Shaping the NYC Skyline

Welcome to Shaping the NYC Skyline, a podcast that explores the stories behind the buildings that shape our city. I'm your host, David Shamshovich, and I'm here with my co- host, Brenda Slochowsky.

Hey, guys, how are you?

Is that Brenda?

What? I know she's back!

She's back!

I know, you really missed me. I've been gone for so long.

We did miss you.

It's been like months.

Well, it's easier to have a full conversation with three people than with two. It's still good with two, but three, there's a lot more interesting stuff that could happen.

A lot of give and take.

Plus, it feels like someone's missing.

Oh, guys.

It's the three amigos of the housingverse.

We're the housers.

There you go.

Back and back at it. And in this week's episode, we had an amazing guest by the name of Basha Gerhards, who's the, Senior Vice President for Planning at the Real Estate Board of New York, a. k. a. REBNY.

Can I tell you she had the perfect podcast voice?

She did.

I think she's done a lot of hearings, a lot of testimony, attended a lot of community board meetings. I think this was something that was really in her wheelhouse.

Yeah.

It was a great interview. We learned a lot.

The things that she's involved in with vouchers sustainability.

Using her planning background, her urban development background to influence what she does now at REBNY was such a great perspective. I really liked hearing the macro aspect of it all.

Yeah. Seeing somebody actually using their degree is always a good thing. The trajectory that she's had is one that seems obvious. What she says was, common sense is not always common, but

It's so true,

Art was really something that was very important to her, but she was also very much interested in history and how to combine those two and then the serendipity of her professor talking to her about the savannah school and I'm gonna have to look at my notes and then yeah, the SCAD Savannah College of Art and Design.

And it kind of took over from there and now that she's at REBNY what's interesting is that she may be representing not the government but the real estate community a different side or different perspective but her opinions have not changed. The things that she feels passionate about- housing, affordable housing, sustainability, urban design, development, things like that. She has the same opinions and the same understandings as she did when she was a college student.

She's just applying them in a new way.

Yeah. And she continues fighting for the community to grow in general, not specific sides or leaning towards just one side.

And she's basically involved in every aspect of design in the city, from zoning to land use, to sustainability, all of the hot topics, and I think she has her work cut out for her, and I guess she's up to the challenge, because she loves to learn and she's not going to get bored I don't think at this position.

Not any time soon.

Similar to our Skyliners in this episode, not going to get bored. You're going to learn so much.

That's right. And, if we forgot to mention it, by the way, we're all attorneys at Seiden & Schein. We're here for our Skyliners to answer any questions about 485-x, City of Yes, UAP, that's right, Universal Affordability Preference.

Article XI.

So, if you have any questions about any of the topics that we speak about on this podcast, whether you're a student or a practitioner, developer, architect, give us a call. I just love that educational aspect and Basha was a great guest and she imparted so much knowledge on us and our audience and we were so happy to have her.

Yeah. We're all going to enjoy it.

And without further ado Basha Gerhards of REBNY.

Hello everybody and hello to our Skyliners and Brendan Camilla. How's it going?

Hey guys.

Very good.

Good to be back.

Yeah, it's been a while.

I was also sick for the last two. So this is me the first time back since the break.

So it was super awkward we had actually a stand in

We got a cardboard cutout of me where

you're or you're sitting.

I was very quiet

That's how you knew it wasn't me, because I was way too quiet.

We totally missed you. And it wasn't the same without you.

Guys.

You're part of the team.

You make me blush.

Yes. You're the three amigos of housing is what I call us.

Yeah, we are. I just made that up just now. Actually,

That sounds better than Housers, which is how we know.

I think I like Housers way better now. Yeah. Just because of the comic effect of it.

As you've heard, that is our secret guest who you see on camera, so it's not really secret. And we're thrilled to welcome Basha Gerhards, the Senior Vice President of Planning at the Real Estate Board of New York, or REBNY, which is the leading real estate trade association representing a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including owners, builders, and other key players in New York's real estate industry, Basha is instrumental in shaping REBNY's policy work on housing, land use. She's shaping the New York City skyline? Guys, it's been so long since I said that.

That's right. Not only that, but she's shaping behind the scenes of the New York City skyline.

The foundations, as it were.

Exactly. The rules and regulations surrounding them. Also, resiliency, community development. And your career path includes significant roles such as being a senior land use advisor to former Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer and planner at the Department of City Planning. You've also been an active member of several important groups and committees, including the CB 1 Resiliency Task Force, the City's Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force, and the BQE Community Visioning Council, of which hopefully we'll touch upon assuming we have enough time because your resume is about 75 pages long.

Actually, I keep it to one page. So I'm not sure where you're at.

I think that's just industry standard. You could definitely span 75 pages if you try.

No, that was after I finished my thesis. I was done with documents of that length and breadth.

And you didn't need it either. You were working on three places since you graduated, which means that you've stayed for significant periods of time. Basha has received a BFA in historic preservation with a minor in urban design development from Savannah College of Art and Design. And she got a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

She's recognized as a key influencer in New York City's urban planning and housing policy landscape, and her insights are regularly featured in major real estate publications and public policy forums. Among her many achievements, which include She will discuss, she's been pivotal in securing legislation to expand access to housing vouchers, promoting housing production, advocating for equitable development, and you've also championed major projects to deliver much needed housing and affordable housing, and you've been a strong advocate for policy changes to facilitate office to residential conversions.

Please join me in welcoming our amazing guest. Basha Gerhards.

I usually don't write my intros. I'll outline them. And as I told you right before the show, I had to write it down because so much stuff in here and so many cool things to talk about. I'm just worried we're not going to have enough time. So I want to just jump right into the thick of things.

And I love to start from the beginning, right?

And this is your therapy.

Tell me how you grew up. What was your childhood like?

I know that your mother was a school teacher. I actually don't know what your father did, but he was an influence on you.

So when I started looking for undergraduate programs, the thing, my dad sat down and said to me, don't go and do anthropology. And I'm like, Why not? That sounds so fascinating. He's like, well, I did it and it was useless.

Both my parents ran their own business for over 30 years. They were wholesale distributors for eyeglasses from Italy, from Germany. And they did that for a long time. So they worked out of the home. My dad would be gone for sometimes weeks on end traveling across the country to see clients. And what I always looked forward to my mom said when I was really little, I would wait at the steps knowing he was going to come home because when he came home, he would sit and read to my sister and I every night. And that's what we look forward to. And my mom, I always look back and I was like, Oh, how much she had to give up to support my dad to support us. She had been a high school art teacher at FIT, and as various rounds of budget cuts happened in the city during the seventies. Her story is not atypical, and they moved to the suburb. So you grew up in the Hudson Valley. But I was really lucky cause we always came back to the city. We were always coming back to see the museums. We were always coming back to cool places like the Met, my dad would drive all the way downtown so we could go for the best burgers, which was at Whitehorse Tavern. And I don't think they ever cleaned that grill.

That's why they were so good.

