I am amazed how concentrated I was on architecture. I guess I finally got tired of being fixated so much on that topic... I wanted to cover more of what was happening in NYC, and then the U.S., and after that, the World.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
"Spiderman" apartment --Tudor City Penthouse for Sale; Other News for Murray Hill
Just out of curiosity, I started googling up real estate news for the Murray Hill neighborhood (of which I live on the edge of)....some of these stories are actually pretty funny, and anyway give you an idea of what is going on here in terms of prices and projects etc.
Green Goblin's Penthouse from 'Spider-Man' Listed for $1.6M
The Windsor Tower penthouse that served as a backdrop for much of Willem Dafoe's evil cackling (as the Green Goblin) during the Tobey Maguire 'Spider-Man' franchise hit the market yesterday. The price tag for the 1BR, 1.5BA duplex is a mere $1.595 million, maybe a bit pricey for a 1BR Midtown East co-op, but surprisingly cheap once you consider the 18-foot-ceiling, floor-to-ceiling windows, working fireplace, beautiful floors, and private terrace, not to mention the bragging rights that inevitably come with the apartment. In fact, we're not ashamed to admit it—if we were the evil, mutated president of a multi-national weapons manufacturing corporation, we'd totally buy the place.
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31-Story Apartment Tower Rising at 325 Lexington Avenue
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Popular
Claustrophobic, Beautiful Murray Hill Townhouse Now Only $4M
There's a lot to like about 115 East 35th Street,
from the ornate fireplaces to the bay windows to the "four seasons room"
leading to a private garden. But if one were to try and identify the
thing that's kept it on the market for almost two years—some might call
it "the skinny"—it would probably have to be the fact that house is
really, really skinny. Not the skinniest,
certainly, but especially considering its depth and height, it's a very
narrow house. Still, it's hard not to admire what oil painter Patricia
Nix, who bought the place for $950,000 in 1998 and embarked on a gut
renovation, according to this old Observer post,
did with it. She re-listed the house last March for $4,995,000 and has
since lowered the ask thrice, switching brokerages each time. The
current listing is for $3,995,000. Hopefully the new brokers aren't already on thin ice. Get it? Thin ice? Sorry.
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The Murray Hill Market,
a farmers' market that occupies the space in front of the Kips Bay
Plaza complex at Second Avenue and 33rd Street, is the victim of a fight
between the community board and the developer over a pedestrian plaza.
The developer wanted the market shut down, and used the board's wish
for a pedestrian plaza on that part of Second Avenue as leverage to make
it happen. The market has until July 1 to relocate. [DNAinfo]
Luxury Brand Wants to 'Transform' 30th and Lexington
Luxury brand Comme des Garcons announced its intention earlier this year to set up shop in New York somewhere "where there are no other fashion stores so that we can give a totally new identity and hence transform the area." The area that Comme des Garcons has chosen to
· Comme des Garcons Signed a Lease on 30th and Lexington [Racked]
1
Confusing Murray Hill Carriage House Slices Price to $8.25M
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Murray Hill Co-op Hit With $1 Million Discrimination Suit
It looks like co-op board of 210 E. 36th Street in Murray Hill has taken a page from the Dakota's discriminatory playbook.
The board has been slapped with a $1 million lawsuit from a wealthy
African man who wanted to buy a studio apartment in the building.
Goldwyn Thandrayen, a 25-year-old business student at Berkeley College
in New Jersey, was turned down without so much as an interview, even
after complying with the board's every bizarre request, which included
translating documents from British to English. The Daily news reports
that Thandrayen put the entire cost of the unit into a bank account for
the board, and he handed over more than a year's worth of maintenance
fees.Thandrayen says the board's behavior was "weird" from the start, and one member even made fun of his financial portfolio because it is entirely in "some tiny little unknown country," aka the Republic of Mauritius, the island nation where Thandrayen is from. He is suing for $1 million in damages because, according to his lawyer, he's now "blacklisted" from ever buying a co-op in the city since he was rejected. Additionally, Thandrayen is out thousands of dollars from fees and interest, and he'll probably have a tough time getting back the $445,000 he put away for the unit, as it would likely be flagged for money laundering.
Will co-op boards ever start to play nice?
· Wealthy African Man files $1 Million Lawsuit After Co-op Board Turns Him Down [NYDN]
· Dakota Co-op Board Accused of Being a Bunch of Racists [Curbed]
3
The Top Five Residential Listings That You Can't Live In
[99 Bank Street #2A, via Streeteasy]
When you spend a lot of time perusing real estate listings, there are few things more depressing than coming across one that loudly boasts, "INVESTORS ONLY" or "VERY LOW PRICE, RENT CONTROLLED TENANT IN PLACE" (it is a well-established scientific fact that, in these cases, brokers almost always revert to all-caps, although the reason for this is unclear.) What these listings are telling you, in so many words, is: "Great apartment! Very cheap! One catch, though. Once you buy it, you have to wait for a human being to die before seeing a return on your investment." Somewhat hearteningly, these listings never seem to sell. The apartment pictured above (which we've featured before, because it's great), for example, has been on the market for 1,137 days and the brokerbabble just reads "rent controlled tenant not moving." Keep on keepin' on, theatre shower curtain lady. Listing agent, think it might be time for a pricechop?
