Donnie and the City Of Yes gets fed their brunch

Today, I testified before the Queens Borough President to make it clear that I am totally opposed to the City of Yes Housing Opportunity proposal. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/2WMeFNnwb2

— Robert Holden (@BobHoldenNYC) August 8, 2024

Donnie Rich made sure an elected official would not be seen making a case against the most dangerous housing plan ever concocted in New York City. But the woman here made the most of her opportunity to describe what a obligatory ruse this hearing was and what these officials are.

I listened to the ⁦@QnsBPRichards⁩’ public hearing today for the City of Yes. A solid 80%+ speakers are opposed to this plan. I hope ⁦@NYCMayor⁩ ⁦@NYCCouncil⁩ ⁦⁦@NYCPlanning⁩ are taking note and reading the room.#NoToCityOfYes pic.twitter.com/rrwZprVvU4

— Jean (@queens_parents) August 8, 2024

City Of Yes time again

That process is running through Queens this week, as my office will be hosting a public hearing on City of Yes for Housing Opportunity on Thursday at 10am at Borough Hall — all are welcome to come testify.

You can also testify via Zoom by clicking here: https://t.co/UQaGWeFruj https://t.co/ehfQ1BvSF7

— Queens Borough President Donovan Richards (@QnsBPRichards) August 5, 2024

QBP Donnie Richards (and all the yimby moles in his staff) decided to have his City of Yes public hearing at 10 a.m. when most of his constituents who are homeonwers like him will be at work. But you can make it on zoom via this link. Hope it gets lit up like the last one with NYC Planing Dirty Dan Garodnick. Maybe Don will allow clapping at this one.

City Of No Vouchers

NY Post 

 A Manhattan judge handed the Adams administration a major win on Thursday in its bitter feud with the City Council over controversial changes to a housing voucher program.

Mayor Eric Adams had vetoed the council’s expansion of the city’s rental-assistance program called CityFHEPS that would’ve fast tracked vouchers for tenants facing eviction — but lawmakers overrode the veto, then took him to court in an effort to force him to comply with the expansion.

But Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Lyle E. Frank ruled only the state government has the authority to expand the voucher program in a ruling that Adams celebrated.

 “While we are glad that the court agrees with our administration that these laws went beyond the City Council’s legislative authority, we are hopeful that our partners in the Council will join us in remaining committed to working to connect New Yorkers in need with safe, affordable, permanent housing,” Adams said in a written statement.

The City Council members disagree with the ruling and are planning an immediate appeal, a spokesperson said in a statement.

“It’s unfortunate that Mayor Adams’ administration has fought to delay help to New Yorkers that can prevent them from evictions and homelessness amidst a housing crisis,” the spokesperson said.

Lawmakers joined a class action lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society and four other plaintiffs back in February that would have forced Adams to comply with the expanded CityFHEPS.

The new law would have made housing vouchers available for people facing eviction without having to enter the shelter system for at least 90 days, and it would have increased the income-level cutoffs to qualify for aid while barring landlords from deducting the cost of utility bills from a voucher.

BP Richards Creedmoor of Yes gets resistance.

  

Queens Chronicle

Seventeen Eastern Queens civic leaders reiterated their opposition to the state’s redevelopment plan for much of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center property last week after Borough President Donovan Richards touted it as a “community-led effort” in a newsletter.

Area civic groups oppose the plan because, they say, it will be too dense for the region, with buildings that are too tall and lack adequate parking, and that it will be too great a strain on existing infrastructure including roads and sewers.

Richards, who regularly speaks of the need for more housing in Queens and touts the projects slated to produce it, included an item headlined “A New Day is Dawning at Creedmoor” in a newsletter his office said was mailed to tens of thousands of homes across Queens last week. The missive was timed to follow his April 12 State of the Borough address.

“The largest community development project in the history of Eastern Queens is on the horizon in the form of Borough President Richards and Empire State Development’s draft Creedmoor Community Master Plan,” the piece says. “The community-led effort aims to redevelop 50 vacant acres of state land through the creation of more than 2,000 units of housing, with 55 percent being designated for homeownership.”

Empire State Development, the agency planning the project, has proposed 2,873 units of housing on 58 acres of the Creedmoor campus. The plan includes 813 elevator co-ops in buildings of six to eight stories, 536 walk-up co-ops in buildings of three to four stories, 186 triplexes in three-story structures and 98 semidetached two-family homes of two stories. There would be 377 senior homes, 431 supportive housing units and 432 apartments deemed affordable and granted by lottery, in buildings of six to eight stories.

