"Related? Hahaha, get it?!"

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.

"Chris Quinn's so-called affordable housing plan," Mr. De Blasio said at a press conference earlier today, "is obviously a giveaway, a very big giveaway, to powerful real estate interests. It's such a big giveaway that even Michael Bloomberg thought that it was unfair," he said, likely referring to a story in The New York Times today, which claimed that advisors within the Bloomberg administration were surprised at how closely Ms. Quinn's plan hewed to that of the Real Estate Board of New York's plan (a plan strongly supported by the Related Companies' Stephen Ross):

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg said they were surprised, even startled, to see the tax cap proposal prominently featured in Ms. Quinn’s speech.

When the real estate industry sought a similar set of tax incentives through a bill in the New York State Legislature in 2011, Mr. Bloomberg’s office singled out the tax cap for criticism. In a memo, a top aide said the plan was “not, fundamentally, an affordable housing program,” but “a large tax break dressed up as a housing policy.”

"I've had my ups and downs and downs with the mayor," Mr. De Blasio told reporters, "but when the mayor says it's fiscally irresponsible to give so much money to the wealthy, you know you've got a problem."

Mr. De Blasio also singled out Related's living wage exemption on the Far West Side, which was negotiated by Ms. Quinn. "And in that case we weren't even talking about affordable housing," he said (although Hudson Yards does have a below-market rate housing component). "We were talking about people trying to make at least $10 an hour so that they could feed their families."

When a reporter mentioned a "related question," Mr. De Blasio joked, "Related—get it?!"

Asked for his alternative to Ms. Quinn's plan, he said he would like to "use the city's own resources from that same tax base"—that is, the one that the speaker's tax breaks would eat into—"to create affordable housing." This bears a resemblance to Ms. Quinn's first idea in her State of the City, though he did not pinpoint a funding source (Ms. Quinn wanted to finance her 40,000 new affordable units through a combination of government efficiencies and new borrowing).

Mr. De Blasio also spoke of wanting to "hold developers' feet to the fire, bargain harder, demand more, because they're getting extraordinary value" out of the rezonings during the "Bloomberg and Quinn years," as he called them.

Below is a video of Mr. De Blasio's remarks on Ms. Quinn's housing plan.

Brown Harris Stevens broker Nicholas Palance.

Square footage was the first thing on our minds when we walked into REBNY's Residential Deal of the Year Awards. The Metropolitan Pavilion space was so cavernous that despite a sizable crowd of brokers chatting over cocktails it still felt oddly empty, with a cold draft drifting in from the entrance. Nor did the flickering candles grouped on the tables contribute much warmth or intimacy, but we appreciated the gesture—a nice reminder that we were among those who sold residential real estate for a living.

Shivering, The Observer walked into the scrum of darkly-clad revelers and found ourselves standing next to Halstead president Diane Ramirez. She planted a kiss in the air some ten inches to the left of our cheek and encouraged us to buy raffle tickets in support of REBNY's "residential member in need fund." The charity was the real point of the evening, she told us, gentling nudging us toward the table before flitting off.

Ann Ferguson of Klara Madlin Real Estate.

The anemic crowd at the raffle ticket table, however, suggested otherwise. The bar, on the other hand, was packed. Feeling somewhat thirsty ourselves, we plucked a cosmopolitan from a passing tray.

A diamond broach glinting in the low light caught our eye. It belonged, of course, to real estate doyenne Sharon Baum, the winner of the 2011 Henry Forster Award for Lifetime Achievement. Ms. Baum informed us that she would be presenting this year's Henry Forster Award.

And did she know who the winner was? Or would she only find out after opening a sealed envelope, Oscar style?

She did not know. Or maybe she was just keeping mum. Confidentiality agreement?

The Observer was eager to mingle more, but soon the lights flickered and loud thumping music made conversation all but impossible. It was time for the Cesar Galindo fashion show. The crowd settled into chairs around the runway, but not everyone was so eager to check out Galindo's 2013 collection. Broker after broker rushed to the bar in the hopes of securing a drink to carry them through this portion of the evening, but cruel world, they were turned away empty handed or with glasses of water. Cocktail hour was over.

After a long parade of models draped in Mr. Galindo's silvery white creations had finished their walk down the runway (an impressive show of staging if overlong), it was finally time for the awards. The Rookie of the Year prize came first with the honor going to Halstead's Elise Ehrlich who, we were told, managed to convince a buyer looking to spend $500,000 to drop nearly $2 million instead.

"And don't we all love that?" exclaimed presenter Barbara Fox to appreciative laughter.

Rental of the year went to William J. McBurney Jr. of Prudential Douglas Elliman. Mr. McBurney found a renter willing to spend $60,000 to renovate the dilapidated apartment of an elderly, ill artist who owned a townhouse with two other artists. "Empire State of Mind," played as he claimed his prize.

The next prizes came in quick succession, with evening's top award bestowed upon Brown Harris Stevens broker Nicholas Palance and Klara Madlin Real Estate broker Ann Ferguson, for co-brokering a complicated deal involving an impossible co-op board, a rejected billionaire and sellers who needed a last minute sublet in the building when the deal closed. Second place went to Halstead brokers Adrian Thompkins and Shebrelle Hunter-Greene and third to Elayne Reimer, also of Halstead.

And as for Ms. Baum's closely guarded secret? She presented the lifetime achievement award to Stephen Kliegerman of Terra Holdings Development Marketing. Altogether, the awards portion of the evening was over in a whirl, with brisk handshakes and quickly reclaimed seats. There were neither tears nor heartfelt speeches. Or any speeches at all. Maybe everyone was saving themselves for shoptalk over dinner, but we couldn't be sure as we ducked out before the stampede to the tables started.

kvelsey@observer.com

The lucky lady. (NYU)

You know them, you love them, and now they have a kid on the way. EDC president Seth Pinsky let slip in an interview with The Real Deal, that his wife Angela Sung Pinsky, a big over at REBNY, is now pregnant.

Do you have kids?
No. We’re expecting [at the end of November]. I haven’t told a lot of people, so this is my way of letting everyone know.

Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?
No. My preference would be not to find out. Angela’s preference would be to find out. And, as I’ve come to learn very quickly, in a tie, the mother’s vote is the one that counts. So we’ll find out in a couple weeks.

Naturally, the couple lives in Park Slope, but it does not sound like they are brownstoners.

