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The state's housing regulator plans to target "frankenstein" apartments - the primary remaining strategy for landlords to jack up rents on regulated units, The Real Deal reported. Homes and Community Renewal Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas indicated Wednesday that the agency will issue new regulations on the application of the new rent law sometime in the spring. The regulations will address the practice of combining vacant rent-stabilized apartments in order to achieve a one-time rent increase. Homeless New Yorkers are poised to hit the jackpot in the affordable-housing lottery without even entering, thanks to a new de Blasio administration initiative, NY Post reported. After Feb. 14, City Hall will match shelter residents to affordable units that go unclaimed in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development's lottery, The Post has learned. The city will pick up the tab - an estimated $2.5 to $3 million in rent annually - for approximately 200 units, many of them in luxe, highly desirable buildings. Landlords - who were previously allowed to find their own tenants for any of the rent-regulated units left unfilled after the lotteries - were notified of the impending change last week in a letter from HPD, selling the program as an "exciting" win-win. The largest private affordable housing initiative in Harlem took a major step forward today as the City Planning Commission voted 11-1 (with one abstention) to approve the plan for Lenox Terrace, Real Estate Weekly reported. More than 60 years after The Olnick Organization built Lenox Terrace, the plan will add approximately 400-500 affordable apartments - including some 160 units available to people earning minimum wage - new neighborhood-focused shops and restaurants, six acres of landscaped green space, and a wide array of amenities available to all Lenox Terrace residents, all at no additional cost to current residents. The city has released an initial version of its long-awaited property tax report, but politicians are taking a wait-and-see approach, The Real Deal reported. The recommendations call for eliminating the current limit on how much the assessed value of a property can increase each year, although the report stopped short of specifying new rates, the New York Times reported. The commission also proposed requiring owners to pay property taxes based on true market value rather than assessed value. The current system has long been considered inequitable for that very reason. The number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes last year jumped to the highest levels since 2015, The Real Deal reported. Permits were issued for 26,547 units of housing in 2019, a roughly 27 percent increase from 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing preliminary data from the U.S. Census Bureau. It marked the second-highest total since the last major building boom ended in 2008. The rise in permits reflects optimism about the long-term future of New York's economy and the one- to three-year lag between a developer buying a property and getting city approval to build, experts said.
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