Eliot Brown | The New York Observer

Liu Forms Community Agreements Task Force

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:34:16 -0400

City Comptroller John Liu has formed his Task Force on Public Benefit Agreements, selecting four co-chairs who hail from backgrounds of labor, the real estate industry, housing and small business. The chairs are Jack Ahern, president of the Central Labor Council; Barry Gosin, CEO of brokerage Newmark Knight Frank; Priscilla Almodovar, a former top state housing finance official and an executive at JPMorgan Chase; and Joyce Moy, professor of Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship...

NYC Partnership for Ravitch Plan

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:39:25 -0400

Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch's budget plan just got another endorsement from a leading business group. The Partnership for New York City, the civic-minded coalition of the city's largest businesses, just sent out a statement endorsing the budget plan, which would install new controls on spending over a five-year horizon, allowing New York to borrow up to $2 billion this year to cover current shortfalls.

From Partnership president Kathryn Wylde:

"The Partnership for New ...

Report: New York a Global Leader—Except in Livability, Air Quality, Housing Costs, Crime, Transit, Etc.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:17:11 -0400

The Partnership for New York City and PricewaterhouseCoopers have a new study out measuring global cities, and New York scores high, leading many categories with cities such as London, Tokyo and Paris.

The report, which does not rank overall but rather ranks cities on an array of different categories, is worth a read, as it tries to quantify a long list of qualities that add to a city's global strength.

While New York scored at or...

State Reups with SOM for Moynihan Station Design

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:29:02 -0400

Architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill has gotten a bit of new work, thanks in part to the federal stimulus package.

The state's development agency on Thursday announced that it had awarded SOM design work for the first phase of its Moynihan Station project, the long-planned expansion of Penn Station into the Farley Post Office.

In the past decade, SOM has been a near constant in a project that is constantly going through gyrations. The firm's David Childs designed...

Bar Association: Reform Community-Developer Dealmaking

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:11:50 -0400

The Association of the Bar of New York City doesn't seem to think all that highly of the current process by which landlords cut formal, non-standardized deals with community groups—known as Community Benefits Agreements—to win approvals for planned developments.

CBAs proliferated in recent years, particularly in the late real estate boom, as community groups and elected officials rushed to try to wrest concessions and mitigations from developers who may or may not be financially prepared to...

The Business of Ground Zero

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:57:08 -0400

A half-century ago, the imperious Port Authority director Austin Tobin unveiled a plan for the public agency to build two gigantic towers on the western edge of a struggling Lower Manhattan, creating a new office district, a city within a city, of 9 million square feet.

Built in the early 1970s, the World Trade Center towers proved a tremendous drain, only starting to provide enough money to cover debt service in the 1980s and not...

One (Likely) Victory for Ravitch

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:44:35 -0400

Lt. Governor Dick Ravitch has (mostly) won over the Citizens Budget Commission with his five-year budget reform proposal.

The C.B.C., which is governed by city business leaders, tends to be rather conservative in their views on issues such as borrowing, so the conditional endorsement is something of a victory for Mr. Ravitch. Then again, he was once the organization's chairman. (And C.B.C. president Carol Kellerman once helped out on Ravitch's 1989 mayoral campaign).

In...

Atlantic Yards and the Great Recession Groundbreaking

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:46:21 -0500

There was an odd feel to Thursday afternoon's Atlantic Yards groundbreaking—one that felt almost as though it wasn't 2010, but rather, say, 2007, when the economy was vibrant and projects were popping up around the city.

A giant white party tent at the site of the Nets basketball arena-to-be in Prospect Heights quickly became filled with business leaders, lawyers, Nets investors and a celebrity or two, as a brigade of caterers passed around gourmet...

State Drops AEG

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:27:46 -0500

The Paterson administration has dropped Aqueduct Entertainment Group from the bid to develop a racino at the Aqueduct racetrack, jettisoning the group a month after it was conditionally designated the winner of the years-long quest to beef up gambling at the Queens property.

Governor Paterson's office just issued the following statement, attributed to the "Executive Chamber":

"The Division of the Lottery has concluded that it cannot issue a gaming license to Aqueduct Entertainment Group (AEG). Therefore,...

WTC Fight and the NYT

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:45:39 -0500

The back of Thursday's Times A-section is torn over the World Trade Center fight.

There is a Times editorial defending the Port Authority and saying it should not be using its money to back financing on a speculative office tower, as the city and developer Larry Silverstein have demanded.

On the opposite page: an op-ed from Mayor Bloomberg and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, jointly calling on the Port Authority to put up more money.

The two pieces...

Ravitch Offers Albany a Trade: New Budget Limits for Less Pain this Year

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:34:40 -0500

Lt. Governor Dick Ravitch today released his plan to bring long-term fiscal stability to Albany, complete with its expected contents: some borrowing allowed, with a new structure to control spending.

A bit more specifically, it allows short-term bond issuance so that a gaping budget hole need not be filled this year, and it installs new controls on budgeting with a semi-independent board that must approve the budget and see that spending and revenue are...

Paterson: Just Read the Damn Ravitch Report and Stop Asking About Borrowing

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:47:04 -0500

Governor Paterson is unhappy with the way the details of Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch's five year fiscal plan have leaked out. That is to say he's sick of questions about borrowing. (The report's now scheduled to be unveiled to the public at noon today).

He was asked about the report, which is set to to call for short-term borrowing in exchange for limits on spending, after speaking at the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association breakfast at Bayard's this morning.

...

Port Authority Punts Vornado, Brookfield From One WTC

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:24:19 -0500

The race to sell off a portion of the Freedom Tower-officially, One World Trade Center-has kicked into a new gear.

The Port Authority, the New York-New Jersey-controlled bureaucracy that is developing the tower and shopping around an ownership stake, late last month dropped two developers vying to take a piece of the 1,776-foot tower, according to people familiar with the process. Out of the running: Steven Roth's Vornado Realty Trust and Brookfield Properties, run by...

The Last (Good) Man Standing

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:58:28 -0500

On the morning of Monday, March 8, Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch placed a call to Kathryn Wylde, president of the civic-minded business group Partnership for New York City, with a request.

Mr. Ravitch, who was working on a plan to reform the state’s dismal system of budgeting, needed support—and fast. He wanted Ms. Wylde, a power broker among the Manhattan business set, to corral some of her members for a meeting with Mr. Ravitch. She...

Boston Mayor Outraged by Roth’s ‘Intentional Cynical Ploy’

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:25:42 -0500

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino does not seem to be happy with Steve Roth.

In a letter dated Monday, Mr. Menino wrote to the Vornado Realty Trust chairman, threatening the use of eminent domain to seize the company's Boston property and expressing outrage over remarks Mr. Roth made about blight and development last week during a talk at Columbia. During the talk, Mr. Roth suggested he intentionally left Manhattan's Bloomberg LP tower site vacant to attract subsidies. We...