Exactly. They're so good. And I think that was just really impactful to me that they never lost touch with the pieces that made New York City great. Even as New York City was going through a really challenging time in the eighties and even the early nineties before things felt good again in the city. And they were like, no, we are going to find those good spots. And we had family that was still living in the Lower East Side and Flushing. So we were here. You asked about, you're joking with a childhood trauma. I think in some ways my trauma was that I had to grow up in a ranch style house in the suburbs when all I wanted to do was be in the city. That's where the fun was. That's where the interesting things were and the interesting conversations and all of that.

And that's what you learned from your parents, which is the city is the capital of the entertainment world of all these things. But at that time, the city wasn't in great shape.

I remember getting off the Westside Highway and my mom like swatting my dad, lock the doors, lock the windows, as the squeegee men all of a sudden appeared and I'm just sitting there being like, Oh, look at that empty lot and look at that building. And at the time, not even realizing it was already analyzing soft sites, but that's what I was looking at. I was like, Oh, what's, why is that empty lot there? And we were going to go to a gallery or we were going to go to a different museum. Are we going to see one of their friends or, my dad had to visit a client even in Manhattan to drop off some frames. But it was always interesting.

That's where your love of the city came from. But then out of high school into college you made some decision that you wanted to do, urban design, urban planning, things like that. How did that decision come about?

So it felt very organic at the time. I had basically taken every single history and art class that was available to me in high school. And my art teacher Ms. Alter or Deb, came into the classroom one day and said, here's this catalog for this school. I think it's the right fit. Because really I was trying to figure out like, where am I gonna go, where I'm gonna combine the art and the history? And I really did like anthropology, even though my dad said don't go do that, . And just the idea of how people interact and with the built environment, and I opened up the catalog and saw the program was called Historic Preservation. It was the largest in the country. And so I convinced my parents, can we go visit this school? And so my dad was like, fine, we're already driving down to Florida to see the grandparents. Cause of course we're going to Florida to see grandparents. And so we stopped in Savannah and I remember when we got there and we pulled up to the School of Building Arts, which is the building where they have historic preservation architecture, interior design. And the door was open and we just walked in and a professor greeted us. He was like, oh, hi. Oh, uh, you're just wandering around. And we're like, yeah, we're just wandering around. And he introduced himself, Professor Marlboro Packard. I was like, what a cool name. And he let us sit in on the class. My mom and my sister were hanging out in the car, reading whatever it was that they were reading.

Cause they didn't want to get out of the air conditioning. Cause it was so hot and we strolled him and sat in the class and like, Oh, I love this. And he's like, yeah, this is the, one of the preservation classes. I'm like, that's it. I didn't fit the traditional image of an art student and I didn't fit a traditional history student. And when I got there, everyone walking out of that building looked different and there was no one look. And that's how I knew I had found the place where I was going to finally feel good and I could not have to worry about all the other stuff and I could just actually enjoy what I enjoyed. College was amazing. Everyone had always said high school is supposed to be the best year. As I'm like, college was really wonderful for me. And I learned so much and I met so many amazing people, including my now husband. And it just really was fulfilling exploring what was I going to be? What was really going to drive me and what was really going to have me get up in the morning and that program, that professor who ended up being one of my professors is just a really amazing experience for me.

Since you mentioned it, I have to know, did your husband go to the same program.

No, he did a double major in graphic design and illustration.

Oh, so he went to the art artsy or part. Yes. Of the art.

And the great thing about the program is everything, even for undergraduate, you were doing graduate level work. So I was working on a Getty Campus Heritage Grant for the school. I got to work on the Fusky Island, and that's now a national corridor and our research work and the documentation work that I did on that project fed into the federal register. So that was really amazing. Worked on the original Girl Scout headquarters to figure out the original paint color schemes. Everything was just a hands on and fun, but you were in class for hours and hours. And I think people think like, Oh, art school is easy. It's like, no, I had to sit there for 10 hours to paint 10 squares that were perfectly one inch by one inch and the various gradients. There's a level of discipline that's involved when you're doing this type of work. And that was also really fulfilling.

Yeah, I think also art can be harder at times because there's no path.

That's right.

If you're writing a paper, you kind of know, introduction, middle, ending, right?

Three details under the thesis statement, right? It's very different and it's very much how are you feeling and what's feeding into your environment.

It fits some and it doesn't others and clearly it fit you like a glove.

You loved it so much that you continued on to grad school.

I was part of a student team first, I would say people to go back into the Gulfport and to the Gulf Coast and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. The highway still wasn't open. The National Guard was still patrolling at night and we were there sleeping on the second floor of the Children's Museum because that was the only place that still had running water in this little neighborhood.

How long did you do that for?

It was just a week because that was how long we were allowed to be there. During the day, we were renovating a house for a couple that had been there, I think, over 60 years. They were in their 90s. They had no kids. They were in no wherewithall to pull out the drywall and pull out their piano, like drag out the fridge to the front steps. But it was also their entire life. So, sorting through everything to make sure we pulled out the deed to their house and their family photos and made sure that stuff was finally drying was really important.

You were actually physically in their house doing those things?

Yes.

She's actively doing the preservation.

You also had mentioned something about a lot of focus in terms of who can and can't move back into the neighborhood.

Those were our nights. Our nights where we were sitting in on these community engagement meetings and meeting urban planners. I had no idea what urban planning was. I very much knew what historic preservation was and more of the tactile aspect of what I was getting into. And these urban planners were there to guide these community meetings about how to rebuild after Katrina. And in meeting after meeting, the people who were present were very clear. They didn't want the affordable housing. They didn't want the multifamily. They didn't want any of that near the waterfront. And it was all going to be on the other side of the railroad tracks next to the mall. And I remember sitting there being like, that doesn't sound right . There was multifamily apartments on the water. There were other people living here. Why are you othering them? Why are you pushing them somewhere else? Just because you have the wherewithal to show up at this meeting because you didn't have to go to Texas to sit in a hotel room during the storm and you had the money to come back. I remember feeling how wrong that was. And that was really my exposure to what urban planning could or couldn't do. And this idea of looking at things on a macro scale, because again, my program was focused on the individual building. We're focused on the individual structure, the individual person. And that experience really helped me look at things from a more macro lens. And that's what really pushed me towards urban planning.

See not just how one single building works within itself, but how it works within the community. Yeah. And what does community mean and what does it mean for a group of people to come together and how's the building or the built environment impacting their ability to come together or not come together?

And then again, professor Mara Wolpacker was sitting there like, what do I do after I finish? And he's like, you should go to grad school and you should do urban planning.

That's when you came back and you spoke to him about it.

Yes. He was my bookend of that experience at SCAD.

So that's what made you say, I'm going to pursue this. I'm going to get a higher degree. And then you went to Columbia. And how did that decision come about? And what kind of things did you do there? I know you had some internships and fellowships there that were quite interesting.

