Employment and startups in the technology sector are surging, taking networking events and meet-ups to the next level
It might have been the most popular ticket in Soho.At least 500 people registered for the July 6 panel, though it was a holiday week during a hot city summer. e hosts, the team from a 30-person arti cial intelligence monitoring company called Arthur, nally had to gate the door.
“People were pushing and shoving to come in,” said Adam Wenchel, Arthur’s CEO.
e panel was on the future of large language models and included a who’s who of builders in the buzzy subsector. Still, the fact that so many tech people converged in one o ce at one time
The gure, used as a benchmark for affordable housing projects,
By Eddie Small
Rodrigo Camarena, a 39-yearold Sunset Park resident, was recently looking into an a ordable housing lottery for a development in nearby Gowanus. He found himself shocked by both the cost of the “a ordable” rent, which would be more than what he pays for his current market-rate apartment, and the income requirements, which did not align with what he actually makes.
fordable housing in the city, namely that it is not a ordable for the New Yorkers who need it most. e complex way the federal government calculates the area median income, or AMI, plays a major role.
BY THE NUMBERS $94K
“It’s sort of like, why even bother,” said Camarena, who works in immigrant advocacy and ran for the City Council in 2021, “when, one, the [area median income] rates themselves are out of sync with my family’s income, and, two, the rents that they’re requiring on a monthly basis are higher than what I’m paying in an unregulated apartment?”
Camarena’s reaction gets at the root of one of the most common complaints about af-
|
e U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which determines the statistic, has designated the city as a high-cost area, meaning a place that has particularly expensive rents in relation to the median income. e agency thus determines income limits for a ordable housing projects based on how much a person would need to earn to spend no more than 35% of their income on rent. Because rents have far outpaced wage growth in recent years, income limits for a ordable housing projects have in turn become signicantly higher than the median income for New Yorkers.
See HOUSING on Page 22
astonished even the most enthusiastic boosters of the local tech industry for the sheer physicality of the gathering. Many of them consider New York City the most exciting location in the tech sector but will also admit there is a limit to the boom, especially when it comes to the industry’s lack of enthusiasm for o ces.
New York is now a worldwide center for national and globally distributed technology companies of every shape and size, but that doesn’t mean it’s playing host to trophy headquarters where most employees work from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It doesn’t even mean that the leadership of
local companies can be found in Flatiron or Soho, at least not on an average weekday morning. For the A.I. event, the Arthur organizers booked Jonathan Frankle during the approximately 18 days per month he spends in the city. Frankle is the chief scientist at San Francisco-based MosaicML, the 62-person company that had sold for $1.3 billion to data storage rm Databricks just weeks before. Frankle lists his location on social media in the coding language JSON as “P{NY=.6, SF=.2, DC=.1, BOS=.1}.” Tech workers are energizing
See TECH on Page 19
GOTHAM GIGS
Leslie Fields-Cruz works to ensure people of color can tell their stories.
Sunset Park resident Rodrigo Camarena told Crain’s he was shocked by the price of “affordable” rental units in Brooklyn. His experience re ects the realities of thousands of city residents burdened with rising rents. | BUCK ENNIS
Sky-high
rents
CHASING GIANTS
The Kittch online platform helps chefs connect directly with fans— and make money.
PAGE 3
is by design signi cantly more than the typical salary
Mayor picks ex-prosecutor as city’s new chief counsel
By Nick GarberMayor Eric Adams has chosen Lisa Zornberg, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, as his new top lawyer.
Zornberg will replace Brendan McGuire as chief counsel in City Hall once McGuire departs in August. The chief counsel serves as the top lawyer for both the administration and Adams himself and also oversees nearly a dozen offices, including the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, the Conflicts of Interest Board and the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.
‘I love the city dearly’
The portfolio she takes over from McGuire includes the ongoing migrant crisis—which sparked a legal battle over the city’s request to weaken its rightto-shelter mandate—and the potential federal takeover of the Rikers Island jail complex.
“I love the city dearly,” Zornberg said at a City Hall press con-
Development giants plan to convert big downtown tower to apartments
By Eddie SmallSilverstein Properties and Metro Loft Management are buying a major downtown office building from the Rudin family for about $173 million with plans to convert it into apartments, the firms announced late last month.
The companies are purchasing the 30-story, 410,000-square-foot tower at 55 Broad St. and intend to turn it into a residential building with 571 market-rate apartments. The Rudins will keep an equity stake in the project, and funds managed by Ares Real Estate have equity in it as well.
several residential conversions in Lower Manhattan, including at 116 John St. The firm has converted more than 3.5 million square feet of downtown office space into residences overall at properties such as 443 Greenwich St., 20 Exchange Place and 63 Wall St. The city has been dealing with a glut of office space since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work more than three years ago. Converting these buildings into residential proper-
ference late last month, adding that she pitched herself as a “straight-shooter” when she met with Adams. “I’m now excited to put everything I’ve learned, every
skill I have, every ounce of energy, to work on behalf of New Yorkers.”
Zornberg, a native of Coney Island and child of two public school teachers, has served since 2019 as a litigation partner at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, according to City Hall and her own LinkedIn profile. She focuses on white-collar defense, regulatory enforcement and internal investigations for corporations and financial institutions.
Before that, she led the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York from 2016 to 2018, working under Preet Bharara and then his two successors.
Zornberg spent a previous, 14-
year stint at the Southern District from 1998 to 2012 in a variety of roles.
News broke in April of McGuire’s pending departure, one of many high-profile exits from the Adams administration in recent months. McGuire, a former federal prosecutor himself, has been with the Adams administration since day one, having previously served on his 2021 transition team. McGuire took on oversight of the city’s Office of Labor Relations and played a major role in negotiating recent contract deals with municipal unions.
Adams praised McGuire’s tenure, saying he had advised him not only on legal issues but on the “optics” of key decisions. He called Zornberg “the right leader for the right time.”
The building opened in 1967 and served as the headquarters for Goldman Sachs until 1983. It is currently about 60% occupied, according to the developers.
The architect on the project is CetraRuddy. Construction should start in August and take about two years to finish, the companies said. Apartments will range from studios to three-bedrooms, and amenities will include a private club, coworking space and a rooftop pool.
Silverstein and Metro Loft are both extremely active developers downtown. Silverstein is best known for redeveloping the World Trade Center, and the firm also bought 116 John St. from Metro Loft for about $248 million in 2021, its first residential purchase in the city.
Metro Loft has already done
ties has emerged as a popular idea, especially as apartment rents continue to hit record highs. Downtown’s office market has been struggling even more than other parts of the city, and it has been through a wave of residential conversions before. A report from the Citizens Budget Commission found that a prior tax incentive enacted in 1995, 421-g, helped spark 13 million square feet of office-to-residential conversions in the neighborhood.
City’s crackdown on rats shows early signs of success: ‘What we’re doing is working’
By Ana AltchekEVENTS CALLOUT OCTOBER 11
CRAIN’S TECH SUMMIT
Crain’s and Tech:NYC will bring together entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, civic leaders and technologists to explore the growth and investment of tech, while creating a new vision on how to keep tech the leading economic driver in New York City. This event programming will feature fireside chats, breakout rooms, demos, pitch workshops and sponsored panels.
DETAILS
Location: Accenture Innovation Hub, New York City
CrainsNewYork.com/techsummit
New York City’s crackdown on rats has resulted in a 20% citywide decrease in 311 calls complaining about rat activity, according to an announcement from Mayor Eric Adams on July 25.
The city’s four rat mitigation zones, areas that receive special attention to fight infestations, which include the Grand Concourse area in the Bronx and Harlem; the Lower East Side, Chinatown and Greenwich Village in Manhattan; and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, experienced a 45% reduction in 311 calls. The figures come from the city’s Rodent Mitigation report, which updated data from May to mid-July and compared it to last year’s numbers from the same period.
“It’s still early, but these numbers show what we’re doing is working and that we are moving in the right direction,” Adams said. “Every food scrap that we keep out of the trash and every black bag that we keep off the street is a meal
that we’re taking out of a hungry rodent’s stomach.”
To keep rats at bay, the Adams administration focused on depriving rodents of food and shelter following skyrocketing rat sightings across the city. According to a Crain’s analysis, there were more than 25,000 reported rat sightings in 2021, a 54% surge from 2020. In response, the Adams administration rolled out a multi-pronged $3.5 million initiative to address the issue and in April named Kathleen Corradi as the city’s first “rat czar.”
Trash collection
In March, the city implemented a rule pushing back the time residential buildings and businesses could haul out garbage to reduce the time trash bags lingered on the street for rats. In April, the city Department of Sanitation made schedule changes to trash collection and moved about 30% of collection to the midnight shift, rather than daytime.
In June, the city started requiring food-related businesses to
switch to containerized trash to reduce the number of plastic bags on the street. In October, Brooklyn will have automatic, guaranteed and free weekly collection of compostable material. The city plans to offer the same in all five boroughs of New York City by October 2024.
The mayor also announced the first Anti-Rat Community Day of Action, taking place Aug. 12 in the Harlem mitigation zone. The event, hosted by the Adams administration and the BUFNY II/
Harlem Streets Tenants Association, aims to educate city and community partners on best practices for rodent mitigation. The administration plans to host additional days in all the boroughs in the coming months.
“It takes all of us to win the war on rats,” Adams said. “So I encourage New Yorkers to keep composting, keep putting your trash in containers, and I hope to see you out there at one of our Anti-Rat Community Days of Action.”
Zornberg previously led the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.JOE WOOLHEAD 55 BROAD ST.
Soho’s Kittch is the OnlyFans for chefs
The upstart: Kittch
At the start of the pandemic, television exec Brian Bedol heard a lot from chef friends whose restaurants had closed. They were wondering how to make money online using Instagram, YouTube or perhaps Zoom livestreams. “A lot of chefs are creators and visionaries,” he says, “but also Luddites to a degree.”
He looked for a suitable online platform to refer them to—something akin to a Twitch for chefs. “We were really surprised to discover it didn’t exist,” he says.
A year later, he and his business partners Elana Karp— who cofounded the meal kit service Plated—and TV producer Doug Deluca launched Kittch, a platform that helps chefs connect directly with fans and make money livestreaming cooking classes, kitchen tours and talks.
Launched in 2022 with $5 million in seed funding and based in SoHo, Kittch now features 100,000 hours of free culinary content produced by 700 chefs across the nation. It has nearly 500,000 active viewers.
Chefs charge what they wish for interactive livestreams. Kittch also made deals with nearly 100 brands and food industry groups ranging from Walmart and Ritz crackers to the Mushroom Council. A brand might allocate $25,000 for creator fees, for example, says Bedol, which is passed along to chefs who produce content featuring the brands.
While the culinary content world is a noisy, crowded space, independent investor Ben Fishman, who participated in the company’s seed round, says Kittch stood out.
“The direct connection between individuals—fans—and the chef was really unique in the marketplace,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of going to a chef’s table. But this kind of democratizes that. It’s still personal, because of the direct, one-on-one connection. But much less exclusive.”
Chef Amanda Shulman, founder of Her Place Supper
Club in Philadelphia, says she joined Kittch because the look and feel was less staged and formal than the perfect vision presented by traditional food media—it allowed her to give her fans an inside look at restaurant kitchen reality.
At the same time, she found the platform’s creator tools easier to use than trying to create her own videos or livestreams for Instagram or Zoom. “It’s really easy to just turn on and capture a moment,” she says.
Her last livestream cooking class had 20 attendees paying $35 each, she says, and she has $800 in her “clam bank”— the Kittch term for its online tip jar.
Her presence on the platform also draws new guests to her restaurant, she says: “I’ve had people come in and say, ‘I saw you making soft-shell clams, and I had to get them tonight!’”
The reigning Goliath: Food Network
Food Network, based in New York and owned by Discovery Inc., includes a cable channel distributed to 100 million households, a website with 46 million unique monthly users and a monthly magazine with 13.5 million readers.
How to slay the giant
It was relatively easy to lure chefs to the platform during the height of the pandemic, and the startup connected to top chefs thanks to help from adviser and backer Shep Gordon, whom some see as the inventor of the celebrity chef phenomenon, Bedol says. Consumers caught up in the pandemic-induced mania for home cooking flocked to the site as well.
