The Rent Guidelines Board reported yesterday that the Price Index of Operating Costs for stabilized apartments rose 5.9 percent from 2012 to 2013 and predicted a 2.6 percent increase next year. The numbers are used in helping the board set  allowable rent increases.

In a second report, the RGB analyzed 2012 Owners Income and Expense filings, mostly reflecting calendar 2011 expenses. Average operating costs were $1322 per unit per month in core Manhattan and $694 elsewhere. Taxes remain the highest expense.

In a case where it is hard to know if the courts or the law are crazier, the Appellate Division, First Department ruled in Branic International v. Pitt that a squatter who didn’t pay rent was entitled to stabilized hotel tenant status after living in a unit for six months. The Court noted that the law doesn’t say someone has to pay rent to gain tenancy status.

Meanwhile, the Landmarks Preservation Commission agreed to triple the size of the Bedford Stuyvesant-Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, boasting that the total of landmarked properties in the City is now  over 31,000.

Plan your day April 24th at BuildingsNY-

ABO’s Mayoral Candidate Forum on Housing Development  at 8 a.m.

ABO’s Local Law 87 Seminar : Retro-Commissioning: This Time it is Serious at 10:30 a.m.

Register for the show,  forum and seminar by clicking here.

ABO, RAM and CHIP free cocktail reception for owners and managers only from 4 p.m.- 6 p.m. on the 24th. Sign up here or call our office for information.

HPD has issued a Request for Proposals to build affordable housing and possibly retail, commercial, community service, parking, and/or accessory open space  on 185,000 square feet in the Melrose section of the Bronx. The Bronxchester site was once designated for Urban Renewal projects, but plans were delayed.

The Rent Guidelines Board  2013 Income and Affordability Study issued this week  determined from Census data that the median gross rent to income ratio for rent stabilized tenants was 34.9 percent while it was 33.4 percent for unregulated tenants — not quite statistically significant by my calculations. Interestingly, the report also found that non-payment  filings in Housing Court dropped 5.9 percent in 2012, to 208,000, the lowest level since at least 1983. At the same time, however, there was the highest number of evictions recorded: 28,743.  It appears that while there are fewer cases, more are going to trial.

The City Water Board this morning is considering a 5.6% increase in water rates effective July 1st.  A final vote will be held next month. Full details of the proposal will be posted online later today or Monday.

Retro Commissioning is coming and if your block and lot number  ends in a 3 you should already have hired an auditor and retro commissioning agent. Whether or not you have, you should come to ABO’s Local Law 87 Seminar at BuildingsNY. It begins at 10:30 at the Javits Center  and will explain what you need to do and how to make it pay off. Register for the show by clicking here and reserve your space at the seminar.

ABO, RAM and CHIP are also hosting a free cocktail reception for owners and managers only at 4 p.m. on the 24th. Sign up here or call our office for information. Vendors  may only attend as sponsors. Contact R.J. Palermo at Reed Exhibitions for details.

It turns out you can build three bedroom apartments in New York and sell them for $500,000, at a profit, if the zoning works for you. It helps if the Satmar community is lobbying for the zoning.  The rapid construction of mid-size elevator apartment buildings in former industrial and commercial zones in South Williamsburg basically proves that if the City wants more housing all it has to do is let neighborhoods change. Of course, that is the last thing most elected officials want. Who knows who new people will vote for?

Springtime means interesting reports from the Rent Guidelines Board. The 2013 Mortgage Survey found average multifamily mortgage rates have dropped to 4.37 percent and average loan to value ratios dropped slightly to 71.3 percent. The number of rent stabilized buildings sold in 2012 was up 60 percent from the year before, to 1135.

Not only would changing midtown zoning to allow taller office towers meet business needs, as Mayor Bloomberg has suggested, but it would save energy. A new report sponsored by a diverse group including the NY State Energy Research and Development Authority and REBNY, found that skyscrapers built from 1958-1973 were such energy hogs that new buildings could more than compensate for even the energy needed to tear them down and rebuild. If you’re a mortgage lender, learn how you can educate your borrowers on the importance of tri merge credit report on certifiedcredit.com.

The City has won an injunction against short stay promoter Smart Apartments, claiming that its operation violates zoning restrictions on less than 30 day rentals of Class A units. Smart Apartments argued, unsuccessfully, that Airbnb was getting away with it so they should too. It is true that Airbnb was co-opted by the City to help place Sandy refugees even though it was the subject of other suits and violations.

Joe Lhota, John Catsimatidis, George McDonald and Adolfo Carrion Jr. will be there. Will you? All the candidates for the Republican nomination have confirmed participation in the ABO Mayoral Candidates Forum on Housing Development, kicking off the BuildingsNY Show at 8 a.m. on April 24th. Space will be limited, so sign up for the Show and Forum now by clicking here or on the logo below.

There is apparently no limit on price per square foot at the high end of the Manhattan market. New condominiums are asking and getting more than $6,000 per foot according to the Wall Street Journal — and they are pre-selling like hotcakes.