So I was lucky. I came back to New York. One, my family was still here, whether they're in the city or outside, and I missed them. And Georgia is in Savannah, Georgia. I used to say joke, it's, I was stuck in the sixties and like 1960s. I'm like, no, 1860s. One, it wasn't burned to the ground like everything else, cause when Sherman got there. there. He thought it was the most beautiful place and he presented it as a birthday present to Lincoln, right? Like this, look at this beautiful city I've captured for you on my march to the sea when I burned everything else. I'm not burning Savannah. It was still highly segregated. I was considered a Yankee with some other expletives in front of it for quite some time and I wanted to come home, so that really drove my decision in terms of where I was looking for graduate school programs. And Columbia had the right combination. With the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, I was also going to have access to preservation classes if I still wanted to continue doing that. And I was able to continue taking some classes at the graduate level as I pursued my master's and focused on physical planning. Again, this idea of like, how do you put together a comprehensive plan? How do you do a plan for a historic district? How does that fit within the broader city?

When I first came back, though, I interned at the Landmarks Preservation Commission because I had just finished SCAD and they were like, great, we'll even hire you. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get my master's, but I'll work here for the summer on a federal work study program. And it was the best first job in the city because they were literally like, go to every borough. Go to every historic district. I was in the enforcement division. So it's complaint based. Landmarks West would send in triplicate. They would email, call, and fax a complaint that someone had destroyed something or was about to destroy something. And I got to go to the Historic District and individual landmarks in Staten Island, and I got to go to the Bronx, and I went to Queens, and I went to Brooklyn, and all these different neighborhoods with my camera, and I had to go document whether the violation had occurred or not. And the great part was when someone came out of their home or from wherever they had been, yell at me, like, what are you doing here? I just flashed my SCAD ID. I'm an art student. What? Like, tell me about your building. And it was great because I, traveled all over and I got to learn the subway system and what an entry into New York City's built environment.

And you got to learn more history and you got to, answer these complaints and maybe do some more good.

Yeah. I was doing legal research as part of that. It was a really fun job, but then graduate school started. And when my program started, I took the first year to get my bearings, was living with my grandparents commuting in and getting now that I finally got here, what does that mean? And then I did a internship that came out of our studio program and that was in Brooklyn and that was really eyeopening. And then I started my planning fellowship with the then community planning fellows program was then run out of the Manhattan borough president's office. Now that's run out of the fund for the city of New York. And for our listeners who aren't sure who to hire for anything, you should go to that program because students were really passionate about the built environment and how things work, and they're working for not much, and they're assigned to a community board for nearly an entire year. So if anything, that is definitely a skin thickening in terms of understanding what communities want and what drives them.

How did the community board actually respond to you coming in there as a graduate student?

I would say for starting anything new, don't go in like you know, everything. And I think that was what I really took out of that experience was the community knows their community best. You may not agree with the tactics. You may not agree with the point of view. You may not agree with the outcome, but they live there. You do not live there. At the end of the day, as an urban planner, you are coming in as a guest. So what are you going to take from that experience? And yes, you can try and shape and advise at some point. And I worked on an extension for the Tribeca Historic District. And I spent a lot of time saying, I'm not so sure about some of these buildings. They're not contributing, they don't have the architectural features. I've done all the research. They've been severely modified and they were like, no, no, no, we want this. And then you see the political part, which is they got that extension after a while, regardless of the merits of the building that I coming in may have may have thought about.

What kind of takeaways did you take with you from that experience? Because I can imagine I've been to community board hearings just as an observer, whether it's my community board or others, because I'm also interested in that process. It can be very daunting, particularly when you're not in that community. But what were you able to take away after being there for a year?

I think what I took away most was their passion for their community and that they were going to know details in every building and every block in a way that someone coming in was never going to know. And if you can't recognize that coming in when you're trying to build something new, then you've already lost. You have to recognize the community engagement piece is not just you coming in and talking, it's you coming in and listening.

I think that's probably a more important piece. And we've talked to a lot of others on the show as well who made a similar point, which is listening to what others want. Because when you listen to what others want, you can follow suit or make an argument to the contrary and explain why what they're saying is not right.

Either way, but I think listening is an important skill. I have not mastered it just yet.

David likes to be self deprecating.

I was watching Bill Burr, a comedian, and he has this schtick where it's like my wife is like a perfect work of art and I'm like that building that always has scaffolding around it because we're always working on me, and it's actually true because she's great. I'm definitely a work in progress. So maybe there'll be some historic preservation in my personality.

No buildings ever done. That's the thing that I also struggled with coming here. SCAD and Savannah has this very rich history of adaptive reuse, to reuse buildings and not keeping things in amber, though you had a contingent of folks who are like, no, we're still in the 18 sixties. That tension was there. But in terms of how the school taught me and how the Landmarks Commission operated in Savannah is this idea of, what a shame if this building stays as is and isn't used. How do we use it? How do we fix it? How do we freshen it up so that someone can continue and the community can continue to enjoy it?

There's a lot of different factors that go into those kind of determinations, right? It's a lot of input and a lot of thinking about how it's going to be used and how we can fix it and preserve that history.

Yeah, I'll say it sounds like you found a really good path to finding the balance of modern development mixed with preserving what's already there. It's finding the adaptive use and how do we make it work with what's already existing.

I don't really know how other states work, but zoning here is different, right? The way that land use works, the procedure for rezoning, all the things are very unique to New York. Did you have some difficulty in acclimating or was it, You know, these are the same principles. I can adapt them from what I've learned already.

I referenced how hands on my program was in undergraduate. So, I was doing AutoCAD. I was working on GIS. I was working on all these hard skills and then I got to Columbia and it was much more, how are you going to think about solving problems? That's very nice that you can paint gold gilt on something and you can do historic pain analysis and do all the photography work. And that's lovely. But how are you going to solve the problem? And I thought the combination of the two pieces was just really nice for me because I had always had those two pieces in me, which was like the artistic side and the problem solving side. In some ways, people are like, oh, artists, they don't problem solve. I'm like, No, of course we're problem solving. How am I going to paint this beautiful flower in a way that people will react to it and respond to it? Or how am I going to photograph something so it still looks like it's alive or living and someone can have a different viewpoint when they're looking at it, when they're sad versus happy? And I loved how all those things came together in urban planning because urban planning inherently is about pulling together all of these different fields and all of these different kind of intellectual threads into real world problem solving.

And problem solving that impacts people to the nth degree, right?

Yes, yes. So when you talk about the complexity of say, the zoning resolution, when I started at City Planning and, opened up at the time, it was three binders. Now it's all virtual, which is lovely. But it was like these three big black binders. And I looked at this and I was like, okay, I can do this. I was reading a thousand pages a week in graduate school. I had to sit for 10 hours painting ten one inch squares, perfectly flat, gradient color. I can do this too.

How did you come about that position? I think you just. Applied. Right.

I applied. It was open posting and there were several different positions available within the agency at the time. It was the technical review division, the environmental review, and then a Staten Island borough planner. And I had no desire, no offense to anyone to commute to Staten Island. from Queens.

