A City Council member has come up with a brilliant idea: make housing more expensive and more affordable at the same time.
If that sounds impossible, it’s because it is, unless the city finds billions of dollars to increase subsidies.
Council member Carmen De La Rosa doesn’t actually want to make housing more expensive. But her bill to raise the wages of construction workers who build city-subsidized housing would do exactly that.
De La Rosa didn’t appreciate it when the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development testified Monday that her Construction Justice Act would slash its production of affordable units by 1,000 to 2,500 annually.
The bill would force the agency to make “difficult tradeoffs” — that is, build fewer affordable units or charge residents more to live in them, deputy commissioner Ahmed Tigani said at a hearing.
The Council member asked why the agency can’t “be bold” and raise construction workers’ pay to at least $40 per hour without cutting production or affordability. As if passing her bill would somehow change the laws of mathematics.
To state the obvious, HPD cannot spend the same dollar twice — once for workers and once for occupants of the housing they build.
This arithmetic issue comes up repeatedly in the City Council, which loves affordable housing and unions (other than the PBA), but cannot seem to grasp the immutable conflict between them.
“The conversation pits those two needs against each other,” De La Rosa said at the hearing.
Changing the conversation won’t change the math, obviously. But the conversation keeps happening because term limits bring in a new batch of idealistic City Council members every eight years, forcing business leaders and city officials to educate them on the same concepts again and again.
Incidentally, De La Rosa’s bill would also require that at least 30 percent of the hours worked on a project are by workers who live in zip codes where at least 15 percent of the people are below the poverty line or are Housing Authority tenants.
Meeting and documenting that threshold sounds like a logistical nightmare, and would add even more to project costs. But nothing that a little boldness can’t fix, right?
What we’re thinking about: Will Charles Cohen’s Cohen Brothers Realty survive the crushing blows to office buildings and movie theaters? Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Film and television industry employment plummeted from 42,800 in May to 30,800 in September, The City reported. Not a promising development for sound stages, into which the real estate industry has sunk vast sums in recent years.
Elsewhere…
— Douglass Elliman stock closed at $2.03 a share Tuesday, the first time it has broached the $2 threshold since Aug. 27. It is up 42 percent since the company ousted longtime chairman and CEO Howard Lorber last week. One of the beneficiaries of that increase is Lorber himself: In July he bought 100,000 shares for about $1.15 apiece. Those shares have since risen in value by $88,000, or 77 percent. Lorber owns 6.5 million shares overall.
— Jessica Katz and Meta’s Andrea Gellert have joined the board of directors of Win, the nonprofit housing and homeless services organization run by former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Katz was the Adams administration’s first and last chief housing officer, a position she resigned from in 2023. She hung up a shingle as a consultant and also teaches at Columbia.
— The City Council held a hearing Tuesday to explore the potential impact of pending hospital closures in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Real Deal asked the Council press office if it would also examine the impact of past hospital closures, which should be easier to gauge given that they have already happened. No one replied.
St. Vincent’s Hospital, which Rudin replaced with a $1 billion luxury residential and retail development, was among about 20 hospitals that closed across the city as empty beds made them financially unsustainable. Most of the closures were accompanied by predictions by local residents of a health care catastrophe.
Closing time
Residential: The priciest residential sale Tuesday was $8 million for a 3,153-square-foot condominium unit at 495 West Street in the West Village. Deborah Kern of the Corcoran Group had the listing.
Commercial: The largest commercial sale of the day was $13.25 million for a 5,891-square-foot art gallery with unused development rights at 547 West 25th Street in Chelsea. The property was marketed by Serhant.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $22 million for a 5,956-square-foot condominium unit at 25 Park Row in the Financial District. Tinnie Sassano and Yardena Agresta of Compass have the listing. — Matthew Elo