The city is taking a developer to court for allowing a West 57th Street complex to fall into disrepair and failing to take down the unsightly scaffolding that's been surrounding the buildings for the past 14 years.
In a lawsuit filed this week in state Supreme Court, the city's lawyers allege that Moshe (Mark) Tress, the New Jersey-based owner of five Hell's Kitchen properties known as the Windermere — one of the city's first large apartment complexes — has neglected to take care of the buildings ever since he bought them more than a decade ago, creating dangerous conditions that must be remedied.
"The Windermere should be considered an architectural treasure for our city, but unfortunately the owners have allowed the property to fall into deep disrepair and have kept the building shrouded behind a sidewalk shed and fence for years," said Department of Buildings Commissioner Jimmy Oddo. "Property owners need to understand that we are no longer tolerating when they put off critical building repairs and allow long-standing sidewalk sheds to detract from the livability of our city."
In 2009 Tress bought the buildings at 400, 402, 404 and 406 W. 57th St. and 869 Ninth Ave. — all of which were and remain vacant — for $13 million under the limited liability company Windermere Properties, records show. He reportedly had plans to renovate the historic properties near Columbus Circle, built between 1880 and 1881, and transform the complex into a hotel.
By the 1890s, the Windermere became known as a home for modern women who pursued careers and other interests outside of the home, according to information from the city. It was designated as an individual landmark in 2005, records show.
This isn't the first legal action the city has taken against Tress, who made Public Advocate Jumaane Williams's worst landlord list last year, coming in at number 32 with an average of 759 violations across just two buildings.
In 2022 Tress pleaded guilty to failing to maintain the properties and coughed up $8,000 to pay for fines for numerous violations. But he still made no moves to take down the scaffolding or safeguard the buildings. This time the lawyers say he has violated the city's Nuisance Abatement Law. He faces a $1,000 fine for each day he does not make the necessary repairs at each of the five buildings and a potential injunction from the court forcing him to do so.
The suit, which is part of the city's recently ramped up effort to force landlords to take down unsafe and ugly scaffolding, names Tress personally as well as two private entities named after the landmarked property.
Attempts to reach Tress — who late last year was arrested for allegedly illegally firing an assault rifle near a busy road in New Jersey, according to local reports at the time — were unsuccessful by press time.
Leases
Darts-focused venue to open in landmarked Union Square building
Address: 31 Union Square West, Manhattan
Landlord: David Ellis Real Estate
Tenant: Flight Club
Lease size: 10,700 square feet
Asset type: Retail
Sales
Brighton Beach apartment building trades hands
Address: 125 Brighton 11th St., Brooklyn
Seller: Sentinel Real Estate Corp.
Buyer: Rockledge and PH Realty Capital
Sales price: $11.4 million
Asset type: Multifamily
Financings
Israeli firm funds redevelopment of former Salvation Army building on LES
Address: 223 Bowery, Manhattan
Owner: Nat Wasserstein
Lender: Onyx Properties
Loan amount: $17.3 million
Asset type: Commercial
Forget the rental car or Metro-North trip, all you need to go hiking is subway or bus fare. Home to over 30,000 acres of parkland, New York City offers hundreds of nature trails to explore in parks across the five boroughs. New Yorkers do not have to travel very far to connect with the great outdoors, from the Staten Island Greenbelt, which [...]
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New York City is kicking off a series of key upgrades to Atlantic Avenue to improve pedestrian safety. Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez on Tuesday announced the start of pedestrian safety improvements along the western section of Atlantic Avenue that runs between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, a corridor infamous for traffic-related incidents. The [...]
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The FBI on Tuesday reportedly searched the Long Island home of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s former deputy chief of staff.
Tuesday’s operation at the Manhasset home of Linda Sun, who left Hochul’s office in 2022, was first reported by the New York Times. FBI spokesman Jason Peck confirmed that the bureau “conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity in Manhasset yesterday,” but did not specify the nature of the search.
The warrant had been obtained by prosecutors from the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, and no arrests were made at the home, the Times reported.
