The answer is simple: Capitalism has outstayed it’s welcome. Its time to go for Scientific Socialism. You ever watch star trek’s society in tng and go “huh, that would be nice…”? Well thats Scientific Socialism.
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.
Username checks out
How does converting an office building have zero cost?
No cost to the city. Sounds like some other entity foot the bill.
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.
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
In red states they’re forcing urban city owned properties to sell. Getting the buildings out of gov. ownership and control is difficult. Doing it this way makes everyone overlook the taxpayer money going to a private investor later. Don’t look too close at the fact that Cochran Gardens, and Pruitt Igoe (StL) were both built buy Minoru Yamasaki, the same man who built the WT towers. It will fail and prolly be demolished in 20 years or so. The building, much like the towers, is probably to expensive to rehab. Also I will just put to people that our nations crubling infrastructure, is not a good sign as far as invasion is concerned. Liquidating government buildings so they’re not liable for their repairs, or so they are not targets of dissent, is also not a good sign. Investors are not investing money in the future. They are invested in the planning process of the future. Roman concrete is reviered not for its composition, but for its ablity to control a society with infrastructure. They say not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but the ‘too good to be true’ rule exists for a reason.
Converting the Oldest House into literal housing? Bold choice!
Upvote for anything control❤️
<The nostalgia/pandering is very much appreciated/tolerated.>
Wow, he’s a magician. He can create something out of nothing. I don’t think he’s heard of secondary consequences !
The perfect reaction gif does not exi—
It’s so perfect I have to exercise restraint not to over use it, but he keeps winning and fascists keep whining…
I don’t think that you are smart enough to know what the secondary consequences would be without being told by Joe Rogan first
Why do dude’s lips look like he could sail away if he caught a decent breeze with them?
Someone should either slap you or kiss you for that username, both concurrently even.
I will accept said actions with honor.
What are they, specifically, in this case?
I’d bet the consequences is more black people having better lives, which somehow is a bad thing to that commenter.
Yeah!
The only ones who can create something out of nothing are those magical job creators who keep cutting jobs.
Centrist democrats will shit on anything that helps poor people.
at no cost to the city
Converting office space into apartments has a cost, it will be easily recouped but there is a cost.
Seems like a good idea though.
Source please if you have one, I’d love to read about what those costs are if they’re real
The costs are real of course, but seemingly handled by a private company that was willing to pay for the project.
Which means the cost to the city was - everyone all together now:
The point is that the original commenter accurately noted that there are costs, but this particular little screenshot does nothing to explain the nuance.
So you have to acknowledge the costs and how they were actually handled, instead of just 'I need sources for the very obvious reality that renovating a building isn’t “free”.
“No cost to the city” is accurate, but it’s completely reasonable to fixate on how ‘no cost’ doesn’t make sense and not think hard enough on the ‘to the city’ part of it and ask for some explanation/discussion of that nuance.
Sinks and showers and walls do not install themselves? What kind of a source are you looking for here?
Just because there is A cost, doesn’t mean it cost the city anything. The original comment sounds like an assumption, and I’d like to validate it
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.
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.
Vacant buildings have a cost too. A vacant high rise building that gets repossessed becomes a massive cost to the city.
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.
Seems like the setup is that the developer gets paid back via the market rate housing revenue, while the city gets a guarantee a minimum number of the new residences are rent controlled. So the developer self funds (or take loans) to start the project, it seems. And the city is still the landowner as far as I can tell, so the developer pays the city a share, which is how the city funds getting new office buildings for agencies to replace these.
I had to dig into what they mean by cross-subsidy to figure that out
So do they sell off sections of the building to developers, who do the work and then sell units back to owners at a price cap?
They rent a building to a property-developer/manager (eg Hines, Douglas Elliman, etc) that converts to residential and rents apt units to individuals, with a guaranteed portion of them affordable and rent stabilized.
It’s like if the city had a fleet of commercial vans they let a local taxi cab company lease at a submarket rate and convert to taxis. In exchange for the deal on the fleet, the taxi company sets aside a certain number of cabs dedicated to shuttling New Yorkers whose disabilities make public transit hard to use.
This property development business model is common, as is the affordable housing stock deal developers make with the city for things like tax breaks. What’s unique here is that the mayor’s office addressed the problem of perpetually lagging housing stock creation and skipped past years of slow property development and construction by offering a large building in the city that’s already built and ready to convert to residential. The city will then use the lease revenue to construct a new office. In the meantime, New Yorkers have more places to live.
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.
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?
This is the haternet. The only reason people come online is to nitpick and naysay others.
It’s wise to look for the potential ‘catch’, and the story provides it if you look, though the headline itself makes it pretty obvious by stating there will be 3,000 unaffordable residences.
In this case, the ‘catch’ still seems pretty solid. Sure a real estate company gets to gouge 3,000 units, but 1,000 units may well be worth that. But it does mean continued vigilance, to make sure the real estate company doesn’t somehow screw up stewardship of those 1,000 affordable units.
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.
to the city
- They’re not converting office space. They’re demolishing and rebuilding.
- 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.
He’s a decent mayor so far and we haven’t had one of those since I’ve been living here
Civilization is expensive and can only be paid for on the installment plan.
When you see what good your taxes can do, it makes you question why the rich don’t pay their fair share. They do not like this.
A city owned office building, why aren’t a majority of the units being made affordable?
“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.
This will end poorly, I guarantee that in 10 years a successor to Mamdani will alter the deal, screening over New Yorkers in favor of that developer. I hope he’s at least smart enough to not give them the land that the city owns.
That’s still 1000 more people housed for 10 years!
Right, because who wants permanent solutions when you can have a cyclical homelessness
The permanent solution does involve a cost to the city. It’s worthwhile, but might take 10 years to achieve.
Well, I hope your pessimism is wrong, but can’t dismiss it. The perils of public-private partnerships is a pretty legitimate worry.
I’m hoping they have enough leverage to have a good, enforceable deal and further hope that succossors will be too afraid of screwing up a popular program.
Same reason status quo democrats dont like him.
Well what about the Democrats huh!
Next, convert Trump Tower into affordable housing.
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.
I was gonna say to just line every wall on every floor with copies of the unredacted files. Name it the Trump Epstein Corruption Library
Nah, convert it to a pile of ash.
And Trump into compost for affordable food?
That would turn any food grown with it into poison, tho?
I can’t remember who said it, but it’s like he got in office and saw the “Get Shit Done” button an jus for the life of him couldn’t understand why previous Mayors weren’t usin it
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.
And awkwardly mention 9/11
The main thing is that he’s really good at publicizing what he’s doing.
Josh Johnson
Josh Joshson.
That’s Crazy…
The reason the right are so anti Mamdani is obvious: they don’t want you to see what your tax dollars being put to work the right way would actually look like.
More like the left way 🥁
🐑 🥁 🐍
It’s why the corporate neo-libs hate him too. They truly are in the business of managing decline instead of doing their fucking jobs.
Is there even such a thing as a non-corporate neolib?
I think there kinda sorta used to be, in 2026? Naw not really.
They’d rather support a sexual predator that they said should resign from being Governor a few years earlier.
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