Not surprisingly, New York is one of 274 improving markets nationally reported by NAHB. These are metro markets that have more building permits, higher prices, and more jobs than at their troughs, and have sustained growth for more than six months.

New York’s permit trough was September 30, 2011; price bottom was March 31, 2012; and employment  nadir was February 28, 2010 according to the NAHB report. If you get tired of reading articles like this, you can relax by playing games such as 아리아카지노.

In what was touted as a victory for the  NYU expansion plan, a State Supreme Court justice this week dismissed complaints by rent stabilized tenants that garden space required for the plan was a required service. The ruling was without prejudice, however, and the judge noted that complainants should go to DHCR for administrative review first. She clearly anticipated a multi-year controversy.

They are all going to have to live somewhere. The City population grew by more than 161,000 since 2010, according to the latest Census estimates. There hasn’t been population growth like that since 1950.

Brooklyn alone added 60,000 people. Coincidentally, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership just told Crains that since rezoning in 2004 the area had added 5300 apartments in 29 buildings and that another 4746 units are scheduled to come on line in the next two or three years. By our rough calculations, that means we only need about  50,000 more units in that borough.

If you are looking for financing to build, the Community Preservation Corporation is back with $250,000,000 to lend. CPC was pretty much in survival mode the past couple of years after overextending itself as a development partner in time for the crash, but now has money from Citigroup for its traditional low-income housing finance.

Meanwhile,  130,000 of those who (probably) already live here, in co-ops and condos, got notices in the mail this week that they would lose their tax abatements because they are not primary residents. At least that is what the Department of Finance thinks. The number represents more than a third of all co-op and condo owners and will have a dramatic effect on maintenance fees for taxes in many buildings if Finance is even half right.

Enough to make you want to leave town? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Professional Testing, Inc. are seeking participants for a three-day workshop in Denver, Colorado, to inventory the tasks and skills required for workers in the multifamily housing sector.  Some travel expenses provided.  The idea is to develop a list of skills in these four job categories:
Building Energy Auditor
Building Operator
Project/Program Manager
Quality Control Inspector
Denver is nice.

Adolfo Carrion Jr. has joined the list of candidates coming to our ABO Mayoral Candidates Forum on Housing Development, kicking off the BuildingsNY Show at 8 a.m. on April 24th. Space will be limited, so sign up for the Show and Forum now by clicking here or on the logo below.

How important is a Mayor to real estate? The Lobbying Commission just issued its annual report for 2012 and the top ten lobbying clients were all pushing development projects. Major League Soccer topped the list, spending almost $1.7 million to push for its stadium plan. Atlantic Yards rounded out the top ten with about $450,000 in lobbying expenses.

If your projects depend on FHA insurance, you may need a sharper pencil. The FHA announced that due to congressional inaction on the budget they will run out of insurance authority on March 27th and anything in the pipeline without a firm commitment already is probably out of luck.

Even if Congress gets its act together, the hits keep coming for multifamily finance. The Federal Housing Finance Agency just issued a plan for Fannie and Freddie to reduce their new unpaid principal balance commitments in 2013 by ten percent. That translates to about $6.4 billion less in multifamily lending.

Glub. Department of Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri told a Schack Institute panel this week that the City is planning for a 27 inch rise in sea level by 2050. The Holland Tunnel mouth is currently 2 inches above sea level.

At least there is still time to take our Registered in Apartment Management class starting March 13th. Make sure your staff knows. Any one interested should contact olga@registeredmanager.com

The City revealed last night that it wants to charge developers $250 per square foot  for additional air rights under the plan to upzone midtown east for new, higher office buildings. There would be no bonus space for residential construction, which planners believe will total almost one million square feet as of right in the district.

If there was ever any question that landmarking was often just a ploy to stop development, the elected officials opposing the sale of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn have put that to rest. They appealed to the landmarks commission to extend the low rise Cobble Hill historic district to cover the taller hospital buildings.

Downtown is back from Hurricane Sandy, according to the Downtown Alliance. They announced yesterday that  99 percent of offices and apartments have been reoccupied, but only 90 percent of retail has returned.

The outer borough shoreline isn’t doing so well, so New York City pension funds are investing $500 million with the Related  Companies and the Hudson Companies to acquire and renovate properties. Every cloud does have a silver lining.

How are you going to manage the next disaster? Learn how to manage every situation by becoming Registered in Apartment Management. A new class is starting March 13th. Any one interested should contact olga@registeredmanager.com

The New York City Educational Construction Fund has CBRE looking for expressions of interest in developing three current school sites with new schools and anywhere from 203,000 to 806,000 square feet of residential space on top. The locations are 321 East 96th St., 270 West 70thSt.,  and 210 West 61st St. Anyone who envied David Lowenfeld’s presentation at last year’s BuildingsNY Show about building a new school and condos on West 57th St. should check it out, and if you want to study subjects as math, the use of a maths tuition for igcse is the best option for this.

