Council member calls 40% affordable project “slap in the face”
One developer’s concession is another City Council member’s “bread crumbs.” Developers trying to save One45, a proposed 915-unit project in Harlem, added 150 income-restricted units to their plan Tuesday, bringing the portion of affordable units to 40 percent. That is more than nearly every project in the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program, which mandates up to 30 percent affordability. But local Council member Kristin Richardson Jordan was not impressed. In fact, she was outraged. Jordan blasted the proposal, saying the project remains unaffordable to most Harlemites. She called the addition of the affordable units “11th-hour bread crumbs” by Bruce Teitelbaum and his partners and said its inclusion of just two dozen apartments for the lowest income tenants was “a slap in the face.” “Mandatory inclusionary housing is not affordable,” Jordan said during a hearing Tuesday. “It does not apply to the humans who actually live in our district, in our community.” Her reaction does not bode well for the project, which requires the site to be rezoned — a power granted by City Council custom to the local member. There have been rare exceptions for projects seen as having citywide importance, such as lab space for the New York Blood Center. But after the Rev. Al Sharpton withdrew his support for One45, Jordan’s colleagues made it clear that they would defer to her in Harlem. One45 could test whether Mayor Eric Adams will intervene in such disputes. His administration has already framed the project as a citywide issue: City Planning Chair Dan Garodnick praised it as an opportunity to help put a “dent” in the city’s “acute housing crisis” — and that was before the developer added 150 affordable units. The project has the backing of 32BJ SEIU and the laborers union, Local 79, but union support does not guarantee approval. For example, 32BJ and the New York Building and Construction Trades Council backed Bruce Eichner and his Continuum Company’s 960 Franklin Street development, yet it still failed. Moreover, one construction union opposes One45. The New York City District Council of Carpenters submitted testimony against it, noting that, unlike the Blood Center, the two-tower residential project will not be constructed solely with union labor. During a hearing by the City Council’s subcommittee on zoning and franchises Tuesday, several Council members expressed concern over the carpenters’ opposition. A representative for the developer said it was open to negotiating with the carpenters but that it could not promise to hire only union workers. (Affordable housing developers say higher labor costs require higher rents.) The carpenters also pointed to the elephant in the room: the exit of a Sharpton-backed cultural institution that could have provided a citywide benefit. The Museum of Civil Rights, founded by Sharpton and Judge Jonathan Lippman was originally expected to be located at One45. A representative of the developers, Tristan Nadal, said they and the museum’s founders had mutually agreed that the museum’s space was better suited for more affordable and senior housing. One45 developer Teitelbaum proposed adding 70 “moderate income” units and 90 for tenants making, on average, 30 to 50 percent of area median income, with a focus on seniors. Jordan has said she would only approve a project with 100 percent affordability, with 57 percent of the units for tenants earning 30 percent or less of AMI; 16 percent for those making 50 percent or less; 16 percent for those making 80 percent or less; and 11 percent for those making 130 percent. Developers lose money on every affordable unit; the logic of the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing law is that market-rate units subsidize the affordable ones. At the hearing, Nadal and Jordan blamed each other for failing to negotiate. Jordan said she would not meet with the developers alone, that negotiations would need to be open to the community. Nadal said developers were open to meeting and to a racial impact study for the project, but hesitated at negotiating publicly. Without the zoning change, the developers can still build roughly 40 apartments, none of which would be required to be affordable. When reached Tuesday afternoon, Teitelbaum said he hopes it does not come to that. As to whether the City Council will support the project, he said it would be “very difficult for any reasonable, objective person to reject the idea” of hundreds of new apartments. “I’m hopeful and confident that objective, reasonable people will recognize that our plan to build 915 units of housing at a time when there’s an acute housing crisis is, as I would say, quoting one of my favorite films, an offer that is too good to refuse,” he said. He added, “While it may not be 100 percent of what everyone wants, it is a darn good proposal that I think at the end of the day will prevail.” Pat Ralph provided additional reporting. A majority of the affordable apartments, 207, would still be reserved for those earning an average of 60 percent of the area median income, under MIH.
