Affordable Housing

Outside of the East Village, the leafy brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn are the defacto homesteads for New York's entertainment types. Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger "moved to Brooklyn for light and space and air," the actress has said, and their neighbors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard got a $1.75 million brownstone last year with no less than seven fireplaces.

But what about the non-millionaire types who want that light and space and air and fire? On the northern border of Mr. Ledger’s old neighborhood, Boerum Hill, a sustainable 97,000-square-foot affordable-housing building for artists, called the Schermerhorn House, was just topped off.  read more »

The downside of all this idealistic talk about building “workforce housing” for the middle class is that there is no easy way to finance them. The Bloomberg administration has used tax-exempt bonds to fuel much of its housing program so far, but those, because of legal restrictions, only work when there is some low-income housing being built.

So, in seeking to finance 3,000 new apartments for middle income families at Hunters Point South (which was originally part of the Queens West site), the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has had to look for another way. It is considering setting up a new nonprofit corporation to issue them instead of funnelling them through the city. But that, according to one leading housing advocate, is a "back-door" way of doing things.  read more »

The Independent Budget Office came out with a look at the mayor’s housing plan, and while it echoes much of the praise from other quarters about it, it questions whether he will be able to meet his goal of building new affordable housing, as opposed to merely preserving existing units.

For one, the city has drawn down almost all of the money it was planning to spend from the Housing Development Corporation, which gives out second mortgages that reward developers for building affordable housing with very cheap financing (like, 1 percent loans).

“Briefly stated, we find that the city’s ability to accomplish the remaining ... goals for preservation appears fairly solid,” the report states. “Funding the remaining units to meet the plan’s new construction goals, however, may pose more of a challenge.”

A spokesman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Neill Coleman, said that the Bloomberg administration remained confident that the city could meet its target of building or preserving 165,000 units of affordable housing by the year 2013 and stay, more or less, within the $7.5 billion budget mapped out when the mayor was running for a second term.

“They sort of seem to look at it as if the preservation funding and new construction funding were separate funds,” Mr. Coleman said. “We have a lot more flexibility in terms of moving money between them than it seems from the report.”

If the plan doesn’t pan out, of course, Mayor Bloomberg won’t be around to take the blame. But then again, he won't be around either to accept the praise if it does.

You can’t get everything you want in life--especially if you are a politician. So Assemblyman Vito Lopez yesterday gave up a couple of things he liked about the 421a tax abatement bill that passed the Legislature earlier this year in order to get it past the Governor’s desk. A new version, reported in the papers this morning, will come up for a vote in September.

“Was I very much in love with the original bill?” he asked in an interview Tuesday evening. “I am happy—not ecstatic—on the compromise. What we accomplished was using the 421a as a means to guaranteeing affordability and expanded that to 22 communities. There is one exclusion zone in every borough now.”

The very popular 421a abatement cuts taxes on multifamily buildings for up to 25 years; various exclusion zones, which used to be confined to the wealthy parts of Manhattan, will now encompass much of Brooklyn and bits of Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, permitting the tax break only if a building includes affordable housing.

“My objective in passing this bill was to provide some form of defense against gentrification of poor and working-class neighborhoods. I believe we have accomplished that,” Mr. Lopez told The Observer. “I did probably 70 or 80 percent of what was in the June bill.”  read more »

The top two officials at the city’s Housing Development Corporation—President Emily Youssouff and Executive Vice President John Crotty—stepped down today to head up a new tax-exempt bond division at JPMorgan Chase.

During their reign, the agency went from being a scandal-ridden redoubt for political cronies into the country’s largest issuer of affordable housing bonds.

The Mayor’s statement after the jump.  read more »

On July 5, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue was recognized by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation as the “Birthplace of Hip-Hop.”

The tenants and supporters of the affordable housing development in the Bronx are now hoping that the recognition will help them avoid being booted from their homes.

In February, word came that the owner of the high-rise was looking into selling the property so that the units could be converted to market-rate apartments.

