DeBlasio working on $325 million ferry debacle

From the NY Times:

With New York City’s subway trains jammed to capacity and more people than ever pouring into neighborhoods outside Manhattan, Mayor Bill de Blasio is embarking on an ambitious and expensive plan to create a fleet of city-owned ferryboats that would crisscross the surrounding waterways and connect all five boroughs.

At a cost of more than $325 million, Mr. de Blasio’s expansion of ferry service would be one of the biggest bets any city in the world has made on boats as vehicles for mass transit. The mayor predicts that the ferries would carry 4.5 million passengers a year, about twice as many riders as San Francisco’s ferry system handles.

Mr. de Blasio has promised New Yorkers that ferries will start running on three new routes, serving South Brooklyn, and Astoria and the Rockaways in Queens, by the end of June 2017, four months before he would stand for re-election. Additional routes to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and to Soundview in the Bronx will be added in 2018.

“Our aim is to make this thing as big as possible,” said Alicia Glen, the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development. “No guts, no glory.”

“We’re still living with the footprint of an early-19th-century transit map that didn’t contemplate the kind of job growth we’re seeing along the waterfront,” Ms. Glen said. The administration, she said, is trying to create a transportation network for “the new New York.”

Job growth along the waterfront? All I see there are giant residential towers filled with yuppies. That's who this is really for. Everyone else will have to do train-ferry-bus or some combination like that, which is impractical.

Staten Island is in big trouble!

From the Daily News:

Staten Island wants to be the new Brooklyn.

An island that boomed with exiles who followed the Dodgers out of the borough is now poised for a new renaissance as investors and developers pour $1 billion into the North Shore in hopes of striking Brooklyn-style gold.

Sure, it’s long been considered the city’s least hip enclave, but these boosters believe it can finally be transformed into the borough’s answer to booming Long Island City or even Jersey City, with glassy high-rises geared toward young professionals.

“Young people want the same types of vertical living as you see in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” said James Prendamano of Casandra Properties, a Staten Island commercial real estate broker. “Not everybody ... wants to live in Uncle Joe’s one-bedroom apartment in a semi-detached home in Southeast Annadale.”

Developers are already building with an eye toward the hipster set that jumpstarted the gentrification of Williamsburg and Bushwick — neighborhoods that, in some ways, are more far flung for some than the island at the other end of the ferry.

I had to laugh at the notion that "Staten Island wants to be the next Brooklyn." No. Staten Islanders do not want to become the next Brooklyn. Developers are hoping they can gentrify the hell out of it so it becomes as unaffordable as Brooklyn. Let's get real.

I'm sure the Staten Island pols have no problem with this, however.

Ridgewood - it's up and coming (or going)!

From the NY Post:

Strolling through Ridgewood, Queens, one doesn’t get a sense right away that change is imminent.

The main commercial corridors crisscrossing the neighborhood — Seneca, Myrtle and Fresh Pond avenues — are still a jumble of local businesses, discount retailers and mid-range, mall-style chain stores.

In keeping with Queens’ international character, the sidewalks teem with a cross-section of residents and vendors selling DVDs, mobile accessories and street food.

But in the tree-lined grid between the busy corridors, small things are percolating and creating a buzz that has put Ridgewood on the map as the next big thing.

Expanded M line subway service and lower rents are attracting those priced out of Brooklyn hot spots like Bushwick, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and other gentrifying Queens neighborhoods like Astoria and Long Island City.

Samantha Zulch lived in Bushwick for four years moving to Ridgewood for “less rent and a quieter, better community.” She reduced her monthly nut by $150. Filmmaker Adam Kerchman pays $1,500 for a one-bedroom that he says “four blocks into Bushwick would be easily $2,000.” But more than the lower rent, Kerchman says he moved across the border for a more real neighborhood.

“There’s a lot of hipster nonsense in Bushwick, and there’s not too much of that in Ridgewood,” says Kerchman.

Not yet, anyway.

See, the thing is that the B.S. that Bushwick puts up with is not exactly welcomed in Queens. It appears that Ridgewood is going to miss out on a full-scale hipster invasion, because the rents are doubling and the types of new businesses that are opening are catering more toward the yuppie crowd than the youngsters.

