Tag Archives: Westchester

Can NYS Rename Trump State Park?

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photo by Jeffrey Putman

Politifact quoted me in Can New York State Rename Donald J. Trump State Park? It reads,

Even after officially decamping for Palm Beach, Fla., former President Donald Trump has continued to stir emotions in his previous home state of New York.

New York Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, a Democrat, said she believes a park currently named for Trump north of New York City should be renamed. Trump donated the land for the park, and it was agreed at the time it would be named after him.

In a Jan. 14 letter to Erik Kulleseid, the Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Commissioner in New York, Galef wrote, “It is my understanding that Mr. Trump did not sign the appropriate documents with the state, rendering any claim of breach of contract moot. We can and should rename the park.”

In an interview, Galef added that the park “really hasn’t been fixed up” and that efforts to do so would be hobbled by having Trump’s name on it. Galef said she believes the park should instead be named after former New York Gov. George Pataki, a Republican.

“Around this area, when you have ‘Trump’ on the name of something, it doesn’t go over very well,” Galef said. “My concern is that people aren’t going to want to put money into Trump Park, whether it’s state dollars or any private dollars.”

Galef has support in her quest to rename the park: On Feb. 11, a bill advanced in the Assembly to continue talks on renaming the park.

But the former president may pursue litigation against the state if the Parks Department decides to rename the park, a Trump spokesman said.

“Despite the fact that the state has done a horrible job running and maintaining the park in question, an utter disgrace to such incredible land and a generous donation, the conditions of this gift, formally documented and accepted by the state of New York, could not be clearer: the park must bear Trump’s name,” Trump’s office said in a statement. “This would be breaching its agreement by removing Trump’s name, and Trump will take whatever legal action that may be necessary to fully enforce his rights under this agreement.”

Is Galef right that New York state could change the name without too much difficulty? The answer isn’t clear enough for us to render a Truth-O-Meter verdict. But we decided to take a look at the issue and explain what we found.

How the park came to be

Donald J. Trump State Park sits on the border of Putnam and Westchester counties along the Taconic Parkway. Trump gave the land to New York State in 2006 after the former president failed in building a golf course on it.

The land deed for the property does not include any naming provisions, but the state named the park after Trump based on a letter of agreement between the Parks Department and Trump’s lawyers.

The letter outlined several terms, one of which is the following: “Each of the properties will bear a name which includes Mr. Trump’s name, in acknowledgment of these gifts. The name will be prominently displayed at least at each entrance to each property.”

The letter includes signatures by Trump’s lawyers and by Trump himself, and it was “acknowledged and accepted” by James Sponable, who was then the Parks Department’s director of real property.

The New York State Attorney General’s office referred questions about the park’s possible renaming to the Parks Department. The Parks Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But legal experts say it isn’t clear how ironclad the terms in the letter are.

“The land is called a gift, so this seems to be memorializing the terms of a gift,” David Reiss, a real estate law specialist at Brooklyn Law School, told PolitiFact. “So, one question is, ‘What’s the enforceability of this letter?’ It’s not obvious to me that this would be analyzed as a contractual dispute.”

Reiss said because the letter does not clearly state that it is a binding contract, it is unclear how a court would treat it if the state were to rename the park and Trump legally challenged it.

“The letter says, ‘We have this understanding,’ but it doesn’t say what would happen if the understanding isn’t held to,” Reiss said. “It doesn’t say what would happen if, at some later time, it changed. There is no promise that the naming would be perpetual. So it’s unclear what Trump’s rights would be to enforce this based on the language of this document.”

Ultimately, Reiss said, “the one sure thing is there could be a lot of litigation about these issues, if the parties chose to litigate.”

A possible plan B

As an alternative, Galef said Trump’s name could be removed from a sign on the Taconic Parkway, which is the most common way for motorists to see it. The letter “doesn’t say you have to have a sign on the Taconic Parkway, … That could come down,” Galef said in the interview.

Reiss, the legal expert, agreed with Galef’s interpretation and said that it might be a feasible option.

“The sign on the Taconic is not the entrance of the park, so you could comply with the letter and still take that sign down,” he said. “It might be confusing to people if you say, ‘Unnamed State Park, next right,” but if you stuck to the black letter of this letter, you could say, ‘Right at the entrance of the park is where we’re going to put the sign, but nowhere before.’”

Homeownership in NYC

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photo by Nathan Hart

Brooklyn’s Charles Millard Pratt House

NYU’s Furman Center and Citi have released their joint Report on Homeownership & Opportunity in New York City. It opens,

In New York City, the notoriously high costs of rental housing are well documented. But becoming a homeowner in the New York City real estate market is also a considerable challenge for low- to middle-income households. Households earning less than $114,000 face a severely constrained supply of homeownership opportunities in New York City.

This report seeks to shed light on the extreme variation in homeownership rates among New Yorkers and quantify the homeownership options that exist at different income levels. We do this by analyzing 2014 home sales prices and examining the potential purchasing power of households at various income levels in New York City, as well as in the nearby counties of Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester.