But as life returned to normal, Kittch had to adjust. “People are going back out to restaurants, and chefs are much busier, restaurants are much busier,” Bedol says. “People’s eating habits have changed from always cooking at home to going out.”
As demand for midday livestreams fell, Kittch began encouraging chefs to reserve their livestreams for special events and experiences. It also began producing shorter videos to address basic topics such as how to chop an onion.
“A chef may think that livestreaming the four-hour ragu that you make in your restaurant is really interesting, and it is to some people,” says Karp. “But it’s also about helping a mom figure out a dinner to get on the table on Tuesday night.”
The startup also decided to stop selling merchandise such as the knives and cookware featured in its instructional videos. “In retrospect, it was really not unique and exclusive enough to buy it through us versus Amazon or somewhere else,” Bedol says.
While it’s a challenge to attract new viewers in a post-pandemic world given the many options available, Kittch says it has a built-in advantage given the hundreds of chef and brand partners referring folks to the platform from their own websites, TikTok reels and Instagram accounts. “We leverage their other channels and voices to bring users over,” Bedol says. “We know where we fit in the ecosystem. And the beauty of ecosystems is that nobody has to fail for us to be really successful.”
The next challenge
What at-home cooks want most these days is personalized advice, Bedol says. It’s not enough to share a Thanksgiving pie recipe. Cooks want to know what they can learn from their Thanksgiving experience this year so they can improve going forward. To that end, Kittch is launching a new paid subscription, app-based service that, for roughly $25 a month, will have chefs serving as personal culinary coaches.
“In our beta pilot of that we’re seeing extremely strong engagement,” Karp says.
Anne Kadet is the creator of Café Anne, a weekly newsletter with a New York City focus.
the platform helps them connect directly with fans and make money livestreaming classes, kitchen tours and talksAnne Kadet Elana Karp and Brian Bedol of Kittch, which launched last year. | KELLI HuLL
Wears Prada’ townhouse quickly nds a buyer
The Beaux-Arts property on East 73rd Street goes into contract two months after being listed
By C. J. HughesHollywood may be shut down by labor strikes. But the movie business still seems to have the power to pull real estate deals across the nish line.
A few weeks after a buyer snapped up the penthouse that served as Kendall Roy’s apartment in the hit show “Succession,” another property with a lm tie-in has also found a taker.
e Beaux-Arts townhouse that had a role in the 2006 movie “ e Devil Wears Prada” has gone into contract after just two months of marketing, according to the Olshan Luxury Market Report, a weekly round-up of high-end sales.
$27.5M
St.
into contract on July 19, Olshan said.
Still, that the deal happened so quickly seems notable, as some luxury properties including well-appointed townhouses have struggled to nd buyers.
e townhouse’s listing agent, Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group, declined to comment.
An ad for the property, which packs in 12,000 square feet, played up the Tinsel Town connection.
e Upper East Side home, at 129 E. 73rd St. near Lexington Avenue, was listed in May at $27.5 million, a price that didn’t budge during the marketing process. But it won’t be clear till its deed hits public records in a few weeks if that gure represented the actual sale price of the home, which went
In “ e Devil Wears Prada,” the six-story, seven-bedroom property, which has its own basketball court, was the ctional home of magazine editor Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep and based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Modlin’s ad for the property, which packs in 12,000 square feet, played up the Tinsel Town connection. Taxes on the limestone edi ce are about $187,000 a year.
e sellers were Craig E ron, a
co-founder of Midtown-based hedge fund Scoggin Capital Management, and his wife, Caryn E ron, a former director at Ackman-Zi Real Estate Group who serves on the board of multifamily lender Arbor Realty Trust, according to the City Register. e couple stands to make a considerable pro t after paying $8.8 million for the 22-foot wide prewar property in 2003, public records show.
In the week ending July 23, 22 luxury homes priced at $4 million and above went into contract, two
fewer than the preceding week, according to the Olshan report, which is produced by the rm Olshan Realty. e E rons’ property was the priciest of the lot. e report also explained that the average discount between original list price and last asking price on the latest batch of units, which included co-op and condos, was 2%. According to the data, the average length of marketing time for the recent luxury deals was 662 days, or more than a year and a half.
Meanwhile, the Kendall Roy apartment, a ve-bedroom triplex at the condo 180 E. 88th St., lingered for months after coming on the market in spring 2022 and endured some price cuts. But after being featured this year in the fourth and nal season of “Succession,” the apartment did manage to nd a buyer, a shell company that shelled out $24.7 million.
Vornado has some good news—and also some bad
By Aaron ElsteinMore o ce space is leased up in Vornado Realty Trust’s buildings. But that encouraging development was countered by rising borrowing costs, and the landlord said occupancy rates could decline again in the months ahead.
“ e principal di erence in our numbers this year to last year is the rise in interest rates,” Chief Executive Steven Roth said on a conference call Aug. 1.
In the meantime, Vornado is forced to o er elevated discounts to potential tenants.
“Concessions remain stubbornly high,” Michael Franco, president and chief nancial o cer, said on the call.
Plans Midtown sales
Vornado controls 20 million square feet of o ce and retail space in New York, making it the city’s second-largest commercial landlord.
More than a fth of Vornado’s $10 billion in consolidated debt is oating-rate.
e good news was that occupancy rates in Vornado’s New York portfolio ticked up in the second quarter, to 90.1% from 89.9% in the prior quarter. e bad news was that in the coming year large tenants are poised to leave buildings such as 280 Park Ave. and 650 Madison Ave. and o cials said occupancy rates could erode further. Additionally, borrowing costs rose by $25 million last quarter and gure to continue rising until the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates.
Funds from operations fell last quarter to $140 million, or 74 cents a share, from $160 million, or 80 cents a share, in the year-earlier period. More than a fth of Vornado’s $10 billion in consolidated debt is oating-rate, and the landlord faces continued nancial pressure unless interest rates start to fall or occupancy rates improve. Arrangements that Vornado made with banks to temporarily cap interest-rate exposure will burn o this year and next.
“Vornado’s earnings will face some headwinds,” analyst Steve Sakwa of Evercore ISI said in a client note.
Last week Vornado said it planned to sell four Midtown retail
spaces for $100 million, and in June it restructured a $421 million mortgage for retail space in the St. Regis Hotel that was in default. Bigger sales may be next, with ocials indicating they could either sell part of or borrow against the Farley Building, which Vornado leased from the state in 2017 and whose 730,000 square feet of o ce
space is occupied by Facebook owner Meta Platforms.
“It’s a great asset and could be an important source of liquidity,” Roth said of Farley.
Earlier this year Vornado suspended its dividend to conserve cash and last month it launched a new compensation plan that offers shares to employees. e new
plan replaces an older one poised to expire worthless in 2025 because the company’s stock price has lost two-thirds of its pre-pandemic value. O cials said the new plan is meant to encourage employees to stick around.
“We lost a few key people the last few years,” Franco acknowledged.
‘Devil
Finalists Named for 2023 New York ORBIE® Awards
The New York ORBIE® Awards honors chief information of cers who have demonstrated excellence in technology leadership. With support from Crain’s New York Business, NewYorkCIO will honor the CIOs who are driving innovation and transforming New York’s leading organizations. The ORBIE Awards will take place on November 9 at the Ziegfeld Ballroom. To learn more about the event visit https://www.newyorkcio.org/awards/details. The nalists are below:
GLOBAL | Over $12 billion annual revenue & multi-national operations
MARCO ARGENTI CIO
Goldman Sachs
SASTRY DURVASULA SEVP, CIO & CSO TIAA
DONAGH HERLIHY CDO & CIO Subway
BOB MCCOWAN SVP & CIO Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
LAKSHMAN NATHAN EVP & CIO Paramount Global
LARGE ENTERPRISE | Over $12 billion annual revenue
JASON GALVIN SVP & CIO, Personal Insurance Travelers
WARREN KUDMAN SVP & CIO Turner Construction
LAURA MILLER CIO Macy’s Inc.
ENTERPRISE | Over $2.5 billion annual revenue
KATHERINE WETMUR CIO for Cyber, Data Risk & Resilience Morgan Stanley
STEWART GIBSON SVP & CIO USI Insurance Services
JON HARDING SVP, Global CIO Conair LLC
CARMINE LIZZA CIO & Global Head of Technology LAZARD
ASHISH PARMAR SVP & CIO Tapestry
LARGE CORPORATE | Over $1 billion annual revenue
RAVI SIMHAMBHATLA EVP, CDO & CIO Avis Budget Group
GARY SORRENTINO Global CIO Zoom Video Communications
CHRISTOPHER COLLA VP, IT & CIO B&G Foods, Inc.
JOHN ELBASAN CIO Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP
VIKRAM NAIR SVP, IT Amneal Pharmaceuticals
PETER SCAVUZZO Principal, CIO & CDO Marcum
CORPORATE | Up to $1 billion annual revenue
FRANCIS VERDIER CTO Neuberger Berman
SHANNON BRITTON CIO Shiseido Americas Corporation
ROBERT GUILBERT CIO Epstein, Becker & Green, P.C.
ANDREA MARKSTROM CIO Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP
SCOTT SACCAL VP, Head of IT Cambrex Corporation
HEALTHCARE | Healthcare & nonpro t hospital organizations
VLAD YEKELCHIK CIO EPIC
LIN ZHOU SVP & CIO The New School
ASKED & ANSWERED
He wants Coney Island to become a bastion of green tech
Brooklyn native Anthony Tortora hopes Coney Island is someday not just associated with edge-of-your-seat thrill rides but cutting-edge green technology as well. On a vast former parking lot near the beach, Tortora’s development firm, LCOR, is building a 463-unit rental complex called 1515 Surf Ave. that eschews fossil fuels in favor of a geothermal system that heats and cools homes by way of pumps that whisk water 50 stories beneath the ground to where temperatures remain constant. A 60% reduction in emissions is the expected result. The largest building of its type in New York, the 417,000-square-foot 1515 Surf also may portend a shift in priorities for developers, with stricter city rules about carbon footprints on the horizon.
Developers have promised geothermal energy for years with not much to show for it, outside of museums and churches. What took so long?
It’s a confluence of a few things. You really need a big site to make sure you can fit in all the wells. We have 1.5 acres, so we can do it. At 1515, we have 153 wells that go down about 500 feet, and the building has more than 600 foundation piles. It was like a big geometry puzzle. But there’s also now legislation that wasn’t here before. Local Law 97, which takes effect next year, sets emission caps for buildings 25,000 square feet or more. There’s also more cost on day one to install the systems, like an extra 1% or 2% of the development cost. We thought about going with solar power but didn’t have enough roof space. Geothermal will save on energy in the long run. I think it’s a win-win.
Do tenants really care exactly how their homes are cooled and heated?
We do think this will help with the marketing of the building. As a society, we are moving to electrification, with electric vehicles and electric buildings. But there are also financial consequences if you don’t comply with the commitments. So I feel like people will be very focused on geothermal now.
This project is on Coney Island, a bit of an untested market when it comes to large-scale luxury development. Why this site?
This is the latest chapter in the revitalization of New York City’s waterfront, just like what happened with Mott Haven and Greenpoint and Williamsburg. The ability to be a block away from the subway and also a block away from the beach is irreplaceable. It’s about an hour to
Manhattan, but with people now working from home, that might not be such a concern. A lot of people are thinking, How do I move a little out of the city and still be connected? Anyway, we designed the building assuming people will use it for lots of different uses. Besides, not everybody works in Manhattan.
How does the housing crunch get fixed?
My hope is that the 421-a tax break is renewed. [The tax abatement program, meant to incentivize developers to create affordable housing, expired in June.] Without it or a similar program,
Dossier
WHO HE IS Principal, LCOR
GREW UP Sheepshead Bay RESIDES Carroll g ardens EDUCATION Bachelor’s in business administration, Villanova University; J.D., eorgetown University
FAMILY LIFE His wife works as a project manager for a construction company, though “that’s not how we met.” t he couple has an 8-month-old son.
CONEY ISLAND MEMORIES “I went on the Cyclone roller coaster every once in a while as a kid and also stopped by Nathan’s.”
