The design universe lands in New York City every spring for the NYCxDESIGN Festival. This major international design event, now in its 12th year, will be in full swing from May 16 to May 22. Expect an influx of visitors seeking the latest creative offerings, fresh ideas, and inspiration from the world of design. Anchored [...]
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A parade dedicated to Japanese culture is returning to New York City for its third year. On Saturday, May 11, the Japan Parade kicks off at 1 p.m. on Central Park West and West 81st Street and heads south to 68th Street. The parade will feature live music, martial arts, traditional dance and drum performances, [...]
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Supermodel Linda Evangelista, who was the face of high-profile brands including Versace, Armani and Ferragamo over a high-wattage, seemingly-everywhere-at-once career, is marketing something of her own.
Evangelista has listed her four-bedroom penthouse in West Chelsea near the High Line for just under $9.5 million, according to a listing that appeared Wednesday.
The 4,000-square-foot condo at 525 W. 22nd St., a 6-story converted furniture warehouse near 10th Avenue, features two baths, exposed brick walls in the pass-through kitchen and a dressing room packed with six custom-built closets. There’s also a peek of a High Line view from the primary suite.
Evangelista, who like Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell was a ubiquitous sight in the 1980s and 1990s at fashion shows, on billboards and in glossy magazines such as Vogue, bought the apartment in 2001 for $8.4 million, a price that included a storage space, according to a deed in the city register.
It’s unclear if the current listing includes the storage area. Carlos Garcia, the Compass broker representing the property, did not respond to a request for comment.
Evangelista seems to be just the second-ever owner of the penthouse, which is part of a 30-unit, 1893 building with a roof deck and lined with 160,000 square feet of art galleries that was developed by the firm Savanna in 1996.
Evangelista, who retired from modeling years ago but made a splashy appearance at this month’s Met Gala, her first time at the celebrity-studded Manhattan charity event in nine years, according to Vogue, was a bit of a trailblazer on West 22nd.
Though the block’s prewar former industrial buildings hummed with popular art galleries by 2001—the Dia Art Foundation opened at No. 548 in 1987, ushering in a parade of similar places to appreciate paintings and sculpture—the High Line then was little more than a weedy and desolate former train track. And apartments, not to mention luxury developers, were very few and far between, though the neighborhood teems with flashy high-rises today. The first leg of the High Line park, meanwhile, opened in 2009.
Greenery, glitz and popularity weren’t enough to prevent the area from struggling a bit in the pandemic, however. Indeed, Covid, and the shutdowns that it prompted, caused a drop-off in visitors to the area, and led to some of No. 525’s galleries becoming vacant.
Savanna, which has owned the spaces since redeveloping No. 525 in the 1990s, apparently responded to the problem by slashing retail rents to attract replacements.
But cutting the rental income undermined Savanna’s ability to pay back a $14 million mortgage, according to the ratings service Moody’s, and a special servicer assumed control of the foreclosure-threatened loan last fall.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration says the city has saved money by putting limits on how long migrant families can stay in shelters. But that 60-day cap has come at a humanitarian cost and its consequences have been poorly tracked, according to an investigation by City Comptroller Brad Lander.
The city does not formally track whether the limits help migrants find stable housing, the investigation found. And despite the mayor’s promise to offer “intensive case management” to help families plan their next steps, Lander said those services are lacking, focused mainly on driving families out of the shelter system and often away from New York City. The city does “very little” to help families find stable housing once they reach the limit, and may hurt migrants’ ability to apply for work permits by booting them to a new address without tracking their location or forwarding their mail, Lander’s report concluded.
Since January, the administration has required migrant families with children to leave city shelters after 60 days — part of an effort to cut costs by encouraging asylum seekers to find their own accommodations. But Lander, who began an investigation as soon as the policy took effect, said Thursday that the administration failed to keep its own promises as it implemented the policy “in a haphazard and arbitrary way.”
As of late April, the city had issued 60-day eviction notices to more than 10,200 families, affecting about 19,500 adults and 18,100 children. It has seemingly achieved its central goal — 51% of families have left the shelter system entirely after receiving a notice, even though they are allowed to re-apply to stay in shelter. Another 40% moved to another shelter and 9% remained in the same shelter they began in, Lander’s office found.
The Adams administration has credited the 60-day policy, along with a stricter 30-day cap for adult migrants, with helping the city cut more than $2 billion in expected spending on the migrant crisis between this year and the coming year. That “prudent approach” helped stave off the need for more painful budget cuts to services like police and early childhood programs, Adams said when announcing his latest spending plan in April.
