By Kim Velsey 5/07 3:11pm

Love and Real Estate

Tea Obreht reads in one of the Westbeth apartments.

Home Is Where the Art Is: Westbeth Opens Its Doors To Literary Looky-Loos

The sun was setting when we arrived at Westbeth, and as soon as we entered the labyrinthine corridors of the artists’ housing complex, we found ourselves dreaming about living here, in what a friend described as “a Hotel Chelsea that never dies.”

As far as impossible dreams go, gaining residence in the rent-stabilized complex, which sprawls across an entire city block in the West Village and offers studios with rent that starts around $600 a month, is one of the most heart-wrenching. The waiting list is not only seven to 10 years long but has been closed since 2007. (As if the rent weren’t appealing enough, Richard Meier was the architect who oversaw the building’s 1970 factory conversion.)

But at least visitors got a peek on a recent Friday evening, when residents in 20 of the complex’s 383 apartments opened their doors for the PEN World Voices Festival’s “Literary Safari”—a somewhat surreal pairing of the literary and the domestic.  Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 4/25 12:52pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unveiled his housing platform today in Williamsburg, where housing prices have nearly tripled since 2004.

Bill de Blasio Unveils Affordable Housing Plan: 190,000 Units, Legalized Granny Flats and More

Until now, Bill de Blasio’s housing platform has mainly consisted of sniping at frontrunner Christine Quinn. But no longer: this afternoon Mr. de Blasio announced measures he would take mayor to curb what he calls the “full-blown crisis” of affordable housing. (Old habits, though, do die hard: Mr. de Blasio did take another shot at Ms. Quinn, saying, “Letting the real estate industry keep calling all the shots with our affordable housing policy isn’t going to deliver what working people need”—an allusion to her tax credits-for-affordable housing plan, which seems cribbed right from REBNY and Steve Ross’s proposals back in 2011.)

Mr. de Blasio started out, as all candidates do, with a promise for the number of affordable housing units he’d create: 100,000 “new affordable units,” plus preservation for “nearly 90,000″ others. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/23 8:00pm

Homelessness

Jori Bolton

The Return of Hooverville: The Deepening Crisis of Family Homelessness

By the time Anne Pierre and her sons arrived at 199 Amboy Street, it was after midnight. The heat of the unusually warm April day had all but drained away, but there was a mellowness to the air, a contrast to the sharp, cold spring nights that had come before. From the outside, the red-brick building looked clean and well-maintained, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for sure. In Ms. Pierre’s experience, the exteriors of homeless shelters were poor predictors of conditions inside.

Late though it was, the family’s arrival at the Brownsville shelter marked the somewhat triumphant culmination of a bureaucratic odyssey that had started two days earlier, when Ms. Pierre had reapplied for shelter at the family intake center in the Bronx. It was only somewhat triumphant in that 199 Amboy was just a 10-day placement, the latest in a string of temporary housing assignments that had become the norm since the family lost its eligibility for shelter in February. But as it turned out, 199 Amboy was the nicest place Ms. Pierre and the two boys stayed since entering the shelter system in June 2012.

As 9-year-old Jordan described their arrival, “When we saw it, we was shocked. It was nice. It was decent.”

Decent is the kind of good-enough existence that has seemed to elude the family for the last 10 months. But it felt potentially within reach again when they fell asleep that night at a little after 1 a.m., relieved if still wary, with the alarm set for 6 a.m.—the preparations necessary for the school day ahead as uncompromising as the dawn.

Like many other families who have recently swelled the ranks of the city’s homeless population, routine has taken on an almost talismanic significance for Ms. Pierre and her boys. They live an approximation of a life that involved, until recently, an apartment of their own—a two-bedroom on Legion Street rented for four years with the help of a Section 8 voucher. Ms. Pierre paid $350 of the $1,100 rent until a recurrent mold problem disqualified the apartment. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/19 3:59pm

Market Madness

It's a mansion. With 7 acres. And it gets light on all four sides.

Will Queens Ever Be Able To Compete With the Borough of Kings?

During the last few decades, Brooklyn has shaken off the vinyl-clad, working-class outer-borough stigma so completely that it can be hard to remember a time when New Yorkers ever dismissed the borough of Kings as a place you came from rather than went to. Indeed, it may well have eclipsed Manhattan as a exporter of culture, with traces of its handsewn jeans and vintage-style facial hair visible on vaguely artsy twenty-somethings in cities around the globe.

Queens, on the other, hand, is still struggling to shed its dreary outer-boroughness, its reputation as a place where secretaries come back to reasonably-priced studios at night. Despite all the enthusiastic references to fun beer halls and more reasonable rents and short commute times to Manhattan that new residents are likely to whip out, it still feels more like a compromise than a destination. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/11 6:59pm

Not making it

Can a low-wage worker even afford a $1,100 a month one-bedroom on Pelham Parkway.

Low-Wage Jobs Are On the Rise In New York, But Where Can the Poorly Paid Afford To Live?