DOWN TIME In his spare time, ortora loves to cook, especially “all things Italian.”
we will see a significant decrease in new multifamily projects, and that will only exacerbate the city’s housing shortage.
Hochul could spearhead grand housing bargain
It’s been more than a year since 421-a, the highly contentious tax break for affordable housing, expired. Democrats in Albany have shown little interest in reviving a version of it, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, despite her promises, hasn’t marshaled the political will to restore a program that would, for all its faults, spur housing construction.
Of late, Hochul has been attempting development in piecemeal fashion. Last month, she announced a temporary tax incentive program for a housing development in Gowanus. If construction is completed by 2026, developers would make payments equivalent to the reduced taxes they would have owed under 421-a. Housing construction has already trailed off in the city, but there are still many projects that got underway— and qualified for 421-a— before the tax abatement expired in June 2022.
Critics, especially on the left, long assailed 421-a for not creating enough truly affordable housing. They had a valid argument to make, but the answer was not for any tax incentive program to vanish. For-profit developers will simply not build affordable housing without some public assistance— either from the state or federal government. Since the feds, under
Democratic and Republican administrations alike, have largely abandoned the cause of mass construction for the working-class and poor, states are forced to step in and do what they can.
‘Good-cause’ issue
But the real estate industry, too, deserves blame for what’s happened. Progressive and socialist Democrats in Albany have expressed openness to a revival of a tax incentive program and upzoning of the suburbs—the housing compact Hochul supported and ultimately could not get through the legislature—if the Real Estate Board of New York relented on its furious opposition to “good cause” eviction, which would cap rent increases and make it harder for landlords to evict tenants.
For real estate developers and the landlord lobby in particular, good cause is treated as an existential fight; once limits are placed on rent increases, New York would tumble down the path of socialism and no one would ever make any money again. That’s absurd, of course—good cause won’t lower any rents, but merely offer the benefits of the rent-stabilization system to tenants everywhere. Homelessness would decrease as evictions de-
clined. And owning apartment buildings would still be lucrative enough.
In fact, if the real estate industry wanted to partner with progressives, they could accept a world of good cause for the greater opportunity of building beyond New York City, along train stations in Westchester County and Long Island. Hochul herself is an opponent of good cause, as are enough moderate Democrats in the State Assembly. There is a contingent of outer-borough and suburban Democrats who don’t want to do anything: no good-cause, no suburban building, no 421-a revival.
With enough political muscle, this coalition could be overcome with a mix of city Democrats and rural lawmakers who don’t have any particular hostility to building more housing downstate. Hochul, as governor, should be spearheading this, and persuading real estate interests to back her. A grand bargain could be found.
What’s worrying is that certain lawmakers and landlords may not want any action at all. They’re content enough to watch housing construction stall and hope the political environment turns against the pro-tenant left. If rents keep rising, they figure, they’ll be blamed only so much.
That political calculus is understandable, if ultimately foolhardy.
It will mean tenants suffering and developers leaving money on the table, missing out on future tax breaks and the chance to build big in Nassau and Suffolk and Westchester. Perhaps Hochul, who has seemed aimless at times, will understand what’s at stake and use the power of her office to force change in Albany.
Quick takes
The looming indictment of Eric Ulrich, the former buildings commissioner, could be a real problem
for Mayor Eric Adams. Ulrich, according to the Daily News, told investigators Adams had warned him about the possibility of a criminal probe of Ulrich.
The marquee House race in New York next year might be Republican Mike Lawler, a first-term congressman, against Mondaire Jones, who served in Congress until last year. Jones made a failed run in New York City following a chaotic redistricting process. It’s a true toss-up in the northern suburbs of the city and could determine the fate of Congress.
Ross Barkan is a journalist and author in New York City.
the governor, who has seemed aimless at times, should use the power of her office to force change in Albany
Ross Barkan| Interview by C.J. Hughes
New federal psychedelics guidance could open minds— and funding sources to research the drugs for treatment
By Amanda D’AmbrosioIn June, federal regulators released research guidance for classic psychedelics, marking the first time the government has offered suggestions for studying medicines like LSD, MDMA and psilocybin to treat mental illness. The draft guidance signals a shift in the medical community’s perception of psychedelic medicine—a field that has previously been deemed fringe.
Local researchers and biotech companies say it doesn’t impact them much.
“In that guidance document, there’s nothing surprising,” especially for companies that have been in conversation with the FDA about their research, said Rob Barrow, chief executive of MindMed, a Midtown-based biotech company investigating psychedelic drugs.
While researchers say the guidance will not drastically change how they study the substances, it does have an effect on two major hurdles facing the burgeoning industry: public perception and funding.
“I think one of the biggest potential upsides is that it communicates [the FDA’s understanding of this research] to the broader
world—whether that’s providers, patients, investors, researchers,” Barrow said.
The organization’s engagement with previously taboo substances signals a shift that the FDA is engaged in legitimate conversations about clinical trials for these medicines, also opening more doors for potential funding.
The FDA’s proposed guidance comes as general interest in psychedelics has increased, and industry experts estimate the drugs will grow into a multibillion-dollar
when private funders and biotech companies began entering the space. The Center for Psychedelic Medicine, which launched in 2021, received $5 million in funding from MindMed to train researchers.
Public funding, which supports critical research that can bring treatments from clinical settings to the real world, has been sparse. But despite limited funding from the government, the field has published research showing the promising potential of these therapies.
In recent years a few randomized clinical trials, the gold standard in medical research, have shown that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy might improve major depressive disorder or alcohol use disorder.
searchers need funding from a key source: the government.
“This is something that needs the kind of investment that all potential therapeutics get—government funding,” said Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research. Currently, trials of MDMA and psilocybin led by Mount Sinai researchers are funded by philanthropy.
Research is costly
“Government funding has to be a partner in this process to promote objective science,” Yehuda said. “It can’t just be industry-sponsored.”
psychedelics. When funds have to cover an hourly rate for a mental health professional for eight hours at a time, expenses start to rack up, she said.
The FDA’s guidance could further push drug companies and researchers to staff trials adequately, as well as take on the costs of doing so—it recommends two oversight monitors at all times, one of whom being a graduate-level professional with clinical experience in psychotherapy. These staffing suggestions, and the costs that come with them, bolster the industry’s call for more funding to push treatments over the finish line.
industry. While interest in the field has grown, most of the funding for research has come from donors and biotech companies.
Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director of NYU’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, said most funding came from philanthropy organizations until around five years ago,
“The very early small studies that were done on limited funding were extremely promising,” Bogenschutz said of psilocybin, noting that evidence is still lacking on whether the drug is safe and effective.
But in order to conduct the studies that further investigate the safety and efficacy of psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs, re-
NY’S MOST AWARDED HEALTH SYSTEM
Such funding is hard to come by; NYU was one of three institutions, including Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama in Birmingham, to receive a combined $4 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 2021 to research psychedelics.
Facilitation from clinical professionals is where the costs of this research really lie, Yehuda said. The cost of a clinical trial has to cover staffing from a psychiatrist or psychologist to administer psychotherapy to participants taking
Just because research is expensive does not mean it should not be pursued, Yehuda said. Professionals who can oversee clinical trials and deliver psychotherapy—a key aspect of the approach to using psychedelic medicine to treat mental illness—are a necessary cost that research organizations and drug companies must take on to fully investigate whether and how these drugs should be used, she said.
“We want to make sure that as drug development continues, it doesn’t become a runaway train,” Yehuda said.
At Northwell, we’re proud to have 6 hospitals recognized as best in the nation across 39 specialties—earning more rankings than any other health system in the state. And to be home to New York’s #1 hospital, North Shore University Hospital*. With more experts working together to unlock deeper insights and newer breakthroughs, we’re blazing the path to a healthier tomorrow.
“Government funding has to be a partner in this process to promote objective science.”
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research
Affirmative action ruling doesn’t need to end the push for workplace diversity
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to curb a rmative action in higher education ended a four-decade precedent that allowed colleges and universities to consider applicants’ race in their admissions processes.
e majority opinion outlined the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause as the basis for its decision. A rmative action was described as a discriminatory policy by the court’s majority.
A rmative action may now be o the table, but there’s undeniable evidence that the diversity it aimed to nurture has positively a ected the business world via a more diverse workforce. ough the Supreme Court’s decision didn’t explicitly target the workplace, the implications of this ruling for businesses are unmistakable and could potentially shape future corporate policies on diversity and inclusion.
Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said companies began revisiting their hiring policies with their lawyers as soon as the decision came down. ey want to make sure the policies are “bullet-proof,” she said.
“There is concern that another case
will be brought that focuses on corporate,” Wylde said. “For D&I goals, many companies have just gotten their act together.”
Smart companies understand the value of a diverse workforce. In a joint amicus brief, major players like Accenture, Apple, General Motors, Google and United Airlines asserted that diverse teams foster better decision-making, creativity and communication. ey said diversity directly translates into their bottom lines.
Some data points to consider:
◗ A 2018 study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher innovation revenues.
◗ A report by McKinsey & Company in 2018 showed that companies in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading pro tability.
◗ Diverse companies are more likely to develop products that resonate with a multi-
To solve our housing crisis, look to Florida
Despite universal recognition of an intractable a ordable housing crisis, public o cials and government agencies are doing little to nd and implement e ective solutions.
e New York state Legislature adjourned without approving policies, programs or funding aimed at increasing the supply of new and preserved a ordable housing and without acting on the governor’s plan to create 800,000 new housing units over ve years.
But several states and other jurisdictions have begun using innovative initiatives to encourage and incentivize a ordable housing development and preservation.
In Florida, for example, new regulations aim at clearing away impediments to the creation of much-needed workforce and a ordable housing. New state laws there are speci cally designed to reduce the zoning and density requirements and overcome political resistance that sustain NIMBYism, while at the same time providing nancial incentives to encourage communities to develop a ordable housing.
Florida’s Live Local Act, designed to ad-
dress the state’s entrenched a ordable housing crisis, went into e ect July 1. It facilitates denser housing development on cheaper land, chie y by limiting the authority of local governments to block affordable housing with zoning and density regulations.
e Live Local Act permits construction of multifamily housing on any commercial parcel if enough of the units are dedicated to a ordable or workforce housing. Developers in Florida are now able to use the maximum zoning allowed within a one-mile radius of the site without having to contend with protracted and costly rezoning applications. Such innovative regulations expand a ordable housing by boosting funding for housing and rental programs, adding incentives for housing investment and encouraging mixed-use developments in nancially distressed commercial areas.
e Live Local Act requires that local governments in Florida must approve— without public hearings, a rezoning process or land-use change requirements— housing development on sites zoned commercial, industrial or mixed-use if at
least 40 percent of the residential units are a ordable for at least 30 years to households making a maximum of 120% of the area median income. e law also reduces local authority to impose density and height limits. ere are few other restrictions. e market-rate units can be rental or condo, and they may be separated from affordable units.
Unsustainable situation
is innovative approach by the state is encouraging counties and municipalities to also act on their own to revise zoning regulations in harmony with new statewide programs, amplifying the impact of a ordable housing development programs.
In New York City, rents continue to reach new historic highs in several boroughs. e gap continues to widen between housing costs and income. NYC households need at least $100,000 a year for food, housing and transportation. Families of four need 50% more. e median income is $55,000.
To keep housing costs below the recommended 30% of income, the average New York City renter must earn about $134,000 per year. Yet about a third of New York renters spend more than half of their in-
cultural customer base, according to a series of Nielsen reports.
◗ A Glassdoor survey revealed that 67% of job seekers consider diversity an important factor in deciding where to work, and more inclusive companies are better at keeping talent.
◗ Research from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that heterogeneous groups are better at problem-solving compared to homogenous groups, due to the variety of perspectives and problem-solving styles present.
e case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, does not have to signal an end to diversity e orts in business. A rmative action was one way to counter past discrimination against historically disadvantaged groups. But there are others, including inclusive recruitment practices, blind application processes, mentoring programs, clear diversity goals, inclusive bene ts, a culture of respect.
Companies recognize the critical importance of a diverse workforce in remaining competitive in an increasingly diverse nation. To lose ground on this front is to risk unraveling decades of progress in creating a more inclusive, innovative and prosperous nation.
come on rent. is situation is unsustainable and jeopardizes the economic and social fabric of our communities.