Where do you live now?
We live in Park Slope. We’re in the process of moving to another apartment in Park Slope. We’re going to totally change scenery and move about a block and a half away.

Do you own any other homes?
No, we don’t. We’ll be lucky if we can afford our new home.

But what religion will they be raising the kid?

Are you religious?
This is dangerous. Can I plead the Fifth on this? I am religious in my own way. … I don’t eat pork, I don’t eat shellfish. I belong to a synagogue; I attend that synagogue from time to time.

Woody Allen couldn't have said it better. From all of us here at The Observer, mazel tov.

Well, is it? (Responsible Landmarks Coalition)

An assault on the city's Landmarks Law has quietly been taking place in the corridors of power, through press releases and legislation, for going on a year now. But groups allied against landmarking are planning to fire their first public volley tomorrow, The Observer has learned, with the announcement of a coalition of development and labor groups known as the Responsible Landmarks Coalition.

Formed by the Real Estate Board of New York, it is made up of a number of influential real estate and labor organizations, "and it is only going to get bigger," one person involved in the effort said. "We are going to have some very major institutions looking at these landmarks."

The main issues of concern for the coalition are the increasing prevalence of historic districts, a lack of transparency in the landmarking process, and insufficient public input. The coalition will argue that the growing number of landmark buildings and historic districts are hampering the city's economy and stymieing  development.

"We're concerned that if you apply the concept of landmarks preservation too much, you resrtrict housing and impinge on other aspects of city life," said Richard Anderson, president of the New York City Building Congress, a trade group for architects, engineers and contractors.

In addition to the Building Congress and the Real Estate Board, the coalition also include the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce; three residential landlord groups: the Rent Stabilization Association, the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, the Community Housing Improvement Program; the building workers union 32BJ; and two groups representing construction unions, the Building Trades Employers Association and the Building and Construction Trades Council.

In addition to drafting a three page signatory letter that is part policy document, part manifesto, the group has launched a new site, responsible-landmarks-coalition.org, as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts to drive their message. The Facebook page already has three "likes."

Clearly illustrating the group's point is a slideshow on the site of eight projects, in four pairs, with the words "The Landmarks Law is BROKEN when these are both landmarks." On the right are rows of townhouses, the Chrsysler Building, the Dakota, on the left an auto body shop and a faceless industrial building.

The group insists it supports the idea of landmarking buildings.

“New York City is known for its great landmarks, which help define our city and drive our economy,” REBNY president Steven Spinola said in a statement, but he charges that "overzealous landmarking" of gas stations and the like makes development in the city prohibitively costly.

This underscores a particular concern with historic districts, one of two designations the Landmarks Preservation Commission can award. By naming an individual landmark, the commission says this specific building has merit. But in creating a far-reaching historic district, like those in Soho or Brooklyn Heights, elevates unspectacular buildings beyond their worth.

This is a somewhat disingenuous argument, since that gas station can indeed be developed, but whatever is planned there must be approved by the commission. This adds to the cost and the time spent developing the project, but it also ensures continuity with the surrounding neighborhood—Soho will still look like Soho, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, and not the two mixed up together.

Elisabeth de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, declined to comment on a pending announcement.

It was two recent districts, on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side and the Downtown Brooklyn Skyscraper District that have particularly inflamed the groups, who argue that the opportunities to build new and maintain old buildings in these neighborhoods, as well as other districts, have been greatly hampered. There is also the question finding out from the commission where in the landmarking process a building is. The group wants guidelines for buildings enumerated when a building is landmarked, giving the owners more certainty about what can be built in the future.

Supporters of the commission argue that the complaints about preservation are overblown. Peg Breen is president of the Landmarks Conservancy, a group that provides funding for renovation work on landmarks, and she said that her group did an informal survey of many of the group's loan recipients, many of whom said they did not feel owning a landmark had increased their costs. "If you have to fix a roof, you have to fix a roof," she said.

Furthermore, Ms. Breen pointed to numerous studies that find preservation increases or maintains property values (partly because of supply and demand issues) as an argument for its value. "Preservation is jobs, too," she said. And with only 4 percent of the city protected by the Landmarks law, "that leaves plenty of room for everybody else."

Nevermind the fact that landmarking does not prohibit development, but simply regulates it. "That is the problem, though," Mr. Anderson said. "New York is the most expensive city in the country to build in, and regulation is a big part of that, of which landmarks is a big part." With more than 12 percent of Manhattan under preservation protection, as well as large swathes of Brownstone Brooklyn, it can be harder to build whatever you want.

New Yorkers have to decide whether or not that is a bad thing.

What would Zabar's do?

Can you legislate a storefront? That is what the Upper West Side is hoping. For more than a year, the Department of City Planning worked at a plan to rezone a swath of the once tawdry, now tony neighborhood, to protect the retail character on its main shopping strips. The plan, which has been opposed by local landlords, just won the conditional support of Borough President Scott Stringer.

"While the area has benefited from a significantly low commercial vacancy rate and a variety of smaller scale retail, many residents have expressed concern about recent trends to assemble large commercial spaces," the borough president wrote in his approval letter to the Department of City Planning, which is provisional though closely followed. He wrote that these assemblages of large retail spaces have created lasting vacancy and a lack of diversity for local retail.

City Planning seeks to limit the size of retail frontage on Amsterdam and Columbus avenues and on Broadway, with a particular emphasis on limiting banks and apartment building lobbies. There is also a minimum number of storefronts per block, depending on size, and new storefronts are required to maintain a certain level of transparency. No blank or homogenous walls, in other words.

Channeling Jane Jacobs, Mr. Stringer wrote that "the ground floor experience is one of the most important aspects of a neighborhood’s character," and that improving the streetlevel activity would "discourage crime, engage pedestrians, and contribute to a neighborhood’s healthy economic growth and vitality."

Among the details the borough president would like to see changed in the coming months as the Department of City Planning and the City Council debate the plan is shallower storefront requirements, to allow for flower shops, book keepers and other stalls; the possibility for wider lobbies, up to 25 feet from a proposed 15; special provisions for landmarks; a community-board led approval process for exceptions, should they be deemed to the benefit of the district; and a clearer definition of those establishments regulated by the program, so as to protect the rezoning from legal challenges.

These changes did not hearten landlords who have been resolved to oppose the plan.