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Just What Americans Need, More Personal Debt
We all know how much trouble we have with public debt in the United States...but what has happened with private consumer debt?
As with most topics, different people see it differently...this woman writer is not that bothered about private debt right now at all...
Consumer Debt Statistics
The Role Debt Plays in the U.S. Economy
By Kimberly Amadeo, About.com Guide
Many consumers cut credit cards during the recession. (Photo:Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
See More About
Updated June 13, 2013
How does consumer debt drive economic growth? Debt allows you to buy your home, education, and car without having to save for it. As long as the economy grows, you can pay off this debt more easily in the future. That's because your house grows in value, your education allows you a better-paying job and your car...sorry, your car is just an expense. But at least auto loans create jobs for autoworkers!
There are two main types of consumer debt: revolving debt, like credit cards, and non-revolving debt, like auto loans and mortgages. Both stimulate economic growth.
Credit Card Debt
Consumer debt that's meant to be paid off every month is credit card debt, also known as revolving debt. Credit card debt reached a peak of $1.028 billion in July 2008, an average of $8,640 per household. (Source: Federal Reserve Revised Credit Card Debt Chart)The recession curtailed credit card debt. It fell more than 10% in each of the first three months of 2009. By April 2011, credit card debt had dropped to a low of $839.6 billion. That's an average of $7,055 of credit card debt per household. (Note: The per household estimate is based on 119 million households, or 308.7 million/2.59 persons per household. Source: U.S. Census, 2010 Data; Average Household Size)
Loans
Loans, such as auto loans, mortgages, or school loans, are a form of consumer debt called non-revolving debt. These loans are usually held for the life of the underlying asset. For a car, it's three to five years, and a home mortgage is usually 15-30 years. These loans can be paid back with fixed interest rates, or variable rates. If the borrower fails to make payments, the bank will usually reclaim the underlying asset.Of course, the bank can't claim any asset on school loans. For that reason, most school loans are guaranteed by the Federal government. These loans have very low interest rates, to encourage higher education.That's because a more educated workforce leads to a healthier economy, in the long run.
Average Consumer Debt Statistics
Here's the month-by-month blog roll of average consumer debt statistics back to 2006. (Note: These are the figures as released. The Federal Reserve continually revises these figures. See Revisions.)2013
- April - Households Shun Credit Cards in Favor of Loans
- March - Consumer Credit Up 3.4%
- February - Consumer Credit Jumps 7.9%
- January - Consumer Debt Now $22,720 Per Household
2012
- December - Holiday Shoppers Relied Less on Credit Cards
- November - Americans Took Advantage of Low-Interest Loans
- October - Shoppers Resume Love Affair With Credit Cards
- September - Credit Card Debt Down 4.1%
- August - Consumer Debt Hits New All-time High
- July - Consumers Said "Back Away from the Credit Card"
- June - Credit Card Debt Shrank as Gas Prices Dropped
- May - Why Credit Card Debt Rose 11.2%
- April - Credit Card Debt Dropped
- March - Credit Card, School Debt Up, Signaling Consumer Confidence
- February - School Loans Up, Credit Card Debt Down
- January - Americans Set New Record in School Loans
My Note: I have stopped here because I think you can see what is happening recently...
For the rest of this article, go to
http://useconomy.about.com/od/demand/a/Average-Consumer-Debt-Statistics.htmhttp://useconomy.about.com/od/demand/a/Average-Consumer-Debt-Statistics.htm
More on Public Housing,,,and new City schemes to try and rent out some of it at market rates
Here is another article on the City's latest, somewhat desperate plans to try and salvage public housing..
NYCHA Wants Luxury Apartments On Parking Lots, Playgrounds
The struggling New York City Housing Authority unveiled a new money-making plan: build 3 million-square-feet of market rate apartments on the parking lots, playgrounds, and community centers of public housing developments. The Daily News reports
that NYCHA chose eight developments in popular neighborhoods—the Upper
West Side, Lower East Side, and Lower Manhattan near City Hall—where
they propose to build 4,330 luxury apartments to generate $50 million in lease revenue to pay for repairs to aging buildings and erase a $60 million budget gap. The new buildings would follow the 80/20 split, with twenty percent of units reserved for families that make less than $50,000 a year. The rest would be market rate, a first for the agency, which has developed middle income buildings on NYCHA property, like the Chelsea Houses where there is an income cap of $167,000/year for families of four. At the Smith Street Houses near City Hall, NYCHA calls for building 1 million-square-feet of new apartments on top of parking lots and baseball diamonds. The tower would face away from the public housing, and it would have its own entrance on Smith Street.