Florida is not alone in coming up with creative approaches to increase the supply of a ordable and workforce housing. Successful programs are underway in the Los Angeles and Bay areas of California and in Westchester County, N.Y.
We need to harness New York’s awesome collective talent and resources innance, architecture and urban planning, commercial real estate development and public and social policy to help solve the problem. at requires clarity of vision and the political will on the part of our elected o cials to quickly address our affordable housing crisis through new policies and programs.
COMMENTARY
As we strive to build a brighter future for New York, an important piece of the puzzle cannot be overlooked: access to safe, affordable child care.
The problem of adequate child care resources is not new, but as New York leans in on its commitment to build offshore wind, the case for prioritizing child care is no longer just about the importance of early education—it’s about unlocking the full potential of our state’s workforce.
Gov. Kathy Hochul continues to prioritize both child care and the energy transition, and these dual priorities should go handin-hand. New York needs a bold commitment to our children and families, and one that will pave the way for a thriving economy, equal opportunities and a stronger, more resilient clean-energy workforce.
economy, in both the energy industry and in manufacturing and other trades. But the key to this transition will be people. An entire generation of highly skilled workers needs training to get the job done. And far too often, talented workers are left behind by new economic opportunities simply because their community lacks reliable transportation, training or child care services.
Full-blown crisis
Hugh R. Parry is president of United Way of New York State.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that more than 11 million American children had a potential need for child care—yet fewer than 8 million spaces were available. During the pandemic, millions of women, especially those with low income and women of color, left the workforce as child care facilities closed. Far fewer reopened in the following years, turning this challenge for working families into a full-blown crisis. And in New York, child care is simply unaffordable.
to consider a job in a new industry, they must be certain they have access to safe, reliable and affordable child care. By connecting New Yorkers with child care services, the state will allow parents to pursue new skills and enter new careers, growing our middle class and strengthening our economy with a skilled workforce.
investment in new and expanded child care services, not just for its own future workers, but all offshore wind employees in the state.
New clean-energy projects will inject tens of thousands of new jobs into our
COMMENTARY
United Way has worked in communities across the state for nearly 50 years, and over that time, we’ve seen that child care is consistently one of the greatest threats to employment security for parents and caregivers. For a parent even to begin
Hochul’s administration intentionally prioritized community investment and equitable access to employment in its solicitations for clean-energy project proposals, and developers are beginning to step up. Community Offshore Wind, a bidder for New York’s latest offshore wind request for proposal, worked directly with the United Way to include a $10 million
These investments should be the norm, not the exception. Reimagining our energy system requires us to reimagine our workforce as well, and demands substantial, sustained investment in the services our parents, caregivers and families need to enter the growing clean-energy sector. Let’s make sure we give them the support they need to do the work by partnering with the developers who understand, respect and share our governor’s commitment to affordable, accessible child care for every caregiver.
Reports of the office’s death are greatly exaggerated
By David NeilEverywhere I go, people ask if the New York City office market is doomed, offering me sympathetic looks.
The gloomy sentiment is not surprising. Headlines have promoted doomsday predictions about the health of the office sector. A real estate industry conference even recently kicked off a panel discussion posing the question: “Is the office market f**ked?” Kastle, a building security provider, posts a weekly “back to work barometer” that would have you believe that every office building in New York is half empty. It’s a flawed and misleading data point based only on a segment of buildings in which they operate, and it includes Fridays, long a sleepier day in the office, including before the pandemic.
The reality is far different. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) just issued a new report showing strong Manhattan numbers for in-person office attendance, hopefully reframing the discussion.
People are returning to the office with in-person midweek attendance rates over 70%, according to the report. The brightest spot is Class A and A+ properties. In our office portfolio, according to Placer.ai— which tracks device data and was the source for the REBNY report—One Bryant Park’s midweek building employee attendance actually exceeds pre-pandemic levels by 30%. In this case, more people are
coming to the building than before the pandemic. Next door at 151 W. 42nd St., attendance is at 90% of pre-pandemic levels.
Leasing activity is also healthy. For our 13 million-square-foot commercial portfolio, we are forecasting a lower overall vacancy rate this year compared to before the pandemic, and several of our properties are now achieving higher net-effective rents.
Importance of quality
The tenant “flight to quality” is setting a new bar for office landlords like us to meet. Landlords and property managers need to provide our tenants a better in-person office experience, with a greater focus on customer service and hospitality.
Now is an opportune moment to communicate to our customers and potential customers the benefits of being in a quality office setting. Studies show the importance of quality office space for culture, mentorship, collaboration and productivity over the long term.
Microsoft’s Future of Work 2022 report found that 100% remote work can lead to feelings of social isolation and a worsening mental health crisis. This is especially affecting Gen Z team members early in their careers, who more and more are reporting feeling “lonely, anxious, or stressed” about working from home, according to McKinsey.
Studies have also revealed that remote
work is often championed by the later-career professionals who have already established their networks and position, contrary to the conventional wisdom that it’s the digitally savvy younger generation that favors working from home.
A recent Federal Reserve study found that working from home deprived early-career professionals of feedback and relationships, stunting their career growth. Ambitious young people prefer the office to establish connections and learn, as do employees without good wi-fi and private workspace at home. The most junior employees get it: Only 6% prefer working from home. We appear to be at an inflection point, with more companies appreciating the value of great office space to inspire and up-
lift. In fact, we are already starting to see some tenants expand into roomier space to foster creative and collaborative environments, regardless if team members are in the office three, four or five days per week.
Yes, it’s a tumultuous time and we’ll continue to see news about parts of our industry—especially those that have not made investments in modernization and sustainability—that are struggling. But New York City’s commercial real estate has never been a monolith, and every period of transition is bumpy. When the dust settles, expect a stronger, better office.
LARGEST ENGINEERING FIRMS
RANK COMPANY/ ADDRESS PHONE NUMBER/ WEBSITE SENIOR EXECUTIVE(S)
NEW YORK–AREA ENGINEERS 2022/
NewNewYorkYork areaareaincludes NewYorkCity andNassau,SuffolkandWestchester countiesinNew York,and Bergen, Essex,HudsonandUnion countiesinNewJersey. Crain'sNew YorkBusiness uses research,extensive surveys andthemostcurrent references available to produce its lists, but there is no guarantee that these listings are complete. To qualify for this list, an engineering firm must have a New York–area office and projects in the area. Executives may have additional titles. n/d-Not disclosed. 1 Previously listed as Hardesty & Hanover. 2 Formerly Lilker Associates, Cameron Engineering, The Harman Group
PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
Global One Investments
Global One Investments, an affiliate of New York-based Nelson Management Group, promoted Saad Saghir to Head of Acquisitions, where he will be responsible for the execution of Global One’s acquisition and asset management activities. In his new role, Saghir’s responsibilities will include sourcing, underwriting, and closing new investment opportunities, while also assisting with the implementation of the asset management strategies of existing portfolio assets.
CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT
Holt Construction
Maximilian Blum brings nearly two decades of professional construction management and leadership with creative and innovative solutions to Holt’s New Jersey Business Unit as their Project Director. Max offers professional construction experience for core and shell projects, interior renovations and fit outs. Max specializes in projects requiring critical advanced planning, difficult staging and logistics, fast-track schedules, and maintenance of ongoing operations.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
Bola Oyesanya is a Managing Director and the Head of the Law Firm Group at J.P. Morgan Private Bank in New York City. Bola directs a team of professional Bankers and other specialists to address the wealth management needs of prominent individuals in the legal industry. She works in partnership across the bank to deliver the strength of J.P. Morgan directly to her sophisticated clients, and in turn to their clients. Bola joins the firm from Citi Private Bank.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
Nicholas Sorrillo has joined J.P. Morgan Private Bank in New York City as an Executive Director and Banker. Nick builds long-lasting and trusted relationships with his clients to best support their financial aspirations and challenges. With nearly a decade of experience, Nick has built a reputation for adding value to all aspects of wealth planning discussions. Most recently, Nick joins the firm from Charles Schwab.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
Ajit George is an Executive Director in Private Business Advisory in J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s Advice Lab. Ajit guides business owners across a range of strategic corporate decisions, including mergers and acquisitions, business valuation, pre-transaction planning and corporate governance of multigenerational businesses. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Ajit was a senior member of the Corporate Advisory Group at Brown Brothers Harriman.
HEALTH CARE
The Leadership Development Group
The Leadership Development Group, Inc (TLD Group), a global talent development consulting firm, is delighted to welcome Karen Curley as Vice President, Client Solutions. Karen, who was previously Director, Learning & Organizational Development at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is an experienced, talent-focused organizational effectiveness professional with expertise in assessments, aligning solutions to key business objectives and linking strategy to impact.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
LSG
LSG, a leading impact agency, has hired Jasme Bantens as a Principal in LSG’s New York City office. Bantens is a Goldman Sachs alumnus and will lead LSG’s brand positioning and product marketing research for a variety of clients. Bantens served as Vice President of Global Media Sciences for Goldman Sachs and has over 20 years of marketing experience and has worked at a variety of global media and measurement agencies, including Wavemaker, Digitas, and OMD.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Popular Bank
Peter McMahon has joined Popular Bank as Senior Financial Consultant, Infinex Investments. With more than 25 years in the financial industry, Peter has a proven track record of developing successful wealth optimization strategies, including portfolio management, retirement planning and insurance. He will be based in NYC. Insurance and investment products and services are not FDIC insured, are not deposits, are not guaranteed by bank, and may lose value. Copyright ©️ 2023 Popular Bank.
Daniel Correia has joined J.P. Morgan Private Bank in New York City as a Vice President and Banker. Dan works closely with some of the most prominent leaders in the legal space who seek a source of trusted guidance and the fortress balance sheet of an industry leader to help grow and manage their wealth. Dan understands the driven nature of his clients and their expectations for high-touch and responsive service. Most recently, Dan joins the firm from Citi Private Bank.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
Jason Caldwell has joined J.P. Morgan Private Bank in New York City as an Executive Director and Banker. Jason partners closely with some of the most sophisticated hedge fund principles, financial executives and entrepreneurs in the business, and delivers exceptional client service and comprehensive support to his clients while overseeing their entire balance sheets. Most recently, Jason joins the firm from Goldman Sachs.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
J. P. Morgan Private Bank
Alexis Wagner has joined J.P. Morgan Private Bank in New York City as a Vice President and Banker. Alexis works closely with a range of highly successful individuals and families, including senior professionals at top-tier consulting and executive search firms, to alleviate the stress of financial decision making so they can focus on their careers. She takes a disciplined approach to help transform her clients’ amassed assets into sustainable legacies. Alexis joins us from Citi Private Bank.
LAW
Vinson & Elkins
Jim McGovern has joined the nationally recognized Vinson & Elkins’ Government Investigations and White Collar Criminal Defense practice as a partner in the New York office. He has more than 30 years of federal and state courtroom experience in New York and Washington, D.C., and in private practice has focused on defending corporations and individuals in criminal and civil government investigations and litigation, as well as regulatory compliance.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
LSG
LSG, a leading impact agency, has hired Jordan Stein as Senior Director in LSG’s New York City office where he will focus on expanding LSG’s footprint in the New York City market after more than a decade of working in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Stein worked for New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and later served as Chief of Staff for Bloomberg News. Stein most recently served as Head of Public and Government Affairs for Rhino, a venture-backed realestate technology company.
REAL ESTATE
LEGAL
Westerman Ball Ederer Miller Zucker & Sharfstein, LLP
Westerman Ball
Ederer Miller Zucker & Sharfstein, LLP is pleased to announce that Greg S. Zucker, Esq has been named Co-Managing Partner of the Firm. John Westerman, Esq., Managing Partner of the Firm since its inception 25 years ago, will continue to serve together with Greg as Co-Managing Partner. Westerman Ball is a full-service business law firm supporting clients nationally and internationally.
Aria Development Group
Aria Development Group, a leading real estate investment firm, is pleased to announce that Rick Lapidos has recently joined the firm as a Managing Director and will function as the Head of Asset Management. In his new role, Rick will oversee Aria’s asset management program, working to optimize financial performance of properties nationally, all while working with internal and external stakeholders. His sector experience will allow Rick to drive the financial performance of Aria’s developments.