More yupster development coming to Ridgewood

From Wyckoff Heights, we get this news:


And also this news:


For a total of about 100 new unaffordable apartments.

How exciting! Maybe one of them will house a store that sells locally-sourced, artisanal (fill in the blank)!

The beginning of the end for Woodside

From the Times Ledger:

Woodside is being mentioned in real estate circles as the next hot neighborhood in western Queens, and a new luxury apartment building called Icon 52 may be responsible for moniker.

The nine-story building, at 52-05 Queens Blvd., sold all 66 units in just six weeks, surprising Eric Benaim, who represents the landlord, the Tsilo Group.

Icon 52 rented studios starting at $1,500 per month, one-bedrooms for $1,700 and two-bedrooms for $2,600. Benaim’s first venture in Woodside went so well he is already at work on another project just a couple of blocks away.

The hot neighborhood buzz has at least one Woodside resident feeling uncomfortable.

David Rosasco leads an award-winning neighborhood beautification nonprofit called the Woodside Neighborhood Association and he said he is aware of more hipsters and young professionals moving into the neighborhood but not enough to cause the current buzz.

“I suspect there are more powerful forces in play,” Rosasco said. “I have a feeling that this is by design to gobble up Woodside and transform it into another generic, dull, hipster and young professional community where they make demands but never get their hands dirty.”

He added that his all-volunteer group has worked too hard cleaning up the neighborhood for the last seven years for the community to be overrun by outsiders, noting that three condominium and apartment buildings have been built in Woodside in the last three years.

“What I do fear is that, after all the work we did to restore confidence and order, pride and service, that all we did was beautify Woodside so thatwe could be banished from it,” Rosasco said. “I am depressed by it because all this work was done by poor, minority, immigrant, working-class people at no cost to the taxpayer.”

Woodside & Jackson Heights - they'll be popular any day now

From the Daily News:

As city housing prices soar higher than the waterfront towers rising in Long Island City, more young professionals and families are moving into nearby Woodside, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, real estate experts told The News.

“People are following the subway lines,” said Michael Tortorici, vice president of the brokerage firm Ariel Property Advisors. “Prices are pushing people to explore areas of the city they wouldn’t previously consider.”

The neighborhoods are especially appealing because they’re only about a 30-minute subway trip to Manhattan, he said.

Thomas Sullivan, 24, who works in marketing, moved to New York six years ago. Since then he has moved, and been priced out of, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ditmas Park and Astoria — before settling in Jackson Heights.

Rentals in Woodside cost 25% less than Long Island City, said Eric Benaim, who runs real estate firm Modern Spaces.

And the price of land, where new apartment and condo buildings can rise, is about 50% to 60% less in Woodside than it is in Astoria or Long Island City, he said.
“Developers are snapping up one- and two-story commercial buildings or warehouses or even residential lots and tearing those down,” Benaim said.

Jeff Orlick, 31, a food blogger who hosts events in the area, said he moved to Jackson Heights seven years ago for its multiculturalism. It is the most ethnically diverse community in the country.

“There aren’t trendy bars popping up yet,” said Orlick, of iwantmorefood.com, a block that chronicles food and drink in Queens. “But I feel it coming. More and more younger people from Brooklyn and Manhattan are moving in here.”

These real estate shilling pieces by Clare Trapasso are getting kind of old. They always follow the same format: Take a neighborhood that has been called "the next big thing" forever, interview a realtor that targets yuppies (Eric Benaim seems to be her favorite,) and then throw in some comments from a food blogger that supposedly knows what makes neighborhoods attractive to assholes that will make things unaffordable for current residents.

Wake me up when they get to East Elmhurst, Ozone Park and South Jamaica.

Restaurants not happy with LIC portrayal

From LIC Post:

More than a dozen restaurants—fed up by the way the media portrays Long Island City as well as the adversarial nature of the Health Department—have come together and formed an association to promote the neighborhood and tackle a range of issues from the health department grading system to sanitation problems.

