Tom Acitelli

Explaining the voodoo economics of 15 Central Park West.

Freddie Mac's ex-president buys a West Side condo, sans mortgage.

Why won't Manhattan rents come down this summer?

Anthony Fodera, a business owner at Willets Point, lays into Mayor Bloomberg.

The last big landowner in Columbia's West Harlem way readies for a showdown.

Obama and McCain get little love from New York real estate--so far.

A former Carter adviser plans a new Bryant Park hotel.

The Hotel Pennsylvania inexplicably shoulders on, hackers rejoice!

Manhattan apartment rents will likely exit the summer as high as—if not significantly higher than—they entered it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course: Everything was going to change because of the flaccid local economy, wilting under the strain of Wall Street layoffs and inflated living costs. Deals would abound.

But the layoffs have been gradual: about 2,000 in the city’s financial services sector in the past year, according to the state’s Labor Department; and the number of private sector jobs increased annually just 0.6 percent. The city’s unemployment rate in June was up to a seasonally adjusted 5.  read more »

"Jesus Christ, get over it. Transportation costs have gone up across the board for everyone, and every shipper. If you're bitching about $92, I wonder what you'll be saying two years from now when airfare to go anywhere domestic will start at $400, and the trains won't be far behind." ["Amtrak On Its Latest Fare Hike"]

Robert Knakal, chairman of investment sales brokerage Massey Knakal, spells out in a recent interview how rising oil prices are affecting building sales in New York City:

Right now we are seeing, for the fi rst time since drilling began in the 1850’s, prices climbing for 7 consecutive years. When we are underwriting apartment buildings now, we can no longer rely on last year’s fuel bills to forecast next year fuel expense. We are underwriting using today’s price to account for the significant increases we have seen. Not too long ago fuel was $750 per unit and today it can be as much as $2,000 per unit.

The rest of the interview, done through the brokerage, can be found here (PDF). And my colleague Dana Rubinstein sat down with Mr. Knakal in June.

Last week, I griped about Amtrak's latest fare increase, particularly in the Northeast. Amtrak got back to me today in an email. It turns out it's not just in the Northeast; and it is partly due to higher fuel costs. From the email:

On July 8th, we increased the fares on the following routes by 5%. This was done as a result of our recent labor agreements as well as the rising cost of fuel on those routes that are powered by diesel locomotives. Our fares are set by supply and demand so the continued high demand and constrained capacity we are experiencing were also factors in the increase.  read more »

• 5 comments

The Financial Times' Jeremy Lemer parachutes into Long Island City and relays the massive changes in the neighborhood back to the folks in Europe.

Interestingly, he weaves how government actions, particularly zoning changes, helped spur LIC's rapid development:

In 1981 it was zoned as a mixed use district. Then, as now, Romanesque Revival terraced houses stood cheek-by-jowl with factories - home to builders' yards, elevator repair companies and printing shops. ...

Zoning changes have, belatedly, had rapid and far reaching effects. Inland, a 2004 rezoning has transformed the Hunters Point mixed-use area by allowing industrial sites to be converted to residential uses. "The rezoning made a lot of millionaires," says [property broker Andrew] Fine.

I wrote in last week's Observer about how a large rezoning in Williamsburg and Greenpoint spurred not only rapid residential development, but also recent home-price jumps (see chart above).

Decades of so-called white flight from American cities, including New York, are ending, according to a Wall Street Journal article on Saturday by Conor Dougherty. This end has spawned a fresh set of clashes and challenges:

[I]n Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.

The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms.  read more »

• 0 comments

We learned that:

• East Village activists love their pizza when they're protesting gentrification.
• Andre Balazs has a new "Beaver Butler" at his Financial District condo.
• A watchdog group wants Charlie Rangel investigated.
• Len Blavatnik could be the $42.5 million buyer of the Wildenstein mansion.
• Chris Ward's 27-year-old chief of staff makes $168,012 annually.
• The Related Companies promoted the project manager of Moynihan Station.
• New Yorkers need their space in the summer.
• South Brooklyn has accounted for over half of the borough's 2008 home sales.
• Staten Island's North Shore holds a mandolin 'mecca.'
• The City Council mulled seven reforms regarding construction safety.
   read more »
  
  • 0 comments

I was at the Old Town bar on East 18th Street on Thursday evening, when a petite woman with a French accent leaned across the bar to my right and demanded from the bartender: "Two Budweisers for Belgian people!"