The civic leaders said in a letter emailed to Richards on April 19 that they object to his calling the project “community-led,” since area neighborhood organizations do not support the plan and saw their own proposals for the property overridden.

They want a maximum of 1,000 units of two to three stories, and note that Community Board 13 passed a resolution to that effect.

“The plan by Empire State Development is not acceptable,” the civics’ letter says. “The layout is primarily four story, six story and eight story buildings, which are not compatible with our communities. In fact, except for one six story apartment building at 259th Street you will not find anything on the Hillside Avenue corridor from Winchester Boulevard to the city line higher than two stories.”

 

Frank Lloyd Crap 101

  Welcome to our newest neighbors on 101st ave.

 

This attempt at brutalism architecture is in Ozone Park on 92nd St. and it's also on the NYC Housing connect program.

 

              

I really don't know what these amenities are supposed to be. They appear to be patio lounge areas. 

   

 

The developer must have really liked the sliding door theme, the cages in front of them kind of looks like an afterthought. 

The commercial spaces would be hard to see, which makes these perfect for unlicensed and unregistered weed and ebike shops.

50 blocks away in South Jamaica, we have this stylish mixed used behemoth. It even has the checkerboard/Purina cat food design aesthetic.This previously was a building materials shop that got destroyed in a massive fire a few years ago. Still unsolved but I bet it involved a lithium ion battery being charged.

 

 

The building is more garage than residential. 

This mammoth mixed use cube annexed whatever space and natural light the next house once had.

No matter how much they deny it, the city of yes was always with us. 

Migrants hoodwinked by hotel shelter worker realty hustle

 

THE CITY 

Around a dozen migrant families desperate to move out of a Staten Island shelter said they were scammed out of thousands of dollars by an employee of the shelter, who promised them leases and furniture in newly renovated apartments, THE CITY has learned. 

The employee was fired after “serious allegations and evidence of dishonest and fraudulent activities” came to the hotel’s attention, according to a letter posted inside the Holiday Inn Express and dated Oct. 2 that identifies the employee as Cythia Guevara Rodriguez. 

THE CITY interviewed more than a dozen shelter residents who said they fell victim to Rodriguez and also reviewed the fake leases they signed, screenshots of Zelle transfers and messages they exchanged on WhatsApp and Facebook with Guevara that show  families willing to do anything to move out of a shelter and into apartments of their own doing business with someone who appeared ready to capitalize on their desperation. 

The situation at the Holiday Inn Express highlights the troubles faced by migrants families in shelters as they try to find places of their own before the city potentially puts them on a clock to move out. 

She played with the emotions of our children. Our children were so excited, they thought they were going to get out of here,” said Jennifer, 41, a Venezuelan mother to a one-year-old who asked her last name be withheld. She and another couple said they’d paid Guevara $1,700 in a series of cash and Zelle payments, and were expecting to move together into a house with a parking spot on Elverton Avenue in Great Kills on Oct. 16. 

“I can’t sleep thinking, ‘what happened actually happened,’” she said in Spanish. “It won’t leave my mind.”

Guevara, for her part, denies the allegations, telling THE CITY on Thursday that she’d taken money from two families and had intended to get them apartments through Craigslist but she hadn’t been able to find them yet. 

“They were impatient,” she said, adding that “they’re gonna get their money back.” 

Others, she said, must have made photocopies of leases and were fabricating additional allegations against her. 

“A lot of people right now what they’re doing is trying to gang up on me,” she said. “They’re just trying to make it, you know, worse than it is.”

Jaclyn Stoll, a spokesperson for Project Hospitality, the nonprofit with a $5.3 million contract to run the Holiday Inn Express migrant shelter, said Guevara was not an employee of the nonprofit and declined to comment while an investigation was pending. She deferred further comment to the city’s Department of Homeless Services or DHS. 

“It is unconscionable that any individual would attempt to exploit vulnerable families for material gain. Whenever we learn of an incident that puts the wellbeing of our clients at risk, we work with our not-for-profit provider partners to immediately investigate the situation and take swift and appropriate action to address the issue at hand, said Nicholas Jacobelli, a spokesperson for DHS.

“We serve incredibly vulnerable populations, and we expect all those who interact with our clients to treat them with dignity and respect.”

Hochul and Adams State and City Of Yes housing plans focus on basements, suburb towers and office buildings

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 NY Daily News

Suburbs would have to step up their development game under Gov. Hochul’s plan to build 800,000 new units of housing across the state in the coming years.