“It is hard to imagine a more flawed policy than this one which replaces measuring storefronts for an economic stimulus," the Real Estate Board of New York, one of the rezoning's chief opponents, said in a statement. "Market conditions, and not a government bureaucracy, should determine where tenants locate.” The board argues the move will effect long-time retailers who want to relocate and expand as much as it might keep out new ones.

Nancy Ploeger, president, Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, already fears the program, which has a predecessor on the Upper East Side, could spread like retail wildfire across the city.

"Too bad the Borough President wasn't willing to take a stand for small businesses," she said. " Unfortunately it seems pretty clear this idea is already spreading to other neighborhoods."

Mr. Pinsky

Imagine, if you will, the landscape of New York City 15 years hence. A drive to Citi Field in Willets Point takes you past a pleasant if overpriced cluster of residential buildings, rather than seedy chop-shops. Roosevelt Island is home to a sprawling $2 billion applied-sciences campus spinning out an army of developers to populate ping-pong-table-clad start-up clusters from Dumbo to Union Square. On Manhattan’s far West Side, the rezoned stretch of Hudson Yards offers millions of square feet for office space, housing and retail and 14 acres of open public space. You can already see traces of a more built-up, scrubbed-down New York in Luna Park’s freshly-painted Scream Zone, the first new roller-coasters Coney Island has seen in 80 years, and the rapidly-metastasizing arena at Atlantic Yards, which will soon play home court to the rebranded Brooklyn Nets.

It’s hardly a scenario Seth Pinsky could have imagined in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed just seven months into his tenure as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a not-for-profit arm of the Mayor's office charged with fostering economic growth across the five boroughs.

At the time, Mr. Pinsky was a 36-year-old former lawyer and investment analyst, only a few years removed from a private sector gig refinancing real estate deals for the big banks as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb. He had one big win under his belt—jump-starting the World Trade Center redevelopment project—but he didn’t have “a political bone in his body,” as one insider put it. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wow, you’re the head of the Economic Development Corporation? We’re in an economic meltdown!’’ Mr. Pinsky told The Observer.

“At the time it meant, ‘You must be really crazy.’”

Under Mr. Pinsky’s leadership, however, observers say the EDC has transformed itself from a real estate matchmaker for companies seeking office space into a policy-setting organization, spearheading diversification away from the finance, insurance, real estate economy (also known by the unofficial acronym, FIRE, which had rarely seemed more apt). Thanks to what one former employee called Mr. Pinsky’s “savant”-like facility with financing and structuring deals, a number of projects first proposed in the ambitious early years of the Bloomberg administration have begun making real progress. Some of the projects, like Willets Point, have “bedeviled administrations for decades,” noted Mr. Pinsky. And then there’s the EDC’s ultimate sleight of hand: convincing Cornell and Stanford to engage in a bitter rivalry to build a $2 billion tech campus, all by waving a $100 million grant and a swath of land on a sleepy East River isle.

All told, these projects will be the tent poles on which Mayor Bloomberg hangs the legacy of his 12 years in office. As careful chroniclers of the Bloomberg administration note, many of these large-scale development projects were first pitched by former deputy mayor for economic development Daniel Doctoroff as part of his grandiose PlaNYC bid for the 2012 Olympics, which drew comparisons to Robert Moses at the time, but didn’t come to fruition in the six years before he was tapped to lead Bloomberg LP.

“Dan in many ways set the agenda, set the vision,” said Robert Lieber, Mr. Doctoroff’s successor as deputy mayor. “And then Seth has been, in no small part, responsible for the execution and getting stuff done.”

In fact, Mr. Pinsky was a protégée of Mr. Doctoroff—part of a group of promising young civil servants he cultivated, which included Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Mathew Wambua, Andrew Kimball, head of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Mr. Pinsky’s wife, Angela Pinsky (née Sung), now a senior vice president at the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Pinsky’s successes have not come easily. Over the years, he has acquired a reputation in the city’s development community as a fearsome negotiator. Detractors complain about overzealous demands. “There’s a widespread belief that Seth tries to get every friggin’ nickel off ya,” said one source. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Narrowly built with a long face, Mr. Pinsky gives off something like a young Woody Allen vibe.

“When one says ‘tough guy,’ it’s not like he’s threatening or anything,” said James Whelan, senior vice president of public affairs for the Real Estate Board of New York, who worked under Mr. Doctoroff at the time. “He’s quite affable, nice guy and everything. Analytically, he's brilliant.”

“His personality can be a little grating on people sometimes,” noted Mr. Lieber. “He’s very picky and argumentative, but I think that has evolved as he’s been there.”

“There are no permanent obstacles with Seth,” said Mr. Doctoroff. Mr. Lieber put it more bluntly: “He wears the other guy out.”

Some blame that stance for the chaotic denouement of the tech campus competition. “There’s a line that Stanford left because Seth was too difficult to deal with,” the source said. Those privy to negotiations say Stanford was taken aback by the binding legal penalties involving factors outside of their control.

“I’m not sure anyone really knows what happened there,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I think developers are used to dealing with cities that just write a check and say, ‘Will you just swear on a Bible that you’ll do this?’”

Meanwhile, community advocates and urban planners decry the EDC’s corporate structure and lack of transparency. “They pass for being a government agency, and in fact they have more power than many of the line agencies under the mayor,” said Tom Angotti, director of the Center for Community Planning and Development at Hunter College and the author of New York for Sale, who noted that by the time neighborhoods are consulted, the EDC has typically already made up its mind.

“If [closing deals] is the only criterion, he’s been a success. But for me that’s not the only criteria, nor should it be for the public. The question is what’s the quality of the deals,” added Mr. Angotti, a technical advisor to the alternative plans for the arena at Atlantic Yards. He cited the Brooklyn stadium as an example of selecting a more suburbanized approach over a plan that would benefit locals. “It divides three neighborhoods instead of uniting them and it just creates another giant super block in the middle of Brooklyn."

*

“When I was in middle school I used to design cities,” Mr. Pinsky told The Observer. We were sitting down for lunch at the Stone Street Tavern, an old-school City Hall favorite, with shamrocks on the menu and Louie Prima in high rotation.

“I had a city that I designed on four big pieces of tag board, where I kind of mapped everything out,” he explained, removing his ’50s-style Browline glasses. The elaborate maps used color coding to show the business district, the residential districts, subway lines. “I made up the companies that were based there,” Mr. Pinsky added of his pre-SimCity urban dreamscapes.

