Remember the commercial where a man in scrubs performing a surgery turns out to be an imposter?
“You’re not Dr. Stewart!” says a shocked nurse. “No,” he replies. “But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
The tagline: “It won’t make you smarter. But you’ll feel smarter.”
City Council members sometimes remind me of that fake doctor. Consider the mandates they are proposing to “increase housing affordability for low-income New Yorkers and families,” according to a press release.
The mandates would actually throw a monkey wrench into the complex machinery of affordable housing development.
The “problem” they are trying to fix is that the share of studios in affordable housing projects increased to 34 percent from 29 percent between 2015 and 2024, while the share of three-bedroom units dipped below 7 percent.
They also don’t like that “only” 43 percent of these homes are for “very” or “extremely” low-income households, given that half of renters in the city are in those categories.
Council leaders have distributed three bills for different members to introduce. Intro 1433 from Eric Dinowitz would set a citywide minimum percentage of two- and three-bedroom units in city-funded projects. Crystal Hudson’s Intro 1437 would cap the share of studios in senior housing projects at 50 percent over five years.
And Intro 1443 from Sandy Nurse would require that a citywide minimum percentage of city-funded rental units must be affordable for extremely and very low-income households.
The Council thinks the way to change the outcomes of a complex system is to simply mandate new outcomes. At the very least, it should have asked the state’s leading affordable housing group for advice.
The current system, NYSAFAH chair Samantha Magistro testified, “adapts to periodic funding constraints, changes in federal policy, specific site conditions and market realities to make projects feasible.”
She continued, “By replacing this flexible system with rigid, citywide mandates, these bills will fundamentally alter the evaluation and financing of projects.”
“The proposed legislative package will lock in mandates that cannot adapt to varying site conditions, neighborhood contexts and financial realities, making many projects simply unfeasible.”
Because of term limits, the business community needs to educate 51 new City Council members every eight years. We’re now at the end of an election cycle, so most Council members should be experienced enough not to do stupid stuff.
Yet they persist.
What we’re thinking about: When will Zohran Mamdani propose property tax reform for New York City? Bill de Blasio’s tax reform commission didn’t come out with a plan until the final year of his mayoralty — too late for him to get Albany to consider it, let alone pass it. That was probably by design. Mamdani did not blame de Blasio for that, but did criticize Eric Adams for failing to propose reforms after promising to do so within 100 days of taking office. Send thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Under a new law, limited liability companies formed in New York before Jan. 1, 2026, will have a year to disclose information about their beneficial owners to the state. Companies formed after that date will have 30 days. Unfortunately for journalists, the state will not make that information public.
Elsewhere…
Foot traffic at New York City offices, as measured by cellphone activity, rose 4.8 percent in the 12 months through October, but remains 16.2 percent below its October 2019 level.
However, that six-year drop places New York’s pandemic recovery at second best among major cities, according to Placer.ai. Only Miami was better, down 10.2 percent from October 2019.
The weakest recovery has been in Chicago, where office traffic is down 42.9 percent. San Francisco was similarly bad, down 42.1 percent. But San Francisco’s number has improved the most in the past year, up 11.8 percent, just above Miami’s 11.3.
The data also show slow office-traffic recoveries in Boston, Denver, Washington and Los Angeles. Nationally, 48 percent of office activity is on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Thursday was $11.6 million for a 9,132-square-foot townhouse at 217 West 20th Street in Chelsea. Ravi Kantha and Jessica Taylor with Serhant had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was for $3.2 million for a 5,368-square-foot auto-repair shop at 70-16 51st Avenue in Woodside.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $22.5 million for a 4,445-square-foot condominium unit at 50 West 66th Street in Lincoln Square. The Singer Team at Brown Harris Stevens has the listing.
— Matthew Elo