To confront the state’s housing crisis, Hochul proposed in her State of the State address Tuesday a plan dubbed the “New York Housing Compact,” which will require every town, city and village in the state to set a target number of new homes to create over a three-year period.

 The governor specifically called out suburban communities surrounding New York City for limiting building in recent decades and said in her address that the state is ready to step in.

“Local governments can meet these targets any way they want,” she said. “They can shape building capacity. They can redevelop old malls or buildings, office parks, incentivize new housing production or just update the zoning rules to reduce the barriers.”

However, she added, if communities “have not made good-faith efforts to grow when proposed housing projects are languishing for no legitimate reason, the state will implement a fast-track approval process.”

That “fast-track” course would allow housing proposals that are denied locally to go to a “state housing approval board” or the courts.

The downstate area, including Westchester, Putnam and both Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, would be required to grow their housing stocks by 3% every three years.

Upstate towns would have to meet a target of 1% growth every three years. Hochul noted that New York in recent years has trailed other states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, when it comes building housing.

The governor also wants to see more multi-residence projects near MTA subway and train stations. The plan requires municipalities with MTA rail stations to rezone areas within half a mile of a station to allow for at least 25 homes per acre.

The proposal includes $250 million for infrastructure to accommodate the increased density including sewers, schools and road work. It also calls for an expedited environmental review process for rezonings.

“Today, we say no more delay. No more waiting for someone else to fix this problem. Housing is a human right,” Hochul said. “Ensuring enough housing is built is how we protect that right.”

Suburban legislators were largely quiet about Hochul’s proposals on Tuesday.

History shows they might be a heavy political lift — suburban politicians have traditionally complained about state laws that would require them to allow more housing.

Griping by suburban politicians forced Hochul to drop two such ideas from the state budget in 2022, including a plan to encourage housing near train stations similar to her current proposal. The other would have required towns to allow apartments to be built within single-family homes.

In the city, Hochul is seeking a new version of the lapsed property tax abatement plan known as 421-a, which would incentivize the building of affordable housing units. A revamped version of the program failed to make it into the budget last year.

Real estate groups and organizations like Homeowners for An Affordable New York, a landlord-backed group, applauded the governor’s proposals.

“The Governor outlined an ambitious agenda for addressing longstanding inequities in the housing market,” spokesman Andrew Mangini said in a statement. “Housing developers and property owners, both big and small, look forward to engaging in conversations with state lawmakers to ensure fair and equitable solutions to practical issues in housing and real estate.”

Tenant advocates and progressive lawmakers, meanwhile, panned the plan. They said it falls far short of what is needed to address the housing and affordability crisis already facing many New Yorkers.

 NY Daily News

Mayor Adams and top city planning officials released new details around their push to convert underused office space into apartments in the city’s bustling business districts, including a plan that would allow for the rezoning of millions of square feet of space in office buildings.

The blueprint, which Adams and city planners put out through a City Planning Department study, would in part require zoning changes to permit conversions in buildings built prior to 1991.

Currently, such office-to-residential conversions are only allowed in Financial District buildings built in 1977 or before, and buildings in other city

Mayor Adams is not going to tell you shit about his housing plan

 

Politics NY 

Mayor Eric Adams unveiled his plan to address the city’s housing and homelessness crises Tuesday but refused to commit to any clear metrics for the number of affordable housing units that should be built or the number of homeless New Yorkers that should be housed under the plan.

While presenting his ‘Housing Our Neighbors: A Blueprint for Housing and Homelessness” plan on the rooftop of 90 Sands St. – a former Jehovah’s Witnesses owned hotel that was acquired by the city and converted into 400 units of supportive housing – Hizzoner said the plan doesn’t have any target number for how many supportive and affordable housing units his administration aims to build and he wouldn’t take any questions on the subject.

“It’s often asked, ‘how many units you gonna build? How many units you gonna build? how many units you gonna build?’” the mayor said. “If that is one of the on topic questions you are going to ask me, don’t, because I’m not answering that. How many people we gonna put in housing? We need to put people in housing. That’s the focus that we are on."

When asked by a reporter about what Adams would consider a successful number of people to be placed in supportive housing under the plan, he again refused to give a specific number and only said “as many as possible to get into housing.”

