Six Bedford Stuyvesant homeowners are accusing developer Delight Construction and indicted Department of Housing Preservation and Development official Wendell Waters of demanding extra cash for their city-subsidized homes, they told the Daily News, and of leaving them with subpar construction on the buildings.

The homeowners, who won a housing lottery for homes along Lexington Avenue, made their down payments in 2005, the News said, but have since run into problems related to move-in delays, requests for more money to clean up suspected contamination, and plumbing and heating malfunctions.

“Either we paid the money or we could walk away from the contract,” said Onika McLean, one of the owners. [more]

Sharif El-Gamal and 1835 Amsterdam AvenueIf Sharif El-Gamal doesn’t show up to court Thursday, he could be sent to jail over the $63,133 his company owes the city in fines, fees and taxes for a Washington Heights property, the New York Post reported.

El-Gamal, the man behind the notorious Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, acquired the 14-unit apartment building at 1835 Amsterdam Avenue in 2008, public records show, although the price isn’t listed. Between July 2010 and May 2011, 150 complaints about rats, roaches, lack of heat and construction debris were filed for the building. [more]

An official in the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development responsible for the construction of affordable housing was arrested early this morning on federal racketeering conspiracy and bribery charges with six developers, two of them lawyers, the New York Times reported.

According to the charges, Wendell Walters, assistant commissioner for new construction, transformed the agency into a racketeering enterprise along with developer Stevenson Dunn.

Walters is alleged to have taken approximately $600,000 in bribes and kickbacks on about $22 million in moderately priced housing projects overseen by HPD in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn between 2002 and 2011, officials said. Walters had played a key role in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $8.5 billion housing plan to preserve and build 165,000 apartments for half a million middle-class and working-class New Yorkers by 2014. [more]

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is looking for a developer to build up to 225 affordable housing units and 68,000 square feet of retail space along a vacant strip on Livonia Avenue, between Pennsylvania and Williams avenues in the East New York area of Brooklyn, Crain’s reported, issuing a request for proposals today.
The request is the first phase in what the department has dubbed the Livonia Avenue Initiative, a plan to revamp the strip.
“This retail corridor has been defunct for a long time,” said RuthAnne Visnauskas, deputy commissioner for HPD. The site’s proximity to the elevated L train line meant there was a lot of noise, which discouraged developers in the past, but building materials can keep out noise, she said. [more]

HPD Commissioner Wambua
New York University’s Furman Center of Real Estate and Urban Policy has compiled the first known comprehensive database of the city’s affordable housing stock that links the units to the agencies that subsidize them. The Wall Street Journal reported that it is available on the Furman website beginning today.

By highlighting the origin of affordable housing subsidies, across the city, state and federal agencies that contributed data, the database provides a clearer picture of when the funding expires and the units can be converted to market rate. [more]

The New York City Housing Authority and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development are planning to overhaul a dilapidated Harlem block, DNAinfo reported, renovating 36 historic buildings at the Randolph Houses on 114th Street between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, in the city’s first mixed-use public and affordable housing complex.

The city agencies have issued a request for proposals to create 140 units of public housing and a minimum of 155 units of affordable housing at the tenements.

This will be the first collaboration between the NYCHA and HPD that will result in public housing and affordable housing units being placed together, they said. [more]

New York landlords who haven’t repaid the city for addressing dangerous conditions in their buildings have run out of time, the Wall Street Journal reported, as yesterday marked the deadline for paying off emergency repair liens before the liens were sold to investors. This is the first time the city has sold the rights to collect charges for repair services.
“This should be a wake-up call for landlords who think they can continue to use the city as their personal repair team,” said Douglas Apple, first deputy commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
An estimated $6.6 million worth of liens will be sold off in the next few days, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance said. More than 700 properties around the city needed $12 million in repairs when the department first drew up a list of potential liens in May. [more]

HPD Commissioner Mathew Wambua and 241 and 247 Linden Boulevard (building source: PropertyShark)

A Brooklyn judge issued warrants of arrest for the owners of two Linden Boulevard rental properties in Flatbush with a combined 500 open housing code violations, Crain’s reported. The landlords, Lewis Alleyne, Dwight King and Gerald King, have allegedly failed to comply with court orders to repair dangerous conditions in the buildings and to appear in court.

The eight-unit building at 241 Linden Boulevard has 322 unaddressed housing-code violations, while 247 Linden Boulevard is a six-unit property with 178 such housing violations. [more]

Two Bronx apartment buildings totaling 99 units with 1,631 housing code violations have received a $600,000 loan for emergency building repairs, Crain’s reported. The funds are coming from the Manhattan-based non-profit Housing Partnership Development Corp. The buildings are owned by Exact Capital, which purchased the notes for $3.5 million last year, after Sovereign Bank foreclosed on previous owner Alan Fein’s $5.4 million mortgage. [more]

An audit by City Comptroller John Liu’s office has found deficiencies in the city’s window-guard enforcement program, which prevents children falling through open windows, in New York City public housing. Nearly half of the violations examined by the Department of Housing Preservation and Developement in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 were closed despite the department’s failure to verify with tenants that guards had been installed. Some violations were also improperly closed due to data-entry errors.

By law, landlords of buildings with three or more apartments must install window-guards in units housing children younger than 11. Complaints are received and investigated by the Department of Health and violations and forwarded to HPD. [more]