So then you decided to apply for the position that that would best, I guess, suit you and also be.

Convenient

Geographically convenient, but also I wanted to be employed. I had a graduate school loan to pay off, and so technical review sounded the most interesting to me because it was like, Oh, I'm going to work on projects across all five boroughs. I'm going to have this chance to learn the zoning resolution even more. Then I'll have access to all these different project types and versus my understanding at the time of what environmental review was within the department is either you were a generalist or your specialist. And I was like, well, I don't necessarily want to specialize in air quality or that may not be the right fit. So I thought technical review was going to be the right fit. And it was really good for a long time. I learned so much. I did get to work on projects all across the five boroughs.

Can you explain what technical review means?

Our job was to make sure applications were ready for the public review process, whether it was going for chairperson certification or going through full ULURP with the City Planning Commission reviewing and opining. And so this meant things like zoning compliance, making sure the application package, the architecture drawings were in good shape. And so, again, those hard skills I had from undergrad came into play. I knew how to do plan review. I had been doing plan review of historic structures since day one at an undergrad. So again, it seemed like the right fit and it was a chance to learn. And that's what was the other driving factor.

So are you just looking through these documents, making recommendations, writing memos? How does all that work?

So typically an applicant comes into the department and says, I want to rezone to build a nine story multifamily building, say a hundred plus units. And I need a zoning map change. And now under the mandatory inclusionary housing, I also need a text change. So say they also want a special permit because they're near the waterfront and they actually want to impinge or change their building shape and they're on a waterfront block. Now they need a waterfront certification. Right. So my job was to make sure all the actions that they needed were outlined when it's a discretionary action. Someone has to do not just only a description of what the project is, but how they meet the findings under that special permit. So reviewing those documents and then reviewing the architecture plans and landscape drawings and the other things that would be associated, depending on what the action was. So a waterfront application, when someone's needing waterfront design changes or waterfront certifications, I used to refer to one of the packages as the size of a small toddler, and that was before I had kids and actually understood how big a toddler was. But I wasn't so far off the mark, right? Like when you're looking at a stack of 70 something drawings to understand because the zoning is so prescriptive to the point of like, do you have this many linear feet of bench and do you have this many trees and are the trees, you have the number of trees based on the square footage of the waterfront esplanade, right? Like all of these different things I had to check all of that.

Did anything come across your desk where you said, I got to follow that. I got to see what happens.

I didn't know it at the time, but some of the best projects I got to work on at City Planning or REBNY members. So there was the Durst Project via 57th Street. This was the Bajarck Ingalls building. I was like, this building is so cool. It was such a bear though, because how do you do encroachment diagrams for something that pivots every three floors and angle and doesn't follow any of the normal encroachment or height and setback windows? So that was also a toddler size package. I worked on Hallets Point, which is now owned by Durst, at the time it was Lincoln Equities. And I worked on a lot of Plaza certifications and design changes. That's been cool. I walked through the Gary Plaza, the Gary building in the lower Manhattan near a city hall and the municipal building. And that's one of the plazas I got to work on. And so one of my favorite places to go meet for coffee. If I'm downtown.

When I traveled in Europe a little bit, they had plazas everywhere. That creates a reason for people to want to live in an area because it has those open spaces .

I think it's all part of urban planning. We have a client who applies for these open plazas because the building he's building, he knows that they'll service them and more people will come more commercial, more residential.

The better your built environment is both at the street level and for the actual building. I think there is value to that, not just to the community, but I'm sure fiscally as well. Two other projects that I got to work on when I was at City Planning that I did follow was the Rudin West Village project. Again, Rudin is a REBNY member. So this was when the hospital closed. It's where the AIDS memorial went. And that project was really interesting and fun because there was a city map change in addition to everything else and where the AIDS memorial ended up going. This idea of what do you do with this forgotten piece of land that was being used to hold oxygen tanks for St. Vincent's Hospital and what is that going to become in the future? And there was also this question of preservation. I think originally a lot of the older hospital buildings were going to be torn down. And then there was this conversation of, okay, can we save two of them? And what does the redevelopment look like?

St. Vincent's, I would say, has been important for every major medical episode, so to speak, for the city. It was where women from the shirtwaist, a triangle factory, were sent. They had inpatients from 9 11. They were there at the height of the AIDS crisis giving care when a lot of other places would not so I would say very important part both in terms of New York City's History and being there for the people and that kind of played out in that community engagement process in the city planning hearing. I remember it being a really long hearing and people being really emotionally invested in this idea of the hospital closing and what did it mean?

Because they were so focused on the thing they could not control, which was the hospital closing, all of those things were beyond macro factors. They were not going to partner with another hospital because that other hospital at the time was still providing abortions. That was a line in the sand for St. Vincent's. They were not going to partner with another hospital that was doing that, even though they did all these other amazing medical things. That was their line. And then financially, they couldn't keep going. Everyone's so focused. Like, how do we save the hospital?

How do we save the hospital? There was actually very little time spent on the memorial. And that really happened at the end of that community engagement process through the public review. It was going to close., except as fact, this is closing. What are we going to spend our energy on in the public review process? And I think that was one of the other things I took from my experience at City Planning was who's focusing on the things you can actually impact in the public review process because no project is perfect. As someone enters that public review process thinking their project is perfect as is, they are wrong. The whole point of the community engagement process is to make it better. Some people would argue that the point of the process seems to be to kill the project. And I think, some people have had that experience.

I think there's productive community engagement and not so productive community engagement, which is something that you just mentioned. And sometimes the not so productive conversations are, in fact, productive because people just have to get their feelings out. So I think it's necessary.

Some people just want to be heard.

And give them a forum to do that.

Yeah, exactly.

And sometimes one of those comments just opens the conversation to something more important.

I think it definitely opens up perspectives. A lot of people have their own agendas, too, right? Whether you're a citizen, involved in politics, everybody has their own agenda. This person doesn't want too much noise. They don't like a Starbucks in their name. Whatever it is, everybody has their own agenda. So it's hard to

You can never have too many Starbucks.

Hard to filter that kind of stuff out, I think.

That's always a frustration for people in these land use conversations. Zoning can only do so much.

So finally, you had one too many migraines after reading all of these plans.

And then I went to work for Gail in her first term.

Did you know her before?

No, I did not.

So, I've learned the things that I think I want to take away from this job. And I think it's time for me to now find something different is that the reason why you left?

If I'm not learning, my boss should be concerned. Yeah. Yes. Agreed. For future, past, present. If I'm not learning, if I'm not finding things interesting, if there's been a theme in any of the work that I've done. Yeah, it's time.

So did that happen?

One of the things I'd say for the agency at that time was in a lot of ways, it felt segmented. I would have loved to have moved over to the one of the borough offices. And that was not an opportunity that was granted to me, even though I applied, even though I asked. And I think at a certain point, even for yourself, it's like, well, I keep applying and I keep saying no. So, what am I going to keep applying or am I going to be okay doing this other thing, or is it time for me to find something else? I was referred to Gail's office, was called in for an interview. I guess it went well, and I had the job pretty quickly, and so I was with her for her first term as borough president.

