Beyond My Ken
A view of the Dyckman Houses of the New York City Housing Authority, from the parking lot of the New Leaf restaurant in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan.
Sign up for our Mapping the Future newsletter to receive housing updates—including the latest news, statistics, tools for tenants and homeowners and affordable-rental lotteries—in your inbox weekly. Here are some of the headlines from this week’s update:
From City Limits
Not far from the site where Amazon would have established its New York HQ2, city planners and community members have been talking—thoughtfully, by most accounts—about a development project that could span decades and reshape western Queens. The Sunnyside Yards site is six-times the size of Hudson Yards and it could be developed into up to 24,000 housing units. The mega master plan is coming together, reports Shannon Ayala.
There are some similarities between the community and city’s rezoning proposals for Bushwick, but the differences are important to Bushwick community members who say they have waited for decades for serious public investments in their neighborhood. Sadef Kully takes a side-by-side look at how the two plans to govern the development in the rapidly-changing neighborhood stack up.
Bushwick is changing, rapidly, and not necessarily for the better. Take just one statistic: the share of apartments on the market that are affordable to households with incomes at 80 percent of the Area Median Income feel from 65.2 percent to 45.5 percent from 2009 to 2017. Jarrett Murphy looks at the changing elements of Bushwick and what a major rezoning adds to the mix.
From Around the City
Children living in lead-tainted apartments were left to stay in them, even after the city discovered conclusive evidence of the lead, the Post reports. Following the report, the mayor pledged to have the conditions in the apartments reexamined.
NYCHA is expanding its office hours at 300 locations throughout the city, NY1 reports. The housing authority’s customer contact centers will stay open until 7:30 pm on Every Wednesday until August. The centers are normally open until 5:30 pm.
Can landlords still find ways to jack up regulated rents under the new laws? The short answer is: not very easily. Gothamist looks in to five ways landlords might raise the rents on regulated tenants.
Foreclosures rose in Brooklyn, even while they dropped in other parts of the city, Bklyner reports. So far in 2019, 242 residential properties have been foreclosed on in in Brooklyn.
