It appears funding is coming from private sources and upkeep labor is being organized by the 32BJ Union, a massive local union that specializes in affordable housing that’s populated with people who work and specialize in “cleaners, property maintenance workers, doormen, security officers, airport workers, window cleaners, building engineers, school and food service workers, factory workers, etc”.

The conversion costs and labor appear to be funded and plan to be performed by GFP Real Estate and city partners, no doubt in exchange for good favor for future permit approvals and project integration by the Mayor’s administration.

Pretty smart if you ask me.

Source: https://www.nyc.gov/...

Having trouble finding any real info on this, but it appears that the city isn't actually performing the work, just changing rules and providing incentives to do the conversion.

So the "no cost" is really just that the city isn't paying for it.

https://www.metro-manhattan.com/...

to the city

Vacant buildings have a cost too. A vacant high rise building that gets repossessed becomes a massive cost to the city.

Source please if you have one, I’d love to read about what those costs are if they’re real

Can you just get the win? It is healthy to be skeptic but in the context of how shit everything else is, what's the point of stating the obvious?

3/4 of the apartments will be market rate, I bet it’s paid off in the first year when you look at market rate there.

1. They're not converting office space. They're demolishing and rebuilding.
2. There's no cost to the city because they're selling the building to a private developer on the condition they use the site for housing.

A lot of commercial real estate has gone unoccupied since COVID and the explosion of remote work. I see for lease signs all over downtown in my city.

So it doesn’t necesarily have a cost and could in fact be revenue positive to convert to residences.

Where I live they are trying to do the same. Sadly the shape of the building do not work well for housing. There's more inside dark areas than window accessible areas. The proposal was to make a "community area" towards the centre of the building which is a terrible idea. The alternative is converting the inner area to apartments without any sunlight, which isn't going to work even if it's legal. The building sits empty because nobody can provide a good idea how to use it.

Opportunity cost

Slavoj Zizek calls the Democrats “capitalism with a kinder face - LGBT rights and so on and so on.”

That’s really it. They think the core economic system is working. They’re fine to greenlight social policies that don’t challenge it, especially if they think it will win them votes. And that’s all they are.

My thought is that for many many years politicians didn't really have to do anything to re-elected. And when they were asked to do something they would always say "we can't afford that." or they would write a bill that would promise "thing" will get funded 10 years from now. So these lifelong politicians have turned into lazy fucks just there for the money and are pissed at these younger officials that are actually doing the job they were elected to do.

I have to admit I had been lulled into a sense of nothing will change attitude and now that I see how wrong I was I've become quite pissed off.

They'd rather support a sexual predator that they said should resign from being Governor a few years earlier.

Is there even such a thing as a non-corporate neolib?

Josh Johnson

https://youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc

DeBlasio was pretty good about hitting it. Bloomberg could hit it, but only for Evil. Adams was just an incompetent shithead who only knew how to take bribes and do photo ops.

The main thing is that he's really good at publicizing what he's doing.

I wouldn't wanna live in that gaudy hellhole even if you paid me

Shit no. That would be like living in Mordor. No, to hallow that place turn it into the Trump library with every floor an exhibition of the lies, stupidity, evil and crimes he committed, with the penthouse dedicated to the Epstein Files.

Nah, convert it to a pile of ash.

And Trump into compost for affordable food?

Trump Tower isn't mobile. One star housing. This is the future. Next.

Edit: word

You don't have to add "word!" just because it's Harlem

You can see it in Mamdani's smile; the man radiates joy from the inside out. His smile says he loves New York, he loves New Yorkers, and he loves serving them. I wish the world had more Mamdanis.

Well what about the Democrats huh!

I don't know if I love that phrase's use here as it sets up the government as some foreign entity that is stealing from you when, at least in theory, it should be the price you pay for your community's betterment. Of course that's not what it feels like in the US (maybe anywhere, maybe federal taxes feel bad always), but that's an argument for redistributing power and fixing the underlying systems more so than it is to be upset that taxes are a thing (or paint them as... Evil or something which this phrase does).

They are going to reach into your pocket no matter what.

They aren't even in your pocket, relatively speaking. At the local level, you're a drop in the bucket beside the big land owners and corporate industries. At the state level, you're even less relevant. At the federal level, between intentional trade and deficit spending, you might as well not exist.

The joke of modern taxation is how it's largely unnecessary at the individual level. If the state simply planned it's economy and managed it's natural resources, everyone could do the Alaska thing where they pay you to live there.

California hosts multiple trillionaires, ffs. Nobody with an income under seven figures needs to pay a dime to support that state's spending plan.