She laughed. Her and her friends were tourists from Belgium.

The bartender grinned wryly and said, "It's not very good beer."

Indeed. But that didn't stop InBev from buying Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion earlier this week in history's biggest all-cash deal. America's largest brewer, which the Busch family ran for 150 years, will now be in the hands of a company run by Brazilians and controlled by a few Belgian aristocracts.  read more »

As 2008 home sales tumbled in Brooklyn and Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties' numbers increased, sometimes sharply.

The number of Nassau home sales jumped 60.1 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2008, according to the latest Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman report. Annually, sales were up 5.3 percent.

In Suffolk (not including the North Fork and the Hamptons), sales increased 74.7 percent quarterly and 4.6 percent annually.

Not surprisingly, homes in the two Long Island counties seemed to be selling faster in the second quarter than in recent months. The average number of days it took to sell a Nassau home decreased 8 percent from the first quarter to the second to 115 days--the average at the same time in 2007. In Suffolk, the number of days decreased 10.6 percent quarterly and about 1 percent annually.

The full report, including Queens' numbers, can be found here (PDF).

Mark Yost in the Wall Street Journal this morning has a searing indictment of sports stadia development. He singles out, among a few others, the new Yankee Stadium going up in the South Bronx.

A 1998 report by the New York City Independent Budget Office found no "economic rationale for assuming that building any new stadium would itself spur construction of office towers and hotels. Total output resulting from the presence of the teams in the city amounts to less than one tenth of one percent of the economic activity in New York City." ...

Consider the New York Yankees, who have the highest payroll in baseball and take in more than $300 million a year just from their television network.  read more »

• 0 comments

Home sales in Queens plunged annually from the spring of 2007, according to a new report, joining Brooklyn and Manhattan in steep year-over-year sales slides.

Queens home sales were down 23.7 percent from the second quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2008, to 2,363, according to the report out this week from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. The second quarter sales amount--nearly 3,100--represents, apparently, a quarterly peak since 2004.  read more »

A report earlier this month showed Brooklyn home sales plunging 43.6 percent annually. And, in Manhattan, sales dropped 21.8 percent year over year. The reports tracked deals closed in the quarter ending June 30 (the Manhattan and Brooklyn ones are available

City Room has a Q-and-A thread going on rent-stabilization with housing lawyer Joel E. Abramson. Wonder why.

Barbara Corcoran was on Larry King Live last night as part of a panel on the mortgage mess (transcript here). The founder of the Corcoran Group, now an author and TV personality, couldn't understand why more people weren't now buying homes and quickly:

I think you ought to be out there shopping the market now. You have three times more inventory. Prices have been reduced by over 15 percent in many markets, some markets 66 percent. And there's cheap money still. Why wouldn't you be shopping right now? I can't imagine why people are sitting at home in their La-Z-Boy chairs.

Barely a few minutes later, though, in response to a question about the origins of the mortgage crisis, Ms.  read more »

Director Peter Jackson is the likely buyer of a Tribeca penthouse.

After 19 years on and off the market, 603 Park goes to contract.

Brooke Astor's old butler is on the deed for the Wildenstein mansion sale.

Why Greenpoint and Williamsburg home prices are suddenly so high.

The I.R.S. may stymie Bloomberg's plans for a big Queens project.

Related tries again to bring a theater to 10th Avenue and 42nd Street.

A biochemist will sell two townhouses and start a charity named after a microbe.

What's Manhattan's real office vacancy rate? The shadow knows.

Why changing the city's cabaret law won't lead to a dance club boom.

Can Atlantic City ever be cool in the eyes of younger New Yorkers?

A Bowery dinosaur faces extinction.

In May 2005, the City Council passed a rezoning of 175 blocks of Williamsburg and Greenpoint that The New York Times rightfully called “the last major hurdle to the city’s most ambitious redevelopment effort in decades.” The city designed the rezoning to foster residential development, with incentives to encourage developers to build moderately priced housing.

The land rush was on.