Sun and her husband, Chris Hu, owned the property before transferring it to a trust this year, according to the Times. The brick home, inside a gated community, last sold for $3.5 million, according to public records.
Sun, a longtime government staffer, started out as chief of staff to then-Assemblywoman Grace Meng in 2009, then spent about five years in various positions in state government before being named deputy chief diversity officer under Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2018, according to her LinkedIn. She became Hochul’s deputy chief of staff soon after Hochul became governor in 2021, and departed the following year for a role in the state Labor Department.
Last year, Sun managed an unsuccessful congressional campaign for Democrat Austin Cheng on Long Island.
Hu, her husband, runs a liquor store in Queens as well as several other businesses, including a medical supply company, the Times reported.
Hochul’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hochul’s orbit has had few known dealings with law enforcement in her nearly three years as governor.
Mayor Eric Adams, by contrast, has been dogged by multiple separate federal investigations: one into his campaign fundraising and possible illicit dealings with the Turkish government, and another into his Asian affairs director Winnie Greco. Neither he nor anyone in his administration has been accused of wrongdoing in those probes.
SL Green is New York’s largest commercial landlord, and Marc Holliday has been its CEO for nearly 20 years. During his tenure the firm has amassed a portfolio of nearly 50 office towers, including 1 Vanderbilt Ave., 280 Park Ave., 11 Madison Ave. and the Graybar Building at 420 Lexington Ave. Its stock price has significantly outperformed its peers' in the past year, and the firm is eyeing acquisitions while rivals struggle to stay in the game. Holliday recently sat down with Crain’s to discuss his view on the office market, the benefits of redevelopment over rebuilding and the "massive community support" for his firm's Times Square casino bid.
How does the Manhattan office market look to you?
It is a challenging market right now, although vastly improved over what it had been like from March of 2020 until maybe the middle of last year. Tenants have options, and they’re choosier. But we’re thriving now, as we’ve done consistently over the past 26 years as a public company.
Interest rates are their highest in many years, and a lot of landlords, including SL Green, have big mortgages coming due that will need refinancing. Does that concern you?
It doesn’t. Our lenders believe in the assets we have, believe in us, and we are doing everything we can to ensure they have a good result on their investment in us. That’s resulted in modifications and extensions of our debt, which ensures our buildings have the proper resources to either maintain or get back to full occupancy.
Crain’s offices are on Third Avenue, where a number of buildings remain pretty vacant. Can you envision any of them coming down?
Only in extraordinary circumstances does it really make sense to tear down and rebuild. It’s usually more sensible to redevelop, which is what we’re going to do with our building at 750 Third Ave. starting in 2025. We’ll make major modifications to that building and convert it into what will be in excess of 600 residential units, both market rate and affordable.
How much will the transformation cost?
Probably in the order of $500 million. I’ll be spending the second half of the year lining up debt and equity capital for that conversion. But the economics make sense because we’ll have 600 apartments in the end. If it was only a 100-unit or 200-unit project, I couldn’t do this.
Let’s talk about towers you might buy. How about the Seagram Building? Its owner, RFR, seems to be in some difficulty.
It’s a great building. We're always interested in investing in those kinds of projects.
The city is trying to help renovate older office buildings with its M-CORE program, but so far only a few landlords have signed up. Why?
The program was tailored to incentivize owners like us to make significant capital investment in older buildings, but my impression is not a lot of owners have access to the capital today needed to carry out these very significant upgrades. I think the combination of an improving capital market and an improving leasing market will result in more people applying.
You’ve applied with the state for a casino license in Times Square. The Broadway League, which represents producers, is opposed. Can you change their mind?
I think we have massive community support for this project, more than any other bid right now by a wide margin. We have incredible support from unions, competing hotels and surrounding building owners. This would be a $4 billion-plus development bringing 10 million people a year with real disposable income into a six-star hotel environment. There will be all sorts of cool entertainment alternatives, not just for tourists but for locals who don’t go to Times Square frequently anymore.
And yet the Broadway League still doesn’t want a casino on Broadway.
Actors Equity wants it. The Broadway League doesn’t speak for all of Broadway. I do think that the overwhelming support for our bid will eventually carry the day over the objections of a very few that kind of just want to maintain the status quo of something that really could be greatly improved.
