Bill de Blasio's last "affordable housing" commissioner makes 17 million dollar profit selling her townhouse

 

NY Post

Now that’s an investment!

Vicki Been, de Blasio’s ex-deputy mayor for housing and economic development and a former commissioner of NYC’s department of housing preservation and development, and her husband, NYU’s Richard Revesz, have quietly sold their ultra-posh West Village townhouse for a whopping $18.8 million, The Post has learned.

“We needed to downsize, and of course we are staying in New York City,” Been said.

The townhouse, at 230 W. 11th St., is on the West Village’s gold coast, which has become downtown’s Billionaires’ Row, as The Post previously reported. It was an off-market deal. The power couple initially bought the stunning townhouse from NYU’s School of Law Foundation for a mere $1.88 million in 2002.

They’ve stayed tight with NYU ever since. While Been will no longer be working for the city, she said that she will be at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, where she is currently listed on its website as faculty director.

Paul Graziano calls out Deputy Mayor Vicki Been during protest against Planning Together

  

The Village Sun

  Activists slammed Corey Johnson’s long-range planning bill as a “Trojan horse” for developers at a rally outside City Hall on Tuesday.

The temperature was freezing but passions were heated as speaker after speaker blasted the bill, Intro 2186, the City Council speaker and Mayor de Blasio at the press conference, organized by the Citywide People’s Land Use Alliance.

They derided the 10-year comprehensive planning initiative as “top-down” and “one-size-fits all.” They charged that it would cut the community out of the process and legally empower an unaccountable “director” to ram through district planning schemes — if necessary, over the objections of community boards and local councilmembers.

Most chilling to them was the fact that Intro 2186 would force mandatory upzonings every decade for every single community board in the city — in short, codifying an unstoppable development juggernaut.

Dozens of organizations supported the rally, from East River Park Action, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, the Soho Alliance and the Seaport Coalition to Preserve BAM’s Historic District, Voice of Gowanus, Inwood Preservation and Stop Sunnyside Yards.

Alicia Boyd of the Movement to Protect the People, which is fighting a development project that threatens the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said the citywide plan is being spun as something that will help low-income black and brown people, when, in reality, it will mainly lead to an explosion of luxury development.

“This bill is being presented as an equalizer,” she railed. “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is a failure. It’s a Trojan horse! This is not an anti-racist plan. This is not an anti-displacement plan. This is a displacement plan. We are tired of the scams [about] affordable housing.”

Paul Graziano, a Queens native and planning consultant, has played a role in helping contextually rezone much of Queens to keep overdevelopment in check.

“It’s been three months since Corey Johnson dropped this bombshell,” he told the rally. “This bill is not a comprehensive planning bill. It’s a comprehensive overdevelopment bill. It’s a comprehensive real estate bill. I have gone through this bill with a fine-tooth comb.”

In short, Graziano said, rezonings make the “speculative value” of property go up.

The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing included in the rezonings is a “scam,” he said.

“M.I.H. has not worked,” he said, “because there is no deep affordability. And it’s set up as a real estate program.”

 Graziano blasted Vicki Been, de Blasio’s deputy mayor of housing and economic development, calling her the engineer of the current upzonings. He said a report Been headed at New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has been used “to justify upzonings for the last eight years.”

“Eighty percent of her data is wrong,” Graziano said. “You’ve got this administration running this phony agenda and you’ve got “Planning Together” looking to lock it in for 10 years. This horrendous bill…will lock it in.

“Planning Together” is a report, released in December, on which Intro 2186 was based.

 

REBNY and the City wants to turn your neighborhood hotel into a cheap substitute for "affordable housing"...

...but probably not this one

THE CITY

 City officials are looking to capitalize on a distressed tourism industry by converting commercial hotels into affordable housing — including creating single room occupancy units known as SROs.

The exploration of cheaper alternatives for affordable housing and supportive housing — offering health care and social services for people with mental illness or substance abuse disorders — comes as the city struggles to overcome a fiscal crisis prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The effort, which also comes as thousands of homeless people are staying in hotels, highlights just how hard a near-halt in business travel and tourism is slamming New York City.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing a tremendous hit to our hotels because of the reduction in tourism, because of the lack of travel — and hopefully most of that will come back. But some of it may not,” Vicki Been, deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said this week during an online roundtable on economic development hosted by the Real Estate Board of New York and the law firm Greenberg Traurig. 

...and probably (and definitely) not this one either

 

“So we’ve been looking hard at — are there hotels that we could acquire to turn into supportive housing rather than having to build from ground up?” she added. “We’re looking both at, are there assets that we own that we can make available to affordable housing or other needs — and are there private market buildings that we could acquire to convert into affordable housing at a cheaper cost.”

Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Louise Carroll, who also participated in the event, said hotels are also under consideration for a shared housing model — which includes SRO-like units that have common areas for residents.

The agency has been testing shared and co-living spaces as affordable housing since 2018.

“Maybe hotels are good for rehab in that way,” Carroll said of SROs.