Tag: Housing
A groundbreaking bill that would provide low-income tenants facing eviction with legal counsel is stalling, CityLimits reports. Similar to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963, which guaranteed defendants a right to an attorney in criminal cases, the Right to Counsel bill would give tenants tied up in housing court universal […]
In NYC, landlords have all the power. The mysterious figures behind official-sounding organizations and LLCs that you send your rent check to can turn out to be little less than crooks, yet it’s so hard to find out information about them unless they’re among the 100 worst landlords in the city. A new website called […]
When facing accusations of potentially illegal activity from New York City officials in January, Airbnb defended itself by arguing that a majority of users rent apartments on occasion. The roomsharing service didn’t present any data at the time, but now community activist Murray Cox has scraped data from Airbnb’s site and put together an interactive […]
Seeing is believing. Some crafty data-crunchers over at Medium’s Reform blog, Constantine Valhouli and his partner Cat Callaghan, have put together visualizations of NYC real estate prices that give a more realistic portrait of our notoriously expensive city. While New York is definitely still expensive, the common estimate of $1,200 per square foot for your average apartment […]
Since New York’s Rent Guidelines Board approved a dramatically low increase on rent stabilized apartments (1 percent increase on one-year leases and a 2.75 percent increase on two-year leases), landlords are doing everything they can to create vacancies that will allow them to raise the prices for new, incoming tenants. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through “buy outs” — […]
Florida-based real estate company Showhomes lets families “manage” houses that they’re selling — living “like ghosts” on the luxury property, never leaving a trace of their lives behind. The existentially depressing set up is chronicled in Tampa Bay Time’s profile of the Mueller family. All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. […]
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development , you can afford to live somewhere when the rent is 30 percent or less of your income. That is, if you make $40,000 a year and your rent is more than $1000, you can’t afford your apartment. As you might imagine, there are lots […]
Maybe you saw those ‘aerial’ photos last week of Hong Kong’s cramped apartments where “square-footage count routinely dips into double digits”? Today, the Daily News has dug up photos of similar housing over in Tokyo where “communal” spaces make Bloomberg’s micro-apartments look like mansions. This morgue-like housing kind of brings a whole new meaning to […]
A group of tenants in a Bronx apartment complex with some truly deplorable conditions–rats, nonworking appliances, no hot water–decided to strike back against their shitty landlord recently, and have reaped the benefits. Under a new program called First Look, which allows community-minded groups to have the first bid on struggling residential buildings, a coalition of […]
This week, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the winner of a contest to design the future of NYC living — 300-some-odd-square-foot micro apartments, packing in more people into smaller spaces with higher ceilings and still comically high rents. (Bloomberg plans to skirt legislation that prohibits building new apartments smaller than 400 square feet by constructing the first […]
