordable than historic average): 76
• Median sales price: $1,862,500
• Year over year annualized wage growth: 6.8 percent
• Year over year median home price growth: 33 percent

Brooklyn

• Affordability index (Under 100 is less affordable than historic average): 92
• Median sales price: $760,000
• Year over year annualized wage growth: 5.8 percent
• Year over year median home price growth: 0 percent

Queens

• Affordability index (Under 100 is less affordable than historic average): 91
• Median sales price: $630,000
• Year over year annualized wage growth: 6.9 percent
• Year over year median home price growth: 7.7 percent

The Bronx

• Affordability index (Under 100 is less affordable than historic average): 91
• Median sales price: $445,000
• Year over year annualized wage growth: 5.7 percent
• Year over year median home price growth: 11 percent

Staten Island

• Affordability index (Under 100 is less affordable than historic average): 101
• Median sales price: $490,000
• Year over year annualized wage growth: 7.3 percent
• Year over year median home price growth: 1 percent