From the Wall Street Journal:
Bill de Blasio has risen to the top of the polls assailing the Bloomberg administration, but if elected he could pursue even more aggressive policies than his predecessor on a crucial issue: creating densely packed new residential towers through land-use decisions.
Mr. de Blasio, the city's public advocate, would push for mandatory affordable housing and fewer tax breaks for developers. But he wouldn't differ from Mr. Bloomberg on a fundamental premise that building significant amounts of new housing is a top way to spur economic growth and control housing costs.
Mr. de Blasio's pro-development policies have helped allay fears in the real-estate industry that perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the race would, as mayor, be a fearsome opponent on big developments.
For some, however, Mr. de Blasio's support for new high-rise towers—even with more affordable housing—is dissonant with his campaign's theme of easing income inequality. As a City Council member in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio was a strong supporter of the three major Bloomberg-backed development projects, including the project known as Atlantic Yards, which critics say has hastened gentrification and helped deepen the economic divide in that area.
Some liberal community groups said they feel betrayed. "The whole thing is a joke to us that people are looking at this guy as if he cares about the community," said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a group that pushed to get the Gowanus Canal designated a Superfund site—a goal Mr. de Blasio unsuccessfully opposed. "I don't find any step of the way that he's actually been on our side here."
Mr. de Blasio has met with developers, and his campaign has received some $460,000 in contributions from real-estate interests, including developers, brokers, architects and construction firms, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
From New York Magazine:
Democratic mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio has styled himself as a scourge of slumlords and a critic of the Bloomberg administration’s policies to shelter the homeless, assailing the “failure of the strategy” in his first policy statement as public advocate. But at a time when he was considered a long-shot candidate, De Blasio found financial support from an unlikely source: one of his most frequent targets, a former Bloomberg administration official who now runs a network of homeless shelters leased from some of the city’s most notorious landlords.
During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to De Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards. (See the full list at the bottom.) Most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels and slum apartment buildings that operate as shelters under the aegis of Housing Solutions USA, run by Robert Hess, formerly Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of homeless services. Though Hess’s organization is a nonprofit, the landlords he works with have reaped millions in public funds by turning their rundown properties into shelters, collecting sky-high rents from the city.
Hess has contributed just $400 to De Blasio, the maximum that campaign-finance law allows for contractors doing business with the city, but in May 2012 he held an intimate fund-raiser for the candidate at his Long Island City apartment. Among the handful of attendees were two hotel landlords who gave generously to De Blasio's campaign, including Alan Lapes, one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.
Hess declined to comment on the event when reached by phone yesterday. “That’s a personal matter,” he said. But other attendees described an informal living-room dialogue about De Blasio’s campaign and his plans to care for the city’s homeless population, which has risen to record levels under Bloomberg. Providing shelter beds can be lucrative for landlords — the city typically pays rents of more than $3,000 a month — and one attendee recalls that, prior to the event, Lapes was frank about his reasons for giving. “This is the guy who is going to win,” he recalls Lapes saying. “This is the guy to bet on.”
In February, after the Times reported that Lapes had exploited an obscure loophole in the city’s campaign-finance rules to give De Blasio twice the legal limit, the candidate returned nearly $15,000 in donations from the landlord and his wife. “I’ve just made the decision to return the money, and that’s all I have to say,” he told the Post. But the broader pattern of giving — which ramped up as Housing Solutions USA, formed only in 2011, was pressing forward with controversial multi-million-dollar city shelter contracts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx — has not previously been reported.