“If you say 30,000 and you have 50,000 that are homeless, then what kind of success is that?” I got 20,000 people that are not,” Adams said. “So, I’m not at this magic number. I’m going to get as many people in my four years to get into housing as possible. And I’m not playing these numbers of ‘what is this number?’ No. Everyone needs to find housing. Those are my goals.”

Adams was joined by the city’s Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz, city Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Adolfo Carrión Jr., New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Chair and CEO Gregory Russ and Shams DaBaron – a homeless advocate known as the “Homeless Hero.”

City to homeless familes: pound sand

  

Photo by JQ LLC

THE CITY

Three in four applications by families seeking homeless shelter got rejected last year — the most since the Department of Homeless Services started disclosing numbers a decade ago.

Families and shelter providers describe an arduous eligibility review process that became even more unnavigable during the pandemic. The state’s public assistance agency is seeing a surge in families appealing their rejections — and a record number of cases reversing DHS decisions, ordering the city to provide families with shelter or reevaluate applications.

“The city has made it virtually impossible to get into a family shelter,” said Craig Hughes, a senior social worker at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project.

It took seven attempts for Ms. D and her family to get approved for shelter, which only happened after a lawyer got involved, she told THE CITY.

Ms. D, her fiancé and their 1-year-old daughter had their application repeatedly rejected starting in July because DHS investigators concluded that the family still had housing options available and could return to their previous residence — the home of her soon-to-be mother-in-law, who had already demanded they leave.

“We told them numerous times that the person don’t want us here. The person kicked us out and there were threats involved,” said Ms. D, 27, who asked to remain anonymous. “And they still denied us.”

Like thousands of other families from all five boroughs, the Manhattan couple and their daughter made their way to the Department of Homeless Services’ Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) intake center on 151st Street in The Bronx, where families obtain an emergency placement while their applications are investigated.

From a pool averaging about 2,000 applications a month from families seeking shelter in 2021, just 24% were accepted, according to DHS figures.

After years of hovering between 40% and 50%, the share of applications accepted began to decline during the pandemic, with 34% admitted in an average month during 2020, down from 40% two years ago.

Manhattan penis extension proposal

 

New York Times

On Jan. 1, Eric Adams was sworn in as New York’s 110th mayor. He is now in charge of the city’s response to big, and growing, problems. One is a housing affordability crisis. Another concerns the ravages of climate change: sea level rise, flooding and storm surges.

There is a way to help tackle both issues in one bold policy stroke: expand Manhattan Island into the harbor.

Last September, after witnessing unprecedented flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Mr. Adams said that it was “a real wake-up call to all of us how we must understand how this climate change is impacting us.” This realization should spur him to pursue aggressive measures to mitigate climate change’s devastation.

Both Mayors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg offered climate-change plans that included extending the shoreline along the East River in Lower Manhattan. But these proposals, while admirable, would be small steps and would hardly make a dent with problems of such big scale.

This new proposal offers significant protection against surges while also creating new housing. To do this, it extends Manhattan into New York Harbor by 1,760 acres. This landfill development, like many others in the city’s past, would reshape the southern Manhattan shoreline. We can call the created area New Mannahatta (drawn from the name the Lenape gave to Manhattan).

A neighborhood of that size is bigger than the Upper West Side (Community District 7), which is 1,220 acres. Imagine replicating from scratch a diverse neighborhood that contains housing in all shapes and sizes, from traditional brownstones to five-story apartment buildings to high-rise towers. If New Mannahatta is built with a density and style similar to the Upper West Side’s, it could have nearly 180,000 new housing units.

Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

 

Eric Adams's hotels reset

 

 Bloomberg

Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, called for tens of thousands of shuttered hotel rooms to be turned into housing to ease the city’s housing insecurity.

Adams, speaking at a campaign event on Monday, said the city has a chance to reverse years of bad planning and convert hotels that have become eyesores. The Brooklyn borough president and former cop said he was looking to turn 25,000 rooms into housing, adding that the city should foot much of the bill.

“The combination of Covid-19, the economic downturn, and the problems we're having with housing is presenting us with a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Adams said in remarks outside of the Phoenix Hotel, a vacant property in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. “We can use this moment and find one solution to solve a multitude of problems.”

Adams echoed other recent initiatives to bolster housing security across the U.S. Earlier Monday, Bloomberg CityLab reported that the White House is launching a new national initiative, “House America,” to combat rising homelessness. In August, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that would finance the purchase of distressed hotels and commercial office properties by nonprofits to convert them into affordable housing.

The need for such housing remains urgent in New York City, where more than 45,000 people were being housed in city shelters at last count, and thousands more are grappling with unsheltered homelessness.