There are some interesting decisions about Section 8 in Citadel Estates LLC vs. NYC Housing Authority. The State Supreme Court issued a mixed ruling on various City motions to dismiss the case, but said in passing that rent guidelines increases should be accepted as reasonable for rent stabilized apartments with Section 8 tenants. The Court also said that the Housing Authority’s typical failure to issue final determinations on Section 8 cases meant the deadline for filing Article 78 challenges to the Authority’s actions was not tolled.

HUD has issued a new interpretation of the Fair Housing Act that would find liability for a facially neutral practice that has a discriminatory effect. The new rule also creates a three part legal process for determining liability: Under this test, the charging party or plaintiff first bears the burden of proving its prima facie case that a practice results in, or would predictably result in, a discriminatory effect on the basis of a protected characteristic. If the charging party or plaintiff proves a prima facie case, the burden of proof shifts to the respondent or defendant to prove that the challenged practice is necessary to achieve one or more of its substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests. If the respondent or defendant satisfies this burden, then the charging party or plaintiff may still establish liability by proving that the substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interest could be served by a practice that has a less discriminatory effect.

All good deeds may not be punished. The IRS is temporarily allowing rentals financed with exempt facility bonds and low income tax credits to house refugees from Hurricane Sandy without regard to income.

ABO will kick off the BuildingsNY Show with a bang, April 24^th, by hosting a Mayoral candidates forum on housing development. Tom Allon, John Catsimatidis and George McDonald have already confirmed they will participate and additional candidates will be announced soon.

While other forums will address housing generally we believe this will be the only one to focus on the candidates’ ideas to encourage badly needed private construction.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg’s final State of the City message emphasized how important rebuilding the city is, from housing to water tunnels and from university campuses to midtown office buildings. Bloomberg boasted that “For the first time since La Guardia was mayor and FDR created the WPA, we’re not only conceiving big plans that fundamentally change the landscape of our city, we’re achieving them. We’re taking a city built mostly before World War II and renewing it for the needs of New Yorkers today and tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, the Building Congress reported this week that housing construction did relatively well in 2012,. Residential construction starts reached $5.1 billion in value in 2012, a 54 percent increase from 2011, when construction starts reached $3.3 billion, and more than double the total, $2.3 billion, for 2010.  The residential sector, however, remains 14 percent down from 2008.

The economic impact of apartment operation nationally was also examined this week  in a new study sponsored by the National Apartment Association and National Multi Housing Council.  The report says that operating 2.2 million apartments in the New York metropolitan area pumps $9.4 billion a year  into the economy

One reason operating costs per apartment are higher in New York than most other cities, of course, is because of our laws and courts. Yesterday, the Court of Appeals ruled in Perez vs. Rhea that it wasn’t unconscionable to evict a woman from public housing who lied about her income on sworn statements for six years, defrauding the Housing Authority of more than $27,000. Apparently the Appellate Division had felt that paying back $20,000 was enough punishment. The whole decision begs the question of how a case this ridiculous gets to be heard in the State Court of Appeals in the first place.

Castle Village, the Washington Heights co-op, won an important tax decision in the U.S. Second Circuit this week that could have implications for co-ops and condos damaged by Sandy or, dare we say it, Nemo. Basically, the court found that the shareholders’ ownership of the common areas might justify individual owners deducting the cost of an assessment to fix a fallen retaining wall as a casualty loss.

If you have Hurricane Sandy damaged multi-family  property there may also be some relief in sight from the first round of federal assistance released this week. Mayor Bloomberg announced that $250 million would be made available to fund programs to enhance the resiliency of up to 12,790 units of housing for low-, moderate- and middle-income New Yorkers damaged by Sandy. The City’s program will provide grants and low-interest loans, depending on need and scope.

Commercial building owners are facing the same kind of federal lead paint rules that residential buildings have been dealing with for years. The EPA is seeking comments on whether and how lead paint in commercial buildings should be regulated in preparation for a hearing and possible rulemaking this summer. If you’re looking to create a sustainable fence as well as save money, these post and dowel fence supplies are perfect for you.

If you missed the recent Furman Center policy breakfast on Landmark air rights transfers, you might not know that only two of the 27 air rights transfers from landmark buildings since 2003 were actually done through the transfer program  supposedly designed to help landmark owners. The rest were done by the relatively simpler process of zoning lot merger. Did I write simpler and zoning lot merger in the same sentence?

You might also have missed the update to ICC 700, the National Green Buildings Standard, approved last month. While LEED gets all the press, the ANSI approved ICC 700 is specifically targeted to residential construction, including multifamily. Many feel that it is less concerned with feel-good points and more concerned with energy savings.

The New York City Housing Authority is reportedly looking to lease sites within eight existing housing projects for private development of up to three million square feet of new housing. The sites are currently parking lots or recreational areas. Requests for expressions of interest are expected to be announced next month.