Horses may be moved to Central Park

From the Daily News:

The city is close to a deal with the horse carriage industry that would permanently move their stables inside Central Park — and could have a City Council hearing on the proposal as early as Friday, multiple sources told the Daily News.

Reps for Mayor de Blasio have been in meetings over the past few days with the Teamsters, the union that reps the drivers, according to the sources.

The city has agreed to pay to build new stables in Central Park as part of the plan to move the horses — who currently live in stables in Hell’s Kitchen — off the city streets.

The Teamsters also want the city to give buyouts to the drivers who will lose their job because of the move to Central Park, which won’t be able to accommodate the current number of 220 horses, the sources said.

The city has not agreed to buyouts, according to the sources.

The new bill calls for licensing 68 carriages and 75 horses to operate in Central Park. Those carriages will be in place by October 2018, sources said.

How convenient that this will free up valuable real estate on the west side!

Stopping harassment of tenants

From the NY Times:

Buyouts have long been part of the city’s real estate lore, complete with only-in-New York stories of tenants who made millions relinquishing apartments they did not own. But as offers have become more common at the lower end of the ravenous housing market, buyouts have become instruments of illegal harassment and a growing threat to the stock of affordable housing, tenant groups and housing officials said.

In fast-changing neighborhoods, like Chinatown and East Harlem in Manhattan and the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, offers are often anything but amicable and rarely are generous enough to help tenants settle elsewhere in the city, they said.

Richard R. White, who leads the state’s Tenant Protection Unit, said some landlords failed to make repairs, declined to cash rent checks or threatened illegal evictions “to force tenants to accept what are often unconscionably meager buyouts.”

Helen Rosenthal, a councilwoman from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who is sponsoring a bill to allow tenants to collect compensatory and punitive damages from landlords for harassment, said landlords’ motive for pushing out tenants was obvious. “They can make a killing in the market,” she said.