Who’s paying which lobbyists in the race for a NYC casino
By Nick GarberThe deep-pocketed players waiting to bid for a lucrative New York City casino license are stuck in a holding pattern—but that hasn’t stopped them from continuing to pay lobbyists to pitch their projects to local leaders.
The dozen known teams vying for one of three downstate casino licenses have paid at least $1.2 million combined to outside lobbyists during the latest two-month reporting period, between May and June, according to disclosures filed last month. During the first four months of the year, casino contenders spent over $2.6 million on lobbying, as Crain’s previously reported.
Some real estate giants and gaming companies angling for a license have picked up new lobbyists in recent weeks, including Bally’s, for its Bronx proposal, and developer Thor Equities for its Coney Island bid. A new entrant, Silverstein Properties, announced its West Side proposal in June and has already joined the lobbying fray, records show.
The continued campaigning comes despite the state’s slow progress in actually opening up applications. The state Gaming Commission is still preparing answers to the first of two rounds of questions from prospective applicants, with no deadline set for the bids themselves. Sources watching the process said they expect applications to open during the first quarter of 2024.
through a citywide zoning-code tweak, as Mayor Eric Adams’ administration recently proposed.
Going with the mayor’s plan could appeal to City Council members, especially in Manhattan, who want to avoid the fraught act of agreeing to specific proposals, said the same lobbyist. On the other hand, lawmakers might be reluctant to give up the virtual veto power they command through ULURP.
“The question is, is the City Council going to go for [Adams’ zoning text amendment]?” the lobbyist said in an interview. “If you take away ULURP, you take away the loaded gun.”
Many still assume that existing “racinos” in Yonkers and Queens will win two of the three new licenses. But Brian O’Dwyer, chair of the state’s gaming commission, sounded irked by all the speculation when he criticized news coverage of the process during a public meeting in June.
“Nobody has a leg up, nobody is in front, and no particular influence is going to bear on the ultimate decision,” O’Dwyer said.
The bidders themselves seem certain that an advantage can be found somewhere. Here’s a look at who’s paid whom over the last two months:
Steve Cohen and Seminole Hard Rock: $397,522
Cohen, the financier and New York Mets owner, continues to dwarf his competitors’ lobbying spending as he pursues his tricky Willets Point casino bid. The site would require not only the license itself but also state permission to build on a parking lot that is technically park land.
Book Strategies and $30,000 to Tusk Strategies.
Related Cos. and Wynn Resorts: $170,339
For its joint proposal with Las Vegas-based Wynn on the undeveloped western half of Hudson Yards, Related has continued paying $20,000 monthly to the lobbyists at Manhattan firm Tonio Burgos. Their main target has been Hope Knight, president and CEO of Empire State Development, according to filings.
Wynn, for its part, dished out a combined $130,339 since May, including $60,000 to Empire Consulting Group, $40,000 of its own to Tonio Burgos and smaller contracts with law firm Kramer Levin and Mercury Public Affairs.
Bally’s: $130,000
Since spring, the Rhode Island-based gaming company eyeing a 10-acre casino on the Trump Golf Links in the Bronx has stopped doing business with two of its prior firms: Moonshot Strategies and Marcos Crespo. But it added a lobbyist: Elizabeth Velez of construction firm the Velez Organization, whom it paid $10,000 since May.
Bally’s has been in business with a total of six lobbyists since May. Its biggest payment, to the tune of $40,000, was to Steel Lion Strategies, the Brooklyn firm led by pastor Kirsten John Foy.
Other lobbyists on contract with Bally’s include Stanley Schlein, who has focused on Bronx elected officials and community boards, Pitta Bishop & Del Giorno, Ward Strategies and Albany Strategic Advisors.
SL Green and Caesars
Entertainment: $112,000
gan to pursue a hotel-casino on a long-empty site near the United Nations. Soloviev has not reported any explicit casino lobbying, but it has paid $50,000 since May to Constantinople & Vallone to lobby city and state officials on a “land use project” at the same First Avenue site where the casino would go.
Mohegan, meanwhile, doled out $40,000 to lobbying firm Yoswein, whose listed target is the office of city Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer.
Thor Equities, Saratoga, Chickasaw Nation and Legends: $85,000
Thor Equities has paid Albany lobbyist Patricia Lynch Associates $50,000 since May to present its four-way vision for a casino just off the Coney Island boardwalk to more than a dozen state lawmakers—several of whom represent Brooklyn.
two-tower casino, hotel and apartment complex on 11th Avenue. Now, Catalyst’s lobbying focus has been shifted to the casino project— lobbying five Manhattan officials at the city and state levels as part of its $10,000-a-month contract, records show.
In late June, Silverstein inked a separate $5,000-a-month contract with Jordan Barowitz, the former Durst spokesman who left last year to start his own consultancy. Barowitz’s targets include Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Assembly member Simone.
Vornado Realty Trust
“The general consensus is that it’s ‘hurry up and wait,’” said one lobbyist involved in the casino sweepstakes.
State senator Liz Krueger, a vocal skeptic of casinos who has three proposals in her Manhattan district, said lobbyists have continued to approach her in recent weeks.
“People keep showing up, sending me things that I don’t believe,” she said. “But there’s no role for the Legislature at this point.”
It remains unclear when the state will convene votes by the six-person Community Advisory Committees that could reject any bid even before it reaches the state’s Gaming Facility Location Board, which will recommend the three winners. Equally uncertain is how the city would bring the casinos into compliance with local zoning—it could subject each proposal to the monthslong review process known as ULURP, or mass-legalize all future casinos
Cohen’s casino group New Green Willets has paid a combined $237,522 to eight outside lobbying firms since May—on top of its own reported lobbying by New Green Willets employees, records show.
Its top payees included Albany-based Dickinson & Avella, the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and smaller contracts with lobbyists Marcos A. Crespo, Moonshot Strategies, Hollis Public Affairs, Lemma Strategies, RXR Development and the MirRam Group.
The listed “targets” of Cohen’s lobbying included state Attorney General Letitia James, leaders of the city’s Economic Development Corp., Parks Department staff and the mayor’s office. Cohen’s lobbyists also have targeted city and state lawmakers to push the state Assembly bill that would boost his bid to “alienate”—or reuse—park land, records show.
Cohen’s rumored gaming partner, Florida-based Seminole Hard Rock, has also paid $160,000 to lobbyists since May, including $90,000 to consultancy Actum, $40,000 to Queens-based Green
Office landlord SL Green has kept up its contracts with BerlinRosen and Ostroff Associates to sell its proposal for a resort-casino within the 54-story tower at 1515 Broadway in Times Square. The company is also maintaining its $7,500-a-month contract with gayrights activist Allen Roskoff— amounting to $85,000 in lobbying dollars since May.
Frank Carone, the former chief of staff to Mayor Adams, joined SL Green’s bid in February to work on a “community engagement hiring plan” with law firm Greenberg Traurig, but he vowed he would not serve as a lobbyist in accordance with city rules. Indeed, although Greenberg Traurig is a listed lobbyist for SL Green, it has not reported any work on the casino project.
Las Vegas-based partner Caesars has continued its own work with public relations firm Bolton-St. Johns, which most recently targeted Midtown Assembly member Tony Simone, records show. (Third partner Roc Nation Entertainment has not reported any lobbying spending.)
Soloviev Group and Mohegan: $90,000
The development company Soloviev Group linked up with Mohe-
Thor also has a new contract, registered in May, with Brooklyn consultants Bender Cantone, while gaming partner Saratoga Casino Holdings has a $10,000-a-month deal with Albany lobbyists Featherstonhaugh, Wiley & Clyne. No lobbying spending has been reported by the bid’s other partners: the Chickasaw Nation and hospitality firm Legends.
Krueger said lobbyists for the Coney Island bid caught her attention by arguing that it would be a waste to award licenses to the existing racetrack casinos. She said they argued that the three licenses should go instead to places that could benefit more from a huge influx of gamblers.
“They’re already so big and making so much money that it’d almost be a waste of a license to just let them get even bigger—it won’t even draw in new people,” Krueger said, summarizing the lobbyists’ argument against Resorts World in Queens and Empire City in Yonkers.
Hudson’s Bay Company: $30,000
The Canadian retail giant that controls Saks Fifth Avenue has kept up its $15,000-a-month contract with Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies to push a vision for a casino atop the legendary Midtown department store.
Silverstein Properties:
$10,000
Silverstein Properties already had a contract with Albany lobbyists Catalyst Government Relations by the time the developer announced its proposal in June for a
Vornado, which has slowed new development amid falling demand, has said almost nothing publicly about the plan it floated in January to build a casino across from Penn Station on the former site of the Hotel Pennsylvania. Although Vornado has done business with at least five outside lobbying firms this year, none has reported any explicit casino work.
Racetrack frontrunners and Nassau bid: $245,000
Las Vegas Sands, which wants a casino on the present-day site of Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum, has paid a combined $115,000 since May to Brown & Weinraub, Ten Key Strategies and the Parkside Group.
In addition, the two slot-machine racetracks that are considered front-runners for licenses have continued their lobbying pushes.
Genting, the Malaysian operator of Resorts World at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, dished out $90,000 since May to Patrick Jenkins & Associates to lobby state lawmakers and the governor’s office about a downstate casino license. Genting paid $30,000 to Bolton-St. Johns to target Molly Schaeffer and Rachel Atcheson, staffers in Mayor Adams’ office, regarding a license. (Genting has contracts with five other lobbying firms, but their filings did not specify whether their work involved a new casino license.)
Finally, MGM Resorts, which operates the existing Empire City Casino in Yonkers, has paid $10,000 to Westchester firm DelBello Donnellan Weingarten Wise & Wiederkehr to lobby members of the Yonkers city government about a “building expansion and construction” of a casino. (The company contracts with three other firms, including top New York City Hall lobbyist Kasirer, though those companies do not specify work on a downstate license.)
“Nobody has a leg up, nobody is in front, and no particular influence is going to bear on the ultimate decision.”
Brian O’Dwyer, chairof the
state’s gaming commissionAt least three lobbying firms are involved in pushing the Coney Island casino proposal— seen in this rendering—from Thor Equities, Saratoga Casino Holdings, the Chickasaw Nation and Legends. suNsHINE sACHs
Sky-high rents in Manhattan and Brooklyn fuel a
StreetEasy says there were 133% more searches for Queens homes in May 2023 than in May 2019
By C. J. HughesTo contend with the city’s housing crisis, policy makers and business leaders have proposed solutions that could significantly rearrange the landscape. Converting offices into housing, permitting denser high-rises and legalizing basement apartments have all been on the table.
But while the debate drags on, one change is already happening on the residential front that has little to do with official planning. It’s garnering a lot less fanfare but could, some hope, help ease the housing crunch all the same.
Accelerating a decades-long trend, Queens is surging as a residential alternative to Brooklyn and Manhattan. That uptick in demand has led to a mini boom in supply, which could produce lower rents, developers, brokers and residents say.
What’s driving the spike is that the housing stock increasingly resembles the high-rise, multifamily type common in other neighborhoods, they say. Plus hybrid work is allowing people to live farther
and is putting the finishing touches on its second Queens project, a rental in Forest Hills called the Yellowstone.
Of course, what works for developers doesn’t always benefit neighborhoods. Development can lead to disruptive construction, strains on services and hikes in the cost of living—all courtesy of gentrification.
But developers say Queens’ huge size makes those concerns overblown. Spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to the Long Island Sound and from suburban subdivisions to post-industrial blocks, it’s the largest borough in terms of area and packs about the same population of Brooklyn into 50% more space.
Catching up
Queens seems hot by several measures.
Last spring demand from apartment seekers more than doubled from prepandemic levels, according to StreetEasy, which reported 133% more searches for Queens homes in May 2023 than in May 2019.
Hybrid work is allowing people to live farther from the office, opening up places that once seemed too far away.
from the office, opening up places that once seemed too far away, like Flushing and Jamaica. But most critically, they add, Queens is still a bargain, as rents elsewhere continue to smash records.
