How de Blasio toughened an affordability formula
Dana Rubinstein
When, earlier this month, the city’s new planning commissioner announced that his face-off with Brooklyn developer Jed Walentas had yielded 40 more units of affordable housing at the Domino development site in Williamsburg, he was doing more than declaring an early real estate victory.
He was elucidating a principle, one he applied again yesterday when his commission approved a mega-development for Manhattan's far west side.
Unlike in the era of his predecessor, de Blasio administration planning head Carl Weisbrod will no longer allow developers to exempt commerical space above the ground floor (office space, community facilities like gyms, etc.) when applying for inclusionary housing bonuses that reward developers for building affordable housing in their otherwise market-rate developments. This means in effect that developers will have to create a greater proportion of "affordable" units in a given building than they currently do in order to get permission to make that building bigger.
In the Bloomberg era, "It was housing for housing," said John Alschuler, chairman of HR&A Advisors, the real estate advisory firm where Weisbrod once worked.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/03/8542115/how-de-blasio-toughened-affordability-formula
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