What were your job responsibilities and what were the things that were highlights for you at that position?

So it was a chance to manage my own team, which was really exciting. When I was applying, there was a borough planner, team leader role in one of the boroughs, and I was like, oh, that would be amazing. I'd always had teams in prior jobs. I wanted to be part of a team, and in technical review, it's like, no, you're the one person reviewing the 70 drawings. So I got to manage a team. And it was a different view on ULURP. All the ULRP applications were going through the borough president's office. They have a charter mandated role to review those things through the land use division. We also have a responsibility to the community boards in terms of education. So this is when I get to do education, not when I was a fellow at the community board, but as the deputy director of land use to go in and do a land use 101, a zoning 101, landmarks 101, and have folks prepared for when those applications came to them at the community board level to actually drawing on that experience from city planning, focusing on the things they can change and making sure that they're prioritizing what they are saying and feeling has been priority. Is it open space? Is it housing? Is it landmarks? Okay, how do you advocate for those things within your review timeframe? Which is advisory soft power and seeing Gail exercise that in a variety of different ways as well.

Is it just the community board themselves or does the community get invited to?

Just the community board members. Our obligation is to the community board members. City planning has a charter mandated obligation to the community at large, actually, to provide technical assistance and training.

And so you and your team are putting on these presentations, making sure that the community board understands what they should be looking for, what their jurisdiction is, how they should be advocating for their community, things like that, right?

Yeah.

Some of these people are professionals, attorneys in real estate, architects, urban planners but a lot of them they're just members of the community who are intelligent, but they don't have that background. So I'd always wondered how they know what to be looking for.

Hopefully they have a great land use staff at the borough president's office, which I was very lucky to have. I worked with some really amazing people who really cared about the city. And it was all about making our technical knowledge accessible to the community board members, to your point, who are like, don't necessarily come from that background. So they could be better advocates for themselves and for their community.

I think that's an important function. And you work with all Manhattan community boards.

Right. All 12.

Anything that stood out about how the people in the communities understood this process or what things really were important to them?

So certain community boards that had had the most development had gone through a neighborhood rezoning. They were in a lot of ways better positioned because they had that institutional knowledge. So like Community Board 4 is a good example of this. They had that institutional knowledge of knowing what to ask for and being able to negotiate for a better project because they knew the levers because they ran a not for profit for housing. It was all about their leadership and what knowledge sharing was happening within the broader board. Some of the community boards hadn't gone through a neighborhood rezoning decades. They had never seen any discretionary action. So there was a lot more opportunity for education and conversation there in terms of like well, what do you want in your neighborhood?

Are you going into specifics with them? If there's a specific project that came up or rezoning, are you helping them navigate those documents and what to focus on? Or you just give them the basics and then it's their job to look at the rest.

It really depended. One of the things that I was really proud of during my time at Gail's office was creating the structure for pre ULURP engagement. We did this on the South Street Seaport for Greater East Midtown, for Garment Center, for Inwood, and for Harlem. And apologies if I'm forgetting any particular neighborhood right now. And I started that work in SoHo before I left for REBNY. What was really important in all those conversations was, okay, what do you want to understand? And how am I connecting you with the people who can help you understand it? In East Harlem one of the conversations that was really illuminating was we had someone come in and really explain area median income and what it costs to build affordable housing. And East Harlem at the time, they didn't just want housing, I mean, they did. That was like top priority, but it was also about open space and school seats and parks. And we had conversations around what all of those things were going to cost. And based on that cost, what are they going to prioritize. There's a finite number of city dollars available. There's only so many development sites. There's only so far they were willing to go on the rezoning. And a lot of the conversation was really focused on this idea of a continuum of housing. And that was really impressionable to me, this concept of people shouldn't be poor, they should have opportunities to move to bigger apartments or more expensive apartments or to buy something and still have a chance to live in the neighborhood. So this idea that if you're going to build something, it's not just for one income bracket, or it's not just for one type of people, I thought was really important. And I was really impressed by the community conversations because it would have been really easy for them to have been steamrolled, like I think historically they had been and they showed up and they're like, no, we're willing to admit what we don't know and we want to learn about it, and then we want to make an informed decision.

You've got to be in it to win it. And if you're not engaging, then you're not going to get anything. You don't want to be steamrolled

And I think a lot of communities sometimes show up and they're just like, no, no, no. And you're just saying no, you're not giving a chance for dialogue.

Because it's going to happen. So do you want input or you just want to say no? And it's going to happen without any input. It's not maybe something you agree with, but you have to accept it. And now let's see if we can change it so that it does fit a little bit more of what you want.

It's coming into the conversation to say, let's have a productive back and forth rather than just saying no.

Right. And with East Harlem, the speaker of the City Council, it was her district. She said she wanted it. She wanted it because she wanted access to all the capital dollars that were under the de Blasio administration that he had committed to. They had all of this as a right development that was occurring without a single unit of affordable housing. So the only way to change the scenario is for a neighborhood rezoning. That is the way to change the paradigm. Otherwise, if we do nothing, all we're going to keep seeing is fully market rate housing coming into this neighborhood and further displacement.

Exactly. It's going to push people out and then cause a gentrification that they're trying to avoid in the first place. So, urban design, planning, zoning, land use, they're very technical and all within your expertise. How did you then try to grasp and understand things that you mentioned earlier, which is construction costs, what it costs to build something, which is very much experience based, totally different than what you were doing. It's like, well, this is how you do it. Well, how much does it cost? And how do I actually get it done? How did you go about educating yourself?

In undergrad, I mentioned everything was hands on. I had to go to Home Depot and price my materials for some of the jobs that we were working on. I could read a spreadsheet and I can read a plan. And so Gotham had come in to Gail's office for a rezoning for this massive mixed income building. And this was in community board 4, but she wanted 100 percent affordable. and they're like, no way, that's not happening. And she was very much like, I don't believe they're like, okay, we're going to open book. We're going to bring everything in. And they did. And I'm reading through it. I'm like, Gail, they're not lying.

They can't do it.

They can't do it. I'm looking at the numbers and they can't do it.

Right.

And she was like, Oh, okay.

Now what?

So you negotiate. What else can you negotiate? Can you increase a little bit? Can you do this? Can you make the buildings a little shorter on the side where it drops down to five story buildings, so it's more in scale or in context? But there's a cost to all of that. Every time you were cutting back a building for neighborhood character, we were cutting off the production of affordable units. Every single time. But what I took from that experience when you said , how do you learn it? You learn it by asking questions. And that's the other thing. I'm not afraid to say, I don't know this, or I need you to explain it to me and actually can explain it to me one more time. And I like to read. So I read whatever the applicants would give us, whether it was their construction book pricing out of all the timber for the stud walls and the partitions and the toilets. And they weren't pulling things like a thousand dollar toilets. It was like, no, this is how much this costs if I went to Home Depot myself or I bought a hundred of them wholesale, understanding that

I think that kind of discipline is important. And some testimony that you had given to the Department of City Planning about the costs and 421A and how things don't pencil out because of the costs. And I was just very much interested in the fact that how you use your left and right brain and then go back and forth with math and then planning and then art. It's very unique. And it's having that multi discipline is not something that a lot of people have. And you must have that kind of brain that can think of all these things. I can't even imagine having all that stuff in there.