The new state law would address, at best, a small slice of Adams’ target of 25,000 units. It sets aside $100 million to help finance building purchases, splitting units evenly between low-income households and people experiencing homelessness. But converting hotels is pricey in New York City. Manhattan hotels sold at a median price of $275,000 per unit in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to data from PWC’s Manhattan Lodging Index. The 100-room Z NYC Hotel in Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood, sold for $384,000 a room in May.

New York's decisions to prioritize upscale real estate development and speculation has led to death and malaise in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic

Association for Neighborhood & Housing and Development


New York City remains the epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic, but its effects are being felt differently across neighborhoods. As ANHD's  previous analysis  shows, this virus is hitting low-income communities of color the hardest. The neighborhoods with the highest range of positive COVID-19 cases in the city are home to communities of color whose residents are disproportionately employed in frontline service occupations and face among the highest rates of rent burden and overcrowding. These communities – the epicenters of the epicenter - are home to the largely invisible workforce that is keeping New York City running in this moment of crisis, and they are the ones who are bearing the brunt of its impacts. Recent data released by the City’s Department of Health shows that Black and Latinx New Yorkers are dying at twice the rate of whites - making clear that this pandemic is not only a public health crisis, but a crisis of racial and economic justice as well.   


Among the host of historic inequities behind the disparate impact of COVID-19, one is particularly striking: the string of hospital closures that took place in these communities over the past few decades. At least 18 hospitals have closed all of their inpatient services in New York City since 1998 - leading to the loss of thousands of hospital beds - with two-thirds of those closures occurring in the outer boroughs. A look at the data shows that the majority of these outer borough hospital closures fell in lower-income communities of color that bear the brunt of the coronavirus crisis today. These community hospitals catered to neighborhood residents, many of whom lack private insurance; the mass closure and downsizing to outpatient services means less access to necessary health services, especially in a time of crisis. Households without health insurance have few options if they get sick, other than visiting the remaining public hospitals, adding to the likelihood of exposure to coronavirus and the further straining of the healthcare system. 

 While community hospitals were being closed in low-income communities of color, hospitals in wealthier sections of the city were being converted into luxury residential buildings, further depleting the city's overall supply of hospital beds. Of the 18 hospitals that closed in the last two decades, over 40% have been replaced by residential developments, most of them with rents or sales prices that are astronomically out of reach for the average New Yorker. At the site of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, where countless poor New Yorkers received care during the AIDS crisis, now stands Greenwich Lane, a luxury condo building. Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, a community medical facility known as America’s first teaching hospital, was replaced by 5 River Park where a studio apartment was recently sold for $1.15 million.

In Queens, the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, the closures of St. John's Hospital, Parkway 
 Hospital, and Mary Immaculate Hospital have led to massive overburdening of nearby medical facilities. Each of the neighborhoods where these hospitals were once located in have some of the highest rates of COVID cases in the city.

 


 The former site of St. John’s Hospital is located just blocks from Elmhurst Hospital - the same hospital that has seen among the most COVID-19-related deaths in the country. What stands in its place now is Queens Pointe, a market-rate apartment building. The former site of Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica - another COVID-19 hotspot - was transformed into a residential development in 2009. Nearby Parkway Hospital, which once served low-income Queens residents, was also torn down to make room for a residential building in 2008.

 

 



 As these hospitals continued to serve poor and uninsured New Yorkers, financial restructuring and an inability to pay their bills contributed to a spate of closures in the late 2000s. The deprioritization of hospital infrastructure and subsequent development of residential - particularly luxury residential buildings - on these former hospital sites is the direct result of the City’s land use decisions. The Bloomberg era saw a pattern of high profile rezonings of both public and private land to facilitate luxury residential development, with few if any public benefits secured in exchange for the enormous value these conversions provided to private real estate developers. The prioritization of profit over community need has left a long-lasting legacy across New York, and communities of color have continued to face the brunt of it through displacement, housing instability, job loss, and health disparities. Communities and advocates have long said that these land use decisions have life and death consequences; we as a city are now forced to reckon with the consequences of those decisions in this moment.

No city for old people

 
City Limits 

Florina, 62, and her husband, who is 63, haven’t paid rent on their rent-regulated Bronx apartment in months.

The husband has not been able to work in 16 years and is blind. Florina does sporadic cleaning work to bring in extra income but is otherwise retired. Neither receives any kind of disability or Social Security benefit, due to their immigration status.