The Summit observatory in 1 Vanderbilt Ave. is a hit with tourists, and now you’re opening one up in Paris. So how is your French?
I'm going to have to brush up because my second language in high school was Spanish. But I built a very good team of people who are now on the ground in Paris and have been integral in helping us secure the new location. I won’t tell you where it is exactly, but we hope to open doors in 2026.
Marketplace health insurers will pay $10.3 billion under the risk-adjustment program for 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Monday.
While insurers will transfer 11.5% more to other carriers than they did the previous year, payments are 10.4% less as a share of premiums. Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies including Florida Blue and Elevance Health are set to receive large payments, while Aetna, Kaiser Permanente and Oscar Health each owe more than $1 billion, according to analyses of the CMS data by Modern Healthcare and the investment bank Stephens.
The health insurance exchange risk-adjustment program is designed to spread financial risk among insurers to discourage carriers from cherry-picking healthier customers and encourage them to offer richer benefit packages.
Under this zero-sum system, insurers that cover high-cost, high-risk populations — such as people with chronic conditions — receive payments from competitors with lower-risk memberships. Over time, marketplace insurers have gotten better at aligning the premiums they charge with the costs their policyholders incur.
“The amount of money that's changing hands in risk-adjustment is lower than it once was,” said Matthew Fiedler, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Center on Health Policy. “That may indicate, for example, that there's less dispersion in plan generosity than there was before, and so there are fewer insurers as a result receiving big payments or making big payments.”
Florida Blue is in line to receive $1.6 billion, Blue Shield of California $1.3 billion and Health Care Service Corp. $1.2 billion, according to the Modern Healthcare analysis. Stephens estimated that those and other nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield carriers will collect a combined $5.1 billion.
Elevance Health, a publicly trade, for-profit insurer that markets Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in 14 states, will get $107 million. Other highlights include $62.3 million for Molina Healthcare, $32.4 million for Humana and $20.2 million for Centene.
These windfall could influence decisions insurance companies make about what to sell and how much to charge, Fiedler said. “[The payments] do factor into an insurer’s overall assessment of how it's doing in this market, how profitable it is and how it might want to change its strategy,” he said.
CVS Health subsidiary Aetna faces a $1.4 billion charge, according to the Stephens analysis. That may mean Aetna offered less comprehensive policies and attracted healthier enrollees or that they’re less proficient at coding, Fielder said.
Kaiser Permanente and Oscar Health each owe slightly more than $1 billion, and UnitedHealth Group is on the hook for $811.5 million.
CMS reported that 605 insurers participated in the risk-adjustment program last year, down from 608 in 2022.
Bright Health Group (now out of the insurance business and operating as NeueHealth), Oscar Health and Sidecar Health are among insurers that owe default risk-adjustment charges for providing insufficient data, the CMS report says.
"Overall risk scores were down slightly in the individual market and small group market in 2023," Stephens Managing Director Scott Fidel and colleagues wrote in a research note Monday.
The numbers suggest that the share of exchange members with at least one major chronic condition grew smaller over the past two years, which Fielder said may be an effect of greater overall enrollment since Congress and President Joe Biden enacted more generous subsidies.
These results, however, may also indicate that health insurance companies with the costliest memberships may not be getting adequate support, leading to skimpier benefits and smaller provider networks, Fiedler said.
“Is it transferring enough money to the insurers that have high-risk enrollees? I think there’s reason to worry that it’s not,” Fiedler said. “That fact may be linked to why the individual market has become pretty dominated by fairly narrow network plans and products.”
This article originally appeared in Modern Healthcare.
In recent months, Google showed interest in two companies, either of which would have been the biggest-ever purchase for the internet giant. And both times, the deals fell apart.
On Monday, the chief executive of Wiz told staff that the cybersecurity startup would reject a $23 billion offer from Alphabet's Google and instead pursue an initial public offering. That came just weeks after Google shelved plans to buy HubSpot, a $25 billion software firm.