But Lander, a progressive and frequent foil of the mayor’s, also faults the administration for admitting that it evaluates the 60-day program only in terms of whether it drives down costs — without studying whether the limits achieve another stated goal of helping migrants find permanent housing.
“The city does not track outcomes for families who are impacted by the 60-day notice unless they return and reapply for placement,” Adams wrote in a February letter to Lander in response to the comptroller’s questions.
City Hall spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak defended the administration’s policies in a statement, calling the 60-day limit “one tool in our very limited toolbox to help migrants to exit shelter.”
“Nearly half of all families who have seen their 60-day notices expire, and more than 65 percent of all migrants that have come through our care, have moved out of our shelter system — without a single migrant family with children being forced to sleep on the street,” Mamelak said. “While several suggestions made in the comptroller’s report are already part of our policy, any ideas on how to improve our herculean work are welcome and will be considered.”
More than 65,000 migrants remain in the city’s care out of some 195,000 people who have entered the city since 2022. Adams and his aides have repeatedly defended the city’s response to what they call a fast-moving emergency, during which the city has gotten little help from the federal government.
The comptroller pointed to other flaws: the 60-day cap was implemented without any written policies to uphold some of the administration’s promises, like exempting pregnant women in their third trimester or transferring migrants’ belongings. And the eviction notices themselves do not inform migrants that they have a legal right to reapply for shelter or request an accommodation for a disability.
Lander’s report also found what he called specific discrimination against families with elementary school-aged children. When those families apply for re-intake after hitting the 60-day limit, the city refuses to place them in shelters run by the Department of Homeless services, where the limits do not apply, increasing the chance that children’s education will be disrupted by future moves. (The 60-day limit applies only in emergency shelters run by city agencies other than DHS, including Health + Hospitals and Housing Preservation and Development.)
The mayor’s office countered that more than 80% of children whose families reached the shelter limit have been able to stay at the same school, and that the administration does keep written policies governing pregnant women and other reasonable accommodations.
“I found this really stunning,” Lander said of that particular policy during a press conference outside the Row Hotel in Midtown, where some of the first eviction notices were issued in January. “The administration offered no rationale whatsoever for that especially cruel and disruptive policy.”
Lander called for the 60-day limit to be scrapped and replaced with a program that “genuinely coordinates” legal help and shelter placement for migrants. He was joined Thursday by representatives from the Legal Aid Society, which recently opposed Adams’ attempts to curtail the city’s right-to-shelter mandate; and Christine Quinn, the former City Council Speaker who now leads the shelter provider Win.
“You’re uprooting children who have gone through the trauma of having to flee their country of origin,” Quinn said. “Every other time in history when we have seen an influx of immigrants to New York City, the city has done better.”
The Adams administration reached a legal settlement in March over its request to amend the decades-old right-to-shelter rule. In the accord with Legal Aid, the city won the right to deny adult migrants a new shelter placement after 30 days, while keeping the shelter guarantee in place for unhoused people generally.
Leases
Law firm takes space in Midtown's Tower 45
Address: 120 W. 45th St., Manhattan
Landlord: Kamber Management Co.
Tenant: Watson Farley & Williams
Lease size: 12,919 square feet
Asset type: Office
Brokers: A JLL team led by Paul Glickman, Diana Biasotti, Kyle Young and Kate Roush represented the landlord. Savills’ John Mambrino, Nick Farmakis and Michael Bertini represented the tenant.
Fashion brand opening first U.S. store in SoHo
Address: 143 Spring St., Manhattan
Landlord: Buchbinder & Warren
Tenant: Jacquemus
Lease size: 4,925 square feet
Asset type: Retail
Brokers: Bill Abramson and Matt Olden represented the landlord in-house. Current Real Estate Advisors’ Brandon Charnas and Adam Henick represented the tenant.
Financings
Rogers Management finances vacant sites in Prospect Lefferts Gardens
Address: 153, 157 and 161 Lenox Rd., Brooklyn
Owner: Chana Lichtman
Lender: Popular Bank
Loan amount: $27.5 million
Asset type: Land
Developer scores loan for converted warehouse in Dumbo
Address: 45 Main St., Brooklyn
Owner: Two Trees Management
Lender: JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Loan amount: $13 million
Asset type: Office
Discount retailer Nordstrom Rack will close another one of its New York City locations this summer, according to an unemployment filing made public Wednesday — just months after the Seattle-based parent company turned the lights off in Downtown Brooklyn.
