Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Mayor Bill de Blasio plan to announce a joint task force today to tackle landlords who harass tenants, Crain’s reports. So what’s it actually doing? “city departments have used their enforcement powers to ensure compliance with building codes if owners neglect their buildings, while the state handles harassment and rent regulation. The new task force will coordinate those prosecutions” the paper writes. Which all sounds a bit vague.
The developers of Essex Crossing have agreed to staff the building with SEIU union members, according to Crain’s. “BFC Partners, L+M Development Partners and Taconic Investment Partners have inked an agreement with powerful building workers’ union 32BJ SEIU for up to 80 jobs that will eventually be part of the 1,000-unit development.”
As for those 11,000 units at Sunnyside Yards, experts tell DNAInfo that it may not be financially feasible (Cuomo sniping aside) as “the mayor’s Sunnyside plan to the Hudson Yards project being built on Manhattan’s west side, where a platform over the railroad tracks is expected to cost $750 million” might not be a good match for an affordable housing project.
Well, at least 55 lucky households will slip through the poor doors on the Upper West Side, as Extell’s One Riverside Park is now taking applications for its affordable units, Gothamist reports. To get one of the units, applicants must earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, and we’re guessing that’s not a single-person household.
More bad news: LaGuardia’s overhaul is being delayed again as its operator weighs design contest submissions to redesign it, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The owner of Greenwich Village’s Caffe Dante tells DNAInfo that the 100-year old cafe isn’t closing after all, despite staffers earlier this week telling a number of outlets that it was. The owner “attributed the rumor’s spread within his establishment to a waitress with ‘a big mouth.’ ”
This week’s New York Times Hunt column follows a couple searching for a housing in Kensington Windsor Terrace. After getting outbid on several rowhouses, they finally settle on a house needing so much work that the husband wasn’t sure he wanted anymore after their $850,000 offer was accepted. “But at that point, I felt like we needed to pull the trigger because our options and opportunities were limited.”
A meadow with wildflowers and a vegetable garden will be coming to the roof of the Gowanus Arts Building at 295 Douglass Street, DNAInfo reports, which has received a $3 million city grant from the DEP. The green roof is intended to stop as much rainwater flowing into the Gowanus Canal.
If wildflowers and gardens sound somewhat impossible these days, it’s for good reason. New York Magazine reports that this February has been freakishly cold and snowy.
One can’t do anything about the weather, of course, but New Yorkers are pretty mad about the snow and the trash pick-up, according to The New York Times.
