The Department of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development have announced modest but real progress in the effort to house homeless veterans. A count of people living in shelters and on the street in 400 communities on one night in January found 12 percent fewer veterans than at the same time last year — 67,495, compared with 76,329 in 2010. The percentage of homeless veterans living in shelters and transitional housing was also slightly better, up by 2 percent.
Read More…
[Source: NYTimes]
Arrangements whereby custodians, porters and other types of employees occupy apartments at buildings where they perform services are legal, indeed common. Buildings and management must take heed that appropriate tax filings are performed, particularly in case in which occupancy comprises all or part of the compensation package afforded to employees who perform services for the building. What happens, however, when the services cease because, for example, the employees is terminated, resigns or passes away? Can you evict the former employee?
The answer to the question above depends in large part upon the nature of the relationship between the occupancy and the employment. If the occupancy is incidental to the employment, then there is no landlord-tenant relationship and the occupancy ends upon termination of employment. In this case, the owner or managing agent may pursue eviction if the former employee does not vacate voluntarily. In contrast, if a landlord-tenant relationship exists independently of employment, then absent other causes, the employee is entitled to remain in possession despite termination of employment.
How does an owner or managing agent know whether the former employee must vacate or not? Courts have looked to the following factors, among others:
Did the employee occupy the apartment before his or her employment commenced?
Does the occupancy constitute part of the employee’s compensation package, or is rent deducted from the employee’s payroll?
Did the parties agree that occupancy ends upon the termination of employment?
In addition, many who serve and reside in buildings are employees of the managing agents. If such employees may they nevertheless retain their apartments at the building itself? The answer is not so clear given mixed conflicting precedent from the Courts.
Regaining possession of the apartment is also subject to whether termination of the employee is legal. A discharged employee may pursue a grievance with his or her union, or commence litigation based upon allegations of employment discrimination or other types of wrongful discharge. Such proceedings will suspend efforts to evict the employee. An employee who is ultimately found to have been wrongfully terminated will likely be able to retain employment and retain possession of his or her apartment.
The foregoing presents just the basic questions management and boards of directors must consider in treating building employees. With over twenty years in landlord and tenant, employment and labor and various other types of commercial litigation, attorneys at Goldstein Hall PLLC are fully equipped to provide you advice and counsel and, if need be, representation in litigation should the need arise. We invite you to call upon us.
Written by: Philip J. Onorato, Member
With green building as one of the most important current trends in housing construction, developers have begun experimenting with the concept of a zero-energy dwelling, known as a “passive house.” The passive house concept originated in Europe and has only recently begun to be used in the United States. Houses designed to be passive houses utilize a system of interior and exterior air exchange, an airtight building envelope and energy-saving appliances to reduce energy needs to one quarter of the amount of energy needed for traditional houses. The passive house design uses an energy recovery ventilator or, ERV, a ventilation system that takes warm air from inside, traps its heat on special membranes, and then uses this heat to warm air from the outside. Passive houses are designed with thicker walls and triple paned windows to prevent the escape of hot air in the winter and cool air in the summer.
While currently passive house construction is estimated to be 10-15% more expensive than equivalent, traditional construction, that cost is offset by the sharply reduced energy costs. Additionally, the cost of passive house construction is expected to fall as building techniques become more efficient and components begin to be manufactured in the United States.
By Matthew Pisciotta, Law Clerk
A community benefits agreement between the residents of Harlem and Columbia University was supposed to be a major asset for the community; instead, it has served to highlight the all-too-common problems that arise in agreements between developers and neighborhood coalitions. The CBA, agreed to as part of Columbia’s recent expansion, contained a benefit package valued at $150 million, including a $76 million “benefits fund” to be distributed over 16 years. However, the nonprofit corporation set up to administer the bulk of the benefits still has no office, website, or staff, resulting in nearly $3 million in Columbia donated funds left unspent. Columbia has directed funds to pay for an agreement compliance officer and a tenants attorney to advise residents on evictions, but these positions remain unfilled nearly 2 ½ years after the agreement.
Matthew Schommer, Law Clerk
To find subsidized housing for a largely Polish clientele, the North Brooklyn Development Corporation’s office secretary scours her newspaper daily for three-inch advertisements announcing new, “affordable” housing developments.
Another employee clips ads from the free daily distributed at his subway stop. A tenant organizer sometimes consults online listings published by city and state housing agencies, but staffers have found those entries often are outdated and incomplete.
“You have to be constantly looking for available units, but we just don’t have the time or resources,” said Filip Stabrowski, a tenant organizer at the Greenpoint nonprofit. “A lot of the time, it winds up coming down to word of mouth.”
In the 21st Century, word of mouth is not how New Yorkers typically meet basic needs. The city has modernized many of its functions, building online systems for reporting potholes, appealing parking tickets and tracking the performance of police precincts and local schools. But even as the city undertakes a major expansion of its subsidized housing stock, the process of finding and applying for those apartments has become so haphazard and mysterious that many New Yorkers don’t even know where to start. Others are defeated by the complexity of the system.
NYCity News Service: Read More…
Bronx Park East opened last year opposite the New York Botanical Garden. It consists of a five-story brick pavilion with triple-height windows facing the street, and a seven-story wing for 68 small studio apartments. “A good neighbor,” is how its designer, Jonathan Kirschenfeld, described the building’s look. [Read More...]