Zoning fantasies don’t often rank among a 13-year-old boy’s after-school activities, but Mr. Pinsky, who tucked his diamond-patterned purple tie into his dress shirt once the food arrived, comes across as a guy who, even as a kid, was more comfortable around adults.

Which isn’t to say he’s without his youthful indulgences. “I have—this is an embarrassing admission—I eat American cheese almost every day,” he said admiringly of The Observer’s grilled cheese. “I actually think I’ve had American cheese for one meal almost every day since I was about six-years-old.” The routine involves some bread and often a condiment. “Not mayo, Miracle Whip. Big difference,” he elaborated.

Mr. Pinsky grew up in the suburbs of New York until he was 10, when his father, a Reform rabbi, moved the family to Minnesota. “I like to tell people I grew up in the New York area and I just lived in Minnesota,” he said. “I was fully formed by the time I moved there.”

After earning a history degree from Columbia, Mr. Pinsky took a job as a financial analyst in M&A at Wolfensohn Inc., the investment firm launched by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, albeit with some reservations. He made a bargain with himself to take the LSATs to decrease the likelihood of “going into finance for the rest of my life.”

From there he went on to Harvard Law, eventually working as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb, where partners, aware of interest in New York, would try to steer local cases his way. The company’s office was at 1 Liberty Plaza, but the day the towers fell, Mr. Pinsky happened to be on a business trip in Washington, D.C. Months later, when employees were allowed back in the building, he would monitor the recovery and cleanup efforts, watching as workers searched for remains and stopped to salute as bodies were driven out of the site covered in an American flag.

As he gazed out from his office window, Mr. Pinsky thought, “If I’m ever going to do it, now is the time.”

On paper, Mr. Pinsky’s résumé doesn’t necessarily read like that of a closer. Indeed, his ascent still mystifies some City Hall insiders. One former official sent us snippets of Mr. Pinsky’s bio via instant message. “Like WTF,” the source commented, still baffled by Mr. Pinsky’s appointment. “There are 500 people in the NYC McKinsey office with more experience than that.”

After he was hired “sort of into the bowels of EDC,” as Mr. Doctoroff put it, Mr. Pinsky distinguished himself with uncommon financial prowess. “You know, in city government there is not a wide range of those sort of skills that are available, particularly when you’re dealing with commercial parties on the other side,” he said. In other words, you can’t go up against Larry Silverstein with a bleeding-heart nonprofit type. Thus, Mr. Doctoroff decided to appoint Mr. Pinsky the “quarterback” of WTC negotiations launched in 2005.

WTC site in 2006 (inset) and 2012.

“Seth was instrumental in helping break that Rubik’s Cube of what it was Larry really wanted,” Mr. Lieber recalled. The city offered Mr. Silverstein an ultimatum: Take $300 million for his interest in the site or sign an alternative deal that offered financing with Liberty Bonds while allowing the Port Authority to take back the Freedom Tower. The offer involved intense backroom finagling with Governor George Pataki and Port Authority chairman Anthony Coscia.

“Not a lot of people have ever focused on that deal,” said Mr. Doctoroff, but it “essentially unlocked the site and allowed it move forward, and Seth really did a lot of the work.”

Mr. Pinsky described his approach to dealmaking as “empathetic”—trying to get into the other party’s head. “I think most people would probably not agree with that,” he admitted. “But I mean it in a very specific way.”

After the WTC deal, Mr. Doctoroff said he saw to it that Mr. Pinsky was promoted to head the EDC’s Real Estate Transactional Group. He was tapped to lead the EDC in 2008.

When the housing bubble started to collapse, Mr. Pinsky was on vacation in Uzbekistan (hardly an unusual choice for someone who picked Sudan and Egypt as his honeymoon spot), keeping up with the news on his BlackBerry. Layoffs in FIRE were imminent, and the city needed to figure out a way to counter the loss.

Sometime that winter, Mr. Pinsky took a walk around Brooklyn and ended up in East New York. “Again, it’s a little bit embarrassing to admit, but what hit me was that we’re called ‘the Economic Development Corporation,’ but what we really are is the ‘real estate development corporation.’ And we really didn’t do that much with the underlying economy itself.” Spending months luring a company to Lower Manhattan with an incentive package to secure just 300 jobs wouldn't cut it.

Earlier that year, Mr. Pinsky had brought in more “strategically minded” hires from the private sector. “Nobody really knew what do with them and I’m not sure they knew what to do with themselves,” he recalled. That group became the Center for Economic Transformation, tasked with reaching out to individual industries, like the tech community—an approach that’s garnered copycat interest from London to Austin.

Mr. Doctoroff pointed out that the EDC has been behind big strides toward diversification before. Under interim president Andy Alper, for example, the EDC helped bring about the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences. There was also an effort to incentivize the film and television industries to shoot in New York.

Mr. Doctoroff characterized initiatives toward growing the tech sector as an unprecedented shift. “We really are on the cusp of a paradigm change. We can gain extraordinary leverage at a unique moment.”

Sources close to Mr. Pinsky insist he has no interest in parlaying his newfound visibility into public office, predicting instead a policy-related track in the real estate field. “I don’t like politics,” Mr. Pinsky concurred. “That’s not my thing.”

In the meantime, however, there’s a lot of work to be done before the mayor’s third term ends next year. “He has a countdown clock in the bullpen,” Mr. Pinsky said. “We’re all very conscious of the deadline. I don’t think he likes unfinished business.”

-ntiku@observer.com

Here to stay. (Getty)

Downtown Brooklyn developers and cooperators, with a hefty helping hand from the real estate lobby, threw everything they could at the Borough Hall Skyscraper Historic District, a new landmarking effort aimed at saving the area's historic highrises. In the end, the preservationists won out, as a City Council subcommittee voted unanimously yesterday to approve the historic district, all but ensuring its passage by the full council on February 1.

There were some interesting compromises that may not have fully assuaged concerns in Downtown Brooklyn but will hopefully go a way toward addressing any problems in the future. The co-op board at 75 Livingston Street was one of the loudest critics of the proposal. Brooklyn Councilmen Steve Levin, who represents the area, and Brad Lander, chair of the landmarks subcommittee, released a joint statement yesterday celebrating the passage of the district but also calling on the Landmarks Preservation Commission to go easy on the co-op.