Over the three years since, the state approved thousands of new for-sale housing units for Williamsburg and Greenpoint, mostly market-rate condos. Developers would request permission to build 1,154 new units in 2007 in the two neighborhoods, accounting for more than 20 percent of all Brooklyn requests that year, according to The Real Deal magazine. In 2006, the percentage was similar. Over half of the developments with these new units fell within the rezoning.  read more »

Eating a bagged lunch at your desk? You're not alone. The toughening economy has more Americans brown-bagging it or eating at their companies' cafeterias rather than at restaurants near the office.

And the restaurants are feeling it. From today's Wall Street Journal:

Lisa Hall, owner of Kitchenette, two home-style eateries in New York City, recently added an incentive for frequent patrons: For every 10 sandwiches a customer buys, they get the next one free. The goal is to boost revenue with additional sales. "We can charge an extra 25 to 50 cents, but that doesn't even halfway cover the extra costs we are being charged," she says.

Nick Liuzzi, owner of Samantha's Trattoria in New York City's Battery Park, typically caters to brokers and banker-types. But, as those industries suffer, Mr. Liuzzi estimates that the Italian delicatessen has seen a 15% to 20% drop in lunchtime traffic since last year.

Most of Brooklyn's home sales are happening in South Brooklyn, a slice of the city much less traveled by Manhattanites than the increasingly mirror-image neighborhoods further north.

In the first half of 2008, over 53 percent of Brooklyn home sales closed in South Brooklyn, according to a report (PDF) from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman.

Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that South Brooklyn, unlike its condo-laden neighbors elsewhere, remains awash in houses. "One- to three-family houses account for half the sales in the entire borough," Jonathan Miller, the report's author, pointed out yesterday.

Conservative watchdog the National Legal and Policy Center has called on the Federal Election Commission to investigate Congressman Charles Rangel's rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, including one used as a campaign office.

Release on the FEC complaint here. More on the Rangel imbroglio in The Observer here and here. (Hat tip: Curbed).

Paul Krugman in The New York Times this morning on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

[T]he storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Still:

... Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.

Just when higher gas prices are making air and car travel ever more expensive, the nation's intercity rail carrier has hiked its Northeast corridor fares. Amtrak some day very recently--we're waiting for an email back about the time details--raised its fares between New York's Penn Station and cities from Washington to at least Boston.

The cheapest ticket between Penn and Washington's Union Station is now $72, up from $69 as recently as a couple of weeks ago (full disclosure: I take Amtrak to D.C. at least once a month). The cheapest ticket between Penn and Boston's South Station is now $89, up from $70 or thereabouts only a year ago.  read more »

We learned that:

• The Wimbledon apartment complex on the East Side sold for $150 million.
• Fernando Ferrer has joined the anti-Bloomberg camp at Willets Point.
• Layoffs haven't opened up all that much space in Manhattan offices.
• Williamsburg and Greenpoint home prices have jumped.
• New York's growth rivals that of the Sun Belt cities.
• The city's bought out another business at Willets Point.
• Manhattan and Brooklyn home prices remain quite different.
• There's a lot of political uncertainty over Willets Point.
• A lot of Prospect Heights is close to becoming an historic district.
• Brooklyn home sales dropped like mad in the spring.
• The WTC site stakeholders and the public talked big-time.
• Charlie Rangel has some rent-stabilized apartments, but so what?

Rent stabilization is one of the nation's most successful affordable-housing initiatives since World War II, but it's increasingly harder to defend thanks to the sorts of performances today by Representative Charles Rangel of Harlem.

As The Times' City Room blog notes, Mr. Rangel was recalcitrant, rude and vulgar in his defense of renting four stabilized apartments in Harlem's Lenox Terrace complex at West 135th Street. Here he is responding to a question from Times reporter David Kocieniewski:

“I have decided unilaterally that you have asked more than your share.” He added, when Mr. Kocieniewski tried to press him, “Hell no, I’m not going to respond to you.  read more »

• 2 comments

Hat tip: Politicker.