The group, called the Long Island City Restaurant Association, held its first meeting at the Creek and the Cave, located at 10-93 Jackson Ave., last Tuesday. The owners/managers of several well-known establishments participated, including: Alobar, Masso, Alewife, Manducatis Rustica, Riverview Restaurant & Lounge and LIC Market.

Rebecca Trent, the owner of the ‘Creek and the Cave’ and the association’s chief organizer, said the members all have similar concerns.

Trent said they are frustrated by the how some members of the media try to compare Long Island City to Williamsburg. “We are not a hipster haven,” she said. “This is a neighborhood of young professionals and children– not men with handlebar moustaches.”

“Some of the older journalists—who are not tapped in– think that anyone who is in their 20s/early 30s is a hipster,” Trent said. Furthermore, “many of these same reporters haven’t even spent any time here.”

Another issue is that some media outlets pitch Long Island City like it’s a hotel.

“Some people promote the area as a cool place to live given how close it is to the city—but fail to say what a great place it is to hang out in,” said Jeff Blath, the owner of Alobar.

Therefore, the restaurant owners say, the underlying message can easily be interpreted to mean: hang out in the Manhattan, sleep in Long Island City.

The organization aims to speak with one voice, where its members refute the hipster and hotel generalizations–and promote the Long Island City restaurant and bar scene as a destination for visitors.

Caveat emptor in LIC

From DNA Info:

Noise from trains idling in the Hunters Point train yard is destroying the quality of life in the increasingly residential area, which is dotted with $1 million apartments, neighbors say.

Despite the Long Island Rail Road’s promises to alleviate the problem, the disruptive noise continues to be an issue, especially for people living in condominiums along Borden Avenue, say elected officials and residents.

The condos, directly across the street from the Long Island City train station began to pop up starting in 2007. Some units cost more than $1 million. 



Branko Kolbek, who has lived in one of the buildings since 2009, acknowledged that he had been aware of noise coming from the yard before he bought his home and moved in.



“But not until you spend enough time in the neighborhood, do you really get a full sense of what’s going on here,” said Kolbek, 29. “During the week, you have to keep the windows closed.”

The issue has been raised by various elected officials, most recently by Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents the area. 

“We have asked the LIRR to move these trains, to turn the engines off, to stop the idling and come up with ways to decrease the sound of these engines,” Van Bramer said. 



The LIRR has taken measures to address the issue and to reduce locomotive idling, according to spokesman Salvatore Arena. Equipment schedules in the yard have been revised, some locomotives have been shut down and idling trains have been moved as far away from Borden Avenue as possible, he said.

"It's an active rail yard in operation for more than 100 years, a station that services 10,000 customers every day and a transit center that plays a crucial role in the service we provide to our 80,000 daily customers," Arena said.

Bars & restaurants make assholes proud to live in Astoria

From Urbanite:

Long a destination for Greek dining, neighboring Astoria has always been a village of Old World Mom and Pops. It's now enjoying a new generation of sophisticated restaurant and bars owners. Places like Rickshaw Dumpling, William Hallet and Butcher Bar-all opened in the last year-have a hip vibe not previously seen in Astoria. It's rumored that celebrity chef Michael Pslakis will take over an empty spot on Ditmars Boulevard, and downtown wine guru Paul Greico says he has his eye on Astoria for an expansion of his popular Terroir wine bars.

The changes are welcome to long-time Astorians like Katherine and David Flaherty, 34 and 36 respectively, former Manhattanites who still work there, but increasingly play in Astoria.

"I [lived] on Houston Street and had so many cool bars, restaurants and shops, I was worried it was going to be boring here," said Katherine. "But over the years, we've seen exciting growth and concepts around here." She added, "At first I used to embarrassingly say I live in Astoria, but now I'm proud to live here."

Funny or sad? You decide.

From the NY Times:

Today, an empty retail space at the foot of a new residential building is a common sight, as are “coming soon” signs, like the one on the waterfront advertising a library that remains a vacant lot for lack of financing. Other basic services are missing, as well.

“The most mandatory thing we need here on the boulevard more than anything is a butcher, and a hardware store,” said Gianna Cerbone-Teoli, who grew up in the neighborhood and owns the restaurant Manducatis Rustica on Vernon. “And a good bread man, a bakery,” she added.