In January of 2019, Florina received a notice saying that her rent would go up by 30 percent, an amount the family couldn’t pay.

The couple are one of a few dozen residents of a building in the Bronx who are now on a rent strike. 

The couple, along with their children and grandchildren, with whom they live, are protesting a Major Capital Improvement – a rent hike on regulated units intended to fund building-wide repairs that they said raises their rent beyond what they can pay. The hike was approved prior to last summer’s rent reforms, which curtailed the practice. They are also protesting deteriorating conditions in their home.

In response, their landlord took the couple to court in an attempt to evict the family. Their hearing has been postponed until March, thanks to the intervention of a lawyer. But Florina and her husband still fear they will be evicted, along with their working age children and young grandchild.

Florina is fortunate, she says, that she lives with children – her son, 39, works at a bakery and her daughter, 30, is a home-health aide. While their combined income does not pay for the increased rent on their apartment, being partially supported by a younger generation is not something all elder New Yorkers have.

Many elder New Yorkers without such family ties and with little retirement savings end up displaced, segregated to an adult home, or worse, shuffled into the city’s homeless shelter system when they become ill.

“Sadly a lot of older, disabled people believe ‘they can’t throw me out into the street’,” says Justin La Mort, a housing lawyer with the group Mobilization for Justice who works with elders. “The bad news is, in fact, they can. It’s just a matter of time.”

The city uses a patchwork of social services and subsidies to keep elders aging in place, but they can be difficult to qualify for and their funds are limited. For those without savings or income from work, federal programs—SSI, SSDI or social security—can come too late and, when they do arrive, may not meet the high cost of rent in New York City. The result is a permanent sense of precarity among the city’s most vulnerable, sometimes culminating in homelessness or displacement.

A lack of retirement savings compounds the problem. According to the commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs, half of New Yorkers 55 and older have no money in traditional retirement accounts. 40 percent of New Yorkers between 50 and 64 have less than $10,000 saved in such accounts. Nationally, 29 percent of adults above 55 have neither a pension nor retirement savings, according to the Government Accountability Office.

This lack of assets can have material effects when older adults face hardships: a recent study from the non-profit Robin Hood looked at material hardship, spurred by housing insecurity, job loss or illness. The study found that 53 percent of New Yorkers experienced such hardship for at least one year in the survey’s four year timespan.

According to the same report, 23 percent of respondents experienced poor health between 2012-2018. The study also found housing subsidies and rent regulations had reduced the poverty rate by 5 percent.

Elders who become disabled suddenly can find themselves in a grey area where social services can’t help them. Awaiting disability benefits, for which they may be rejected, they could find themselves in arrears and face evicted for unpaid rent. Still others who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) may be surprised to learn that their income is less than what they owe in rent but too much to qualify for a city or state subsidies to prevent homelessness. 

As City Limits has reported, the percentage of older adults in New York City’s shelter population is increasing. There is no way to determine how many elders become homeless each day through eviction, as eviction data made public by the city does not include age as a data point. While the number of adults in city shelters who are age 65 and above increased 300 percent between 2004 and 2017, older adults who are evicted don’t always enter shelter. And seniors don’t have to be formally evicted to be displaced by the threat of eviction; if they move out ahead of being uprooted by a marshal, or take a buyout, the result can be the same. Few elders are fortunate enough to find more affordable housing in the city, and some are forced to relocate to other states.

Evictions have been decreasing overall across New York City, thanks to a raft of pro-tenant legislation that closed loopholes for regulated apartments and provide access to counsel. Evictions executed by city marshals decreased 25 percent between January 2019 and January 2020. But for tenants who can no longer gain any income from work because they are elderly or disabled, eviction or displacement are more difficult to put off.

The rent just got too damn higher

 

NY Daily News

Rent reform advocates may have notched a big win in Albany this month, but they couldn’t stop the Rent Guidelines Board from raising the rent on stabilized apartments for the third year in a row.

The nine-member board voted 5-4 Tuesday to increase rents by 1.5 % for one-year leases and 2.5 % for two-year leases during a raucous meeting at Cooper Union where protesters often drowned out statements from the panel.

The hike comes days after the state legislature passed a sweeping rent reform package that included lowering the cap on monthly rent increases for major capital improvements to 2% a year from 6%.

“Small building owners are struggling due to high operating costs,” said David Riess, the board’s chair, who introduced the rent hike.

The hike was comparable to 2018′s increase, which saw a 1.5 % hike for one-year leases and a 2.4 % hike for two-year leases.