The Times' Sewell Chan has a run-down on Representative Charles Rangel's public defense today of his four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem. Mr. Rangel, who entered Congress in 1970, a year after the state introduced rent-stabilization in New York City, seems rather flustered by all the attention:

Toward the end of his news conference, Mr. Rangel suggested that it was absurd that he should be criticized, asking rhetorically whether he should place an ad in a newspaper asking, “Is there any place I can get this at a higher price because there’s some crazy reporter who thinks I have a good deal?”

"This is probably why I still can't find an apartment to buy that I can afford - and so I'll just stay in my rent-stabilized walkup that's too cramped, and buy my first home outside of New York as a weekend escape. We make a solid middle class income - north of 75K and south of 100K - and live in Hell's Kitchen. We'd like to buy something, but don't want to commute for more than 30 minutes to the Worldwide Plaza area where we work." ["New York Only Non-Sun Belt City Amid Nation's Fastest-Growing"]

From the Wall Street Journal this morning:

In New York City, foreign buyers now make up about 15% of the market, with Russians the largest contingent, says Hall Willkie, president of real-estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. "A few years ago we didn't see any Russians," Mr. Willkie says. "But now, especially at the high end of the market they are buying big apartments...so they are a significant factor."

The Daily News reports that master marketer Michael Shvo will, for his new Shvo Academy, have eight interns compete this summer to design the first residential property for the moon.

The interns, who come from top schools around the world, will take the project through pre-development research, strategic planning, design, marketing, communication and sales. Then, they will present their project to a panel of real estate experts including Shvo and a scientist from the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

Yes, but can he get Philippe Starck this time around? (Hat tip: Curbed).

Here's a breakdown by Brooklyn region of home sales in the second and first quarters of 2008, and in the second quarter of 2007.

Sales dropped just about everywhere--and by double-digit percentages boroughwide--according to the new statistics from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

The Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman second-quarter Brooklyn market report is now online as a PDF.

Earlier summary here.

Here's a breakdown of Manhattan and Brooklyn housing prices in the second quarter of 2008, according to reports from Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman.

Average sales price

• Manhattan: $1,669,729
• Brooklyn: $588,441

Median sales price

• Manhattan: $1,025,000
• Brooklyn: $525,000

Average condo sales price

• Manhattan: $1,937,090
• Brooklyn: $601,280

Median condo sales price

• Manhattan: $1,267,000
• Brooklyn: $514,725

Average co-op sales price

• Manhattan: $1,280,201
• Brooklyn: $332,250

Median co-op sales price

• Manhattan: $755,000
• Brooklyn: $255,000

New York was the only city outside of the southern United States to make the Census Bureau's annual estimate of the nation's top 10 fastest-growing cities. New York ranked sixth amid a top 10 speckled with familiar Sun Belt names like Phoenix, Atlanta and (somewhat surprisingly) New Orleans.

New York also continued to be the nation's most populous city, gaining an estimated 23,960 people between July 1, 2006 and July 1, 2007, bringing the city's population to 8,274,527 million--more than twice the population of the next biggest city, Los Angeles, and roughly three times the population of Chicago, the nation's third-largest. From 2000 to 2007, New York added about 265,000 residents, more than any other U.  read more »

Home prices in Williamsburg and Greenpoint grew more in the last 12 months than prices in any other Brooklyn area, according to a new report.

The average sales price in the two neighborhoods increased 12.7 percent from the second quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2008 to $663,946; and the average sales price per foot increased 20.3 percent over the same period to $445.

These annual increases were greater than those in other Brooklyn neighborhoods. The Williamsburg-Greenpoint median price also increased annually, though by a relatively small 9 percent.  read more »

The report, an inaugural Brooklyn market report from brokerage

Across the pond, as many as 15,000 real estate brokers could be out of work by the end of 2008, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning. That's roughly 5 percent of the United Kingdom's 300,000 brokers.

The cause? High seller expectations and buyer skittishness. Things aren't as bad in the U.K. as in the U.S., but the psychology of home-hunting, like here, has changed.

Mr. Harrison, a 23-year-old first-time buyer in Liverpool, said he and his partner had viewed 27 properties and considered all but two to be overpriced. They made an offer on one. "It needed £10,000 [$20,000] of work, so we took off £10,000 and [the seller] wasn't very happy. If we don't find [a place to buy] by the end of July, we'll rent for another six months," he said. "It's well worth the wait to save astronomical amounts of money."

