The city is spending $38.4 million to put heat pumps in the 712 units at the Housing Authority’s Beach 41st Street Houses.
No need to get your calculators out. I got you. That’s $54,000 per unit.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani shared the first two numbers, but not the third one, on Wednesday in Far Rockaway as he proudly announced the expenditure. “The need for this infrastructure is urgent,” he said.
Mamdani said when he represented Queensbridge Houses in the Assembly, its residents would tell him “of a heating system that was so unreliable that they would have to regulate the heat themselves, opening up windows, no matter what the temperature was, to try and create some level of stability.”
A much greater problem is when the heat doesn’t work at all, which happens quite a bit at NYCHA developments.
It’s one of the reasons that the Housing Authority is both loved and loathed — often by the exact same people.
Socialists and NYCHA tenants love the idea of publicly owned, operated and subsidized housing but loathe the terrible condition into which the government has let its developments fall. Many see no connection between these two facts.
Private landlords loathe that NYCHA gets away with a lot of stuff that they cannot.
“Although HPD does cite the housing authority for violations, it does not enforce collection of fines. As a result, a NYCHA property can get hit with dozens of citations and pay no penalty at all,” Greg Smith wrote in The City in August 2023, eight months after a new law was supposed to start holding NYCHA to the same standard as private owners.
But these same landlords love having NYCHA as an example of what they say would happen to their buildings if the government took them over. They loved that NYCHA was No. 1 on the “worst landlords” list, until Public Advocate Jumaane Williams took it off the list entirely, perhaps to avoid embarrassing the Mamdani administration.
Private housing providers also love bringing up NYCHA’s spending to show that the government is being disingenuous when it says rent-stabilized owners should be able to renovate units for $15,000 or $30,000 or even $50,000.
Those amounts come from actual laws and government programs — individual apartment improvements and Unlocking Doors. Meanwhile, NYCHA spends well over $400,000 to fully renovate one of its units.
What we’re thinking about: Does Gary Segal and Brad Zackson’s Dynamic Star have any hope of finishing its massive Fordham Landing project?
The eight-year-old firm was hit with a foreclosure suit in October and sought bankruptcy protection in December for itself and the entities with equity stakes in the development. Last year, after the state kicked in $55 million in infrastructure work, Zackson claimed to be on track to deliver 900 affordable units in 2026.
The second phase of the project, which doesn’t even have zoning approvals, calls for 1.8 million square feet of mixed-income housing, 744,000 square feet of office and 143,000 square feet of retail. The firm is looking for new investors. Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Bill Weidner, who runs a Local Law 152 inspection business with his brother, a master plumber, also has a real estate podcast called Realty Speak. I joined Ann Korchak of the Small Property Owners of New York as a guest on the latest episode to talk about rent-stabilized housing and other New York real estate topics. It’s also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Elsewhere…
My colleague Liz Cryan reported that Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau said a new city law requiring bird-friendly glass added $2 million to the cost of a city-funded affordable housing project. Blau’s point seemed to be that the city was working at cross-purposes.
Another question is whether that $2 million could have saved more birds if spent some other way. Cats kill an estimated four times more birds than windows do (see the chart below from New Hampshire Audubon). Perhaps spending $2 million to neuter 15,000 cats would be better for birds.
That math is not going to persuade any volunteer who partakes in the heartbreaking task of collecting dead birds from sidewalks beside glass buildings.
Politicians also have a hard time putting efficiency before emotion. I have yet to hear one suggest that the billions of dollars spent on sidewalk sheds to comply with the city’s draconian facade statute could be used to save more lives than Local Law 11 does.
No elected official wants to be blamed for the death of another Grace Gold, even if the alternative is 10 deaths — blamed on someone else.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Thursday was $19 million for a 6,850-square-foot house at 78 Morton Street in the West Village. Jeremy V. Stein and Kat Trappe of Sotheby’s had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $30 million for 12,552 square feet of vacant commercial land at 539 West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $13.5 million for a 4,678-square-foot condominium unit at 158 Mercer Street in Soho. Jim St. André, Trevor Stephens and Michael Maniawski of Compass have the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 52,660-square-foot, eight-story, 60-unit project at 3070 Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx. Panagis Georgopoulos filed the permit on behalf of Floriand Lulaj.
— Matthew Elo