The good news is that New York City is still, in some sense, a land of opportunity. There are jobs to be had here—New York lost fewer jobs than any other city during the recession and the employment growth has been steady these last few years. The bad news is that many of those jobs are scarcely worth having—yielding less than $27,000 a year, which isn’t really enough to live in on New York.

While rents have continued their relentless climb (ever skyward!) wages for low- and middle-income New Yorkers have not followed suit. Moreover, the disparity between pay and the cost of living in our metropolis is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon given that a significant proportion of job growth has been in low-paying occupations, according to a new study from the Center for an Urban Future. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 2/14 5:20pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unveiled his housing platform today in Williamsburg, where housing prices have nearly tripled since 2004.

De Blasio Blasts Quinn’s Affordable Housing Plan as ‘Multi-Billion Dollar Giveaway’ to Developers

New York City public advocate and Democratic mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio added his voice to a growing chorus of commentators (including The Observer) who have noted similarities between Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s affordable housing platform, announced in her State of the City address earlier this week, and a plan proposed by the real estate industry in 2011. The proposal would cap property taxes for whole buildings if they agreed to set aside a certain percentage of their units to let at below-market rate rents. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 2/11 2:50pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

Christine Quinn's headline plan is for the city to borrow money to build 40,000 new middle-income apartments over the next decade

Speaker Quinn Vows to Keep Park Slope and Carroll Gardens from Becoming ‘Luxury’ In State of the City

In her 2013 State of the City speech, City Council Speaker and Democratic mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn focused on housing affordability—namely middle-class housing.

Ms. Quinn’s headline proposal is to “build 40,000 new middle-income affordable apartments over ten years.” It’s unclear what definition of “middle-income” she would use, but the Middle Class Squeeze report that she released earlier today defines middle class as “households with incomes between 100 percent and 300 percent of area median income.” Read More

By Christopher Brennan 11/16/12 3:16pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

Paul Rodriguez of Picture the Homeless. (Christopher Brennan)

As Sandy Creates Thousands of New Homeless, Advocates Draw Attention to Those Suffering Before the Storm

The winds of Hurricane Sandy caused massive damage to the New York area when it made landfall at the end of October. But the gusts of the superstorm blew more than just debris, dislodging New Yorkers from their homes and into a constellation of already full shelters. Yet in spite of the issue of overcrowding both before or after the storm, there may actually be large amounts of space to house people in the city.

Hoping to capitalize on the renewed awareness of homelessness and the dire situation in the city’s shelters, advocacy group Picture the Homelesss and a number of its allies held a rally Friday morning in Harlem to draw new attention to its regular reports on vacant properties in the city. Picture the Homeless has long argued that landlords across the city have left properties vacant while they wait for property values and rents to rise. The practice, known as warehousing, is legal, but it robs the city of precious living space at the same time.

“If you were able to pull out the money for Sandy, you were able to pull out the money before Sandy,” Raul Rodriguez, an organizer with Picture the Homeless, declared, criticizing the city’s failure to capitalize on rundown properties. Read More

By Kit Dillon 9/24/12 6:47pm

STATE OF THE UNIONS

She's digging in. (Getty)

Not Buying Union Bias, Speaker Quinn Leads Veto Override on HPD Transparency Bill

As promised, the City Council overrode the mayor’s veto of Intro 730, a bill dubbed the HPD Transparency Act, by a unanimous vote. Speaker Christine Quinn defended the 46-0 override saying, “This piece of legislation, which is simple in many ways, it’s just transparency. It’s just the info. Why don’t we want to have the info behind our Department of Housing out there? Why don’t we want New Yorkers to have all the facts out there.”

The bill has been criticized for it’s wage reporting standards, which opponents say adds an onerous bureaucratic burden for small firms and MWBEs. Opponents of the bill argue that the supposed transparency of the bill would do little to ensure quality construction. Just knowing how much someone gets paid does not guarantee a better building, the ostensible reason for the bill. When asked about how the bill might still achieve this, the speaker stood by Intro 730. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/24/12 9:00am

Troubling Developments

Rat-balloons

A Hit Piece of Legislation: Will a Transparency Bill Reform Affordable Housing or Just Open It Up to a Union Takeover?

On March 23, Wendell Walters plead guilty to two counts of racketeering and bribery. As the assistant commissioner for development at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, he oversaw billions of dollars in city contracts to build and repair the city’s vast stock of private affordable housing. The projects only grew over the past decade as Mayor Bloomberg launched a program to create or rehabilitate some 165,000 units of affordable housing.

During that time, the kickbacks to Walters also grew, totaling some $2.5 million over the course of a decade involving at least 10 different affordable housing developers in the city. Some payments were made in coffee cups, others in thick envelopes stuffed into Walters’ golf bag as he and the builders took in a round of golf. Among the gifts received was a brownstone on 139th Street in Harlem, free renovations to the townhouse and a honeymoon in Greece.

When he was arrested last October, Walters was paraded in front of the Brooklyn Federal Court House. Like so many perps, he was caught by surprise and still wearing his morning clothes, a black fleece pullover and black sweatpants. Tall and handsome with a shaven head, the 49-year-old Walters looked shocked, embarrassed, dismayed.

So was Matthew Wambua. Read More