90 West Evacuated

The building Stuart and I live in, 90 West Street, near the World Trade Center site (WTC), was evacuated on Monday (more info here, here, here, here, and here). Heavy rain and work at the WTC resulted in a broken sewer line and over fifteen feet of sewage filling the subbasement of the building.

Building water and electrical services have been shutoff. We likely won't be able to go home for two weeks. Last night, at a meeting for residents, The Port Authority has promised to cover all costs incurred by the incident and evacuation. People and news outlets were recording the Port Authority official repeatedly saying, "we'll pay for it." Questions about water and air safety remain unanswered.

A blog for residents, by residents, has been established. It's at 90weststreet.blogspot.com.

All in all, it could be much worse. No one was injured. Stuart, Lady, and I made it out aok and have living quarters.

I also want to add that the local news coverage has given the impression that the building is filled with nothing but affluent, spoiled Manhattanites. That's simply not the case. There are rent stabilized apartments in the building and, just like everywhere else in NYC, there are people living together in tight spaces. There are all kinds of tenants there.

Crazy Saturday

Yesterday was a crazy day. Stuart and I went apartment hunting. I'll eventually blog about our experiences with NYC apartment brokers. For now, I'll leave it at saying that NYC is a frustrating place to find rentals (and it's not all due to volume).

But, the day was dotted with a few very cool things.

First, lunch at the Merchant's Cafe was very tasty. The Cobb salad with chicken strips was really good and Stuart liked his BBQ grilled chicken sandwich.

Then, I took some overlapping photos and played with some free image stitching software, AutoStitch, that seems to work better (without intervention capabilities) than Photoshop's Photomerge function.

Finally, dinner at the Dodo Cafe was delicious. It's a relaxed little place with great organic food. The cashew hummus is decadent. If you go there and their homade brownies and ice cream are available, don't miss them!

The panoramas I assembled (click for larger versions):

Um, Mr. Borough President

I just received an update in the mail from Scott M. Stringer, Manhattan's borough president. Among other things, it claims:

Fighting for New Affordable Housing: At the PS 51 development site, worked with the community to ensure that 600 affordable housing units will be constructed, along with a new school and a new facility for the Police Athletic League.

Six-hundred affordable apartments on the west side is nothing. Really, it's nothing (1. 2.).

NYC May Force Landlords to Pay for Renovations

I'm all for forcing landlords, the people holding virtually all the cards in the insane NYC rental market, to pay for renovations that ensure the safety of their buildings. From a NYTimes article:

New York City wants to strengthen its hand against recalcitrant landlords by giving itself broad new powers to overhaul entire building systems — like heating, electrical or plumbing — in long-troubled properties, and to force landlords to pay for the work.

That's great as long as owners don't use the renovations as a chance to skip out of rent stabilization. The following paragraphs are a good summary of the way NYC landlords move apartments off rent stabilization:

“If a tenant abandons an apartment because it’s not habitable, then that unit is at risk of coming off the rolls of regulated and affordable units,” said Ray Brescia, associate director of the Urban Justice Center, a legal-services organization that supports the plan, “because the landlord can make the repairs that it’s been neglecting, then jack up the rent over the regulated amount.”

Under the city’s rent rules, the landlord of a rent-stabilized apartment can raise the rent 20 percent after it is vacated and can also add 2.5 percent of the cost of any improvements or renovations to the monthly rent. If a vacant apartment’s rent hits $2,000, it falls out of the regulation system and the rent can rise to the market rate.

The legislation needs to ensure that, once the city has done major work and billed the landlord, the landlord can not pass the costs of repairs onto tenants by increasing rents. There is no reason why tenants should have to pay for a landlord's intentional negligence.

Surprisingly, one association that represents owners isn't worried about the proposed legislation:

“As an owners’ organization, we’ve always sort of been tainted by bad landlords, which probably represent 1 percent[yeah right] of all building owners in the city,” said Frank P. Ricci, the association’s director of government affairs.

Of the proposed bill, he said, “We think it’s reasonable in that it’s really going to target owners who are irresponsible.”

Give Me Your Tired, Give Me Your Poor

Yeah right. That America is long gone. In its place is this America:

There are some truly startling figures out about how much money it costs a family of four to live a middle class lifestyle in New York City.

The costs, according to the figures, is between $75 and $135,000 dollars a year. Those numbers are way above the national average. ...

In fact, while the median family income here is just over $49,000 dollars a year, those surveyed said it actually takes $75 to 135,000 dollars a year for a family of four to live a middle class standard of living.