"We want to particularly recognize the co-operators of 75 Livingston Street and praise them for their stewardship of the building over the past decade, as they have spent millions restoring their building after years of decline," the councilmen said. "Given their hard work and investment, we ask the LPC to work with the board of the building, and to show maximum appropriate flexibility as they move forward in their efforts to maintain the building without imposing hardships on the co-operators."

Another new wrinkle, one that will have citywide implications, is an announcement by the commission to revise how it reviews storefronts, another major issue for landlords. Instead of lengthy public reviews, these will be handled at the staff level. "These new guidelines will allow many more new and relocating stores—in Downtown Brooklyn and around the city—to obtain a quick, staff-level approval for exterior work," the councilmen said.

"After close consideration," they concluded, "we believe that this new historic district will strengthen the character of Downtown Brooklyn, allowing for new development and growth, like the new retail space planned for the Municipal Building, while preserving the graceful, historic, early-generation skyscrapers that make it Brooklyn’s civic center."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

5:45 The 116th annual REBNY banquet is just getting started at the New York Hilton. Chicago Title is having an invitation-only party on the building’s second floor.

5:46 As usual, the night’s official festivities begin with a cocktail party in the room adjacent to the Hilton’s main ballroom, where the dinner is held. Jason Muss, a principal at Muss Development, stands near the entrance to the room with Jared Kushner (owner of The Commercial Observer), Jared’s wife, Ivanka, and Fried Frank chief Jon Mechanic. “I love this party. It’s a great place to catch up with people,” Mr. Muss says.

5:50 The cocktail reception is quickly filling up. Simon Ziff, a principal at the financing company Ackman Ziff, stands near the open bar with his wife. “It’s overwhelming,” Mr. Ziff says. “Think of all the people here. A few seconds to say hi to each. That’s a lot of seconds.”

6:00  Hal Fetner, a developer who is building two prominent residential buildings with partner the Durst Organization, steps over to the bar. “The feeling in the room is always tied to the health of the market,” he says. So what’s the vibe? “Ask me later. It’s too early to tell. But I think things are good.”

6:01 John Santora, an executive at the real estate services firm who recently helped negotiate an agreement between landlords and the union that represents building employees, 32BJ, is chatting with C&W appraisal expert Brian Corcoran. “A lot of people worked on that deal,” Mr. Santora says of the negotiations. “I can’t take the credit for it.”

Steve Spinola, REBNY’s president, greets guests in the main room of the cocktail space. “We had to put a few tables upstairs,” Mr. Spinola says, indicating that attendance at the banquet has picked up from last year. “We got a lot of last-minute calls from people who wanted to come.”

6:17  Alan Weiner, the group head of Wells Fargo Multifamily Capital, one of the biggest lenders in the city, is chatting busily with Rob Speyer, one of the chief executives of the real estate firm Tishman Speyer.

Eric Deutsch, the former head of the Downtown Alliance who now is an executive at Montparnasse 56, a builder of observation decks, surveys the crowd. “My first job out of college in the early 1990s was with REBNY,” he says. “The market was terrible then and they barely had anyone at the banquet. They made me sit up front during the dinner to make it seem like people were here.”

6:30  Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney strides in. “I just secured us $300 million, a high-speed-rail grant to develop a line between Boston and New York. It’s very exciting,” she says, taking a crab leg. After she’s done with the morsel of meat, she holds the shell and looks for the waiter. “Where do I put this thing?”

6:32 The room’s cocktail banquet is about 75 percent full.

6:45 Robert Lapidus, an executive at the real estate investment company L&L Holding Company, becomes enraged when The Commercial Observer asks him if he is bidding on a leasehold interest in the Flatiron office building 114 Fifth Avenue, as is rumored. “We’re not here to talk about fucking business!” he yells, grabbing The CO’s notepad and tossing it.

Gary Green, head of the building services company Alliance, briskly and very politely retrieves the notebook while Mr. Lapidus hurls epithets at The CO. Acting like a true gentleman—and also looking the part in a finely cut tuxedo—Mr. Green apologizes for his friend. “You can’t do that! Knucklehead!” The CO overhears him say to Mr. Lapidus.

6:46  Kenneth Fisher, a partner at the real estate investment company Fisher Brothers, tells The CO that this is the first REBNY banquet he has been to in five years. “Every time this year, I’ve been playing golf in the desert [at the Bob Hope Classic].”7:00

Jeff Roseman, a retail leasing executive at Newmark Knight Frank, squeezes through the crowd. “It’s a great place to see old friends.” He greets Steve Green, the founder of the city’s biggest landlord, the REIT SL Green.

7:05 “This is my childhood,” Helena Durst, looking elegant in a flowing dress, says of the banquet. “Do you like Christmas? Do you like Sunday dinner? That’s what this is for me. I have so many memories of coming to this party.”

7:09 Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and Councilwoman Jessica Lapin walk through the room together, busy in conversation.

7:15 Guests are being pushed out of the cocktail reception into the main dining room. The dinner is about to begin.

7:16 “Do I like this party? It’s OK,” Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, says. “I go to a lot of parties.”

7:25 The CO bumps into Woody Heller in the men’s room and mentions to him a rumor that Will Silverman, Mr. Heller’s colleague at Studley, doesn’t sit at a desk but stands. “It’s true,” Mr. Heller says. “He has a swivel desk that can be lifted and he stands at it rather than sits. He says it’s more comfortable.”

Does Mr. Heller do the same thing? “I pace,” Mr. Heller says.

7:40 The crowd, now dense, is heading into the main ballroom.

7:41 Bruce Mosler, a top leasing executive at Cushman & Wakefield, chats with friends outside the ballroom. “A lot of my good friends are in real estate, so this is a fun night for me, I get to see them all,” Mr. Mosler says.

7:42 Paul Pariser, a chief executive of the real estate investment company Taconic, stands nearby. Known as an avid skier, The CO asks him if he’s been to Colorado yet this season. “There’s no snow!” Mr. Pariser replies.

7:50 Howard Michaels, of the financing firm Carlton, is making his way into the ballroom. “If you’re in the real estate business and you’re not at this party, you have to have your head examined,” Mr. Michaels says. “Want to know something? I almost didn’t come. That was the pep talk I gave myself.”