I think it brings a great approach to your role at REBNY as well.

Oh, that's a good transition.

Thank you.

I like that. So then you went to this little place called REBNY, which is not too far away from our secret headquarters where we're recording this podcast.

Don't give her a location.

Nobody knows where REBNY is.

We're hiding in a landmark building, which might be the thing that no one would think.

And so you went from Gail Brewer's office to REBNY, jokingly jumping to the dark side, right?

Cue Star Wars.

Vader's Imperial March. It's fine. And some of your friends and colleagues were teasing you a little bit, but frankly, maybe you're working for a different group that has different perspectives, but really you're still advocating for the same things. Your positions have not changed.

My core has not changed. that has not been renovated in any way.

You're there to bring a perspective that may not have been there previously. So how did that transition happen and what made you excited about that position?

In every single job that I've had I need to be learning. I want to learn. And I want to have an impact and I want that impact to be positive. In each of these jobs, especially as I've gotten older, am I in a position to have a positive impact on the city that I love and a positive impact in the sense that it will make it better for other people in the future? What was really appealing about this job was, especially coming from Gail's office, it was no longer going to be focused on Manhattan only. It was all five boroughs, it was at a state level, and once in a while at a federal level. And taking a city wide lens on things, and that was really appealing to me, seeing what's like much further away before it becomes self evident for everyone else.

Yeah. I think one of the things that you had said in an article is we've only produced, I think. 10 percent of our current housing in the last, what is it?

10 years. Decade.

Yeah.

So it's like 1 percent and our population is probably growing exponentially greater than that.

If we're lucky, 30 units permitted per 1000 people.

No wonder we're in a crisis.

Not to say the rest of the country is necessarily doing so much better, but they are doing better than us. And what are the fundamental systems that are keeping us from doing better? That was what I was basically sold on to come to REBNY, to work on those systems. So again, in each of my jobs, in my education, moving from this micro view of, I'm going to fix this one building for this elderly couple in their nineties in Gulfport, to how do I fix zoning in the city of New York? How do I do tax incentive policy that's going to help build?

I love that you just went there. You're helping one couple do this thing years and years ago when you were a student, and now you're having this amazing impact on policy . Some advice that your dad made clear to you that every step of your career has been a way to learn more. It's like one of those paintings with the dots.

Pointillism. It's a sub school of the impressionist.

I like the metaphor. When you look at one dot, an isolated site, you only get a limited picture back up and you've got a whole city to look at.

It can also be daunting to look at it that way, but that's what you're trained for. So I don't think you get overwhelmed by this stuff.

No. I mean, you don't seem to be.

When you're looking at the big picture of City of Yes, what are some of the things that you are big proponents of?

City of Yes is really exciting in the sense that it's probably the largest rewrite of the zoning resolution since the zoning resolution, which we use today was adopted in 1961. Fun fact, REBNY was one of the leading organizations calling for the establishment of a zoning resolution in 1916.

Oh, wow. Look at that.

That is a fun fact. And now we're revamping it.

I would say things we're most excited about, the changes for office to residential conversions to occur citywide. I think universal affordability preference has so much potential. And when we start looking at that with 485X, I'm very curious as to how this will shape out over the next several years. We're still a little bit away from people using it. We still need local rulemaking and need to understand the enforcement mechanisms, but there's some potentially magic alignment there.

We're always going to be really concerned about our housing pipeline and how are we protecting it and historically our zoning resolution doesn't do a very good job about thinking about things that are in process or in transition, the vesting rules. Zoning is like either you're doing it on this date and then after the state, you have to do all the new stuff. There's no grace period. Vesting is something we have to advocate for every single time there's one of these citywide tax amendments. We did it for economic opportunity. We did it for carbon neutrality. So here we are for housing opportunity. The largest rewrite since 1961. 1961 had a grace period when they moved from 1916 resolution to 1961. They're not talking about a grace period here. They're saying everything we're doing is better and therefore you should want to use it. That's maybe fine at that macro level, but then you've got to zoom back into the individual site. And on an individual site basis, we have existing large scales and we have phase developments and we have all these little particular things. Some of our projects I worked on when I was at City Planning and I know those particulars, and we need something different to protect that. And that has been, I think, one of the main areas we need to focus on. The other thing, looking at all of this, the mayor and the governor said we have a 500,000 unit moonshot goal of housing production over the next 10 years. Are all the changes going to generate more housing? And we see in City of Yes, there's a couple of changes in the high density districts that I would say are counterproductive to that goal. These are existing programs that are producing housing, are producing affordable housing, producing market rate housing. And again, this idea of a continuum, we need all housing types should we be eliminating things that we know are working today? This is one of those spaces where we collectively, the city populace needs to see the details. The vesting section was purposely left blank.

One of the things that you said is that if not phased in appropriately, the proposal has the potential to disrupt the existing housing pipeline in ways that will undermine its overall goal. That was such a smart way of putting it.

One of the challenges, when we talk about the zoning text changes is, again, for whatever reason, it's always this drop dead, you're either doing this or you're not doing this. And I think that misses the nuance, those micro views. We have a really long development process and things can take a really long time to come to formation and start. And then you have to get the financing and plan approvals and the rounds of approvals. It's a conversation just to get something into one place and to get a project started.

So how have they addressed those concerns? Have others expressed that concern?

Yes. In the other two citywide text amendments, carbon neutrality and economic opportunity, they said, as long as you filed by this time, you have up to a year to get approval. We're asking for more time than they gave in City of Yes, we pulled in statute language examples from 421 A, from other parts of the charter. There's a lot of precedent in city and state law, and then especially when you start looking at other municipalities. An on and off switch is not going to work for housing production. We really do need more time. So now we made our case at the hearing. There are other entities talking about this as well. And now we have to see what the post hearing and pre vote discussion is at the City Planning Commission.

Once they've gotten all these comments, all this feedback, I assume there are going to be some revisions.

Yes, I would hope so, right? That's the point of the process, is to revise it. We already had the city planning commission hearing. The commission typically has their post hearing discussions. They've had more than one on this particular text amendment, and they'll come together before they do a final vote to talk. Staff will typically give a presentation, here's what we're changing to respond to these top concerns we heard at the hearing. Here's the draft CPC report. And I know all this because I worked there and I used to work on these reports, but it's also a discussion that happens out in the public, which is one of the things I think is really wonderful, actually, about our process for all the conversation of, Oh, we get rid of it or fix it or change it, it actually works pretty well because the commission deliberations happen in full view of the public. They have to justify why they're making the changes that they're making.