A new database created by the Furman Center at NYU allows individuals to identify and track almost all of the privately held subsidized housing in New York City. The database consolidates extensive information about more than 304,800 affordable rental and coop units, providing valuable information that was previously unavailable in a single location. Vicki Been, the director of the Furman Center, created the database so that city officials and advocates could identify buildings whose affordability restrictions are expiring and plan ahead to preserve this housing. Already, the center has identified 227 properties throughout the city that are at risk of expiring out of affordability programs by the end of 2015.
Matthew Schommer, Law Clerk
Parking lots are emerging as a new hotspot for the installation of photovoltaic solar panels. Parking lots tend to have a larger footprint than building roofs which maximizes the size of the panel system. Systems can be installed 12-20 feet off the ground and provide the extra benefit of shading cars parked underneath and serving as a symbol of commitment to renewable energy sources. The real benefit, however, is that photovoltaic systems can produce enough energy to substantially reduce energy costs on a project. One solar installation company predicts that a solar system can bring up to a 10-15% return on investment, and recent large scale installations have successfully produced 15-20% of the electricity needed to power a project.
Thus far, large scale solar installations have been concentrated in California and New Jersey, but the trend seems likely to spread as more and more property owners discover solar power’s unique ability to transform underutilized space into an efficient way to reduce overhead.
By Matthew Pisciotta, Law Clerk
Enterprise Community Partners
and the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development present:
Construction Contracts:
Understanding the Big Picture and the Fine Print
A well-written construction contract is the best protection against time-consuming and costly construction claims and dispute resolution. Your construction projects can often succeed or fail based on the terms and conditions in the contract.
This training will help you better understand and evaluate the risks associated with terms and conditions in a standard fixed price contract. Learn how to protect the assets of your company, and how to negotiate a fair and balanced contract. Discussion topics will include change orders, downward adjustments, tax credit compliance and the role of the architect.
DATE: Thursday, November 17
TIME: 9:00-11:00 AM
LOCATION: Enterprise Community Partners
1 Whitehall Street, 11th floor, NYC
PRESENTERS:
Leo Baez, Director of Construction Management, Enterprise Community Partners
Heather Gershen, Senior Property Manager, Fifth Avenue Committee
Jennifer Redmond, of Counsel, Goldstein Hall PLLC
MODERATOR:
David Goldstein, Principal, Goldstein Hall PLLC
Please RSVP to Edeana Martinez at the Network: emartinez@shnny.org
Not-for-profit corporations play an essential and integral role in providing a vast variety of social services in the State of New York. These organizations afford opportunity to those in need of medical care, affordable and supportive housing and substance abuse treatment among other services. Such organizations depend wholly or in large part upon public funds in the form of grants, tax credits and other similar mechanisms. Such resources are indeed scarce, particularly in the current economic climate. Therefore, many individuals who serve in such organizations do so in return for compensation that is generally below that which they may receive in the private sector.
The not-for-profit model is, however, vulnerable to abuse. A recent article by the New York Times reported that two managers of a New York based not-for-profit organization each received close to $1 million in annual compensation. They also used the organization’s resources to fund their children’s’ education. FN. In light of such abuse, and concern for the protection of public resources, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced in August his creation of a new task force to investigate compensation levels and compensation practices at not-for-profit corporations that rely on taxpayer resources for their operation: “Not-for-profits that provide services to the poor and the needy have a special obligation to the taxpayers that support them”.
Among the first efforts by the Task Force is the issuance of a 5-page letter addressed and forwarded to the Boards of Directors of approximately 600 not-for-profit organizations. Following a brief, one paragraph introduction, the letter sets forth the Task Force’s request for the production of information relating to the organization’s compensation levels and policies in general and, in particular, information relating to management and board members who receive in excess of $100,000 annually. The demand seeks information that goes beyond the scope of information required by the form 990 that is filed by not-for-profit organizations with the office of the Attorney General each year. It is also interesting to note that the letter is addressed to Boards of Directors, as opposed to financial officers and other managers who devise and administer the organization’s compensation practice. By doing so, the Task Force seeks to elicit greater attention from Boards, and to avoid the potential for conflict inherent in seeking information from those who stand to benefit from it. The letter does not provide for sanctions or other consequences that an organization may suffer should it fail to comply. Nor does the letter specify whether information regarding the organization’s response or failure to respond may be reported to other, funding and regulatory, agencies that influence the organization’s operation.
Predictably, the Task Force and its mission are not without their detractors. Adam Kirkman, director of technical assistance for CARES, Inc., a not-for-profit organization that assists people in locating affordable housing, disagrees with the timing of a task force in this economic climate. He is quoted as saying: “It seemed like a slap in the face to agencies that are doing difficult and important work”. Despite such sentiment, the work of the Task Force is well under way. The first round of letters, approximately 600, were addressed primarily to not-for-profits, large and small, that offer health and welfare services. In the event of a subsequent round of inquiries, the scope of inquiry may indeed expand to other areas such as the affordable and supportive housing industries, among others. Given the sensitive and technical nature of the inquiry, and the potential consequences for failing to properly reply, it is advisable for organizations that receive the notices to consult with their legal counsel to assure complete full cooperation and compliance.
1. New York Times, August 25, 2011
Written by: Philip J. Onorato, Member