Lobenthal.com

Thom Hartman assigns blame where it  belongs:

“Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

“Forty-three years into America’s Reagonomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is helping cause it.”

And remember, every time another luxury tower goes up in New York City, your rent is that much more likely to go up as well. The realtors’ high-end, high-rise construction pushes up the cost of  all housing.

I’m reading at the Village Preservation’s web site Andrew Berman’s breakdown of what’s in Gov. Hochul’s just-unveiled budget.  The Tech Bros’ attempted assault on the landmarks law didn’t make it in this time. Tech Bros will be back, though.

There has not been such well-organized and well-financed sabotage of landmarks and neigborhood preservation since the Landmarks Preservation Commission was chartered in 1965. LPC itself has already become a captive government body.

It truly is open season on New York City, as the developers and the moguls and private equity scheme to overturn every last proviso the city has established to protect itself.

A tech-funded astroturf group is now furiously lobbying to end landmark status for buildings employed by religious institutions. Most likely, that will be part of the disastrous budget that Gov. Hochul plans to unveil.

This was pointed out to me yesterday by a friend who worked for NYS for decades.

The post-pandemic ity is now glutted with excess office space, while City Hall gives the green light to ever more gargantuan office projects, like whatever that thing is that is rising on lower Park Avenue. They are driving the real estate market toward a precipice.

There may be a perverse incentive for developers and landlords to gin up a collapse so as to pay even less taxes than they do now. But NYC, of course is left holding the bag, as tax revenues plummet.

The current roster of NYC politicians will go down in history as probably the most feckless and corrupt of the post-Tammany Hall era.

has been built, or is likely to be built, in the Soho-Noho-Chinatown catchment area that was brutally upzoned two years ago. It was all in the service of affordable housing, so we were fraudulently told. At that time, it didn’t seem possible that our pols could shaft the city any more than they had. We were wrong.

Now here  are again, with the same sham promises made to justify another–and even more consequential– windfall to the developers at the expense of the city. And yet self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians like my NYC Council Member Bottcher and NYS Senator Hoylman-Sigal are willing to shred their reputations and perhaps end-stop their political careers to go along with the fraud. 

Reportedly, a deal has ben  struck between Gov. Hochul, and the NYS Senate and Assembly on lifting the size cap on new residential construction. It is sure to be the latest betrayal of our city.

Let’s face it, NYC is on its way to becoming a fallen city. It is impossibly expensive and grotesquely over built. As we’re seeing here, public policy is principally made to benefit a tiny sliver of very wealthy business people.

As Jesse Watters engages in obstruction of justice to protect Trump by sabotaging jury selection. And shouldn’t the Deartment of Justice finally step in to curtail Fox’s nightly traitorous incitement as well as subversion of the law?

Too much of the media–corporate and otherwise–keeps minimizing and misrepresenting the charges against him. No, it’s not just about hush money.

City Hall would be fighting the restrictions that prevent the City from itself building affordable housing, and give up the sham that working out sweetheart deals with the developers is accomplishing that.

It pains me to write this, because  I’ve dealt with a wonderful staffer at his office, but I’m shocked, although I shouldn’t be, by my Council Member Bottcher’s decision to betray the city by supporting the outrageous proposal to lift all caps on residential construction. This is an act of planning insanity and urban extinction.  

You cannot claim to be a progressive and be a toady for the realtors.

NYC has a a housing affordability crisis. It also has an overdevelopment crisis. Both of these crises will be exacerbated by this terrible provision.

Nobody wants to live there–44% of the units remain unsold. The gargantuan buildings sway in the wind. The apartments that sell are mostly used as occasional pied a terres by absentee owners. The apartments are deliberately under assessed by the city so the owners don’t have to pay what they actually should owe in taxes.

The scale and spirit of 57th street has been utterly crushed.  Almost every low-rise building that’s not landmarked has come down, including the former Rizzoli  and adjacent townhouses.  Low-rise landmarks like Steinway Hall and the Art Students League have become doormats for the supersized towers that rise above them–the Landmarks Commission has been disabled.  And there isn’t a jot of even “affordable” housing to be found. 

And this is what the developers and the politicians they bully and bribe envision for all of Manhattan, and why they want the height restrictions–which allowed these behemoths to be built–to be lifted entirely. It’s open season on New York City.