When I get a press release about an affordable housing development with a price tag and unit count, I do a crude calculation: dollars per unit.
This does not produce apples-to-apples comparisons or a definitive metric, because projects often include other uses, and apartment sizes vary.
For example, a Queens-based “human justice organization” called Elmcor Youth & Adult Activities announced Thursday it is breaking ground on a project with studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, three-bedrooms, community space and wraparound services.
But for all affordable projects in the city, the cost divided by the number of units is always well over the $500,000 promised by Zohran Mamdani, the probable next mayor.
The 55-unit Elmcor development at 43-12 50th Street in Woodside has a $51.5 million price tag — about $936,000 per unit. That is fairly typical. Again, there is community and services space, but eliminating it would not bring the per-unit cost anywhere close to $500,000.
Also, the nonprofit Elmcor and co-developers Lemle & Wolff Companies and Sarana Development Group are almost certainly not paying union wages to construction and building service workers, as Mamdani would for his projects. (The list of groundbreaking attendees included no union leaders.) Union labor would push the cost well over $1 million per unit.
I have written about Mamdani’s housing plan a lot. Perhaps I am beating a dead horse and should not take his promises at face value. As the late Mario Cuomo said, you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Mamdani campaigned in fiction, but will have to govern in facts.
Still, it bothers real estate people that he won the primary by making promises that he can’t deliver. For sure, some voters believed he could freeze all rents, raise taxes on the rich, and build 200,000 units of social housing for $100 billion.
But other voters chose Mamdani because he wants to do these things, not because they think he can. Sen. Bernie Sanders has built quite a following on that premise. Had Sanders moved back to his hometown, Brooklyn, he might well have been elected mayor at some point (2009 and 2013 come to mind).
What we’re thinking about: Are nonpaying tenants increasingly turning to Adult Protective Services (a city office) to delay or avoid eviction? “You used to see one APS case every month or so,” one landlord attorney told me. “Now you see one every day.” Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: The Suffolk County Water Authority says 70 percent of the water it pumps from Long Island’s aquifer is used for lawn irrigation, and about half of that is wasted by overwatering. The town of Southold is requiring that irrigation systems have rain or soil-moisture sensors, the North Fork Sun reported.
Elsewhere…
The Adams administration — specifically, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — has fired the Census Bureau as the data collector for the Housing and Vacancy Survey, and hired the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research instead.
The survey is conducted every three years, except when the city needs to make an exception to perpetuate the “housing emergency” and thus rent stabilization, as it did when vacancies spiked early in the pandemic.
The city has been using the Census Bureau for the task since the 1960s. In other words, since the beginning: The study is required by the Local Emergency Housing Rent Control Act of 1962.
City officials explained the decision this way: “This partnership with the University of Michigan will ensure HPD can continue to make decisions rooted in reliable data.”
That suggests the agency lacks confidence in the Census Bureau to do so. Perhaps HPD does not trust the Trump administration to collect the information and make it available to the public, or worries that Congress will defund the bureau. The amount of data collected for the Housing and Vacancy Survey has continuously increased, so the task tends to only get bigger.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Thursday was $13.1 million for a 3,188-square-foot sponsor-sale condominium at 500 West 18th Street in Chelsea. Deborah Kern and Steve Gold from Corcoran Sunshine had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $37 million for Unit 1 of 200 Lafayette Street in SoHo. It contains part of the cellar, the ground floor, and the second floor for a total of 27,970 square feet. The Real Deal reported in May on the sale by Brookfield Properties to Meadow Partners.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $5.4 million for a 1,571-square-foot condominium unit at 5 East 22nd Street in Flatiron. Barbara Licalzi of Brown Harris Stevens has the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building application filed was for a proposed 28,188-square-foot, 39-unit residential project at 1295 Shakespeare Avenue in Highbridge. Jakov Saric of Node Architecture filed the permit on behalf of Aleksander Kalaj at Continental Construction.
— Matthew Elo