This morning, elected officials, including Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Jose Serrano, along with musicians and tenants, planned to congregate at the historic address to lobby for the preservation of the affordable housing complex.

The full press release from the Save 1520 Sedgwick Ave. Coalition is below.  read more »

While the bigwigs duke it out over congestion pricing, another Mayoral drive in Albany has hit rough waters: last-minute amendments that would permit the 421a housing tax break to apply to subsidized middle-class housing planned for Queens West.  read more »

The Bloomberg Administration has another favor to ask of the state Legislature, along with passing congestion pricing: change a law you just passed on the 421a property tax abatement.

The Mayor was none too pleased with the Legislature’s revision of the program and even asked Governor Spitzer to veto it. But it turns out Mr. Spitzer might not have to, because the bill, passed in different versions by the Senate and the Assembly, has not even made it to the Governor’s desk.

“The position is still that we are negotiating to try to get a better bill before it goes to the Governor’s desk,” said Neill Coleman, spokesman for the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development. “Then we are looking for a veto. Right now there isn’t a bill before the Governor to veto.”

Mr. Coleman said that housing officials were talking with legislators, including Vito Lopez, the chairman of the Assembly’s housing committee. If the Assembly returns along with the Senate on Monday to vote on congestion pricing, an amendment could be introduced Friday night to give it enough time to mature to be eligible for a vote the following week.

The city wants the Legislature to make three changes: extend the abatement to government-supported middle-income housing, such as that planned for Queens West; shrink the so-called exclusion zone; and retract the $300 million additional tax break that Atlantic Yards, alone among new developments in Brownstone Brooklyn, would qualify for.  read more »

The Feds today denied Clipper Equity’s bid for the Starrett City housing complex in Brooklyn for the second time, saying that the buyer would not be able to maintain the largest federally subsidized complex in the nation as affordable housing after paying $1.3 billion for it.  read more »

The state Legislature is expected on Thursday to approve a sweeping, if also haphazard, reform of the 421a tax incentive—a program that gives developers 10- to 25-year abatements off property taxes for creating new apartment buildings. It goes far beyond the City Council’s version passed in December by requiring builders in 14 more communities to include low-income housing in their buildings in order to qualify for the tax breaks.

The one exception, however, is laid out in Section 6, paragraph 13, which refers to “a multi-phase project” with “at least 2,500 dwelling units” that has been “approved by the Public Authorities Control Board”—which, to people who have been following the project in central Brooklyn, can mean only one thing: Atlantic Yards.  read more »

A number of community groups thought they might have forced the city to reconsider a downtown Brooklyn real estate deal by packing public hearings with dissenters, but the transaction closed anyway last week pretty much as planned.

The big difference was that the developers have scaled down expectations for the number of apartments—a change that might end up diminishing what critics thought was the one redeeming, if limited, feature of the plan: affordable housing.

The buyer, a partnership consisting of the White Plains-based Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners and two smaller entities, closed on the deal to buy real estate developer’s Joe Sitt’s groundlease for the Gallery at Fulton Mall on June 13, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The purchase price was reportedly $120 million, compared to $25 million that Thor Equities, Mr. Sitt’s company, paid in 2001.  read more »

At a board meeting this afternoon, the New York City Housing Development Corporation signed away the last of the tax-exempt bonds that it has been allocated for this calendar year, a moment The Observer presaged last month.  read more »

The Working Families Party, labor unions and housing groups are holding a rally tomorrow afternoon in which they plan to form a human chain, 10,000 links long, surrounding Stuyvesant Town. Someone, please, hire a helicopter and take this aerial shot. For a more substantive discussion of the issues, see the Web site New York is Our Home.  read more »

The housing boom, or what’s left of it, has spawned a strong backlash against real-estate developers. First there was the City Council’s dramatic overhaul of the 421a property-tax incentive, which repealed the tax breaks that Mayors since John Lindsay had given new apartment buildings in lower Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn.  read more »