I think that also goes back to you talking about listening to your community and meeting the needs of your community because. You're having an open conversation. So they're listening to the community, making those changes, and then implementing them.

In this case, they're listening to all 59 community boards,

A lot of voices.

Five borough presidents and all the stakeholder groups in between. So they're going to have that conversation, unlike the ULURP clock they could take longer. The city planning commission doesn't have to vote in September, even though that's the end of their quote unquote, 60 days, which is typically what they would look at a ULURP, but once they send it to the city council, 50 days is the clock. So, I think it's fair to say before the end of this calendar year, we will know what our new zoning is for housing. That's really exciting. Actually,

you heard it here first.

I think Dan Grotnick said it a dozen times, actually.

You heard it here. Second,

maybe 10.

Okay, fine. I want to go a little bit back in time. Think about 421A expiring, the turmoil that occurred You mean the lack of housing production? Exactly. Precipitous cliff under which all production dropped.

The record scratch where everything comes to a screeching halt. And there were negotiations until 485-x came. What were the goals that REBNY had going into the session and how do they feel about the results?

Our goal going into any of these legislative sessions is can we provide a voice of math and reason and what inherently have been, especially when you're talking about housing, very political and emotional conversations. For us, understanding what the real criticisms of 421A had been, but also understanding that an on and off switch of taking away the program wasn't actually going to meet our housing goals. So it was really important for there to be a deadline extension and for that deadline extension to not retrade on key parameters, such as affordability and labor costs, because those are two major cost variables in the math of whether to build new construction or not, with 485-x, understanding there was going to be a new program, that meant moving forward we were talking table stakes about permanent affordability because that was a major criticism of every reiteration of 421-a that the benefit goes away. And so did the affordable units. The other major criticism was the AMI levels for area median income. A lot of buildings use the 130 percent AMI option under 421A Affordable New York. A lot of those buildings were using that option in neighborhoods where that AMI was actually above or at market rate rents and therefore was not considered affordable whatsoever. So in some ways that tainted the production value of that program. It tainted the integration value of that program because that program was really successful in building 60 percent 80 percent AMI units in Manhattan in the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront where new construction otherwise would not have built income restricted units. And that all got lost in this kind of bigger narrative of, this program doesn't produce affordable units, it's a real estate giveaway and the affordability goes away anyway. So what good is that? So we had to address that coming into it. I think what was hard with the narrative of it's a real estate giveaway is they're assigning morality to construction. They're assigning morality to whether you replace the boiler or not, or you build a roof. And fundamentally, it's about am I going to take on all the risk of this lengthy development process, all of the compliance required of any tax or government program? And am I going to build new construction in the city of New York? Or am I going to take that money and invest in an existing building or put it in the stock market? And for a really long time, and one could argue even today, with where interest rates are and inflation, I can make more money putting my money into the stock market, sticking it under my mattress, sending someone to the moon than I can buy a new building here today, that's going to be permanently constrained in its revenue because I'm providing permanently affordable units. That's how we approach the conversations. The emotional component is, everyone wants a home and everyone should have a home and everyone should have access to housing. And I think where the other rub in all of this is access to housing doesn't mean access to that particular unit in that particular building in that particular neighborhood. And what was lost in a lot of the conversations, especially on the rent stabilized side, is this idea like people should just have access to the housing unit they are currently in. And if they only have access to that unit, that means they're not moving. And maybe that's really great in a lot of different ways. But it also means no one else can move in. And if someone else can't move in, what happens to the people who are coming to the city, who are moving into the city?

They don't have a place to go.

They don't have a place to go. So that's why we have some of the highest homeless rates, the highest overcrowding rates, all of these metrics of our housing stock is not in good health. That's what those metrics tell me.

That's just another example of how you're listening to what the other side is saying in order to be able to address some of the inaccuracies. It's not totally false, but there are some spins on it that are going to the agenda of the other side that are not seeing the full picture. And you were very much a proponent of access to vouchers. I wanted to see if you can discuss your support of those programs and of landlords of existing buildings.

With vouchers, I think this is both the right thing and it's the right thing financially. When we say it's the right thing, again, this idea of access to housing, vouchers are a way to keep people housed where they are, if the programs work better. It's a way for people to access better housing than the one that they're in, whether they're in shelter or they're in an overcrowded unit. And to me, when we think about having an impact and making the city better, fixing wage policy can sound daunting. Fixing the property tax system sounds daunting. Telling construction labor they should get paid less so the cost of housing goes down. Probably not the way to go, right? So all these things feel really daunting. And then you start looking at the eviction cases and when 90 percent of them are for non payment and then the median non payment amount is $5,000, that seems fixable from a public policy standpoint. So, for vouchers, we're like, this is a way to help people where they are, meet them where they are without touching these macro systems that may not be working well or may not be working well together. And we'll spend more time doing that, but vouchers can provide immediate relief. I think one of the things that's been frustrating in all those conversations is the administration of the programs is not where it needs to be. It takes at least twice as long In New York City, as it does anywhere else in the country. It is bureaucracy.

And then it expires after a certain period of time. Correct.

Because we have a supply constrained environment, you have only a set amount of time to find a housing unit. I don't want to dismiss or be dismissive of the source of income discrimination complaints. I think that is very real and that is happening. But the administration of these programs also creates opportunity for bad things to happen. It creates opportunity for someone to say no, because Government's going to take you three months to approve it or send an inspector and do all the things that are enabled in these programs. So that's a major problem. But before we get to the administration of these programs, even the value of those programs were set so far below what rents are set at for apartments, even for stabilized apartments, that they were functionally useless. So that was a really big thing for us to get engaged on in the city and state level. And we were joining folks who'd been working on this for years. So getting the city FEPs and the state FEPs supplemental value, getting the voucher payment standard up, where someone could actually use it and where the rents were aligning with those amounts, that was really important. Now we can focus on the administration of the programs and we could spend another three hours about all the red tape like one city agency asking for documents that three other city agencies should. have. It's stuff like that. The other thing is each of these programs were designed over time and to meet certain population needs, which means there is not a continuum. There's gaps in the voucher program. So we've been really involved over the last several years in pushing for the housing access voucher program at the state level, which seeks to fill those eligibility gaps. So, like, if you're an immigrant, if you fall below a certain income, if you're a single adult household, there's all these eligibility criteria with city FEPs and state FEPs and HASA and Section 8. And if you don't meet the precise government criteria, some of which was established decades ago. You're out of luck. And then we can say we should focus on a wage policy and we should focus on housing supply and let's stabilize more apartments. But at a certain point, we're talking about a finite unit of housing and really fundamentally property taxes need to get paid. People want to have insurance on their buildings. You want the people who clean and build those buildings to get paid.

You got to operate the thing, too, right?

You got to operate it. You don't want it falling down. So all of those things eat from the revenue. So what's left? What's left on the rent? So we need people to be able to afford their rents. And there's a lot of different ways to approach it. And we always felt like vouchers was, in the short term, one of the best ways to do it. And then longitudinally, what else is being saved for government? You're saving on shelter costs. You're saving on ER visits. You're saving on education absences because someone is stably housed.