The Nordstrom Rack at Gateway Center Mall in East New York will shutter for good Aug. 31, ahead of its lease expiration later this year in the 500 Gateway Plaza Drive shopping center, according to the public notice and a spokeswoman for the company.
Thirty-nine of the location's 44 employees will be handed the pink slip, the filing indicates. A company spokeswoman, who declined to provide a name, said after initial publication of this story that some employees elected to transfer to other Nordstrom locations.
The unemployment warning comes after Crain's reported in February that the discount retailer's parent company, Nordstrom, which also operates a luxury department store chain of the same name, was pulling the plug on a Fulton Street Nordstrom Rack, with all 51 employees who worked there slated to lose their jobs. A month before that, discount retailer T. J. Maxx also announced it was vacating its 25,000-square-foot location on Fulton Street, in the same structure as the Nordstrom Rack.
It's still not totally clear why Nordstrom Rack closed in Downtown Brooklyn earlier this year. In a statement to Crain's after the initial publication, the company said only that "Decisions like this are never easy." The company provided the same statement to Crain's Wednesday following the announcement about its second Brooklyn closure at the Related Cos.-owned mall — the last in the borough. The Manhattan-based developer, who is eyeing building a massive casino development in Hudson Yards, said in a statement following initial publication of this story that it looks forward to announcing a new tenant later this year and that "demand for retail space at Gateway Center remains exceptionally high," according to Related Cos. spokeswoman Kathleen Anne Corless. And the spokeswoman for Nordstrom declined to provide details of the company's lease at the mall.
As of February, the 51-year-old department store firm reported that it had 258 Nordstrom Racks in operation across the U.S., according to its most recent financial statements, and that it recorded net earnings of $134 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 — up from the $119 million it made during the same three months in 2022. In that same report, the parent company said it expected 2024 to be a "year of continued momentum in its growth and profitability drivers, including opening new Rack stores."
The company still operates a handful of Nordstrom locations in Manhattan — two Rack stores, in Union Square and Chelsea; its flagship luxury department store, which includes the men's shop next door, at 57th Street and Broadway; and two Nordstrom sites for online pickups and returns, on the Upper East Side and in the West Village. They are all that remain in the five boroughs.
Homelessness in America is hitting record highs. The poverty rate in New York City is now nearly double the national average and rising evictions threaten the housing security of thousands of our neighbors. The reality of New York’s housing affordability crisis is visible in the city’s overcrowded shelters and strained public resources. Something must change.
Now, with Grants Pass v. Johnson before the Supreme Court, justices have an opportunity to finally address America’s homelessness crisis in a serious way by answering one question: Is it a crime to be homeless? For decades, criminalizing housing insecurity has been the de facto solution enforced by state and local leaders in states across the country, even though we know from experience that criminalizing unhoused people will not eradicate homelessness. If our elected leaders are serious about moving people off the streets and into homes, increasing access to affordable housing must be our top priority.
The housing crisis requires both long-term and short-term solutions. Here in New York, lawmakers passed a $237 billion budget with significant housing reforms including new tenant protections, zoning changes, and tax incentives to spur housing development. Unfortunately, most of these reforms will take years to implement and fail to address the urgent needs of housing insecure New Yorkers today. Meanwhile, skyrocketing rent is eating into New Yorkers’ income as millions of tenants struggle to pay rent. They do not have years for state policies to wind their way into force – they require immediate action at the city, state and national levels.
That’s why Trinity Church Wall Street and the broader Housing Access NY coalition were so disappointed to see lawmakers yet again fail to enact the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP). With a $250 million investment, a mere .1% of the state budget, lawmakers could have created a Section 8-like voucher to help 30,000 New Yorkers access permanent housing. Long-term rent subsidies like those offered by HAVP are proven to reduce homelessness and promote beneficial outcomes for family well-being. Studies show that only 1% of families with long-term rental vouchers returned to shelter after one year compared to over 15% for families without.
The legislature must also leverage its considerable resources to boost a dwindling housing supply that no longer meets the needs of New Yorkers. We call on lawmakers to pass the Faith-based Affordable Housing Act, which would enable faith-based organizations to more easily develop affordable housing on their land. Faith institutions of all denominations are trusted pillars of their communities, and we stand ready to help upgrade underutilized spaces into affordable and mixed-used housing that is responsive to community needs. A good start would be reforming our outdated and burdensome zoning restrictions. A supermajority of New Yorkers agrees: a Pew Charitable Trust study found that 75% of New Yorkers support building new homes on faith owned land.
