USA Today has a nice article today on the Portland Streetcar, a downtown streetcar (trolley) line that has exceeded ridership expectations and stimulated neighborhood economic development. Now other cities, including St. Louis and Cincinnati, are interested in creating similar lines.
Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on “shared-equity coops.” These have been a great method of revitalizing neighborhoods by getting residents to be invested in their buildings. The current economy has hurt existing shared-equity buildings where residents cannot keep up with their monthly maintenance, but the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), the organization profiled in the article, is moving forward with the conversions.
Low-Cost Home Ownership (Strings Included) – Wall Street Journal.
Here’s a nice adaptive reuse of a historic building in Waterbury, Connecticut. I’ve heard about Waterbury as an “up and coming” town. Note the relatively low $415,000 price the developer, PM Architecture, paid for the building.
Waterbury’s Apothecaries Hall to house apartments – Waterbury Republican American.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “Metropolis” section comments on the current glut of unsold luxury condo units in New York. Now the Bloomberg administration is discussing creating affordable housing by having developers “downscale” some of these luxury units in exchange for subsidies.
[The] plan… requires banks and building owners to write down the cost of their mortgages by roughly 30% to 50% in exchange for subsidies of $50,000 to $75,000 per unit.
Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, of Brooklyn, spoke about his proposal to turn “troubled” luxury buildings into affordable housing at our Housing & Urban Development Committee CLE program in January. Apparently, his proposal has had trouble catching on because the developers would rather wait for the real estate market to pick up.
Crains, meanwhile, puts the number of vacant luxury condominium units at more than 4,000, spread among 138 buildings across the city.
The Star-Ledger has this story on an interesting new development, planned by RBH Group, for Newark:
The $120 million project [is] intended to lure the 15,000 people who staff the rich base of schools and universities but don’t necessarily live in New Jersey’s largest city.
Teachers Village at Four Corners… will include seven new buildings, the rehabilitation of a nine-story shell and the demolition of eight largely vacant buildings dating from the 1870s in the Four Corners Historic District.
Too bad about the eight buildings that will be demolished. I wonder how far gone they are.
Here is a rent stabilization issue that comes up periodically: who is rent regulation meant to aid? See last week’s Times article on 37 Wall Street, a luxury rental building with a marble lobby, crystal chandeliers and a private screening room:
The building could gain another alluring feature. If a December Housing Court decision holds, all of its 372 walnut- and marble-adorned apartments, which were constructed with the help of a [421-g] tax break, could become rent-stabilized.
Harold Shultz, senior fellow at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, comments that
[the December decision] was incorrect. Legislators who created the 421-g program always intended for the units to be decontrolled when they hit the $2,000 mark. This is the ultimate case about rich people… with problems that I’m not sure we should care about.
Incidentally, Mr. Shultz is also speaking on the panel I am moderating next Friday at the City Bar on overleveraged multifamily housing. More information on the full program is here.
One interesting, complicating feature of New York’s historic apartment buildings is that almost all of them are covered by the Rent Control and/or Rent Stabilization laws. This is where the history and architecture connect (collide?) with the affordable housing issue. I regularly deal with rent control and rent stabilization in my current work, and I find the history and effects of these very broad laws fascinating. For some background on rent regulation in New York, here is the Rent Guidelines Board’s history: http://www.housingnyc.com/html/about/intro/History(1).html. I would like to explore what effect, if any, rent regulation has had on historic preservation.
I’ve been thinking about the many, many beautiful but uncelebrated, mostly 1920s era apartment buildings across New York City. Most are ordinary, yet solidly constructed and packed with detail from all the historical styles of architecture. These buildings also provide the bulk of New York City’s affordable housing. This connection between architecture, historic preservation, and urban housing fascinates me, so I plan to weave in posts about the old buildings.
Building on Eastern Parkway
The Apthorp is one of the great Upper West Side courtyard apartment buildings. See today’s New York Times.
The New York attorney general’s office is taking a close look at plans to convert the Apthorp apartment building, one of the city’s best known, into luxury condominiums…