I think there was some kind of study where they said how much you spend on somebody who's homeless. It's like a million bucks. You can house them and save the city money. You're not looking at it from the big perspective, like we were talking about.

You're giving families opportunities to have access to education in different platforms that you will see the impact 10 years.

That's a good point.

They have the chance to move to a different neighborhood if that's what they want or not if they don't want. And I think that's the other thing that's lost in the housing conversations about, well, I don't want housing in my neighborhood, or I don't like that type of housing is, well, you don't have to live there. If you want to stay in your suburban neighborhood, as people described it at the City of Yes hearing, you can do that. No one is saying you have to move to Long Island City. But if someone wants to move to Long Island City, give them the opportunity to do that, whether it's through the voucher, whether it's adding more housing. I think that's the other piece that's missed in all the conversations at the community level, which is, well, I have what I want. And therefore, what I want is the only thing that anyone could possibly want.

It's a theme, right? The 2019 rent laws. It's been attacked, obviously, numerous times is REBNY doing anything to try to ease the difficulties of landlords?

At the end of the day, our role is we're the largest trade association for real estate in the country or the oldest, maybe not the largest anymore.

125 years.

More than that now.

Oh man.

Oh, is our picture wrong?

We're going to have to edit this out.

127 years. I think we're just about to celebrate 128. We've been around a while. Point being though that, what is our role today? Our role is to advocate on behalf of the industry. One of the best ways we can do that is with data. I think we were really successful in the housing production conversation. We've been really successful on office to adaptive reuse for residential and all of those conversations, tax incentives on new construction. We've been less successful on rent stabilized because there's a lack of publicly available data fundamentally. So every year we try and do a industry survey. We try and glean what we can from the housing and vacancy survey from the 311 complaint data. from the PDF that DHCR puts out saying there's at least one stabilized apartment and all the following buildings on this massive PDF. And we do that every year at the rank Island board proceedings, but because we're bringing it, there is a level of mistrust even though it's all publicly available data, just, it's not actually feels like publicly available data because you'd have to foil it right and you have to be so specific in your foil to get through the bureaucracy and the Sphinx like responses that you get from government where they don't have the resources to generate the data at the zip code level, which is fundamentally what we need. If there's anything I would want moving forward is for all of us to have a shared baseline understanding of what's happening on the rent stabilized stock. But what I am most concerned about right now is the rent guidelines board in this last year saying that monthly expenses exceed monthly rent on average citywide. That is a problem.

That's something that a voucher program could help with. I don't know what the solution is, but expenses are larger than income, and that's, I think, as a result of the limited ability to increase.

Right, because 2019 basically took out all of the different ways someone could raise their rent. And again, there were really fair criticisms about individual apartment improvement mechanisms and this idea of an automatic vacancy allowance coming in and whether that was leading to displacement in certain communities and whether that was leading to tenant harassment. Those were all real concerns and real complaints. Is the solution getting rid of something altogether. Probably not, but that's effectively what was done in 2019. So, I think tenant advocates have been pushing for those changes for over a decade. I would say to everyone, we're probably going to have to wait another five years before we see the full impact and maybe have the chance to do a larger scale change to this just because our housing stock was in the best condition it had been ever in 2019. We had the lowest amount of deficient apartments and deficient buildings and distressed buildings and like decades for New York City. So that was the time for them to break something in some ways. In retrospect, it's like, okay, you want to try this experiment where no one feels like they ever have to leave their rent stabilized apartment ever. Okay, let's see what happens to overcrowding rates and let's see what happens to out migration because people can't find apartments. I think we're seeing a combination of all those things come to bear, but as my dad says, common sense isn't common and what is self evident to me may not be self evident to others. And our rent stabilized housing stock is on a bad path in terms of being available for tenants. People are like, of course, landlords will keep putting money into something. I'm like, the bank won't give them the money to keep doing that.

A lot of them are in the red at this point.

Again, average monthly expenses exceed average monthly rent. That is not sustainable financially and what that fundamentally means to me when I'm looking at those numbers is, okay, that's very nice that that apartment is 800 today and then the tenant moves out and you would like it to be 850 tomorrow. That's not the choice. The choice is between having no apartment available and an apartment that's been invested in and yes, it's going to be renting for more than 850 or whatever the amount is adjusted by the rent guidelines board. That is the choice we are going to be facing.

You've done some testimony before the rental guidelines board. Is this information that you've been passing on to them?

The rent guidelines board starts its annual proceedings typically in March, there's a series of staff level presentations in which the staff is presenting the data that they've pulled. And a lot of times it's whatever back like data share agreement they have with DHCR, Department of Finance. And usually they're looking at data that's at least two years old. So yes, all of this data we pass on to them, but they're fundamentally looking at like the RPIEs. They're looking at them from that time lag. So that's a challenge. HVS, the housing vacancy survey is only updated every three years. Then they're going off of rent registrations from DHCR, which historically there was a lag and people forgot to do it and there was no fines. Now there's a fine. So I hope everyone filed by July 31st or you're facing fines. You should file. So hopefully we won't have that lag anymore from a data perspective.

So they don't manipulate the data a little bit to account for that lag?

No, it's just, this is the data, these are what the numbers are.

And then the Rent Guidelines Board just votes?

No, they don't just vote. They hold multiple hearings. There's the invited testimony from owners and from tenants. And then there's the big public hearing. So these are the hearings that were occurring in Cooper Union in the basement, pre COVID, for example.

And they would invite REBNY. Is this something that you do every year?

Not me personally, but yes.

Is there any difference in what REBNY says other than providing the more updated data?

If I went back before my tenure, I think there was a lot of like, you should do like 20 percent increases to keep things commensurate with expenses or things that were a little not sensitive necessarily to the political realities and the tense lived experiences, but in fairness to REBNY and any of the other owner groups at that time, expenses continue to go up, rent remains somewhat static or not commensurate with that, and eventually those gaps get too big. And I think now we're seeing like, oh, that gap is really big because all these other things were changed under 2019 and it's going to be much harder to keep pace with expense growth.

I think you have your work cut out for you.

Yeah, I'm not bored.

I think there's a lot more for you to learn. And a lot for me to learn, apparently. The information that you possess and that you've just given to us and to our audience it's a wealth of knowledge. And we so appreciate you coming in and spending the time with us and to educate us as well.

We're your little community board here at Seiden & Schein. And we greatly appreciate you coming in and being such a wonderful guest.

Yeah. Thank you so much. for coming. for having me. Thanks.

Well, everyone, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening.

And of course, don't forget to subscribe. Also, don't forget to leave comments. Could we love to hear from our audience, right, Brenda?

Yeah. Feel free to reach out at info at sidenshine. com or visit our website at sidenshine. com. We really look forward to hearing from you.

You

could also reach out to David and Brenda at dshamshovich at

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and beastlekowski at sidenshine. com.

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