The 234 Apartment

Home-sharing services such as Airbnb are great for homeowners looking to make extra money by renting out properties, but for people living in apartment buildings it’s a bit more tricky. Apartment construction has been booming in recent years. Now, a handful of startups are aiming to wring even more money out of that market, both for the building owners and tenants. “Right now, it’s the wild, Wild West when it comes to short-term rentals,” said Sean Conway, the CEO of Pillow Residential, a company which is trying to make it easier to rent apartments on Airbnb. Most big apartment buildings have rules barring Airbnb , so Conway asked property owners what it would take to change that. “And they told us transparency, control, and profit sharing,” Conway said. Pillow, which is now in 12 cities, lets building owners track and control how much tenants use Airbnb. It also gives building owners a cut of the profits — between 5 and 15 percent. Conway said it’s also a way to for tenants to ...

WITH the median price of an apartment in Manhattan topping $1,000 a square foot, homeownership is often far out of reach. But there are options for those who cannot afford the market rate, including co-op apartments for buyers who earn a certain percentage of the area median income , or A.M.I. These buildings are scattered all over the city. Some date to the 1950s; others are brand-new and still looking for buyers. Some are limited to those who earn less than the median income -- 60 or 80 percent, for example (the median for a family of four in New York City is $83,000). Others have apartments for those earning a bit more than that sum. Many new developments try to bring in owners from different economic backgrounds, and are likely to include market-rate units as well. At one recent development, Atlantic Terrace, near the new Nets arena in Brooklyn, similar one-bedroom apartments were priced at $85,000, $113,000 and $232,000, depending on the buyer's income. A market-rate one-be...

When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City in 2014, he made no secret of his intent to place affordable housing at the center of his term. Not long after his election, he rolled out his Housing New York plan–a 10-year strategy to build or preserve around 200,000 affordable units across the city’s five boroughs. advertisement Affordable, when it comes to housing in New York, is a slippery term. Critics of de Blasio’s plan have pointed out that the majority of the units built or converted under Housing New York remain out of reach of low-income New Yorkers–those earning less than $43,000 per year. And while the plan has succeeded making a nearly 100,000 unit dent in the city’s 550,000 affordable-unit shortfall, the terms of the new unit’s affordability are ephemeral: The majority of the units created and preserved under the mayor’s plan are only regulated temporarily, often for as little as two decades. There is no guarantee that a unit designated as affordable today will remain...

As rents climb across the U.S., more people are being driven into homelessness. In some of the country’s hottest housing markets , rent increases have a strong connection with upticks in the homeless population , according to a study released this week from real- estate website Zillow . In New York City, a 5% rent hike would lead to nearly 3,000 more people becoming homeless. In Los Angeles, the same increase in rent would leave around 2,000 people without a place to live. To produce the report, Zillow created a model that analyzed different variables, including how population growth and changes in rent affect the homelessness rate. The model also considered the accuracy of homeless counts. Zillow then passed Census population figures , homelessness counts and its own rental data through the model to determine the relationship between rental prices and homelessness in different cities. The Census population numbers also take into account people who move in or out of a city, inclu...

Less than a week into Cheyenne’s 151st year, the City Council has another chance Monday night to shape its future. What do we want to be? An open, welcoming community that embraces all people, regardless of socioeconomic status, and invites them to live wherever they choose? Or a city that forces people below a certain income level to live primarily in a certain part of town? The right choice should be obvious: Avoid any hint of discrimination and grant final approval to the rezoning application for a proposed low- and middle- income apartment complex in north Cheyenne. In doing so, our elected leaders would reject the specious arguments of a group of residents who live near a planned 72- unit complex east of Converse Avenue and south of Storey Boulevard. These homeowners maintain that allowing the apartments in this location would decrease their property values and somehow keep their neighborhood from “flourishing.” We understand the basic urge to protect what’s rightfully yours –...

A housing project in Qingdao, Shandong province. [Photo/VCG] President Xi Jinping has said "houses are built to be lived in, not for speculation". In this context, the pilot for joint property rights housing implemented by Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban Rural Development is an important move to cool down the heated housing market in the capital. According to a document, the government and the homebuyers will jointly own the policy- based housing units , with the government granting the buyers the right to use the property. Since the Beijing municipal government will provide policy support for the construction of joint property rights housing , the price of such housing units will be lower than commercial property in the same neighborhood. However, the homebuyers' right to use the property will be partly restricted. Different from economically affordable housing , joint property rights housing is a kind of limited property rights housing , becau...

federal loans withdrew from Georgia’s public colleges and universities between 2013 and 2015. Photo by bearsky23/via Adobe" width="689" height="402" class="size-large wp-image-225431" /> More than 108,000 students who had taken out federal loans withdrew from Georgia’s public colleges and universities between 2013 and 2015. Photo by bearsky23/via Adobe ATLANTA – Alduha Leon and Jared Sanders, roommates at Savannah State University , dined on hot dogs in their apartment on Thanksgiving Day of their sophomore year. They had decided to skip feasting with family in Atlanta to pick up extra hours at their airport jobs loading luggage onto planes. Payday wasn’t until Friday, though, and Leon only had $5 left on his food stamps card . During the three years they spent at Savannah State , Sanders and Leon struggled to pay their tuition, fees and living expenses. They accumulated more than $50,000 in loans between the two of them, despite working up t...

Two Tulsa apartment complexes have been purchased by separate investors for more than $16 million. The properties include Canyon Creek Apartments at 2102 E. 51st St. and Foxfire Apartments at 7324 S. Wheeling Ave., Tulsa County land records indicate. The 384- unit Canyon Creek Apartments was purchased for $9.6 million in a joint venture by Investors Properties Services of Irvine, Calif., and Oro Capital Advisors of Los Angeles. Michael Chesser, president of apartment income investors for IPS, said the company was attracted to Canyon Creek because Tulsa made a favorable impression. "We own properties all over the country, and we're interested in Tulsa because of its stability and the favorable economic conditions there," he said. In fact, Chesser said the company will close on the purchases of four more Tulsa apartment properties this spring. Although Canyon Creek's occupancy has suffered somewhat from the construction on Interstate 44 near Lewis Avenue...

Along Florida's Turnpike in South Miami -Dade, where potato farms and fields of row crops stretched all the way to the visible horizon at the time when Hurricane Andrew struck , it’s virtually all rows of close-packed houses and townhomes today. Now the unavoidable noise walls are going up to forever block vistas once among the most beguiling in South Florida. Along South Dixie Highway , where scraggly lots, small farm fields and vegetable- and fruit-packing houses once mixed it up with used-car lots and budget motels, the landscape is a cornucopia of strip malls, Publix and Wal-Mart stores and fast- food chain restaurants . And everywhere there is traffic, backed up one way in the morning, when three-quarters of all employed adults in South Miami - Dade head north to downtown Miami , Coral Gables or even Doral to work, and the other way when they drive back home in the evening. Lightning struck as thunderstorms swept through the ruins of Homestead in the days after Hurricane...