Scroll through some of the apartment listings on Craigslist or the New York Times. Show me where the affordable apartments for someone making $49,000 a year are. They aren't in Manhattan. You aren't likely to find any in well policed neighborhoods with good public schools. There is no good living here for median earning working families.

Speaking of Scummy Lying Landlords

(Jerry Speyer)

When Tishman Speyer bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, they assured residents and NYC that rents wouldn't be jumping suddenly:
Tishman Speyer called tenant leaders to let them know that a deal was done and to say that residents of rent-stabilized apartments are completely protected by the existing system.
“No one should be concerned about a sudden or dramatic shift in this neighborhood’s make-up, character or charm,” Mr. Speyer, the president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer, said in a statement.
“As a business with deep roots in New York City, we have a sincere appreciation for these cherished neighborhoods, and we are honored to become stewards of the property,” he said.

It turns out that Tishman Speyer is using private detectives to oust tenants for lease violations, renovating units, and then doubling rents:
Mr Knapp is well known for such work. For his fee of $1,000 to $2,500 per case tenants on low stabilised rents can be evicted. Once an apartment is renovated it can be let to new tenants at uncontrolled prices, usually twice the amount.
Tenants in Stuyvesant Town complain that an atmosphere of suspicion is being created. "The sweep is so wide that legal tenants who have done nothing wrong are bearing the annoyance and expense of defending themselves," said Daniel Garodnick, a member of the city council who lives in the complex.
...
Tishman Speyer said using a detective to help cope with illegal tenants was standard practice.

The New York Sun has more on this:
A tenant lawyer in Manhattan, Samuel Himmelstein, said he has more than 100 clients from Stuyvesant Town. "I deal with Stuy Town and their lawyers literally every day," he said. "I'm sensing that they're going to go after people more aggressively."
Mr. Himmelstein stressed that the move to push out rent-stabilized tenants was not a new trend, though the level of effort appears to have increased.
"The myth that Stuy Town was not aggressively pursing cases like this for the past 10 years is just that — it's a myth," he said.

As I've written, no one in power in NYC is looking out for working class residents in the abominable NYC housing market.

Real Estate Developer Blocked in East Village
In the East Village, Public School 64 (PS64), once a community center, was bought by a developer. It was recently made a landmark. Attempts by the developer to create more luxury housing in the already gentrifying neighborhood are being blocked by the local community. It's great to see that people in a neighborhood are able to get together and, with their elected officials' help, block: gentrification; the developer; and New York's powerful real estate lobbying organization, the Real Estate Board (who opposed the landmark step). From the NYTimes article:
Gregg Singer, the small-time developer who bought the building, which runs from Ninth Street to 10th Street, for $3.15 million at a city auction, says he has been stymied at every turn from renovating the building for elderly tenants, nonprofit organizations or college dormitories. He said he was the victim of a political deal between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a former city councilwoman, Margarita López.

Mr. Singer’s opponents view him as an interloper with little respect for the needs of the community or the building’s history as a political and cultural center for the East Village and Lower East Side. They say his secret intention is to build luxury housing.
...
Last year, the city declared the building a landmark, an example of the French Renaissance Revival style. It now plans to change the zoning to eliminate most development options.

“For the government to sell me the building and then landmark it, it’s like bait and switch,” Mr. Singer said. “Complaints from the community don’t bother me. It’s the government that’s the problem. They’ve blocked me from doing any useful development here.”

City officials called his claims nonsense and have asked that the suit be dismissed. Virginia Waters, a city lawyer, said that Mr. Singer could use the building for a medical or community center, or a dormitory, so long as the city is assured it would be occupied by students.

“The city has in no way prohibited those uses from going forward,” she said. “However, we have read that he wants an exorbitant rent. That may be his problem.”

So, Singer will develop PS64 into a community center with student housing if and only if the city and community stay out of his hair? Riiiiight. Wealthy New York City real estate developers always have the best interest of the community at heart. I'm sure his version of student housing would be luxury condo lofts at market value; you know, just like the ones you remember from college.

Again, good for the local community for interrupting a change that would only hurt working-class New Yorkers.

More NYC Apartment Stuff
It looks like some New York City officials are starting to notice some of the creepy practices of apartment brokers. I won't hold my breathe waiting for a change though. Theses brokers take being crooked to levels on par with corporate lawyers, without the gloss. From the article:
In September, the committee called 223 real estate agents who had advertised no-fee apartments on craigslist.org and backpage.com, two popular Web sites that list classified ads. When asked if they charged a broker's fee, 31 percent said they did, despite their ad.

