Almodovar, Former Spitzerite, Leaves State Housing Finance Agency

The state’s housing finance chief is on her way out.

Governor Paterson’s press office sent out a late Friday statement announcing that Priscilla Almodovar, CEO of the New York State Housing Finance Agency, is resigning from her job.

Ms. Almodovar came into government through the world of Eliot Spitzer, serving on the policy team of Read More

Deeds and Deals

Last Call for Bar’s Lonely Anti-Atlantic Yards Boycott

Boycotting can be a lonely business. Just ask Frank Yost, proprietor of Freddy’s Bar and Backroom in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

Freddy’s is the last bar standing within the 22-acre footprint of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project. The famous dive and art gallery, which is slated for Read More

Developers Buckle Under, Sort Of

The state Housing Finance Agency’s deadline to reapply for tax-exempt bonds is today–a really dry-sounding event but part of a process that could have a huge impact on how quickly the West Side is developed and how.

While not all of the nine developers seeking tax-exempt financing said they could abide the state’s new Read More

Deeds and Deals

Stonewall Reopening; Will It Be ‘Disruptive’?

Get ready to rip out a parking meter or two.

“The Stonewall Inn will re-open for business on Monday, March 12,” according to a sign posted this week outside the historic tavern at 53 Christopher Street—the site of the bottle-tossing, meter-uprooting 1969 riot that birthed the gay-rights movement.

For Read More

Developers Scramble as Spitzer Caps Financing

Real-estate developers like Tom Elghanayan and William Dickey once had a dream: buy up parcels on the barren West Side, wait for the right Mayor to come along and rezone it, and then become pioneers in the neighborhood of the future.

Suddenly, though, the success of that rezoning has made those dreams less lucrative. Right Read More

Levine Says 'No' to State Bond Cap

Jeffrey Levine, the president of Douglaston Development and an influential real-estate developer, is resisting the cap that the state financing agency has placed on tax-exempt bonds for mixed-income apartment buildings.

Mr. Levine is one of two developers who received permission to use tax-exempt financing in the waning days of the Pataki administration. (The other one Read More

Finance Crisis Hits West Side Projects

Larry Silverstein, Tom Elghanayan, Jeff Levine, William Dickey and Steve Witkoff are staring a new monster in the face: the end of cheap financing that was supposed to help them settle Manhattan’s wild West Side.

These five real estate developers thought they had it made last year when the state Housing Finance Agency approved their Read More