We use five income categories for this analysis—Low-Income, Moderate-Income, Middle-Income, NYC-Middle-Income, and High-Income. These income bands are based on percentages of Area Median Family Income (AMFI) for the New York City metropolitan statistical area established by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) and are based on data from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey. This report includes an additional middle-income band (NYC-Middle-Income), given that affordable housing programs in New York City serve households up to 165 percent of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) area median income (AMI). (3)

You’re all wondering, of course, what NYC-Middle Income is, so the report provides the following explanation of the income categories:

“Low-Income” households have an annual income of $34,000 or less, or 50 percent of AMFI;

“Moderate-Income” households have an annual income between $34,001-$55,000, or 50 percent to less than 80 percent of AMFI;

“Middle-Income” households have an annual income of $55,001-$83,000, or 80 percent to less than 120 percent of AMFI;

“NYC-Middle-Income” households have an annual income of $83,001-$114,000, or 120 percent to less than 165 of AMFI; and

“High-Income” households have an annual income above $114,001, or 165 percent of AMFI or greater. (3, emphasis added)

The report finds that

the purchasing power of most New York City households is limited, largely due to growing housing prices and stagnating incomes since 1990. In addition, while New York City had a relatively low share of homeowners compared to the U.S. in 2014, it was disproportionately low for Low-Income and Moderate-Income households relative to their U.S. counterparts.

The vast majority of home sales in New York City in 2014 were at prices unaffordable to Low-Income and Moderate-Income households, which comprised 51 percent of New York City households. Of the nine percent of sales in the city affordable to these households, three percent were affordable to Low-Income households and an additional six percent were affordable to Moderate-Income households. Home sales with prices that were affordable to Low-Income and Moderate-Income households in 2014 were, for the most part, concentrated outside of Manhattan.

Prospects for homeownership were not much better for Middle-Income households. In 2014, Middle-Income households, which comprise 15 percent of New York City households, could afford an additional 13 percent of sales (based on a total purchase price of up to $364,000), leaving 78 percent of sales out of reach for households with incomes of less than $83,000 annually. Less than half of sales in 2014 (42%) were affordable to 77 percent of New York households, including those characterized as NYC-Middle-Income.

Moving outside of New York City does not necessarily improve a New York City household’s potential to buy a home. In Westchester County, only two percent of sales were affordable to New York City Low-Income and Moderate-Income homebuyers combined in 2014. In Nassau County, only 24 percent of sales were affordable to New York City Low-Income, Moderate-Income, and Middle-Income homebuyers in 2014. In Suffolk County, 42 percent of sales were affordable to New York City Low-Income, Moderate-Income, and Middle-Income households. (4)

New Yorkers, and a lot of non-New Yorkers, are going to eat up the graphs in this report (what IS the median sales price in Brooklyn?!?), so it is worth a read for the real estate obsessed (yes, you). But it also has policy implications about the housing stock of the City and the surrounding region. The report itself does not make any policy recommendations, but it offers a stark reminder of how important rental housing policy is to any effort to maintain socio-economic diversity in the City.

 

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnthony22 at English Wikipedia [GFDL (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling in Westchester v. HUD, No. 15-2294 (Sept. 25, 2015) the longstanding case regarding whether Westchester County has “adequately analyzed — in its applications for HUD funds — impediments to fair housing within the County’s jurisdictions.” (3) The Second Circuit affirmed the District Court’s judgment in favor of HUD, which means that HUD’s withholding of funds under the Community Planning and Development (CPD) Formula Grant Programs stands.

HUD withheld those funds because it found that the County had failed to “assess the impediments to fair housing choice caused by local zoning ordinances or to identify actions the County would take to overcome these impediments.” (6) HUD further found, as a result that the County would not “affirmatively further fair housing” as required by the Fair Housing Act. (6)

The case resolved a narrow, legalistic question:

May HUD require a jurisdiction that applies for CPD funding to analyze whether local zoning laws will impede the jurisdiction’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing”? Because HUD may impose such a requirement on jurisdictions that apply for CPD funds, and because the decision to withhold Westchester County’s CPD funds in this case was not arbitrary or capricious, we conclude that HUD’s action complied with federal law. (50)

While the case was decided on narrow grounds, the Court does notes that

The broader dispute between the County and HUD implicates many “big‐picture” questions. Beyond prohibiting direct discrimination based on race or other protected categories, what must a jurisdiction do to “affirmatively further fair housing”? What is the difference, if any, between furthering “fair” housing and furthering “affordable” housing? How much control may HUD exert over local policies, which, in its view, impede the creation of “fair” or “affordable” housing? And if conflicts of this sort between HUD and local governments are to be avoided, is the simplest solution to avoid applying for federal funds in the first place? (32)

These are all very good questions and it is unfortunate that this case does not help to answer any of them. The level of segregation in the United States by race has been a tragedy for many, many decades and we are no closer to figuring out how to deal with it after all these years.