Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

So, besides unreasonable expectations of financing and tax breaks , another reason New York lags in housing, as the Wall Street Journal's Konrad Putzier explained 11/22/22, is that  Housing Shortage Reflects the Cheap Cost of Holding Vacant Land . The signal example: a six-acre parcel of empty land next to the United Nations headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, zoned to support some 1,500 apartments, but empty for 17 years, because the developer hasn't figured out what to do--and hasn't been pressured to do so. After all, the site doesn't have a mortgage--which can, of course be a spur to build and reap revenues--and annual property taxes of about $1.5 million per acre are less than one-sixth the rate for nearby apartment buildings. To the WSJ, an executive with the owner blamed zoning approvals, the pandemic, and other priorities for the delay. Unapped potential From the article: U.S. cities are littered with vacant or sparsely built sites like this one. New York City...

The Real Deal had an interesting piece yesterday, headlined “We’re going to see some real distress”: Witkoff , quoting developer Steve Witkoff as saying a glut of inventory in new developments means there are: at least 15 new projects in New York that sell just one percent of their units per month. “That’s a 100-month sellout. Unless you’re [Forest City Ratner CEO] MaryAnne Gilmartin or Larry Silverstein you can’t withstand a 100-month sellout.” It's hardly clear that Forest City Ratner, or its joint venture Greenland Forest City Partners, can withstand such a slow sellout. In fact, the clouds over the development market are likely one reason why GFCP has put up for sale three building sites . (By the way, an executive at Forest City Realty Trust said Friday that the buildings include "market-rate rentals," though the B12 and B13 site have long been described as condominium sites. At an affordable housing information session last night, Forest City Ratner executive ...

With all the focus on "affordable housing" and lotteries that will deliver results to a lucky few but leave many in the lurch, it's worth being reminded of the larger picture. As Dana Rubinstein wrote in the 5/6/16 Politico,  Weisbrod: NYC can’t solve housing affordability crisis on its own , Department of City Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod said the city needs 500,000 more affordable housing units. That's more than six times more Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan would produce: his plan for 200,000 units to be created or preserved includes 80,000 new ones over ten years. "I don’t actually believe that New York City can solve the affordability housing problem,” Weisbrod said, not unreasonably. “We can address it, we can improve it. But we’re not going to solve it unless there’s a broader regional approach and there’s more affordable housing, not just in the city but in the surrounding region." Indeed, both the suburbs and smaller regional c...

This is bizarre on more than one level. First, it's total chutzpah that--as DNAinfo reported yesterday, to wide pick-up--Forest City Ratner is trying to lower the assessment of its properties on Block 1129, the southeast block of the Atlantic Yards project site, in anticipation of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) perhaps a decade away, once the parking lot is covered with four towers. Second, as has not been reported, the current assessed values are already bizarrely low, so making them lower flies in the face of 1) the amount of money Forest City Ratner paid for the property and 2) value--on a per square foot basis--of the land. DNAinfo's James Fanelli reported, in  Atlantic Yards Builder Sues City in Attempt to Cut 'Tax' Payments : The Finance Department put the block’s market value at $11.2 million for its current fiscal year, which began July 1. But FCR says in a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court that it’s only worth about $1.6 million. FCR wants ...

From the Daily News, Another break for Ratner: Barclays Center owner gets tax savings on Brooklyn Heights property : The Tax Commission shaved off $7.8 million of the assessed value of a separate Brooklyn Heights office building owned by the controversial developer at 135 Pierrepont St. after FCR requested a reassessment, city records show. As a result, the Bruce Ratner firm's tax bill dropped by an estimated $802,000 over five years. That was the second tax reduction granted for the 19-story property in two years, records show. In 2011, FCR knocked down the building's assessed value by $4.8 million, saving an estimated $496,000 in taxes over five years. The tower, also known as One Pierrepont Plaza , opened in 1987 and was built to keep Morgan Stanley back offices in New York City rather than be lost to New Jersey. Reassessment is not uncommon , but it would be interesting to see the underlying documents to understand the rationale. Yes, the building's getting o...

From a 1/22/06 op-ed in the New York Times by sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, headlined Fair Ball : The Yankees are proposing a fair financial deal to the city. Nationally, during the last 15 years, the public share in stadium development costs (that is, the stadium plus roads, utilities and so forth) for professional sports has averaged around 75 percent. The Yankees are planning to spend $800 million of their own money on the new stadium (no major league baseball team has spent more than $300 million on their own playing field). The city and state together will spend about $210 million for improvements in the neighborhood. By this reckoning, the public share is only about 21 percent. A different view From a 7/17/08 essay by Tommy Craggs, headlined G oodbye Ghosts, Hello Hefty Tax Bill : As the excellent book "Field of Schemes" by Neil DeMause puts it, Steinbrenner’s tenure has been "little more than one long plea for a new city-financed ballpark," a wish that w...