Tenant groups are worried about the dynamic the new luxury
housing could create in their neighborhoods, with one person going so
far as to call it "a war." Councilwoman Chin said that reserving only 20
percent of the new apartments for affordable is "definitely not
enough," but NYCHA maintains that they need to do this to generate as
much revenue as possible. The plan already has the mayor's support. A
mayoral spokesperson called it an "innovative plan to generate hundreds
of millions of dollars of value will allow us to reinvest in NYCHA."
· NYCHA Set to Lease Playgrounds, Community Centers for Luxury High-Rises [NYDN]
· NYCHA coverage [Curbed]
Photo via Alfred E. Smith Houses Facebook
· NYCHA Set to Lease Playgrounds, Community Centers for Luxury High-Rises [NYDN]
· NYCHA coverage [Curbed]
Photo via Alfred E. Smith Houses Facebook
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NYC Public Housing...So Recognizable to the Native New Yorker, and what a history--but is there a future?
The first one shown here is the Lenox Hill Apartments, which is next door to the very nice Lenox Hill Community House with its gym and swimming pool and other facilities.
New York is kind of unique in the United States in the way it TRIED to build public housing on a big scale to make housing affordable to vast numbers of people.
It has been a rough ride. This writer for New York magazine is not very optimistic about what is happening to NYCHA Housing ( acronym you will see again in this story)...
His take on it all is pretty astringent-- and here is the first part:
Asked if he’d heard of Lloyd Blankfein, the man in the Yankees cap standing by 295 Cozine Avenue in East New York muttered, “What he do?”
In the projects, when someone who looks like me comes up to you, it almost has to be bad news: a cop, a process server, a guy from the Housing Authority. But no, I explained. Blankfein was the head of Goldman Sachs. They ruled Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission too, sat at the table with the Illuminati.
“He used to live in this building,” I said.
It was so. Son of a postal clerk and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm factory, Blankfein had grown up right there, at 295 Cozine Avenue, a redbrick building more or less exactly like the other eighteen redbrick buildings at the Linden Houses. That was in the fifties and sixties, before the white people moved out of the projects and East New York became one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Still, the Goldman CEO apparently retained affection for his childhood home, once sending a post to the East New York Project, a website for people nostalgic for the days of egg creams and spaldeens. It said: “Graduate of Jefferson (’71), Gershwin (’68), P.S. 306 (’65) and the Linden Projects. Currently reside in Manhattan with wife Laura and three kids. Lloyd Blankfein lloyd.blankfein@gs.com.”
“King of the world, right here?” the man declared. “No shit.”
My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what I’d come to call “Nychaland.” As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, a.k.a. the projects.
New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of its own. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx—178,895 apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park. The population of Nychaland is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One NYCHA employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8 percent of New York—with 160,000 families on the waiting list. If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.
Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft—just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE.
Indeed, perhaps Nychaland’s most compelling attribute is the fact that it exists at all. Across the U.S., public housing, condemned as a tax-draining vector of institutionalized mayhem and poverty, whipping-boy symbol of supposedly foolhardy urban policy, has largely disappeared. Chicago knocked down Cabrini-Green, St. Louis imploded Pruitt-Igoe, New Orleans flattened Lafitte after Katrina. Only in New York does public housing remain on a large scale, remnants of the days when the developments were considered a bulwark of social liberalism, a way to move up.
Not that the passage has been smooth. The eighties and early nineties were the crack era. In the South Bronx, whole families at the Mott Haven houses were addicted, parents copping behind the developments, kids in front, hiding their stash so mom and dad wouldn’t steal it. Then came the gangs, bands of territorial youths calling themselves the 40 Wolves, Gun Clapping Goonies, Broad Day Shooters, and Fuck Shit Up (FSU). Over at the Polo Grounds Towers on Coogan’s Bluff, where the Say Hey Kid once ran free, Bloods and Crips marched by windows in full colors. This was followed by the crash, a greater economic disaster at the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx than on Wall Street. Currently, 26 percent of working-age project residents are unemployed, a nearly threefold rise since 2008.
Earlier this year, after a decade of chronic underfunding from the Feds, John Rhea, NYCHA chairman, told the City Council what it already knew: Public housing was in dire straits. For years, NYCHA was considered the most successful public-housing organization in the country, a vast, unwieldy, often-complained-about bureaucracy that somehow managed to maintain at least the illusion of acceptable marginality. But now, the daily operating budget was millions in the red. With older developments like the Red Hook Houses, built in 1939 and sinking into the loam like a Mayan ruin, the capital budget shortfall—the money needed to repair the aging housing stock—exceeded $6 billion and was likely to balloon to a mind-boggling $14 billion by 2016. In the current climate, the prospect of more money from the Feds seemed remote...
There is simply too much the author goes into to post here...continue at
http://nymag.com/news/features/housing-projects-2012-9/
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