“For a long time, Brooklyn was the good value proposition, but that’s no longer true. Now it’s Queens,” said David Schwartz, a Brooklyn native and co-founder of decade-old development firm Slate Property Group, which started out developing in Williamsburg
That jump was greater than in Brooklyn, which had an 108% increase over 2019, and Manhattan, up 78%, according to the data. The parts of Queens closest to Manhattan had even greater gains, with a 150% bump in places such as Astoria and Sunnyside. “Competition is building in Queens,” said economist Kenny Lee, the report’s author.
Across its 109-square-mile entirety, Queens does seem like a good deal. Its average rent is $2,800 a month, according to listings service RentCafe, versus $3,300 in Brooklyn and $4,600 in Manhattan.
But in a sign of the borough’s new strength, rents are rising in some pockets. In June the median
rent (the preferred metric for many analysts) in Long Island City and its surrounding neighborhoods was $3,600 a month, according to data prepared by appraisal firm Miller Samuel for brokerage Douglas Elliman. The rental reports have analyzed only northwestern Queens in part because the area has more apartment buildings than other parts of the borough. That $3,600 number, up 19% from June 2022, was about the same as the median rent for all of Brooklyn, Miller Samuel said.
“People have become location-agnostic,” said Clinton Botway, a broker with the Heller Organization who markets new Queens rental properties. “They start searching and say, ‘I want a gym and doorman and music room and washer and dryer in my unit,’ and then quickly realize they can’t afford Chelsea,” Botway said. Then they venture across the East River, he said.
And he might know. In 2021 Botway and his wife moved from the Upper East Side to Forest Hills because the real estate economics were so appealing.
At one of the buildings he works at, Parkside Manor, a 90-unit rental building near Rufus King Park in Jamaica, Botway had leased almost every one of the building’s 66 market-rate apartments in midJuly after a quick two months of marketing. Prices started at $2,000 a month for studios. (Parkside Manor also has 24 below-market-rate apartments.)
Not every tenant at the building, on 90th Avenue, flocked there from other boroughs. Many people who are from Queens, population 2.27 million, require housing as well. Still, Botway said about 40% of Parkside’s occupants are from outside Queens, a significant number for a location near the end of subway lines.
Parkside Manor’s developer,
Long Island-based ZD Jasper Realty, whose first project was in 2019 in Long Island City, also built nearby Archer House, a 109-unit rental from 2021. Empowered by its successes, perhaps, ZD Jasper, which declined to comment, is now taking a stab at Manhattan and this summer filed plans for a two-tower development on Ninth Avenue in Hudson Yards.
Heller Organization has migrated in the other direction. Founded in 1997, the Flatiron-based firm focused mostly on Manhattan and Brooklyn projects before developer Werber Real Estate enlisted it in 2020 for Roosevelt Parc, a 154-unit luxury high-rise in Jackson Heights. Two Queens projects followed before Parkside Manor.
Broken ground
More projects are coming. In the second quarter, developers filed for permits for 3,236 new apartments and hotel rooms in
Queens, according to website Yimby, which based its count on Department of Buildings data but did not distinguish between rentals and condos. The total was below the first quarter, which had 3,487 filings. But the haul for the first half of 2023, 6,723, exceeded the 5,919 in the same period in 2022, Yimby said.
The projects are not bunched in Long Island City—the site of first forays by developers in the 1980s— but across the map.
Flushing continues to bustle.
Prolific builder Chris Xu, who earlier developed Queens’ tallest spire, the 67-story Skyline Tower in the Court Square area, filed plans in the spring for a 260-unit project on an industrial block on Janet Place. Rockaway, Rego Park and Woodside, locations served by ferries and trains, have also recently been active.
Similarly, burgeoning Astoria will add a 500-unit project on Ditmas Boulevard where a strip mall
Queens mini boom
called the LaGuardia Center stands today. The Queensbased Rosenwach family, which made rooftop water tanks before switching to development, is a partner, records show. Rosenwach, which did not return a call or email for comment, also recently scored a rezoning to allow a more than 200unit project in the Dutch Kills neighborhood.
Over some local opposition, city officials also recently paved the way for movie facility Kaufman Astoria Studios and partners including Silverstein Properties to develop 3,000 apartments by rezoning five blocks of a commercial district. Innovation QNS, which will set aside 45% of the project as affordable housing, will be a $2 billion project.
Even Long Island City, whose low-slung bakeries and metal shops long ago gave way to luxury apartment towers, is still managing to grow. BLDG Management, a developer with deep New York roots, is at work on a 69-story, 824unit spire at Orchard Street and Jackson Avenue that’s aiming to be Queens’ tallest tower. In a big vote of confidence, an M&T Bank-led group invested $425 million in the project this summer. BLDG, which has owned the site for decades, had no comment.
Coming around
In some places, construction can seem to be bringing things full circle. The Yellowstone, Slate’s 166-unit development, for instance, is one of the first major multifamily buildings to go up in its part of Forest Hills since the opening in the 1950s of Parker Towers, a three-building complex with more than 1,300 apartments.
Built by the Jack Parker Corp. on the site of a former golf course, the building was sold to Blackstone for $475 million in 2018, two years after Slate teamed up with supermarket owners Grobman Gross Properties to develop the Yellowstone at a former Key Foods.
“Blackstone’s deal did nothing
but help us feel good about our thesis that this is a great market,” Schwartz said.
The Yellowstone’s marketing began in mid-July, and within a week and a half, 22 units were leased for around $65 per square foot, or starting at $3,500 a month for market-rate one-bedrooms. Fifty units are set aside as affordable. Pacific Western bank lent $65 million to the project, which is supposed to
open soon. The work-from-home trend seems to have opened peoples’ eyes to Forest Hills. “People think, ‘We can live 30 minutes away, rather than 15 minutes away, because we don’t have to go in so much,’” Schwartz said.
Despite elevated interest rates, lenders are more willing to take chances on Queens than they were a decade ago, some develop-
ers say. In the mid-2010s, Mitchell Rutter, CEO of Essex Capital Partners, had trouble lining up financing for the Mill, an 89-unit rental in Ridgewood along the L train line and Brooklyn border. But the days of skeptical bankers seem numbered.
“Queens will continue to absorb renters because Manhattan rents are rising geometrically,” Rutter said. “Queens still has a lot of legs.”
Adams’ Bronx cricket stadium idea faces local pushback as its proposed economic benefits bring skepticism
By Nick GarberWords and dollars are flying as the Adams administration pushes a plan to build a large, temporary cricket stadium in the middle of a Bronx park in time for a global tournament of the bat-and-ball sport next year.
The 34,000-seat circular structure would rise near Broadway on the west side of sprawling Van Cortlandt Park, on a site already home to a few cricket fields. It would be built between January and June 2024 in order to host about six games of the 2024 T20 World Cup, which is organized by the International Cricket Council.
The ICC has been lobbying City Hall, and the Adams administration is advancing the proposal over the wariness of local elected officials and nearby residents. The administration is pointing to optimistic financial projections—and the apparent lack of any public subsidies—as well as a ticking clock for the Dubai-based ICC to decide on its hosts.
Hosting the event could generate $163 million in economic activity for the city, including $129 million for the Bronx alone, according to a report prepared by the ICC that was obtained by Crain’s. The $20 million stadium would be paid for entirely by the ICC, according to another document from the sport’s governing body.
But skeptics question those rosy estimates, object to the monthslong closure of about 20 acres of a public park, and argue that the city is trying to bypass months of review that the project should be subjected to.
Meanwhile, records show that the ICC, which has not named any host cities for next summer’s tournament, has paid $100,000 since
said during a meeting last month.
Claire Furlong, an ICC spokesperson, declined to name any other cities being considered, although Oakland, Los Angeles and Dallas have all been mentioned in news reports as potential hosts. Furlong told Crain’s that a venue-selection process is underway, with host cities to be announced “in due course.”
‘Call me skeptical’
As many as 3,600 people would be hired by the ICC to build and staff the stadium, amounting to nearly $26 million in earnings, according to ICC’s projections, which were prepared by real estate firm BJH Advisors. The six matches would draw 136,000 attendees—a quarter of whom would come from outside the city—generating $72 million in tourist spending, according to the forecasts. The estimates relied on federal wage data, past ICC World Cup attendance records and tourist reports by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.
City Hall touted the forecasted benefits.
“As the five boroughs continue to serve as an international sports destination, holding this tournament in New York City also has the potential to generate $150 million in potential economic activity and create thousands of new jobs,” Brad Weekes, deputy communications director for Mayor Eric Adams, said via email. “New York is ready to deliver a tournament that no other city will be able to offer and bring this long overdue sport to the best city on the globe.”
But Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz, who represents the park and its surrounding neighborhoods, pointed out that local officials often promise sports stadiums will serve as economic boons, only for those benefits to fail to materialize.
um “a significant win for the Bronx” but said the city should accompany it with permanent improvements to Van Cortlandt Park. Queens Assembly member Jenifer Rajkumar, an ally of Adams, has also urged the ICC to choose New York as a host city, pointing to New York’s large South Asian and Caribbean populations.
Weekes, of the Adams administration, also pointed to the city’s large immigrant communities, saying it “only makes sense to host the International Cricket Council’s Men’s T20 World Cup 2024 in the melting pot that is New York City.”
The administration did not comment on the local officials’ objections and did not confirm ICC’s claim that it, rather than the city, would fund the entirety of the new stadium.
according to a fact sheet prepared by the ICC.
long is it going to take to restore?”
January to Manhattan lobbying firm Geto & de Milly to pitch the World Cup to officials in the Adams administration, including deputy mayors Sheena Wright and Meera Joshi and intergovernmental affairs chief Tiffany Raspberry.
The ICC, looking to widen the reach of what is sometimes called the world’s second-most popular sport, picked the U.S. and West Indies as locales for next year’s T20 tournament. T20 is a slimmeddown version of traditional cricket, allowing matches to be played within three hours rather than stretched across multiple days.
The city is working on a tight timeline. City Hall officials told neighborhood leaders last month that the ICC is already overdue on picking its host cities, with a decision appearing imminent, Bronx Community Board 8 members
“Explain how two weeks of contests is going to generate $129 million for the Bronx. I don’t see that,” Dinowitz said in an interview. “Call me skeptical.”
Dinowitz and his son, City Council member Eric Dinowitz, have both emerged as vocal skeptics of the proposal, as The City first reported. The officials have met twice with the Adams administration in recent weeks to discuss the stadium but said they had never seen the projected economic benefits before a reporter asked about them.
Both men emphasized in interviews that they have not ruled out the stadium. Jeffrey Dinowitz praised the Adams administration for “trying to bring a significant event to the Bronx.”
Other officials have come out in favor of the plan. In a statement read at a recent community board meeting, Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson called the stadi-
Assembly member Dinowitz has questioned the legality of building the stadium without going through the city’s monthslong ULURP review process for zoning changes, and he argued that the project would need the state Legislature to pass a bill authorizing the “alienation” of parkland for private uses—much like New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is attempting for his Queens casino proposal.
“I can’t imagine under what circumstances I would ever sponsor legislation to alienate parkland in Van Cortlandt Park,” Dinowitz told community board members last month.
‘Big unknowns’
Besides the stadium itself, the project would include a “fan zone” with food and beverage stands, batting cages and a stage, officials have said. The modular grandstand would be built entirely above ground to avoid interfering with drainage and irrigation systems,
The stadium site is also steps from the Enslaved African Burial Ground, where people enslaved on the former Van Cortlandt family plantation are likely interred. The cricket council says it has “committed to working with the city” to ensure that the gravesites are not affected.
Neighbors raised other concerns during the recent community board meeting. The 20 acres home to the stadium would be fenced off to the public for months, limiting access to a site that normally hosts high school cross-country races and New York Philharmonic concerts. Ticket prices will likely be steep—seats at a previous World Cup final ranged from $250 to $5,000, Community Board 8 parks chair Deb Travis said last month.
Board members also worry whether the event will leave Van Cortlandt Park better off than it was before. Although the ICC says the council would make a “meaningful capital investment” into the park as a “legacy benefit,” the city has not announced any firm commitments, and neighbors said the grassy site could suffer under the feet of thousands of visitors.
“These are big unknowns: How
Travis said. The cricket council’s most concrete pledge is that it would leave Van Cortlandt Park with a brand-new synthetic turf cricket pitch once the stadium grandstand is dismantled next July.