A large reason the advanced talks between Google and Wiz failed, according to people familiar with the situation: a faulty software update from CrowdStrike Holdings that caused Microsoft Windows to crash on millions of devices around the world. That episode increased interest in — and the potential value of — companies that offer cloud security features, like Wiz, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing private matters.
But also looming over both of Google’s failed deals was the specter of antitrust. Google has faced a litany of monopoly cases around globe over the last decade, with scrutiny growing even after the company stopped pursuing as many deals. Now that Google is back on the market, it’s once again dealing with the regulatory pressures that have scuttled multiple high-profile tech purchases in the past year.
In the U.S. and Europe, competition authorities have increasingly zeroed in on the tech sector for its economic sway and market power. European regulators have forced potential deals to undergo months of reviews, and Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, has aggressively gone after Silicon Valley in a way her agency never did before.
Wiz turned down the deal partly over concerns it would lead to a protracted approval process, Bloomberg News previously reported. One of the last big proposed tech takeovers — Adobe’s $20 billion overture to web design startup Figma — fell apart at the end of 2023 after clashes with regulators in the U.K. and Europe. A month later, Amazon dropped its bid to buy Roomba-maker iRobot for similar reasons.
Amazon’s abandoned bid “spooked a lot of people,” said Stefan Slowinski, global head of software research at BNP Paribas Exane. “Lina Khan had the impact of preventing some large M&A just by being present.”
Those aborted deals followed an intense FTC probe over Big Tech’s AI investments, and Microsoft's lengthy, albeit successful, fight to get U.K. regulators to sign off on its purchase of Activision Blizzard.
“The first thing I thought of when I saw the CrowdStrike news was ‘Oh, the 23 billion valuation for Wiz has just gone up a little bit,’” said Slowinski.
Still, if the Wiz deal had gone through, analysts think it would likely have been exposed to prolonged antitrust scrutiny, like most of Google’s recent large deals. Spokespeople for Google and Wiz declined to comment.
In its first two decades, Google built many of its core properties, like YouTube and Android, through acquisitions, making gutsy bets on unproven technologies that ended up giving the company footholds in mobile computing, video and artificial intelligence. After spending $3.2 billion on Nest, a connected-device manufacturer, in 2014, Google effectively stopped cutting big checks for consumer companies. Its last major move in that category — the $2.1 billion takeover of Fitbit proposed in 2019 — took over a year to clear regulatory hurdles.
More recently, Google has focused its corporate development strategy on its cloud business. Under Thomas Kurian, Google’s cloud chief, the unit has aggressively expanded its sales forces and product lines in order to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. In 2019, a year after Kurian joined Google, the company agreed to spend $2.6 billion for cloud software firm Looker, and three years later, Google dropped $5.4 billion on cloud security provider Mandiant. Still, Google remains a distant third in the cloud market — a fact that the company likes to point to when dismissing claims that it’s a monopoly threat in the sector.
Google never entered into detailed due diligence conversations with HubSpot, which provides customer management software, according to people familiar with the situation. But had the deal gone through, it would have immediately threatened HubSpot’s leading competitor Salesforce, given Google’s “financial strength and AI expertise,” according to a report from Bloomberg Intelligence.
An acquisition of Wiz, meanwhile, would have dwarfed Google’s previous deals. Wiz sells technology that scans data stored in public clouds for potential security risks. The company would have been a natural fit for Kurian’s cloud division and would have helped Google’s cloud unit in a field where it lags behind competitors, people familiar with Google’s strategy said.
But that possibility evaporated when Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport told staff that the startup would focus on hitting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and target an IPO, according to a memo viewed by Bloomberg News. The company declined to comment further. Figma, the design startup, also said it would pursue an IPO after its Adobe deal fell through. Such announcements have reassured startup investors who have seen very few lucrative exits lately, and been shaken by watching regulators tank promising deals.
“With IPOs, you’re the captain of your own destiny,” said Haakon Overli, a partner with Dawn Capital, an enterprise software investing firm.
At the same time, many venture capitalists have accepted that selling a company to one of the larger tech firms will inevitably invite attention from antitrust busters, Overli added. “It’s a known unknown.”