Delivered every Monday by 10 a.m., New York Real Estate & Infrastructure is your guide to the week’s top real estate news and policy in Albany and around the Empire State.
Delivered every Monday by 10 a.m., New York Real Estate & Infrastructure is your guide to the week’s top real estate news and policy in Albany and around the Empire State.
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By JANAKI CHADHA and DANIELLE MUOIO DUNN
As the city’s homeless shelter population balloons — reaching 54,770 last Thursday, up nearly 10,000 people from January — advocates are calling for a raft of reforms to the process for moving people into permanent apartments.
VOCAL-NY, the Legal Aid Society, Community Service Society and others will rally on the City Hall steps to call for reforms to the voucher program known as CityFHEPS, ahead of a City Council hearing Tuesday on a package of homelessness legislation.
“While CityFHEPS has the potential to be a critical tool in the campaign against homelessness, the program is plagued by needless bureaucratic delays, rampant discrimination against CityFHEPS voucher holders and limited eligibility for families facing homelessness,” VOCAL wrote in a fact sheet on the program.
The organization cited a range of issues that make vouchers difficult to use. One is a “utility allowance” the Human Resources Administration deducts from the maximum allowable rent for a unit covered by the voucher, which can further limit the options for voucher holders in an especially tight rental market. One of the bills the Council is considering this week, pushed by Council Member Tiffany Cabán, would prohibit the city from making this deduction.
Homeless advocates are also calling for the city to eliminate a practice in which it will sometimes reject apartments within the payment standard because the rent is deemed “unreasonable” when compared to other units in the immediate neighborhood. That’s all on top of bureaucratic delays that mean — even after finding a landlord willing to accept a voucher amid rampant source-of-income discrimination — families often have to wait for months for the apartment to be approved by HRA, which can frequently result in landlords moving on to a different tenant.
VOCAL is also calling on the city to expand eligibility for the vouchers to undocumented New Yorkers, as City Hall attributes the rise in the shelter population to migrants being sent to the five boroughs from states along the southern border.
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NUMBER OF THE DAY: 5.89 percent — the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage, the highest level in almost 14 years.
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SUIT AGAINST PENN STATION PLAN SEEKS FINANCIAL RECORDS — The City’s Gabriel Poblete: “The New York State agency pushing a controversial redevelopment of the Penn Station area is refusing to release records that could reveal financial details behind the massive project — claiming that its communications with property owners are trade secrets. A lawsuit filed last week in Manhattan state Supreme Court by an attorney active in city development battles demands that Empire State Development (ESD) release records related to the state’s negotiations with the developer Vornado, the largest property owner affected. ‘Vornado was there every step of the way — and not just as an observer,’ lawyer Charles Weinstock said to THE CITY. Weinstock is representing himself as plaintiff in this case.”
NYCHA WATER NOW SAFE, MAYOR SAYS — New York Post’s Rich Calder: “Mayor Eric Adams chugged down a glass of drinking water inside an East Village public housing complex Saturday in a bid to end concern that it was contaminated with arsenic. ‘We’re just here to make sure people know I’m drinking it,’ said Adams after he and city Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan both drank a glass of water inside an apartment at the Jacob Riis Houses. ‘The water is safe to drink,’ he declared. An Illinois-based laboratory, Environmental Monitoring, and Technologies, initially said it detected the dangerous heavy metal in drinking water at the housing complex, setting off over a week of panic. But the lab has since retracted its test results and admitted to being the ones that introduced the toxic compound in the samples, officials said.”
TOUGH ROAD TO GETTING SUPPORTIVE HOUSING — City Limits’ Jeanmarie Evelly: “Last month, at the groundbreaking ceremony for an affordable apartment complex in The Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams praised the project as a model for the type of housing he sees as key to solving the city’s homelessness crisis. Supportive housing—affordable apartments paired with support services for vulnerable tenants, such as counseling and health care referrals—is ‘where our money should go,’ the mayor said. ‘We know that permanent housing can transform lives,’ Adams said. ‘Nothing does it better than supportive housing.’ But landing a supportive unit in New York City is tough, even for tenants who qualify. During the most recent fiscal year from June 2021 to the end of July, just 16 percent of New Yorkers approved by the city for supportive housing were actually placed in an apartment.”
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ONE45 SITE TO BECOME TRUCK DEPOT — Patch’s Nick Garber: “A portion of the Harlem block once slated to hold a pair of glassy towers and hundreds of apartments will soon be repurposed for a very different use: a truck stop. Developer Bruce Teitelbaum told Patch on Friday that he plans to open ‘a rental depot for big-rigs and trucks’ near the mid-block of West 145th Street between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard — the site of the ill-fated One45 rezoning, which Teitelbaum withdrew in May as it faced opposition in the City Council. ‘Given the proximity to several nearby highways and roads, we think it’s the perfect spot for them and we have received a lot of interest in this regard,’ Teitelbaum said.
PUBLISHING FIRM DOWNSIZES OFFICE SPACE — New York Post’s Lois Weiss: “IAC’s recent $2.7 billion acquisition of Des Moines-based publisher, Meredith — which is now known as Dotdash Meredith — is leading to a downsizing of its Lower Manhattan offices as the new company consolidates at Brookfield Place in Battery Park City. A JLL team of Brad Lane, executive vice president; Todd Stracci, executive managing director; and Brett Harvey, managing director, is now offering for sublease a whopping 331,509 square feet of Meredith’s huge headquarters at 225 Liberty St., which has a term through December 2032. They’re not alone, as there are still millions of square feet for rent locally in both direct and sublease opportunities.”
— Developers behind a planned mixed-income residential development in East Harlem are running into problems with an auto shop at the site.
— A Greenwich Village block association has hired private security guards to patrol neighborhood streets.
— There’s a new seafood restaurant being planned for a 10,000 square-foot space at the MetLife Building.