8:00 Already murmurs are going around about where the after-parties are going to be. “I’m not going to an after-party,” says Bob Knakal, chairman of the brokerage firm Massey Knakal, which during the boom years threw epic REBNY parties. “I have dinner plans with my wife.”

8:05 Steve Berliner, an executive at the brokerage company Studley, flashes The CO a stack of his business cards, which he plans to hand out. “Tonight is the best recruiting night of the year,” he says. “I started getting recruited to Studley six years ago at this party.”

8:20 The CO tells Amira Yunis, a retail leasing executive at CBRE, that she looks stunning in her black dress. It’s true, the former model does. Asked what her plans for the year are, she jokingly grabs The CO by the shoulders and shakes, “Make millions and millions and millions of dollars!”

9:00 The ballroom is full. But few people are eating. In the center of the room, Mitch Arkin, an executive at C&W, is chatting. “I haven’t eaten yet,” Mr. Arkin says. “I’m not going to eat.” What is he using for fuel, a hungry CO asks. “Adrenaline.”

9:10 “After-party is at Nobu,” Matt Astrachan, an executive at Jones Lang LaSalle, tells his colleague Mitch Konsker and C&W retail executive Brad Mendelson. “JLL party at 10!” Mr. Mendelson booms.

9:15 Dessert is being served. Some kind of chocolate-coated-ball concoction. The CO is still looking for dinner, finds a steak and eats it. It’s not as rubbery as rumored, though it’s certainly overdone.

9:45  Steve Durels, SL Green leasing chief, and Paul Glickman, an agency leasing specialist at JLL, walk out chatting. The banquet is winding down.

10:00 Kent Swig, with a closely cropped beard and carrying a few extra pounds, makes his way out. “I’m having a beer,” he says.

dgeiger@observer.com

Mary Ann Tighe.

The Commercial Observer: Two years ago, you were named chair of the Real Estate Board of New York. Around the same time, you told me that, among other goals, you hoped to increase what was then a membership of 12,000. Have you achieved that goal?
Ms. Tighe: Well, actually, we’re over. I know we’re, right now, at the highest level we’ve ever been in its history. It’s over 12,000, but I don’t know the exact number. I can tell you that we’ve brought in, for example, a number of additional Class A members.

What have you learned from the experience? Has being chairwoman posed challenges?
Well, I think that I did not have a full appreciation of the complexity of REBNY’s portfolio—the diversity, the complexity of it, and the abundance of issues with which REBNY deals. And I now have an appreciation for how encyclopedic Steve Spinola’s knowledge of New York City real estate is. I also have great pride in the reshaping of the staff that happened under my chairmanship.

Besides bringing in new staff members, you also created a political director position, to which you appointed James Whalen. Why hadn’t REBNY already thought of that idea?
Mr. Spinola had done everything, and with a great staff. He has really fine people. But the idea of bringing somebody in to whom Steve could offload hadn’t occurred. We deal with the feds. And that was another important point of emphasis for me. I wanted to make sure we were playing on all fields because, increasingly, federal regulation and the state were as impactful, or potentially as impactful on the city, as New York City was. And so to cover all three playing fields, with the manpower that existed, that was impossible.

And so how is bringing in someone like Jim Whalen helpful?
Just, again, taking a look at, for example, the work that we were able to do in Albany. Jim has engaged the Committee to Save New York. They were critical in the period when we were dealing with the issues of rent stabilization and the legislation connected to that. And we were very concerned about how that was all going to shake out. We were very concerned about some of the regulations that had to do with Fannie and Freddie that said you couldn’t use financing from these entities if you had a flip tax on your property. Now, you know that’s a standard feature in many of the co-ops in the city. So we would have cut off all kinds of funding. Again, that’s a federal-level issue. So it’s in issues like that where they jumped in and were able to have an impact.

Besides playing defense, which is probably a large part of what people like Jim do at REBNY, have you been able to inject fresh thinking into the 116-year-old organization?
When I became chairman I wanted the board not only to play defense, but to also be the generator of big ideas that would help move the city forward. And there are a variety of things we’ve been focused on that are big ideas that will take many years to play out. And that’s another reason why people don’t engage the big ideas—because everybody wants to have something that’s instant gratification.

But I can tell you that I am very proud that the board has engaged the subjects of, for example, the No. 7 line. That’s Example 1. But Example 2 is relooking at Midtown zoning, raising the question with our city planning commission. Have we inadvertently frozen one of the most—in fact, not one of but the most—important business district in the city? As I phrased it when I spoke with Amanda Burden, “Are we in danger of becoming a very romantic 20th-century city because we have made it impossible to build in the 21st century in some of the key locations in the city?’
Last year, you worked on at least three of the city’s biggest and most remarkable office deals: Condé Nast, Coach and Young & Rubicam. All said, was 2011 good for you?
Yeah, 2011 was a very, very good year for our firm. It was a very, very good year for me, personally. And all is well on the personal front. So all in all, fine.

At the beginning of 2011, did you have any inkling that it would end so successfully?
I felt pretty certain we were going to do the Condé Nast deal. Let me say it slightly differently: If we were doing a Condé Nast deal, we were well underway. I had actually thought, since we signed a term sheet in August of 2010, that we would close on the deal by very late in the fourth quarter 2010.

And yet the deal at 1 World Trade Center wasn’t finalized until May. What happened?
We didn’t sign until the third or last week in May. So what happened after we signed the term sheet in August is that we had two quarters of what I call “problem identification.”

What does “problem identification” mean, exactly?
It’s just, basically, not negotiating. You’d start to negotiate, and then, “Whoa, I didn’t know we had that problem.” And, “Whoa, where did that come from?” Because remember, the World Trade Center is a unique site. And I think I had been naive about the fact that because Beijing Vantone Industrial had signed a lease there, I had some expectation that all the questions had been answered. Here’s the simplest example of the first harbinger—which came in September—that questions weren’t answered: Condé Nast asked the question, “Where do we vent out our kitchen? We don’t see vents on the facade.”

You must be referring to Condé Nast’s legendary cafeteria at 4 Times Square, which its rumored to be replicating at 1 World Trade Center. There were problems, you say?
Yes, and they said, “We don’t see any vents on the plans.” Now, how’s that for a straightforward question? So, just showing where our heads were, I’m like, “Oh, we must have some early-stage plan,” because a big part of selling Vantone was that they’re going to have true Chinese food dining on their premises, so that when you headquarter there, you’re going to be able to eat food that tastes like the mother country.

