From left: Christine Quinn, Hotel Chelsea, Joseph Chetrit
UPDATED, 12:04 p.m., March 23: The city Department of Buildings ordered Joseph Chetrit to stop work at the Hotel Chelsea late Friday night, in response to a construction incident that knocked out gas, heat and hot water at the property — and a day after City Council Speaker Christine Quinn demanded an immediate shutdown of construction. [more]
From left: HPD Commissioner Mathew Wambua and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
The City Council has approved a controversial new law requiring more transparency for affordable housing projects for which developers receive subsidies, Crain’s reported. The statute will require the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city agency responsible for the creation and financing of affordable housing, to disclose detailed information on how developers are selected for affordable housing projects. HPD will even have to disclose the wages earned by any worker employed on an affordable housing project, according to Crain’s. Builders have said the new law could cost them millions. [more]
From left: Stephen Glascock of Anbau, Matthew Wambua of HPD and the Chelsea Citizen
Anbau Enterprises, the development firm behind the Chelsea Citizen, a new 16-story condominium project, has petitioned the New York State Supreme Court to intervene in its ongoing dispute with the Department of Housing, Preservation & Development. The developer, which is constructing the 29-unit project at 124 West 23rd Street, has asked the court to step in to ensure that it will receive the 421-A tax abatement it applied for in December but has since been denied by HPD. In court records, Anbau claims it has met all the requirements to qualify for the abatement. [more]
From left: Carolyn Johnson and 131 West 122nd Street (building credit: PropertyShark)
A Harlem brownstone with a beautiful pale limestone exterior has sat vacant for years, because no one can determine who its rightful owner is, the New York Daily News reported. Carolyn Johnson, a project leader with the New York Liquidation Bureau and owner of Welcome to Harlem tour company, has been trying for years to buy the building, at 131 West 122nd Street, but legal deed documents have not emerged.
The building was bought by a lifetime resident, Raymond Springer, in 1979. He died in 1994 and friends said he had no heirs and he left no will, so tenants tried to manage the building and got the Department of Housing Preservation and Urban Development to appoint an administrator to oversee it. [more]
The owners of three Upper West Side single-room-occupancy buildings will pay $600,000 in civil penalties to settle claims they violated housing laws by renting out some of their roughly 600 units to short-term tenants and tourists. The agreement, approved by a New York state judge on Nov. 22, resolves a longstanding legal dispute with the city that spurred legislation last year clarifying that SRO units must be used for permanent residents only.
For almost a century, tourists and other temporary occupants have rented units at the properties — the Montroyal at 315 West 94th Street, the Pennington at 316 West 95th Street and the Continental at 330 West 95th Street, all between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive — and the owners have advertised the accommodations on travel websites, according to court records. … [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]
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]
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