 Rent advocates and the Legal Aid Society blasted the vote Tuesday night.

“People making minimum wage and with big families can’t take rent increases and pay bills. All this money is going in the landlords’ pockets," said Randy Dillard, 63, a member of Community Action for Safe Apartments.

Legal Aid’s Adriene Holder, who once sat on the board, said the “panel chose to heed the fear-mongering of landlords.”

Who is lying when it comes to supply & demand?

From Crains:

New York City and the surrounding area, including northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and southwest Connecticut, is home to 22.8 million people working at 10.4 million jobs, the Metro Economic Snapshot released Tuesday by the Department of City Planning found. Since the last recession, the region has added around 708,000 new jobs—much more than anywhere else in the country in terms of raw numbers—but at a growth rate of just .9%, which is about half that of other metros and roughly on par with the country as a whole.

Over the same time period, the New York area added just 378,000 new housing units, far fewer than the number of jobs created and not nearly enough to meet demand. The mismatch was centered in the five boroughs and helped drive around 100,000 people to the suburbs each year between 2012 and 2016.

The metro area also lost a significant number of recent college graduates to lower-cost cities elsewhere in the country—something Glen has experienced personally.

"I just moved my daughter to Minneapolis," she said. "It was great, but it was also really sad."

From Forbes:

Researchers at the Fed found there were no "direct estimates of the rent elasticity with respect to new housing supply in the literature." No one knows how much housing you'd have to add to have any significant impact on costs. So, the researchers built a simulation to estimate, directly from data, the elasticity of rent with respect to housing supply.

They wanted to know how much rents might change if there was an influx of new housing. Given metropolitan housing crises and a lack of other data, it was an important study.

However, elasticity isn't a simple phenomenon. There are products where changing the price doesn't necessarily result in big shifts of demand. Look at the Apple iPhone X: $1,000 for the device and tens of millions purchased it.

The Fed report suggests that housing will be much the same:

The implication of this finding is that even if a city were able to ease some supply constraints to achieve a marginal increase in its housing stock, the city will not experience a meaningful reduction in rental burdens.

Add 5% more housing to the most expensive neighborhoods and the rents would drop only by 0.5%.

The reason is that people like the amenities in given neighborhoods and want to live there, so will continue to pay higher prices. Amenities can include shopping, schools, and ease of access to public transportation.

Would this work for the homeless?

From the Commercial Observer:

In 2002, I had an idea to take vacant city-owned land and have developers and various trades donate their services to build a multifamily building, housing only destitute tenants in rent-free units. It was a utopian vision but the building did indeed get built with the collective genius of Helen Ng, Lance Brown, Mark Ginsberg, Tara Siegel, Rex Curry, Rick Bell, Karen Kubey, the late Margaret Helf and and countless other volunteers. Shaun Donovan of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development shared our vision and found us a site in the Bronx for us to build on. The architects on our team changed the vision and decided that a “green space, sustainability and replicable, affordable design” competition would be a more achievable theme. After being on the initial steering committee, I opted to fade into the background after the goals changed, but I was pleased that so many professionals took the call to action. Rose Associates ended up winning the competition, Via Verde was built in 2006 and thrives today. The process was known as the New Housing New York Legacy Project. However, the recession of 2008 derailed replicating it in scale.

Fast-forward to 2016. Bill de Blasio unveiled the Turning the Tide program to revamp the shelter system to help the homeless. The administration was saying the right things, vowing to build 90 new shelters. Muzzy Rosenblatt of the Bowery Residents’ Committee gets high marks for taking the initiative and building Landing Road as a model project, combining a 200-bed shelter subsidized by 100 low-income apartments. However, since it is privately owned, the numbers don’t work for the city to replicate it in bulk without simultaneously overburdening taxpayers.

Here’s a refined idea:

Have the city identify existing owned multifamily buildings that are abandoned or foreclosed or commercial buildings that can easily be converted to multifamily buildings. Since they aren’t yielding tax revenues anyway, a 10-year moratorium on property taxes won’t impact the budget.

Have developers take on the project pro bono with regard to fees. This might seem Pollyanna, but I have faith that the Real Estate Board of New York could get our members to step forward and take this on. The PR effect, goodwill and intangibles would be invaluable to said developer.

Ask contractors with excess capacity to reduce their rates to aid on the project. This is clearly a big ask. The city could barter other services to partially offset the reduction while getting neighboring restaurants and retailers to further donate to these trades.