Sounds like here it's letting a private company spend the money to get access to 3,000 residences in exchange for 1,000 affordable ones.

No cost to the city. Sounds like some other entity foot the bill.

They rent them out, so likely had a contractor do the conversion and then woth the rental income cancels out the cost. "No cost" is also just what that post used, doubt official documents say no cost.

No cost to the city as explained in comments written long before yours in this thread

https://www.nyc.gov/...

Following a competitive request for proposals process, the city selected GFP Real Estate to develop the site.

Note it said only 1,000 affordable residences, but 4,000 overall. A real estate company is happy to cover the cost and cede 1,000 units to affordable terms in exchange for 3,000 residences at market rate.

It seems like a significant cost is in reading the whole sentence.

Upvote for anything control❤️

God, living there would suck. Somebody accidently turns harmonization device off and your hallway is now non-Euclidean shape.

Or take wrong turn when searching laundry room and you are now lost in interdimentional quarry.

🐑 🥁 🐍

Username checks out

No it's time to form a decentralized autonomous technotheocracy, what are you talking about? This is self-evident how the structure of the mothership will be manifested.

Seems like CA is doing pretty good actually. What's up?

BUT HOW ARE THE LANDLORDS (I am not one)

So many of these NYT / WaPo Op-Eds are written by Landlords. So many Twitter shitposts and Facebook hate threads are started by landlords. So much of the local news bullshit is financed by landlords.

The NYPost is landlord required reading.

Lies.

Office space is easily remodeled. Most high rise commercial buildings have windows. they are designed for it to be changed every few years.

Older buildings regularly get turned into housing and sell well exactly for their unique characteristics.

I lived in a converted building that had an enormous industrial crane structure inside of it. They had retrofitted a pool, hot tub, and basketball court on the roofs. It even had two stall parking.

Is there a written version of this podcast, all this article says is there are structural and governmental problems, ending with if we want more have the government doing it, which is what they did.

They're not converting the building. They're tearing it down and building new ones.

It's more costly than doing cookie cutter patterns that have been used for residential buildings. It's way cheaper than demo and rebuild though.

just with a fresh coat of paint covering their faces

Naw, he's gone now

The real urgent solution is to have the municipality build low income housing. The people responsible for the housing crisis should not be involved at all in that.

Politician pockets via dark money and obfuscation, as is always has. The reason most people hate taxes is they go right into corrupt pockets. I wouldnt mind taxes if they actually did shit like this.

The situation in LA is so bad that I'm going to vote exclusively based on how they'll deal with the armed thugs all over the city. It was bad enough when it was just the LAPD!

If he hasn't gotten cynical at this point, he'll be fine. It's basically expected that he's going to get roadblocks from the establishment and he has been so far, whining from the left is also fairly inevitable and it seems like he has a good enough support system and popularity that I'm not concerned about that.

"At no cost to the city". The office building is going to be developed by GFP Real Estate and in exchange for the 3,000 units for free market stuff, they have to make 25% of them available as affordable.

So this is a public-private partnership with strings attached. Hopefully it goes according to plan and/or the company is held accountable for any bullshit it pulls.

What units?

He literally explained how he cannot arrest Netanyahu and told exactly who is stopping him and called Netanyahu a criminal several times on that announcement. The NYPD thing I cannot argue against because I literally know nothing of it, so I'd love to learn about it, but calling him a controlled opposition smells of either right wing paid troll to get the left to not like Mamdani or a person who really wants to let perfect be the enemy of good. Gog forbid anyone be less than perfect and help us move towards a better future in any shape or form besides all the way in a single move exactly how I envision it

I think its about dealing with the increase. Most people are already thin in margin, having a guarantee that your expense aren't growing arbitrarily each year is FAR better than the alternative.

It's not even ideal for the people who have rent control.

Sure, they have rent that's a lot cheaper than it could be. But, they're stuck. Maybe their place doesn't have enough bedrooms. Maybe it's not near their friends or family. Maybe it's too big for them. Maybe they hate their neighbours. But, they have rent control, and they lose it if they move.

Meanwhile, someone else who that apartment would be perfect for has to look elsewhere.

It's a bad system, but rent in NYC is so outrageous people will fight for the bad system because they doubt anything better is really possible.

I don't think that you are smart enough to know what the secondary consequences would be without being told by Joe Rogan first

Yeah!

The only ones who can create something out of nothing are those magical job creators who keep cutting jobs.

What are they, specifically, in this case?

Centrist democrats will shit on anything that helps poor people.