The New York Post's Keith J. Kelly speculates aloud on what it means for a Conde Nast magazine to be moved from the headquarters at 4 Times Square to 485 Lexington Avenue, where the publishing empire has auxilary office space:

Last year, House & Garden was shut down just a year after moving its offices into that building. This week it was Golf for Women.

"If any magazine gets moved into here, it probably means they are getting ready to shut down," said one source.

One more title and it's an official trend!

The Bronx cottage where Edgar Allan Poe and his wife lived in the late 1840's is getting its first full restoration, plus a visitors center.

The restoration's slated to start next spring and last a year, during which time the cottage, at 2460 Grand Concourse, will be closed. Construction of the visitors center is already under way, according to The Washington Post. The restoration will cost $250,000, the visitors center $4.2 million.

Poe and his wife Virginia moved to the cottage in 1846 in hopes that being away from the city would help Virginia's tuberculosis. She died there, however, in 1847, and Poe famously checked out two years later on a trip to Baltimore.

The visitors center, according to The Post, will be designed to evoke Poe's "The Raven," with the roof done in an upraised V shape and the shingles on the outside walls gray.

Haim Revah and partners "emerged unscathed in their refinancing of the iconic Lipstick Building, a New York office tower it bought near the top of the market in 2007 for $607 million," the Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

Mr. Revah's Metropolitan Real Estate Investors and partners had a $60 million loan from Goldman Sachs due July 10, tomorrow. The partners were able to refinance, however, and reduce the principal owed the banking giant.

The Lipstick Building, at 885 Third Avenue, is nearly full, the Journal notes, though a small space remains available on the 33rd floor.

* The Observer isn't publishing a print edition this week. These stories were in the paper's double issue out last Wednesday, July 2.

Mega-broker Larry Kaiser talks about the indominability of higher-end Manhattan.

A $47.5 million co-op listing at 1030 Fifth Avenue could lead to a new city record.

The Met's Philippe de Montebello sells and buys near the famed museum.

Sociologist Andrew Beveridge sees the city getting older, whiter and more stratefied.

Manhattan's luxury apartment market appears to have peaked.

The Port Authority's Chris Ward begins his uphill climb at Ground Zero.

With Joe Bruno's Senate exit, tenant advocates hope for real estate wins.

The Syms family is secretly amassing a sweet property deal downtown, shareholders say.

Commercial brokers turn uncharacteristically candid about the market's dismal state.

The Carlyle Group takes a $525 million bite out of 666 Fifth's retail.

What Florent Morellet's Meatpacking exit means for the district.

The Real Estate will be posting sporadically from Wednesday, July 2, through Tuesday, July 8. We're back in full July 9. Happy Fourth!

Location: The theme that unites the Mayor’s 2030 PlaNYC is that the city will grow by about one million people in the next 25 years. Do you agree?

Mr. Beveridge: It’s an interesting thing because the way they framed it was that it’s inevitable that the city’s going to grow that much. … If you take a look at it, that isn’t that much growth, percentage-wise, since they have it over 30 years.

So what happens in 20 years? How big is the city?

It will be bigger. Unless something bad happens! Then it will be smaller.  read more »

Luxury apartment prices dropped in Manhattan in the second quarter of 2008, and sales were down in the first six months of the year compared to the two six-month periods immediately before. The end of an era in Manhattan luxury?

Not bloody likely. There are at least four apartments on the market in 15 Central Park West for $80 million or more, according to various sources and scuttlebutt, including one “quietly” asking $150 million (the city’s biggest listing ever), according to Douglas Elliman mega-broker Dolly Lenz. That’s just one example of the particularly heated luxury market that has seemed all these years, even during the hottest times of the hottest housing market, rather rarefied and detached.  read more »

Over $13.8 billion in Manhattan investment sales closed or went under contract in the first six months of 2008, a precipitous drop from the $34 billion in sales volume done in the first six months last year. Nearly half of this 2008 volume came via foreign investors.

The numbers come from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield's latest quarterly Manhattan market report, released this morning during a breakfast at Midtown power eatery Michael's.