So, I’m like, “Oh, they must know the answer to this.” P.S., the answer came back, “Oh, no. There are no vents.” And so, obviously, Condé asked the next question: “Well, then, how might we exhaust from the kitchen?” And the answer was, “We’re going to run black iron up the shaft”—truly, an enormously expensive thing to do, and also the longest black iron run in history, probably. So we now have a conversation. That’s when the bell sounded. And all of a sudden, we’re like, “Geez!” And we said, “What did you tell Vantone? What was their solution?” By the way, after we asked that two or three times, we began to realize Vantone never asked the question. So there were no solutions.

Considering that the Condé Nast deal was, in fact, signed, I assume the problem got solved?
It was because we had a tremendously gifted team leader from Condé, Bob Bennis, who is a master of design construction, and has been at Condé for many, many years. Bob walks in, and he says, “I can tell you how many deliveries a week Condé Nast gets. I can tell you how many come by messenger, how many come by tractor-trailer, how many come by van. How many people come for lunch.” This is a company that has been operational for years—for decades—and Bob is the master of this data.

Meanwhile, the deal with luxury handbag designer Coach was announced in November, but as I understand it there’s still a ways to go before it’s finalized. What’s left to do?
Everything—all the documentation and all the operational questions: How do we get in? How do we get up? What do we control? What does our signage look like? Who pays for this? Who pays for that? All of it. We have a very detailed term sheet. But now we’re in the nitty gritty phase. And we’ll see whether Coach gets done.

With both of those deals, you paint a tumultuous picture. What about Young & Rubicam?
The big surprise of 2011 was Young & Rubicam—or Y&R, as they call themselves today. Because we’ve been working on Y&R for many years, and we didn’t know whether or not we were going to solve the problem. So fortunately, the problem got solved.

What did the problem surface, and when did it get solved?
Seven weeks before it signed, because we walked into the year thinking that we had a shot to make a deal for Y&R at 1107 Broadway. And around June we discovered that the building was not going to go commercial. It had been bought out of bankruptcy and was going to be converted into a residential building. So that blew up. But the Y&R deal was used as a stalking horse, with the understanding that there was what they call a “kill fee.” If the deal didn’t happen there was a certain sum of money the bankruptcy court gave out. No one wanted the money. Everybody wanted the building and the deal. But, as it turned out, Witkoff triumphed in the auction process, which took place on one day in June. It was just one day in the judge’s chambers.
How many times have you attended the annual REBNY gala?
Oh, gosh. I’ve been, easily, more than 25 times—easy.

Is there one gala that stands out, either because of something great that happened, something embarrassing that happened, or something memorable that happened?
That’s easy. It was the January gala that came immediately after 9/11.

Why?
Remember that our business was frozen for many, many months after 9/11. There was a general sense of, was the model of how we were built—our great vertical city—going to vanish because no one would ever want to be in a skyscraper again? These thoughts seem inconceivable today. But they were absolutely on everybody’s mind back then. And to feel the commitment of the members and the recognition that everybody felt such a connection to the city, and a desire to see its citizens and its skyline restored to health, was inspiring. The energy was about those emotions. That’s the banquet that jumps out.

Without knowing for sure, how would you summarize this week’s REBNY gala?
Brandl Frey, the chairman of the Young Men’s/Young Women’s Real Estate Association, said to me at the banquet last year, “Oh, this is so amazing. This is the first time I’ve ever been.” And so I’m like, “What are you talking about, Brandl?” So I said, “Here’s what I want you to do: Young Men, Young Women, I want you to organize. You pick the number of young people who would not be able to get in through their firms. And let’s get tickets so that we have, for the first time at this one coming up, 2012, a whole slew of people who are the next generation of leaders. And YMREA should be the ones to select them and make them our guests at this event.” So that’s what’s going to happen this year.

jsederstrom@observer.com

The Commercial Observer: With 2011 officially closed, let’s review the biggest issue the Real Estate Board of New York, and the industry at-large, tackled in 2011.
Mr. Spinola: Well, clearly, the first issue would be that the state was in a major downfall with serious budget problems, and Albany pushed to raise taxes and to decrease spending by $10 billion to $13 billion. And so one of the first things that we got involved in was the question of obviously holding the line on spending in the State of New York .

How did REBNY react?
We got involved in lobbying and working with the Committee to Save New York to, I think, accomplish what was not thought to be accomplishable, which is to hold the line on that $10 billion shortfall without raising taxes. More importantly, the business community was able to articulate a common voice on important issues, which included, on a statewide basis, a cap on taxes. It doesn’t affect New York City , but the cap on real estate taxes, as well as holding the line on spending and not going crazy on raising taxes.

As you said yourself, that was one of those issues people thought couldn’t get done, and it got done, but I imagine it wasn’t without major lobbying and publicizing your stance.
Yeah. I think we not only made our points, but we also raised some serious money to be able to address those points and get them on TV. We demonstrated that we can work well with others and we were able to support what I thought was significant leadership on behalf of the governor, taking a lot of shots and yet demonstrating what can happen when the chief executive officer actually gets his hands dirty and gets involved in the discussions and the negotiations and advocates a position.

Generally speaking, Governor Cuomo has a reputation for being easy to work with. Is that how you view the governor and is that how the real estate industry sees him?
The answer is he’s easy to work with because he’s willing to work when you raise an issue with him, or when he cares about an issue. And there’s no holding back as to what his feeling is or his position is or what he thinks can be done. With some other people, who we won’t mention, they may not have wanted to stick their neck out. Well, nobody could accuse Andrew Cuomo of not sticking his neck out.

I assume that at the beginning of each year you gather all the committees together to lay out the important issues and decide which deserve to be addressed. In 2011, were any of those plans disrupted by unexpected events?
I mean, this past year, we had to get 421A extended. We did. But part of that issue was there was a push to require prevailing wages for anybody who got 421A. Well, that would have hurt, we believe, a lot of low-income housing that was going to be built, and it would have guaranteed that Course of Construction would have stayed at a much higher level, and we need to bring down Course. So without breaking our relationship with the construction trades, we fought that off. They’re going to continue to fight for it. It’s an issue that’s going to come up again, but we’re building that relationship. We continue to work on that relationship and articulate the reasons we can’t do it.