Multiple cricket leagues play at Van Cortlandt, the largest of which—the Commonwealth Cricket League—is supporting the stadium plan, according to the ICC materials. But while the Commonwealth league says it could move its matches in 2024, other amateur players told PIX11 last month that the proposal would “devastate the local cricket community” and leave them with “nowhere else to play.”
Adams’ interest in the project makes him the latest in a long line of New York City mayors to be drawn to sports stadiums for their economic development potential—although the Van Cortlandt proposal is different for apparently avoiding any public subsidies. Rudy Giuliani controversially put millions in city funds toward minor-league ballparks in Coney Island and Staten Island, and Michael Bloomberg famously proposed spending $600 million on a stadium at the present-day site of Hudson Yards.
“Explain how two weeks of contests is going to generate $129 million for the Bronx. I don’t see that.”
Assembly member Jeffrey DinowitzAn International Cricket Council rendering obtained by Crain’s shows how the 34,000-seat cricket stadium would appear in the Parade Ground section of Van Cortlandt Park. The new stadium would be built atop several existing cricket pitches in Van Cortlandt Park. | BUCK ENNIS
Covid rent relief still hasn’t arrived for more than 108,000 New Yorkers after the program launched in June 2021
By Eddie SmallMore than 100,000 New Yorkers are still waiting to receive Covid rent relief years after the launch of the program, according to the state comptroller’s office.
The state’s emergency rental assistance program has received about 300,000 applications from tenants in the city, the office said. Of those, 108,044 remain unpaid, comprising about 70% of the total unpaid applications statewide.
The program, which launched in June 2021 and closed to new applications early this year, had given out almost $3.1 billion to about 250,000
Napoli’s office has released. Public housing residents have not received money from it yet, although the state included $390 million in funding for that in its budget—the one major piece of housing policy that survived negotiations.
Last priority
Applications from public housing residents received last priority under the program, which effectively cut them off from it given that it was constantly short on money. ZIP codes in the city that include public housing complexes represented almost 80% of its unpaid rent-relief applications as of April, the report says.
applicants as of mid-June, and officials have made improvements to it that addressed some of the many issues it faced before and upon launching, according to a new report state Comptroller Thomas Di-
Many of the unpaid applications have already been denied, and the vast majority of remaining ones are for tenants in subsidized housing, according to the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which administers the program.
Agency spokesman Justin Mason said the comptroller’s report highlights the important work the program has done “and the stabilizing effect it had on low-income
New York City residents.”
The city has received 81.2% of the program’s funds, or $2.5 billion, and more than a quarter of that has gone to Brooklyn specifically, according to the report. It describes the program as well targeted in general, given that the city had high rates of rent-burdened tenants even before the pandemic and went through significant job losses during it.
Renters in the city have received
average payments of $13,289, higher than the statewide average but lower than most Long Island and Hudson Valley counties, according to the report. The state has so far distributed about $775 million to Brooklyn households, $702 million to Bronx households, $558 million to Queens households, $382 million to Manhattan households and $62 million to Staten Island households. The Bedford Park neighborhood in
the Bronx has received the largest share of funds citywide, at about $60 million.
“The emergency rental assistance program got off to a slow start in New York, at a time of great urgency,” DiNapoli said. “Two years later, funds have flowed to many of the households in need. Still, rent burdens continue to plague many amid relatively high inflation and housing costs.”
The report highlights the important work the program has done, state comptroller’s spokesman Justin Mason said.
New York by flocking to meet-ups, breakfast networking events and parties and supporting rooftop bars, gyms, immersive experiences and restaurants.
“It has become more of a central meeting place and a hub for tech and venture capital,” said Patrick Chun, partner at Noho investment firm Juxtapose. “Especially for people who traverse the boundaries, who are here part-time or fulltime, the city has become the town square of tech.”
The numbers are telling. Median salaries at city tech companies are outpacing those of the traditional top earners in finance. This past winter, New York edged out Silicon Valley with the most early-stage startups in the U.S., according to equity management platform Carta. And the number of people working in technology occupations in the New York metro area is now 371,000, up 11% since 2017, according to real estate firm CBRE.
Yet tech isn’t growing by another measure: New York City headquarters and office space absorption. The Manhattan office vacancy rate is around 18%, up from about 12% before the workfrom-home shift, according to real estate firm Newmark. The firm pointed to the technology, advertising, media and information sector as “the driver of both an increase in sublease space and decline in tenant demand” in its second-quarter report.
Tech industry leaders say they are committed to New York, even if that commitment looks more virtual than other sectors.
Remote work remains a norm in the tech industry, even as other sectors have returned to the office.
Many tech companies have become increasingly global, so they have to travel often to see colleagues, strategic partners and investors. New York’s prime spot on the tech circuit makes it a frequent pitstop for out-of-towners, especially those heading to San Francisco from Europe or the Middle East.
The talent pool here makes New York an attractive place to build a team: There are at least 200,000 people with expertise in every occupation of the tech field, including artificial intelligence, and the numbers continue to grow.
The city’s labor market and tech culture are better off for the participation of its occasional denizens, observers say. Still, there is lingering worry about what’s missing, including a well-founded fear that tech firms will never graduate from home offices to floors of commercial space. There’s also the threat that the expense to live and work here could hold back the tech talent pool from growing to its full potential.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recognized that possibility in a speech noting the surprisingly small share of New York City employees in the firm’s 300,000-plusperson workforce. “We now have more employees in Texas than New York state,” he said on
Bloomberg TV in March. “It shouldn’t have been that way.”
Doubling down on virtual
It’s not possible to track exactly how many companies are based here but don’t have leadership or leases in the city. However, industry observers note that at least a handful of firms that have raised big rounds this year, such as Hugging Face and Wiz, have leaders who mostly stay away. Both companies declined to comment.
There were more than 25,000 tech-enabled companies in the city last summer, which is at least 2.5 times greater than the figure a decade ago, according to a report by Tech:NYC and Center for an Urban Future. About 400 more startups launched over the course of the past year, according to a report from the city Economic Development Corp. A not-insignificant number of the 371,000 people working in tech jobs in the city— defined both as people at tech companies and tech workers at other firms—report to companies that aren’t based here, including tens of thousands at Amazon, Alphabet and Meta.
Gone today, here tomorrow
Misha Esipov, the founder of NovaCredit, a fintech startup that integrates data among credit bureaus and financial institutions, lived in San Francisco for the seven years he has been building the company. In 2018 he established an office in New York City—almost a necessity in fintech. “For a business like ours that sells into large financial institutions, you have to be in New York,” he said.
Now, after commuting by redeye for years, Esipov is moving the company’s headquarters to New York this summer and searching for a place to live.
Tech CEOs travel a lot—that’s not news. They fly to meet investors on both coasts and to pitch or coordinate with strategic partners around the world. For Esipov, it was growth that led him to move eastward, since more frequent in-person meetings with East Coast partners like American Express made the jet commute less tolerable.
A leader who’s here just a fraction of the time can still drive local job growth, however. On the Tech:NYC job board recently, there were about 5,300 positions open with tech industry employers who are members. A search for “remote” yields about 600 positions, but many more express flexibility. The board includes all jobs that can be done in New York, regardless of the headquarters’ address or founder’s location. Hugging Face, a hub for open-source A.I. tools, maintains offices in Paris and in downtown Brooklyn, and its founder reportedly dwells in Florida. “We support our employees wherever they are,” one of its job listings reads.
Even before Esipov made it official, about half of his employees were based in New York City, he said. The company leases 5,000 square feet in Flatiron for the group, which includes members of every company team—core ad-
ministrative, go-to-market, legal, compliance and product engineering. It has long been in both the enterprise and consumer tech playbooks to post sales or marketing teams in New York City while keeping core development or product teams elsewhere. That was the script Esipov followed, keeping NovaCredit’s go-to-market team here near banks and credit-card firms. Then in 2021 and 2022, three Bay Area-based engineers asked if they could make the cross-country move to New York. “It’s become the headquarters of the company,” he said. A San Francisco office with about one-quarter of employees will remain open.
From an economic development perspective, “provided they put people on the ground,” including the tech team, the physical headquarters of a company is not its most relevant feature, said Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City. In fact, Gotsch sees the question the other way: The growing talent pool attracts companies to come work here, since they know they will be able to hire. Anecdotally, leaders say the San Francisco-to-New York City move was a common journey for the country’s engineers during the great office untethering of 2020 to 2022.
“Post-Covid we have more talent than ever,” said Jonathan Lehr, partner at Work-Bench, which invests in enterprise tech firms. “If we think about it company-wise, it’s a net positive. With talent, while not every founder or chief marketing officer is here, there is more talent than there was.”
Still, the size of the tech pool is not growing as fast as in other places. Both Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area had double the tech talent growth between 2017 and 2022 as New York City, according to the CBRE data, and Dallas-Fort Worth and Seattle had increases of 28% and 29%, respectively. Austin, Salt Lake City and Phoenix are smaller markets that boasted even more growth.
The party is local
The writer E.B. White said that newcomers give New York City its passion. He did not live to witness the enthusiasm of the tech nomads and recent arrivals.
Events like the packed Arthur panel are becoming more common, participants in the tech scene say. Lehr said he noticed that newcomers eager to get out into the city and build their networks had been driving attendance at events like his firm’s Enterprise Tech Meet-up over the last year and a half. New York’s key place on the international circuit guarantees that not everyone’s here all the time, but when they are here, they have business and socializing to do.
Morgan Barrett, who works in the tech group at law firm Lowenstein Sandler, said he has recently been running into industry acquaintances from Texas seeking a respite on the streets of Soho from the above-100°F temperatures there.
“Because it’s the summer, and it’s so hot in Austin, it feels like half of Austin is here,” Barrett said.
He discovered the irrepressible nature of the city’s tech scene when he and 10 friends in the industry got together for a breakfast catch-up at Balthazar. “We had such a good time,” he said, “we decided to do it again in a few weeks.”
The next time the group met, 30 tech types came, then 60. Eventually, he and co-host Ariel Purnsrian started hosting Breakfast Clubs at event spaces, and they were still packed.
“I always try to host in Soho,” he said, “because it’s like the center of the universe for startups.” The density of New York City—and the even closer geographic ties of the tech neighborhood in Manhattan below 30th Street—means most people can stop in easily to the meet-up on their way somewhere else.
Inquiries for events and dinners from tech-sector clients have grown exponentially over the past six to eight months at Soho French restaurant La Mercerie, said Dana Rizzo, its director of hospitality. There are client dinners, board meetings and press events, she said: “With in-person time less frequent, they want to ensure moments of gathering are memorable and elevated.”
The restaurant has a 28-seat table in its private dining room that appeals to companies “looking to carve out time to be deeply connective and creative,” Rizzo said. Clients have included the big players like Google and Meta, as well as out-of-town companies, like Uber, which Rizzo said hosted an event with its San Francisco-based CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, in attendance.
Like Barrett, she said the Soho location makes for an ideal central hub in a remote work world.
More anchors
The party does not extend to the office. Tech companies with distributed workforces need fewer square feet for desks and conference rooms. Several larger tech firms have recently downsized or called off expansions, and Newmark reports that Meta, Verizon and Publicis are rumored to be returning blocks of office space to the market soon.
The connection between remote work and a slower demand for real estate is clear, even for companies that are committed to New York.
“It is true that technology companies, large and small, are cutting back on their space needs,” Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog in July.
“But that is more a reflection of the
era of remote/hybrid workforces than anything else.” That, he pointed out, does not mean that tech is no longer a growth industry here.
The story of Dayforward is an example. Launched in 2019, Dayforward sells accessible life insurance plans online to young families. At the helm is Aaron Shapiro, one of the founders of digital advertising agency Huge, a company whose presence in Dumbo helped define the neighborhood as a hub for creative work in the 2000s.
Shapiro lives in Manhattan, but the company is fully distributed.
“A lot happened accidentally,” he told Crain’s. He intended for Dayforward to sign a lease in 2020, but with the pandemic, “we thought we’d wait a little,” he said. By the time everything opened up, the team was comfortable working remotely, and several key hires were living elsewhere. For example, Dayforward found its head of underwriting outside of Cincinnati. The 25% of the team based in New York still meet several times a week, but instead of leasing their own office, they go to a space at Juxtapose, the Noho investor, that’s reserved for portfolio companies. Shapiro does not rule out signing a lease for Dayforward some day.