The only tenants eligible for the building have to demonstrate extreme need. Start with those that are chronically homeless. Get referrals from the local soup kitchens and shelters. Convince retailers to furnish the apartments. Get clergy, social workers, job counselors and medical workers to help the tenants after they move in.

DeBlasio cronies rake in dough for homeless housing

From the Daily News:

Twin brothers with identical eye-popping salaries have been double-dipping off their nonprofit that provides housing to the city’s homeless — even as their clients suffered poor service and have been blindsided by eviction notices.

Mark and Solomon Lazar, the sons of Joseph Lazar, a former political ally of Mayor de Blasio, each make $240,000 a year as the top executives of the Brooklyn-based nonprofit LCG Community Services. But their big checks don’t end there.

The city has paid millions of dollars to LCG Community Services to place homeless families in temporary housing since 2012. The city also awarded LGC a four-year, $10.9 million contract in 2015 to run a Brooklyn shelter.

Mark and Solomon Lazar, in turn, use LCG to pay millions of dollars to a for-profit firm, Razzal Hospitality and Management — which they own.

Razzal manages many of the properties where LCG places homeless families.

In 2016, LCG paid Razzal $2.7 million to manage part of its cluster-site housing — a controversial city program that places homeless families in private apartment buildings, according to the nonprofit’s most recent federal tax filing.

LCG also paid $1.94 million to the Lazar brothers’ private firm in 2015 and $1.4 million in 2014, records show.

Meanwhile, LCG clients who live in cluster housing sites in the Bronx have complained in a lawsuit about bad conditions in their units, including roach infestations, leaky toilets and broken appliances.

Illegal construction leaves family homeless

From CBS:

A rally was held Tuesday in support of tenants at a Brooklyn building – one in particular who has been forced to live in a shelter due to illegal construction by the landlord.

As WCBS 880’s John Metaxas reported, some 50 protesters gathered in front of Brooklyn Housing Court in support of Najary Torres and her family.

The Mexican immigrant told a tale of bewildering governmental apathy. She has been forced to live in a city shelter with her husband and three young daughters for the last two and a half years, after the city forced her out of her apartment in the building at 94 Franklin Ave. in North Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

The vacate order came after her landlord built an illegal synagogue in the backyard , blocking access and creating an unsafe condition.

De Blasio: Puerto Ricans who come to NY must have family here

From CBS 2:

Life after Hurricane Maria for thousands of Puerto Ricans could mean a new life in New York City.

As CBS2 Political Reporter Marcia Kramer reported, Mayor Bill de Blasio said there will be health and educational support. But he said finding a place to stay is up to those who arrive.

It was only a few weeks ago that Mayor de Blasio walked to a Brooklyn firehouse to donate diapers to people in Puerto Rico who were devastated by Hurricane Maria. And while the city certainly intends to help the displaced, there is a limit – they will have to stay with family members because the city will not provide housing.

Kramer asked de Blasio what if they are to do if they come to New York and do not have family – and whether they will have to stay in hotels or whether affordable housing might be allotted. She asked if the city has any money available if Puerto Ricans coming to New York need any financial assistance.

“Marcia, we do not have that plan, and I don’t want to encourage people to come here if they don’t have some family to turn to,” de Blasio said. “I think we have to be really clear about that.”

Lawsuit challenges background checks for apartments

From the NY Times:

A leading provider of social services for recently released prisoners is challenging a New York City landlord that, it says, has a policy of not renting to people with criminal records.

The social services group, the Fortune Society, filed a lawsuit on Thursday in federal court contending that such bans were illegal because they disproportionately affect black and Latino men, and that such disparate impact was in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act and New York State law.

The lawsuit was brought against the owners and manager of the Sand Castle, a rental complex in Far Rockaway, Queens, with more than 900 apartments. The suit is one of the latest efforts in a nationwide push to make it easier to integrate people emerging from prisons back into their communities.

Concern over legal restrictions that hinder former prisoners’ efforts to find jobs and homes, long voiced by advocates of criminal justice reform, has taken on a broader urgency in recent years. Faced with stark fiscal pressures and rising criticism, many state governments have been rethinking practices that led to record levels of incarceration. Nationwide, about 700,000 people a year are currently being released from prison.

Some states and cities have passed laws prohibiting employers from asking about criminal histories during the initial round of a job application. In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed an executive order in 2011 banning questions about criminal histories by city agencies until the second job interview, and limiting the use of any criminal record that was disclosed.

But housing is a newer front.