Brian Hennessey, who moved into the 5th Street Lofts in 2008 with his wife, Verena Arnabal, and their new daughter, Maya, made the jump to Long Island City from Murray Hill and hasn’t looked back. The couple shop at the Queens Costco when Foodcellar gets too pricey, and on weekends they hang out with a laptop at the teahouse, Communitea, on Vernon Boulevard.

“They just have the right recipe for success here,” he said. “It’s very easy to get to Manhattan. It’s at the right price point. It’s got all the luxury amenities that people want in the yuppie crowd, and it’s got a good community feel to it.”

Still, Mr. Hennessey is clear-eyed about what the neighborhood needs. Parking is a problem: when friends come to dinner, he has to help them find spots. The service interruptions on the No. 7 train are annoying. He wonders if facilities for dogs will ever come to be, as they aren’t allowed in most of Gantry Plaza State Park and there are few other places to take them.

Those issues may intensify in the coming years. The city’s Economic Development Corporation plans to develop up to 5,000 waterfront units at Hunters Point South, 60 percent of them as middle-income housing; construction should begin next year, said Gayle Baron, the president of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation. And Rockrose, which has already built several waterfront towers, has the rights and plans to build several more.

“I can only imagine that we’re going to wish these days would never end,” Mr. Hennessey said. “When the people come, I can imagine this becoming a very busy part of town.”

Standing over a cappuccino at her restaurant’s counter, Ms. Cerbone-Teoli is circumspect. Some of her regulars are old-timers, but some are new arrivals, and business is good.

As the neighborhood continues to find its way, she hopes that some kind of centralized planning will prevent overdevelopment and disorganized growth.

Keep hope alive!

Another questionable grant from Smith

Smith ripped for saying ye$ to yuppies
By CARL CAMPANILE, NY Post

State Senate President Malcolm Smith steered a $150,000 grant to a well-heeled, politically connected business group -- as the state grappled with the worst budget crisis in decades, The Post has learned.

Smith's legislative largesse benefited the Council for Urban Professionals Institute, a Manhattan not-for-profit whose stated goal is to advance "the agenda for urban professionals and their communities."

Its members and sponsors include AT&T, AIG, BET, Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Verizon, and its 2008 tax return reported net assets of $646,851.

Government-watchdog groups blasted Smith's decision.

"The members of this group are successful businesspeople. Why do they need to raise $150,000 from taxpayers when they could raise it among their members?" said Lise Bang-Jensen, an analyst with the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center for New York State Policy.

The group also hired Albany lobbyist Jacqueline Williams, formerly of the Long Island law firm Suozzi, English -- whose partners include Basil Paterson, father of Gov. Paterson.

Smith declined to comment.

Recession makes Shibber shiver

From The Real Deal:

Astoria, characterized by old-fashioned, low-rise housing stock, has traditionally been home to first-generation European immigrants. With limited available land to build on, developers have sandwiched a new crop of condos and rentals into the established residential neighborhood.

Shibber Khan, managing principal of the Criterion Group, said many of those who are moving into the new construction buildings are 20- and 30-something "yuppies" who are taking advantage of the first-time homebuyer tax credit.

Still, Criterion was forced to adjust the marketing strategy for its properties to jump-start sales activity and stoke rental demand.

Criterion's 80-unit Broadway Apartments complex is slated for completion in June 2011. Khan said a one-bedroom will rent for about $1,500, roughly 28 percent less than what he could have gotten during the boom.

"Before, I would have easily gotten $2,100," Khan said.

At the Piano Factory, on the same block as East River Tower, at 31-01 Vernon Boulevard, sales started in March 2009, but none of the units had sold as of last month, according to StreetEasy. Elliman, the marketing agent for the project, declined to comment.

The former Sohmer Piano Factory in the historic, landmark building was overpriced, other sources said. According to StreetEasy, a one-bedroom in the building was priced at $590,000.

The property is far from the train station, and the demand was questionable "for that kind of luxury in the area," Hultmann said. (The condo includes amenities such as a pet spa and penthouses with working fireplaces.)