Madness new york city

Live coverage every week plus every game of the NBA Finals. New to Kayo? Some members of the crowd snuck through the quickly overrun security staff and reached the front dors.

The NBA does not mandate the vaccines, but New York City does, and players in local sports venues are required to be inoculated to play. He has become the most divisive figure in the NBA right now — and he was last week given a serve by basketball legend Charles Barkley.

Footage posted on Twitter shows hundreds of protesters descending on the Brooklyn arena earlier in the day. Before the start of this season, the team informed the point guard he would not be allowed to practice with the team or play at Barclays because of his refusal to get a COVID vaccine. Irving, 29, joined Brooklyn in and helped lead the team into the playoffs last season before missing playing time against the Milwaukee Bucks due to injury. No other large American city so grandly substitutes tax money and municipal management for private housing.

Yet there is little evidence the New York approach has improved housing for low- to middle-income New Yorkers. And the city budget might be in balance. This housing, built mostly with federal money, costs the city relatively little to operate. See Table 1. On a per capita basis, New York ranks seventh in the nation, with Chicago, by contrast, has only 13 public housing units per thousand, and Los Angeles a mere 2. It is, for the most part, a response to the abandonment and deterioration of once privately run housing.

The number of new units to be constructed is relatively small. The year plan looks like this:. See Table 2. In fact, Mayor Dinkins has already considered doing that as the budget problems have worsened. Because of the generous exemptions given to both the nonprofit and profit-making landlords who will build or rehab, own and run them, the , apartment units in the program will not yield property taxes for nearly 20 years and then will not be fully assessed for another 12 years.

The remaining 37, single-family homes will receive partial abatements for 10 years. This gargantuan public-works effort is half the size of the MX missile program. Mitchell-Lama units are subsidized in two ways. Over 60, units in New York City were also built with municipal loans. Second, Mitchell-Lama units get an abatement on municipal property taxes, usually between 80 and 90 percent. Eligibility requirements for tenants vary according to a complicated formula.

Designed to keep the middle class in the city, the Mitchell-Lama program has done so only by exempting middle-class residents from property taxes. In addition to Mitchell-Lama are the a, b, and J programs. The state a and b programs encourage new construction by giving builders year partial tax exemptions. The a program applies to newly constructed multiple-dwelling units, and the b program applies to new one- and two-family homes.

Most a buildings are brand-new luxury apartment houses such as the Bristol and the Greenthal on the Upper East Side. J is a city program that allows an owner to deduct up to 90 percent of the cost of making permanent improvements to a property. On a major renovation, the exemption will probably wipe out property taxes for 20 years. There is also a J maximum program, which permits the property to be brought onto the tax rolls for 12 more years at the pre-renovation assessment.

Most early Js were in midtown Manhattan, contributing significantly to its gentrification in the s. Since , Js have been restricted to upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs. Still there is more. New York has one too. No other city has such a second housing authority. A few cities have now set up small housing departments to administer federal block grants, but none is on the same order of magnitude as HPD.

Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco do not have housing departments. This makes it about one-third the size of the police department and roughly comparable to the fire and sanitation departments. See Table 3. The police department puts 26, uniformed officers on the streets.

The fire and sanitation departments employ 12, and 8, uniformed officers respectively. HPD, on the other hand, fields only building inspectors.

The reason other cities can spend their CDBG monies on parks and playgrounds is that, outside of the federally sponsored public housing stock, no other city in the country owns more than a handful of occupied apartments.

Most cities hold tax auctions, turning abandoned properties over to other private owners. Some cities refuse to take in rem properties altogether. Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Houston have no in rem properties at all. Philadelphia has accumulated about 8, buildings, but they are all vacant one- and two-family homes in deteriorating neighborhoods that the city cannot sell at any price. Boston takes a few in rem properties but quickly cycles them back into private ownership.

The real cost is probably higher. Nor does it include lost tax revenues from thousands of abandoned buildings that were never rehabbed, many of which were demolished. Still, to show that a program is expensive is not the same as showing that it is wasteful or unnecessary.

