The Pinnacle Group has reached a $2.5 million settlement with
rent-regulated tenants who had claimed in a lawsuit that they were subject to harassment, unlawful rent increases and
aggressive eviction attempts during the real estate boom, the New York
Times reported. Under the settlement, Pinnacle Group, as the landlord,
will pay $2.5 million to legal and tenant-rights groups to help
current and former tenants make legal claims for damages. The Pinnacle
Group, which owns about 15,000 apartment units citywide, must now set up a
help line and in the future must carefully notify tenants of plans to
increase rents or start evictions. [more]

The 30-year rent caps on close to 170,000 publicly subsidized rental units will expire by 2037, opening the door for landlords to start charging market rents, according to a new report from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a non-profit tenant advocacy group. The news comes on the heels of the Bloomberg administration’s announcement that it has reached the 100,000 milestone in affordable units created or preserved since 2003. “The mayor is saying they’re making impressive gains; however, by 2037, an equal number of units will have been washed away by their lack of foresight,” Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the organization, told the New York Times. [more]

New York State housing czar Priscilla Almodovar resigned from her
post this afternoon, after less than three years in the position.
Almodovar, president and CEO of the Housing Finance Agency, has been
widely credited as one of the state government’s most effective
members, with the state’s inventory of affordable housing units more
than double its level when she took office. Industry experts say she
was particularly deft at redistributing funds from ineffective
programs into more efficacious ones. “Priscilla really took the
state’s bonding resources and used them in a way to produce affordable
housing in reasonably large quantities and in places where it wouldn’t
usually happen,” Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the
Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, said. “She took
some messed-up crony programs and thought them through and made them
really effective.” Almodovar plans to transition into the private
sector, according to a statement from her spokesperson.

The number of residential evictions in Queens rose by more than a
quarter last year while the volume was flat or decreased in other
boroughs, according to the most current city data obtained by The Real Deal. In Queens, 4,401 households were evicted in 2008, a 27 percent increase
from a year earlier when there were 3,467, data from the city
Department of Investigation reveals. By evictions, The Real Deal is
including what are technically called “evictions” as well as “legal
possessions.” The Department of Investigation uses both terms to describe the return
of the property to the control of the landlord, although both are what
are commonly understood to be an eviction.
[more]