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At a news conference on Feb. 4, Mayor de Blasio reiterated his intention to follow through on a promise he made during his campaign last year to not recommend any increase to New York City's property -tax rate when he releases his fiscal 2015 budget proposal.
The mayor and City Council have the power to make across-the-board increases to the nominal tax rate. They can also slice up the pie a bit differently, so that one type of property pays more or less than another, as long as no one slice rises by more than 5 percent in a year.
Landlord CWCapital Asset Management, the loan servicing firm that represents the bondholders of Stuyvesant Town Peter Cooper Village since the previous owner Tishman Speyer defaulted on its debt, recently agreed to grant tenants a one-month rent reduction because of damages suffered during Superstorm Sandy.
The October 2012 storm knocked out power in Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village, and tenants waited more than three months for services such as intercoms, some elevators, and laundry and storage facilities to be restored before filing for the rent reduct
Records show that the number of tickets issued to owners for not removing sidewalk snow in front of their properties is on the rise as winter weather keeps hammering the city. During the first three weeks of the year, Department of Sanitation agents issued 2,036 tickets to lax landlords and homeowners for failing to shovel their sidewalks, according to the Sanitation Department.
This number of tickets so far is on pace to more than double the 5,096 tickets issued during the six-month snow season last year.
An East Village tenant who used an unorthodox “sushi defense” to keep her rent-stabilized studio apartment has recently lost her last court battle to keep her discounted pad. The owner had tried since 2007 to evict the tenant based on nonprimary residence. As evidence, the owner cited the fact that the electric bills for the apartment were negligible, but the tenant claimed that was because she ate a lot of take out and made a lot of sushi. This was dubbed "the sushi defense," and the appellate court bought it, voting 3-2 in the tenant's favor.
In 1885 New York State legislators enacted a law intended to safeguard construction workers who were finding themselves facing increasing dangers while working at ever-greater heights. The law, which became known as the Scaffold Law, requires employers on building sites to ensure the safety of laborers working above the ground.
In December, a high-profile panel issued a set of recommendations for reining in the state's high property and business taxes. The group, led by former Governor George Pataki, identified some $2 billion worth of proposed tax cuts, half of it earmarked for property-tax relief for homeowners in suburban New York City and more rural upstate New York.
The Bloomberg administration recently launched a new Web site to track how money earmarked for Hurricane Sandy relief is being spent. Administration officials said that some of the information on the site would be updated every month, while some of it would be updated every quarter.
A limited-equity housing cooperative's board in Chelsea is evicting a retired resident after the board used a sting operation to catch the resident renting out his private terrace on short-term rental sites AirBnB and Roomorama. The resident's apartment building was given 25 years of tax abatements to keep it affordable to those with limited incomes. Currently, the city allows the building's taxes to be calculated based on the cooperative's income, as is done with Mitchell-Lama housing. In return, the development must remain a limited-equity cooperative until 2022.
Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has pledged to see through his plan to tax vacant lot owners, a move that could affect upwards of 10,000 lots throughout the city, with the highest concentration on Staten Island.
Manhattan is set to get its first residential building that measures up to passive house standards, a set of green guidelines that aim to cut heating costs by 90 percent through the use of solar energy, better insulation, and other measures. Developer Synapse Capital recently closed on a 9,900-square-foot lot at 542 West 153rd Street and has plans to construct a 40-unit passive building on the site.
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