The dismal investment sales numbers--which cover building, property and portfolio sales--aren't a surprise, really. Nor is the increase in the amount of foreign investment (it accounted for maybe 12 to 15 percent of investment sales in previous six-month periods).  read more »

OoooooK. A backlash has apparently bubbled forth against Starbucks' new Pike Place Roast, a smoother blend that the coffee giant unveiled in April. The Wall Street Journal this morning reports that regular Starbucks addicts are the ones none too pleased with the blend and they're taking to the blogs!

Much of that debate is taking place on the company's customer-feedback Web site, which the chain launched in March. The site is littered with thumbs-down verdicts on the new roast. ...

A customer with the handle Westend complained in a posting on the site that the flavor of Pike Place Roast is "weak, watery and no substitute for the bold." Another, ArtM, called the coffee "a fundamental, grievous error." Beccajav derided its finish as "reminiscent of a taste from the dentist's office."

Office market vacancy rates are up significantly over last spring in Manhattan, according to a new report from brokerage Colliers ABR. The increases seem, at first, incremental; but they're actually quite significant for a market that last year had gotten used to month after month and quarter after quarter of steady vacancy rate drops as tenants leased more space at ever higher rents.

The vacancy rate for Midtown, for instance, the borough's top office submarket, increased from 6.4 percent in June 2007 to 8.2 percent this June. The vacancy rate for top-shelf, Class A towers in Midtown increased to 7.4 percent in June from 5.  read more »

Jonathan Miller's Matrix blog alerted us to Gallup polling out last week on how Americans view the economy. It turns out that their annual income may have a lot to do with shaping that view (see above graph).

Basically, as Gallup notes, the more you make, the more optimistic you are right now. The less you make, the more pessimistic.

[I]t is not surprising that upper-income Americans are also generally less likely to rate the economy as "poor." For example, during the week of June 16-22, 40% of those making at least $90,000 a year gave this rating. "Poor" ratings were proportionally higher among those making $60,000 to less than $90,000 (42%), $24,000 to less than $60,000 (47%), and less than $24,000 a year (56%).  read more »

• 2 comments

The publisher of relentlessly cheery Sunday magazine Parade signed a 10-year lease renewal for 89,413 square feet of space at SL Green's 711 Third Avenue. The publisher occupies the entire sixth floor and parts of the seventh and 15th floors in the 20-story building at 44th street. The asking rent, according to brokerage CB Richard Ellis, which represented Parade on the deal, was $65 a square foot, about average for the area.

Gregory Tosko, Mary Ann Tighe and Ramneek Rikhy of CBRE represented Parade. SL Green handled the renewal in-house.

Release below:

CB RICHARD ELLIS ARRANGES 89,413-SQUARE-FOOT

PARADE PUBLICATIONS LEASE RENEWAL

New York, NY – June 30, 2008 – CB Richard Ellis announced today that it arranged a 10-year, 89,413-square-foot lease renewal at 711 Third Avenue on behalf of Parade Publications, Inc.  read more »

We read with glee and expectation the Sunday Times article by Vivian S. Toy on landlords in higher-end apartment buildings offering incentives to prospective tenants. Could it really be happening? Could free rent and paid-off broker fees finally be the ascendant norm?!?

We counted five specific examples in the article of buildings where landlords were offering incentives, and then there was this one line:

Mr. Malin said a recent Citi Habitats search found about 70 buildings offering incentives. The owners of these buildings, he said, “are doing what they can to make their property stand out from another property across the street.”

That's 70 buildings among hundreds. That's not that much. But that's certainly something.

Does anyone know of any specific buildings offering tenant incentives?

We learned that:

• Red Hookers were largely indifferent to Ikea's opening.
• George Carlin lost his virginity on West 121st Street.
• Richard Brodsky blames the city for holding up a public authorities bill.
• Winona Ryder got $2.2 million for her Gramercy co-op.
• The M.T.A. wants to delay some capital projects.
• Brooklyn parenting isn't all bad.
• The sign 'will live' at the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg.
• The economic downturn has hit panhandlers hard.
• Former M.T.A. board members will no longer get free E-ZPasses.
• There will be no bedbugs in the new Trump Dubai.
• Manhattan apartment rents dropped a bit in June.
• Cipriani and Tavern on the Green have no fear of the future.
   read more »