Housing Finance Agency

The state Housing Finance Agency's deadline to reapply for tax-exempt bonds is today--a really dry-sounding event but part of a process that could have a huge impact on how quickly the West Side is developed and how.

While not all of the nine developers seeking tax-exempt financing said they could abide the state's new financing requirements, at least they responded--which is more than one, Jeffrey Levine, had indicated he would do.

"I have received a letter from every developer to whom we sent letters. Some say our new criteria is workable; others say that it's not," Priscilla Almodovar, HFA president and chief executive, told The Real Estate on Friday afternoon. "Those who say that it is not workable have made suggestions of things that we should consider to make it workable."

On Feb. 26, Ms. Almodovar capped the amount of bonds that developers could receive at $1.5 million for each affordable unit because her agency was not able to accommodate the overwhelming demand coming from companies eager to settle the Hudson Yards neighborhood.

She said she would review the responses in the next few days and try to resolve the situation quickly.

- Matthew Schuerman

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Jeffrey Levine, the president of Douglaston Development and an influential real-estate developer, is resisting the cap that the state financing agency has placed on tax-exempt bonds for mixed-income apartment buildings.

Mr. Levine is one of two developers who received permission to use tax-exempt financing in the waning days of the Pataki administration. (The other one was Larry Silverstein.) Shortly after Governor Spitzer took over in January, the state Housing Finance Agency froze those projects and nine others that had not gotten so far because it did not have authority to issue that much tax-exempt financing.  read more »

This week, as The Observer reported, HFA President and Chief Executive Priscilla Almodovar sent a letter to all applicants--including Mr. Levine and Mr. Silverstein--asking them to revise their applications for tax-exempt financing by March 16, limiting their requests to $1.5 million per affordable unit that they build.

Larry Silverstein, Tom Elghanayan, Jeff Levine, William Dickey and Steve Witkoff are staring a new monster in the face: the end of cheap financing that was supposed to help them settle Manhattan's wild West Side.

These five real estate developers thought they had it made last year when the state Housing Finance Agency approved their applications for tax-exempt bonds. But the incoming Spitzer administration noticed something funny: the rental boom was eating up all of the state's available bond volume. So, the administration froze the financing.  read more »

Counting several other projects at earlier stages of the approval process, the HFA has $4.8 billion worth of applications for tax-exempt bonds pending; it only expects to be able to dole out $590 million this year.

The Pratt Center for Community Development report finds just 47 percent of units built with tax-exempt bonds administered by the state Housing Finance Agency were affordable--a percentage that went down to 28 percent last year. See full press release on our sister site The Politicker. -Matthew Schuerman