With the State unlikely to enact additional housing reforms in this year’s legislative session, it’s more important than ever that Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council move the needle on policy changes to address the housing crisis.
Mayor Adams’ City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan is an ambitious vision to facilitate housing growth across the city, encouraging all neighborhoods to add affordable housing. Trinity is proud to be a member of the Yes to Housing Coalition urging our partners in government to spur housing creation. We’re especially excited to see Mayor Adams’ proposal to allow churches to develop housing on existing campuses, mirroring the vision of the state Faith-based Affordable Housing Act.
It’s also a meaningful effort to ensure we can keep as many unhoused New Yorkers sheltered as possible. New York City’s right to shelter laws are among the strongest in the nation, and they are a critical part of our safety net. That’s why it’s imperative to fully uphold and strengthen this crucial policy.
Homelessness is one of our nation’s most pressing challenges. As a faith-based organization, we hold a strong commitment to advancing an equitable society. We believe in God-given dignity and learning from the experiences of every human being. Too often, unhoused people are treated as invisible. You may even be surprised to learn that some of your peers are homeless or have experienced homelessness. We must approach this crisis with compassion and care.
The status quo of skyrocketing homelessness can no longer continue. We urge our leaders at all levels of government to enact bold, creative solutions that will meet this moment with urgency and get our neighbors on the pathway to housing and stability.
Thehbia Hiwot is Managing Director for Housing and Homelessness initiatives at Trinity Church Wall Street.
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the nation’s largest mass-transit provider, faces a potential $25 billion funding shortfall on future infrastructure upgrades to improve subway service and strengthen its system against extreme weather events, according to New York’s comptroller.
The MTA, a state agency that operates New York City’s subways, buses and two commuter railroads, is set to release its 2025—2029 capital program by Oct. 1. If that spending plan is the same size as the MTA’s current $51.5 billion capital budget — and the agency has said it most likely will — it will need to deal with a $25 billion gap as certain revenue sources are already committed, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Thursday in his annual update on MTA’s debt profile.
The MTA needs to upgrade a more than 100-year-old system to help attract more riders and provide an essential service for New York City’s 8.3 million residents. Its multi-year capital budget pays for subway station renovations, signal upgrades, accessibility improvements and sustainability programs to protect against flooding, heavy rains and extreme heat. MTA officials last month said the next capital budget will need to include $6 billion to address climate change.
MTA officials and state lawmakers will need to find new funding sources for the next capital plan. In 2019, the legislature approved a new congestion pricing initiative — which has yet to begin — and a levy on high-end real estate sales to help fund a combined $25 billion for the 2020—2024 capital program.
“The MTA’s capital program is critical to winning riders back to public transportation and increasing fare revenue. When capital projects are delayed, repairs and upgrades are put off, causing parts of the system to deteriorate further,” DiNapoli said in a statement.
The MTA earlier this year was forced to sideline some capital projects because of a legal battle with New Jersey over the new congestion pricing toll, which will charge most drivers $15 to enter Manhattan’s central business district. The toll is expected to bring in $1 billion a year that the MTA will bond against to raise $15 billion for its current capital plan.
“We are pleased the state comptroller recognizes how important capital investments are to the MTA’s future,” Kevin Willens, the MTA’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “As we’ve said for some time, it is critical that the capital budget is sufficiently funded with dedicated resources so the MTA can continue to provide frequent and reliable service, while also delivering on projects to modernize the transit system.”
The MTA had $46.7 billion of debt outstanding as of April 24 and is set to pay about $2.8 billion in debt service this year, according to the agency. DiNapoli estimates the transit provider’s debt will increase to nearly $60 billion in 2028. Principal and interest payments, including for debt that’s repaid through a lockbox and not through the MTA’s operating budget, will reach $5 billion by 2031, according to the report.
“if new capital funding is not forthcoming or additional revenue is not found from increased ridership or better-than-anticipated tax subsidies, the MTA will have to make a choice between maintaining the required level of its state of good repair capital projects and balancing its operating budget,” according to the report.
The MTA has $46.7 billion of outstanding debt, as of April 24, according to MTA data. It’s set to pay $2.8 billion in principal and interest payments this year.
Renowned Argentinian artist Felipe Pantone’s largest installation yet brings a burst of vibrancy to Jersey City. “OPTICHROMIE for Jersey City” covers 25 floors of a residential building in Journal Square with a dazzling digitized-style gradient mural of geometric patterns. The towering artwork contrasts the darker tones seen in the background of the Manhattan skyline and [...]
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