To be sure, for every real estateagnostic startup, there are tech companies in physical growth mode. VTS, which sells software for commercial and residential building managers, just took 34,325 square feet at 3 Bryant Park in a sublease from Salesforce; the deal will double VTS’ headquarters. Celonis, a data-mining firm started in Germany, leased one floor at 1 World Trade Center in early 2020 and leased a second floor in spring 2022. Datadog, a cloud security firm that went public in 2021, leases over 150,000 square feet at 620 Eighth Ave.; its office has become a different kind of anchor than the meet-ups or the A.I. panels, said John Dickerson, chief scientist of Arthur.
“We are only just starting to get the big players in the space,” he said, calling Datadog the “shining jewel of the New York scene” because of its firm presence and deep integration with scores of other tech companies that use its cloud services and may need to meet its representatives in person—similar to how the city’s finance industry attracts fintech firms like NovaCredit to be on the ground in New York.
In addition to smaller and distributed firms, he said, “We need that style of company.”
IT Category Manager (Citadel Enterprise Americas Services LLC – New York, NY); Mult. Pos. Avail. Offering a salary of $145,000 to $215,000 per year. Support the implementation & continuous innovation of the Enterprise Resource Plann’g (“ERP”) systems. Coordinate efforts in integrating a Source to Pay (“S2P”) system with the broader Info Tech (“IT”) framework to optimize purchasing, spend, & tech processes. F/T. Resumes: citadelrecruitment@citadel.com. Job ID: 7585160.
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Senior Software Engineer (Citadel Securities Americas Services LLC – New York, NY); Mult. Pos. Avail.
Design and build software components that are foundational to research and trading activities. Enhance proprietary elec trading sys and tools to support new products and algorithms. F/T. Offered salary range of $230,000 - $270,000 per year. Resumes: citadelrecruitment@citadel.com.
JobID: 6925784.
Java Developer positions (Future US, Inc.; NY, NY). Develop product features w/ minimal supervision.
Analyze req’ts & dev’t SW solutions.
Position is fully remote & may be performed from anywhere in the U.S. Salary range is $89,253/year$100,000/year, depending upon qualifications. Send resume to maddison.nicholas@futurenet.com, & indicate you are applying for the Java Developer (LN) opening.
Sr. Manager, Data Science positions (NBCUniversal Media, LLC; NY, NY). Resp for creating analytical solut’ns for verticals of Peacock Video Streaming Service incl. but not limited to, recommender syst, automated marketing, personalized ads, commerce & revenue, optimization syst, & customer journey & CRM solut’ns. May work remotely. Salary range is $195,000/yr - $215,000/yr, depending on qualifications. Send resume to: Elsbeth Velasco-Fulgencio at elsbeth.velasco@nbcuni.com, & indicate you are applying for the Sr. Manager, Data Science (SC23LN) opening. NBCU is an EOE.
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“These programs mandate affordability, and then the truth is that what they deem as affordable is not on par with the reality of most New Yorkers,” said Camarena, “and certainly not mine.”
The median household income for the city as of 2021 was about $71,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That is $23,400 lower than HUD’s median family income figure for New York, which is $94,400, and $27,900 lower than the figure for an individual earning 100% of the AMI, which is $98,900.
AMI has consistently been about $20,000 higher than the actual median income in the city over the past decade, according to the Association for Neighborhood Housing & Development, a citybased affordable housing nonprofit. Almost eight out of 10 rent-burdened households earned less than 50% of the city’s AMI last year, or $63,550 for a family of three, according to the organization.
“HUD’s convoluted AMI calculation only further masks the disparity between what is considered ‘affordable housing’ and what housing New Yorkers need,” the organization wrote in its 2022 “cheat sheet” on AMI.
The logic behind calculating the figure this way is essentially that areas with high rents will have more people who need access to affordable housing even if they make what seems like a comfortable salary, according to the association. Although there is some truth to that, there is also no deny-
ing that the term not aligning with what many people assume it means has sparked confusion and frustration about how affordable housing in the city actually works.
“The concept is correct in doing it by rent. It’s just the terms that are used are nonsensical,” said one former city employee who focused on affordable housing and requested anonymity to speak more candidly. “It is really just a problem where you lose your sense of reality when you use these terms that are actually dysfunctional.”
A long history
Using the AMI as a yardstick for affordable housing dates all the way back to the 1937 U.S. Housing Act, when the federal government needed some sort of calculation to define the middle class and determine the maximum income people could earn to be eligible for public housing. It was further locked in as a measurement in 1986 during the creation of the federal low-income housing tax credit program, which remains among the country’s most important tools for financing affordable housing. To be eligible for the tax credit, units in a residential project must average out to be affordable for someone making no more than 60% of the AMI, or $59,340 for an individual in New York.
Although the AMI has long been a statistic set at the federal level, nothing is preventing the city from building housing for people who earn less, emphasized Brendan Cheney, policy director at the New York Housing Conference.
“The city can choose to set income levels lower than federal
AMI,” he said. “The city can just decide that they’re going to use city median income in terms of affordable housing or just say, ‘We’re going to build most of our housing [for] incomes of $50,000 or less.’ As long as they are below the HUD low-income housing tax limit, they can have the income ranges at whatever they want.”
Developers themselves can also do this, according to Joy Construction Principal Eli Weiss, who has worked on several affordable housing projects in the city. Many developments include units for people earning 30% of the area median income, for instance, which at $29,670 for an individual actually is below what a typical New Yorker earns.
“You can really use it any way you want,” he said of the AMI. “It’s really about where the project is.”
But the more affordable the building is (and the lower the rents are), the more government subsidies it will need to turn a profit, which has been a constant source of tension in the industry. The deeper subsidies essentially make the projects more expensive for the government to fund without leading to more affordable housing units than would otherwise be built, which Cheney acknowledged. However, it is still extremely important and worthwhile to build these types of projects, he said.
“You spend a lot more money for the same number of units,” he said. “We think, and a lot of other advocates think, that going deeper is important, and we understand that tradeoff and think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff.”
More than 75% of the roughly 16,000 apartments financed by the
Department of Housing Preservation and Development during fiscal 2022 were for households earning less than 80% of the AMI, or $101,680 for a family of three, and homes for people earning up to 30% of the figure, or $38,130, made up 23% of production, according to the agency.
“The vast majority—around 80%—of the homes we create serve low-, very low- and extremely low-income New Yorkers as we’re taking concrete steps to make housing more accessible and speed up the process from end to end,” said HPD spokesman William Fowler.
Defining the area
One complaint about the city’s AMI that comes up frequently is that the “area” also includes the wealthy suburban counties of Westchester, Putnam and Rockland. Federal legislation introduced in 2022 by U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, who represents New York’s Ninth District, comprising Brooklyn, and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who represents New York, targeted this issue directly. The bill would require HUD to assess the impact of including the suburban counties and examine other methods of determining the AMI, including replacing it entirely. The bill does not seem to have advanced since its introduction, and representatives for Clarke and Gillibrand did not respond to requests for comment.
The areas HUD uses to determine the AMI often include multiple cities and counties, according to agency spokesman Adam Glantz. The Washington, D.C., area includes several counties in
Virginia and Maryland, for instance.
Because New York’s AMI figure is based more on rents than incomes, excluding the suburbs actually would not make much of a difference, according to multiple affordable housing experts. Rents in the city itself have long been notoriously high, so taking Westchester, Putnam and Rockland out of the equation would barely change the region’s AMI, they said.
The median rent for the five boroughs as of 2022 was $1,579, according to the Census Bureau. That was slightly higher than Putnam’s median of $1,544 and just barely lower than Westchester’s median of $1,682 and Rockland’s median of $1,642.
In other words, having a large metro area is not the main reason why AMI is so high, according to Cheney. The main reason is the region’s high rents, which in turn leads to higher AMI levels, he said.
Opportunities to find any affordable apartment remain few and far between, according to Camarena. He attempted to apply for one years ago and remains cynical about his chances of getting one in the future and whether it is even worth trying.
“There aren’t many of these to begin with. If I were to apply now, it looks like there are 12 lotteries in Brooklyn,” he said, referring to the number of buildings in the borough he saw with available affordable units. “One of the largest boroughs, and only 12 opportunities to win some kind of affordability, maybe, if you’re eligible and you want to pay a monthly rate that’s higher than what you’re probably paying.”
Director of Black Public Media on representation in documentaries
By | Olivia BensimonLESLIE FIELDS-CRUZ
Twenty years ago Leslie FieldsCruz showed up to interview for a job at the National Black Programming Consortium—now called Black Public Media—with a thought-out strategy for ensuring that the Harlem-based nonpro t could keep supporting the development and distribution of documentaries by Black lmmakers.
“I had a whole game plan as to what I knew I could do if [the organization] hired me. I was like, ‘I can do this,’” said Fields-Cruz, who considers herself a movie bu . “I was determined to get that job.”
at rst job was in grant making, for which Fields-Cruz put together panels to review documentary proposals. After four years, she went on to serve as the director of programming and created “AfroPop: e Ultimate Cultural Exchange,” an award-winning television series in its 15th season on PBS that features stories about the African diaspora. After that, she became vice president of programs and operations, and in 2014, was named Black Public Media’s executive director.
Because of her lifelong passion for movies, Fields-Cruz brie y considered a career in acting or lmmaking. But things changed in a graduate school class taught by George C. Stoney—known as “the father of public-broadcast televi-
sion” and a documentary lm “guru,” as she puts it. She saw the art and power in documentary storytelling and was inspired to nd ways to support lmmakers telling authentic stories about the diversity of the Black experience.
More work to be done
“ at’s where I was like, I just want to make sure that the stories that we’re putting forward, that we’re funding, are the stories that represent an experience that the broader American public probably isn’t aware of,” Fields-Cruz said. “What’s always been a challenge for a person of color in the States working in media is representation and trying to make sure that the stories that are out there in the world, especially in lm and television, do a better job representing our experiences.”
She says she is troubled that lawmakers in Florida and other states are seeking to regulate what tales are being told. To make sure the stories of underrepresented groups are not cast aside altogether, she says, better representation is needed to make sure there are people of color in decision-making roles, such as writers, directors and executive producers.
In a given year, Black Public Media, which has been in existence for
more than four decades, helps between 25 and 30 creatives, which includes both lmmakers and creative technologists. So far in 2023, the nonpro t has given out $510,000. Its annual budget is $3.3 million.
Two decades since she rst joined Black Public Media, FieldsCruz is just as committed to supporting Black creatives as she was at the beginning. She has spearheaded multiple incubators and programs with the purpose of supporting lmmakers of color from inception all the way through pitch preparation and receiving funding. rough the incubator, the nonpro t pairs production teams with mentors who serve as guides on topics including story structure, pitch reels and impact campaigns, and can provide tips on how to navigate public media systems.
Still, Fields-Cruz knows there’s more work to be done to provide resources to lmmakers of color.
“It’s about longevity. It’s about working together to support makers of color. And you can’t do one without the other. As a country, we’re not there yet,” she said. “We have a long way to go because racism is ugly. And the way you address it, you have to change hearts and minds. And that is not something that is easily done, but you just have to keep at it.”
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Grew up Santa Ana, California Resides Cortlandt Manor, Westchester County Education Bachelor’s in psychology, University of California, Berkeley; master’s in cinema studies, New York University
Big coincidence In her rst year at Black Public Media, Fields-Cruz helped with the funding for the documentary “Chisholm ’72 — Unbought & Unbossed” by Shola Lynch. From the lm, she learned that a Black woman ran for president in the early 1970s. “I was like, ‘How come I don’t know this story?’” she recalled. “And then, of course, I tell my parents, and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we know Shirley Chisholm!’ When she came out to California, they had actually held a campaign fundraiser at our home. I had no idea!”
Giving back Fields-Cruz is on the board of New York Women in Film and Television and local nonpro t New Era Creative Space.
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Leslie Fields-Cruz says making sure people of color can tell their stories will offset laws trying to silence themBlack Public Media Executive Director Leslie Fields-Cruz BUCK ENNIS