This is not the place for an exhaustive review of the literature on rent control, or the evidence, which has mounted inexorably over the years, that rent control and its attendant regulations are largely responsible for the general tightness of the New York rental housing market. The economic profession is all but unanimous on the subject. Rental vacancy rates throughout the country are now at 7.

In New York, on the other hand, vacancy rates have not been above 3 percent since the late s. Rent control discourages new construction. Thus, private developers in New York put up only about , new housing units a year, fewer than are built in Dallas, which has one-seventh the population of New York and vacancy rates of over 12 percent.

In fact, in many parts of the country, landlords and developers consider their biggest problem to be a surplus of housing. The last time a major insurance company built housing in New York, however, was when Metropolitan Life constructed Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in both begun before rent control.

Both projects are now rent stabilized, and Met Life officials say they will never again invest in New York as long as there are rent regulations. Even more important than the effect rent controls have had in discouraging new construction has been their impact on small landlords.

The median New York landlord owns only 14 units, or one small building. With generally undiversified holdings, slim profit margins, and far smaller cash reserves than the big established real-estate groups, small landlords have been much harder hit by rent controls. They cannot afford to wait years for vacancies which permit slight upward adjustments in the rent or to warehouse units in hopes of taking them co-op.

The procedural complications of rent control—the extensive tenant-protection provisions, the loss of tenant selection, the difficulty of evicting people who do not pay rent—also weigh more heavily on small landlords. Finally, small landlords are often overwhelmed by the paperwork requirements of rent control.

The rent regulations, for instance, include hardship provisions allowing special rent increases to financially pressed owners. But the application process is enormously complex, with the instructions alone running 14 densely printed pages. In five years of interviewing landlords around New York City, I have only met two firms that successfully obtained hardship rent increases: the Church Management Corporation and the Lefrak Corporation.

Both had their applications prepared by staff accountants. Both of these applications were approved before the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal took over the process in Since that time, DHCR has approved only five hardship applications.

Rent regulations have little or nothing to do with it. Dealing with regulations is just part of being a landlord. At the time, thousands of residential properties were in arrears in their property taxes. Almost half the property taxes in the decaying South Bronx were uncollected. To improve tax collection, the city government began accelerating the procedure by which buildings were taken in rem. As it turned out, this assumption was wrong.

Most landlords were behind in taxes because they were not making any money. Instead of collecting property taxes, HPD began to collect apartment buildings. The abandonment of residential property in New York during the s has become legendary. Between and , New York lost , apartment units. Some of this housing was eventually leveled—creating the moonscapes of the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant—but much of it ended up in the hands of HPD.

By , HPD held title to 8, buildings containing , apartments—62, occupied and 46, vacant. Policy shifted from passive acceptance to active acquisition of small properties.

As originally conceived, 7a was a program by which respectable members of the community—lawyers, accountants, and licensed realtors—would be given trust of buildings whose owners had proved incapable of handling them. The administrator was empowered to collect rents from the tenants. These remained the responsibility of the owner. The administrator, on the other hand, was supposed to use all the rent monies to operate, repair, and improve the building.

Thus, in what would become a basic pattern of city housing policy, HPD began taking buildings from landlords who, because of rent regulations, did not have enough cash flow to run them, and then turning them over to city-favored surrogate landlords—after ensuring that the surrogates would have resources the real landlords were denied.

Despite these advantages, the 7a program has not turned out as planned. In the early years, the law was little invoked because of the difficulty of recruiting lawyers, accountants, and other professionals to the task. With the founding of HPD in , the 7a program was dusted off and put into wide use. In , at the request of HPD, the state legislature dropped the professional requirements so that virtually anyone could become a 7a administrator.

In practice, appointments quickly fell to tenant activists, community-organization leaders, and friends of housing court Judges. Several judges have kept a stable of regular 7a administrators, who handle several buildings at a time. At least one Judge Ralph Waldo Sparks, became the center of a scandal involving his 7a administrators.

In , rumors of corruption became so common that the 7a program was investigated by the City Department of Investigation DOI.