Brookfield gets Ritz-Carlton SF in $3.8B deal for Watermark
Brookfield will acquire the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Downtown San Francisco as part of its $3.8 billion acquisition of hotel REIT Watermark Lodging Trust. The Toronto-based developer recently announced it would buy Watermark’s 25 hotels across the U.S., a portfolio that totals more than 8,100 keys. One of those hotels is the 336-key Ritz-Carlton San Francisco, located at 600 Stockton Street, just half a mile from Union Square, though it’s unclear how much Brookfield will pay per key for the hotel. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Watermark investors bought the hotel for $231 million in 2016, or around $687,800 per key, financial filings show. Watermark Lodging Trust took control of the five-star property in April 2020, when the company was formed through a merger of Carey Watermark affiliates. Watermark most recently refinanced the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco in November, with a $149 million mortgage loan from MetLife, public property records show. The San Francisco Ritz-Carlton currently has a book value of $216 million, or around $642,900 per key, according to the company’s most recent annual financial report. Book value refers to how much money shareholders would receive for the property if all assets were liquidated and liabilities were paid off, rather than what the market is willing to pay for a property. Moody’s recently valued the Westin St. Francis — a four-star hotel in Union Square — at $298.8 million, or about $250,000 per room. That valuation was a significant cut from the owner’s — a successor to the now defunct China-based insurance provider Anbang — own valuation of $436 million. Moody’s cited “significant uncertainty” around whether the Westin would rebound after the pandemic, given its past reliance on business and international travelers, as reasoning for its lower valuation. On a recent earnings call, Starwood Property Trust CEO Barry Sternlicht called San Francisco “the worst hotel market in the United States by 1 million miles,” adding the market will mostly remain “very challenging.”
Time for a fourth Covid vaccine dose? Here’s why medical professionals are skeptical
Countries are beginning to offer a fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to vulnerable groups, but medical professionals are undecided on whether it would benefit the wider population. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has so far authorized a fourth shot only for those aged 50 and above, as well as those who are immunocompromised. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was skeptical of the need for a fourth dose for healthy adults in the absence of a clearer public health strategy. Those decisions came as a study from Israel found that although a fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers protection against serious illness for at least six weeks after the shot, it provides only short-lived protection against infection, which wanes after just four weeks. The medical consensus so far is that there hasn’t been enough research on how much protection a fourth dose can offer. The World Health Organization hasn’t given an official recommendation on a fourth dose, and “there isn’t any good evidence at this point of time” that it will be beneficial, said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan. “What we know from immunology is that if you give another booster, you will see a temporary increase in the neutralizing antibodies. But what we’ve also seen is that these neutralizing antibodies will wane quite rapidly,” Swaminathan told CNBC in an interview. “This happened after the third dose. And it’s happened again after the fourth dose,” she added. Paul Goepfert, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama, shared that view, saying that “a fourth dose doesn’t really do much of anything ... I’m not sure we need to get out and just jump up and down screaming that everybody needs to get aboard.” Since the study from Israel shows the fourth dose can provide protection against serious disease, countries such as Israel, Denmark and Singapore have made a second booster shot available to high-risk groups. “Rather than saying that the protection wanes, I would say that this boost effect is strongest shortly after the vaccine was administered, but that it remains protective overall,” said Ashley St. John, an associate professor at Duke-NUS Medical School. “Importantly there was no waning of protection against severe disease, which is the most key effect of vaccination we aim to achieve,” she added. Annual booster shots? Questions are being raised over the need for more booster shots as the emergence of more Covid variants may require more targeted vaccines. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, told NBC News in January that people may need to get booster shots every year or two. However, blanket vaccine approaches may not continue to work. It is possible that high-risk groups — such as the elderly — may need an annual vaccine, said Swaminathan. But “it’s not clear whether a healthy adult is going to need a regular annual shot.” It’s also important to note that the current vaccines being administered may not work for future variants of Covid-19, she said. If the virus “changes so much that you need to change your vaccine composition, then you won’t need another shot,” Swaminathan added. “The challenge of changing the vaccine composition is that you’re always playing catch-up.” Goepfert said “only time will tell” how long more the population has to take booster shots, but the safest approach would be to “plan on a booster every year, and maybe combine it with the flu vaccine.” Omicron subvariant The WHO announced on Tuesday that weekly new Covid deaths had fallen to the lowest level since March 2020. But the more contagious omicron BA.2 subvariant remains the dominant strain in the United States, making up 68.1% of all cases in the country during the week that ended on April 23, according to data from the CDC. Although experts predict that the BA.2 subvariant is unlikely to be more severe than the original omicron strain, it should remain a concern. “I do think infections are going to continue ... it’s taken over most parts of the country, said Goepfert. “But in terms of severe infections, I think that’s going to continue to be less and less.” Patients from locations with adequate vaccination coverage would experience only “mild or manageable disease” and this would reduce “burden on the healthcare system compared to waves of Covid pre-vaccines,” St. John said. “Just like studying for an exam, a vaccine booster can trigger immune system memories and increase performance during the real test,” she added.
Categories
Recent Posts