Another 4 percent said the cost was actually noted on the posting, in miniature print at the bottom. Of those with fees, 87 percent charged one month's rent or 10 to 15 percent of the annual rent.

"These ads are costing New Yorkers thousands of dollars," Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Woodside), chair of the committee, said at a news conference Thursday."The truth is that you can't put an ad in a newspaper that's dishonest and we've gotten pretty good at protecting against that."

Robert Eichner, president of the Manhattan Realtors Association, said he was shocked by the amount of fraud the committee found."The magnitude is out of control," Eichner said, adding that most probably use the old "bait and switch," luring customers with a deal that's too good to be true.

If Something Sounds Fishy, it Probably is
With the recent announcement of the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village to a mega real estate group, Tishman Speyer, middle income housing prospects in NYC look bleaker than ever. Some 27% of the village are already out of rent stabilization.

Today the NYTimes announces that Bloomie is swinging in to act the role of hero, planning the construction of 5,000 rental units on the Queens waterfront. Reality is the only downside to the grand plan:
Housing activists reacted mainly with praise, but also with measures of skepticism.
Some questioned the income limits, suggesting that they overshot the families in greatest need. But the larger issue seemed to be one of scope and emphasis.
Michael McKee, treasurer of the Tenants Political Action Committee, and Tom Waters, a housing analyst with the Community Service Society, repeated a longstanding complaint that new construction will never be enough to offset the loss of rental units that are rapidly moving from regulated to market rate.
A study in May by the Community Service Society found that between 1990 and 2005, nearly a quarter of the roughly 121,000 apartments built under federal and state subsidy programs dating from the 1960’s and 70’s left those programs. This year alone, by the authors’ count, New York City will lose more than 5,000 apartments for low- and middle-income families.
“This is a blind spot on the part of the mayor and the administration,” Mr. McKee said. “They are stubbornly refusing to recognize that they are taking one step forward, three steps back.”

And rent are rising sharply, as I've written about before. New York will never again be the city for everyone while a wealthy white male Republican is mayor.

If I can be a Part of it

Living the American dream in the big apple seems far away.

One-fifth of New York city lives below the federal poverty line (more demographics here) and rents are increasing sharply:

Over the past three years, housing rents in New York City have risen faster than inflation, and inflation-adjusted incomes have fallen...

“Despite a record increase in new construction, housing is still very tight for New York City’s renters,” said Vicki Been, an NYU law professor and the director of the Furman Center. “Although it comes as no surprise that New York City is an expensive place to live, the fact that rents have risen 8 percent after adjusting for inflation in just three years, and at a time when incomes were stagnant, is troubling.”

Yesterday we walked along the river in Jersey City. It's still relatively affordable there. That is, it's affordable in the insane NYC area housing market sense.

More Apartment Hunting

Yesterday we looked at places on Roosevelt Island. I never knew it was so nice over there. There's plenty of outside space for the dog and it's quiet (yes, I'm turning into an old fuddy duddy on that front). It took me 20-25 minutes to get there from work. Not too bad. It takes me 45 minutes to get downtown from the UES now.

After looking at apartments it took us about 30 minutes to get down to the East Village for dinner. It's cheaper than mainland Manhattan too. It does stink that the tram isn't working, but more on that later.

Creepy Apartment Brokers in NYC

Somewhere between the level of the ranting of FauxNews talking heads and the kill em all mentality on the Yahoo News messages boards lives the level of discourse that occurs on Craig's List NYC housing forum. The brokers and broker wannabees tend to dominate the discussions.

As someone renting in NYC (and thinking of moving), I started to read the forum to get ideas about housing in NYC. I used CList to find a roommate in SF. It was an easy and quick experience.

The comments in the NYC section are alarming. The brokers' comments there demonstrate nothing but contempt for renters. That's a bit scary since having to deal with a broker when finding a residence in NYC is a real possibility.

This is currently what's being discussed in the housing forum. Lovely. And I'm supposed to trust these types to help me find housing (and then give them 15% of the first year's rent)?

Please, the day will come when NYC wakes up, realizes their mistake in electing white male republican mayors, and elects officials who will lobby to get rent control control out of Albany and back to NYC where it belongs. Then housing in NYC can start to become fair for everyone.

In the meantime. I'm trying to stay as informed as possible. housingnyc.com seems like a decent site for real information. The other thing I'm doing is playing the stats to minimize contact with shysters. If I have to deal with a broker for any reason, I am going to avoid ones fitting the profile:

straight, white, male, age<70.