A study that says a proposed city living wage law would kill 13,000 jobs based its analysis on a state subsidy program that wouldn’t actually be covered by the city measure.
Job growth is soaring in Coney Island, says a new report. That was news to anyone who’s actually been to Coney Island lately.
An influx of young, more affluent residents is remaking the Brooklyn neighborhood. What’s gained, and what’s lost, in this transformation? Watch a video interview with reporter Patrick Wall.
A federal planning grant to be shared among several governments on either side of the New York-Connecticut border aims for transit-oriented development.
After seven years of legal wrangling, hundreds of millions of dollars in city expense, and the eviction of many of Coney Island’s historic amusement operators, the island is still seasonal.
Last week, fifteen Bronx high school students added their voices to the volatile mix of dialogue over the redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory, a former National Guard ammunitions warehouse in the Bronx.
P.S. 186 on 145th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam in Harlem has not echoed with the thud of books or the hum of adolescent gossip since the mid-1970’s. Its “green roof” would be enviable if it weren’t for the fact that lush green leaves are the only things between the sky and the inside of much of the top floor. Trees have taken root in the abandoned building and their branches and foliage peek out of glassless windows and formerly stately arches.Now, the M.L. Wilson Boys and Girls Club has plans for the graffiti-strewn building—plans that include demolition. But not everyone in the community is on board with that idea. The club is planning a development that includes a large Boys and Girls Club facility, a school, 90 units of affordable housing and a commercial space which might be a U.S. post office.
The 5 million square feet of new apartment space that the city wants built on the Queens side of the East River will include 3,000 apartments of affordable housing, according to a request for proposals released this week by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.The proposed complex at Hunter’s Point South is “in accordance with the Mayor’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, which responds to the changing housing needs of New York’s communities by committing to the new construction or rehabilitation of 165,000 housing units by 2014,” the RFP reads.But in an illustration of the complexities underlying “affordable” housing, most of the city-subsidized units at Hunter’s Point will reserved for families making more than the average city family. Sixty percent of the 5,000 apartments at Hunter’s Point South are supposed to be affordable; the rest are market rate. But two-thirds of the affordable housing being constructed there will be reserved for people making between 81 percent and 165 percent of the area median income, or AMI. For a family of four that income range translates to $63,000 to $130,000.One-third of the affordable housing will be available to families making less than 80 percent of the AMI, or $63,000.The city will subsidize all the “affordable” units, and those units are required to be affordable permanently. If a developer wants to build more than the required 3,000 affordable units, the RFP states, those units “should be skewed toward the upper tier in furtherance of this project’s middle income goals.”Area median income is defined by a federal government formula, which yields an estimated median of $79,200 for a family of four.
A developer broke the rules, the city belatedly cracked down and dozens of Brooklyn families own property with no legal right to exist.
The city steps in, hoping to rescue 10 Bronx buildings laid low by overambitious investors, potentially establishing a model for rescuing others.
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