The other thing that came up was a serious push for sick-leave requirements in the City Council that put forward that sick leave be given for any employees who were in some way in a building that was getting some kind of a benefit. We fought that. The good news was that Speaker [Christine] Quinn came out and opposed it. And that was a battle that we joined in with the chambers of commerce in all five boroughs and the issue was basically laid aside. Right now, there’s a push, again, to require a living wage.
The Real Estate Board of New York has also taken umbrage at what it believes to be a liberal stance on landmarking by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Will the board continue to take on that issue in 2012?
It’s not that the city shouldn’t be identifying individual buildings and saying these are wonderful buildings for whatever reasons—the architecture, the historic nature. Let’s landmark those buildings. Nobody is questioning that. We may have a legitimate debate as to whether or not they’re wonderful buildings. But the main concern is that there’s been this aggressive attempt to create districts, huge districts. Districts used to be unique small areas around the city that you want to preserve for a reason, but not districts that basically encompass a collection of different types of architecture, or hundreds of buildings. What’s unique when we’re all of a sudden landmarking hundreds of buildings?

The Real Estate Board of New York is one of the most powerful lobbying arms in the city, but the Landmarks Preservation Department seems to be getting the upper hand here.
There’s no question that we have lost more of those battles than we have won. We think the city is landmarking away its economic future, and during the middle of this year we started to rev up some of our efforts on this. And we’re going to clearly look at 2012 as a year in which we’re going to try to make our case even stronger.

Would you consider yourself David or Goliath in that particular fight?
We’re always David. This is a battle with the City of New York and the Landmarks Commission that seems to want to respond to the landmark advocates who would landmark every building in the City of New York. There are a lot of people who don’t want to see new buildings built. I don’t know if I have an answer as to where we’re going to put the additional million people that are supposed to come and live in the city of New York by 2030. But they don’t want it in their neighborhood, and so they want to landmark buildings. We’ve opposed districts that included empty lots and old gas stations that were determined to be worthy of being included in a landmark district.

Do you ever worry that overdevelopment could threaten the character of New York City ?
Well, the answer to that is I do—there’s always the potential that if every developer decided to start a new office building tomorrow, then I’d be very worried about it. But the truth of the matter is that we have an aging stock of office space. The average age is somewhere over 71 years old for office buildings. That is very different than around the world, where office buildings are much more recent, and clearly more modern.

Just to play devil’s advocate, from the few issues you and I just discussed, most are at odds with the average New Yorker who’s not in real estate. Does that concern you at all?
Well, of course it’s a concern. I think we win our argument if we have an opportunity to lay out our arguments. With landmarking, everybody says, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful?” And then, we ask them to take a look at these buildings: “Do you believe these are worthy of landmarking?” And we usually get a different response if people actually spend the time.

In terms of development, the quick answer for people who say they don’t want development is, well, then where should your children’s jobs be created? Should they be created here, or should they be created somewhere else? Because that’s what we’re talking about. If we don’t have development, we don’t have the companies here that bring the jobs, that pay the salaries, that pay the taxes, that pay for the services that the city of New York desperately needs.
Let’s shift topics. Would you rather have a drink with Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs?
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t drink.

“I don’t drink”? That’s a nonanswer.
I mean, Moses clearly is someone that anybody who’s been in government, as I have been, would like to have a drink with.

Do you think that you and Jane Jacobs would see eye-to-eye on much?
I don’t know.

Despite the fact that you oversee an organization that boasts more than 12,000 members, many of them brokers, you’ve never worked as a broker yourself. Has that ever hampered your ability to understand their particular needs?
No. I mean, when I was with the city, I did economic development, and so, you know, was I functioning as a broker? I don’t think I was functioning as a broker. But when I came here I had the talent of brokers and owners to support me, and I’ve had a tremendous learning experience from the best people in the world in terms of doing real estate, everywhere from brokers to owners, financial institutions, residential, commercial.

So I’ve been to school. And I think I understand a lot of what’s needed to pull deals together, which is what brokers are so great at. I don’t think I’d be a bad broker, but I’ve never gone for a license. I didn’t want to get into potential conflict-of-interest issues.

Governor Pataki appointed you to the New York State Real Estate Board in 1996. What’s more influential: that or the Real Estate Board of New York?
They’re two different organizations. The state board of real estate is really an advisory group that makes recommendations on real estate policy to the governor. I was also then appointed by Joe Bruno when my term was up with Pataki, and I served for 10 years. And one of the things I’m very proud of is that I chaired the education committee on that board and we revamped the curriculum for continuing education for people with licenses.

REBNY is very different from that. We’re a lobby organization, and so, in terms of who’s more influential in getting to the governor? It might be his own state board of real estate. Who’s more influential in terms of dealing with the legislature, the city council and the governor? I’m betting that it probably is REBNY.

Speaking of betting, early on in your career you worked for the New York City Off Track Betting Corporation. Do you ever go out to Belmont to make a bet?
No. I never was a race fan. I’ve been to Belmont once, and I’ve been to a dog track once, and it’s not something that I enjoy. I mean, a horse is a beautiful animal, but it’s not something that I enjoy. Now, I haven’t been to Aqueduct yet either—for the gambling.

When’s the last time you took a vacation?
Well, I haven’t really taken a vacation. I normally take off between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’ll take days here and there, and I take long weekends in the summer. And other than that, we really haven’t gone away. I used to go away. Actually, let me take it back. Easter week we went skiing for a week out in Vail.

Do you ski?
I mean, you’re spoiled when you ski there. I mean, there are other wonderful—especially out West—other wonderful places. I’ve been to Jackson Hole, but we’re just so used to Vail, and we’ve done spring skiing there. I’m not a big cold person, and the weather is usually perfect out there, and you ski the top half of the mountain. And it’s ideal.

I’m so used to talking to real estate professionals who, when you ask about hobbies, they usually just talk about golf.
Well, I do play golf, but I didn’t play much this year. My handicap went way up, and, in part, I just couldn’t get out.

Hopefully, you’ll get a chance.
Believe me, nobody’s crying for me. But I’m not asking for that. But four weeks ago, I came down with pneumonia, so that actually had me out of the office for a few days.

But you’re back in action now?
I’m back.

Jsederstrom@Observer.com