Week 5

Hello everyone, welcome back to my senior project blog! This week for my senior project I continued my onsite placement, researched, and began writing my final paper.

At my onsite placement, I had the chance to speak with members of the firm about Governor Hochul’s new housing bill that just passed over the weekend. This bill introduced adjustments to tenant protections, office-residential conversions, and renovation rules. This new bill has large implications for the revitalization of Midtown South due to its alterations of policies used to carry out the efforts. The highlights of the bill include the new 485x tax incentive and the lifting of the 12 FAR cap in rezoned areas. With these changes developers in Midtown South will be able to build upon their pre-existing properties. These new changes will benefit developers allowing them to create more units and do so cheaper. While this creates opportunity, an issue is that the base renovations for rezoning are very expensive for certain properties making the projected figure for units created an overestimate presenting a less optimistic view of the project’s magnitude. To gain an estimate of how many buildings could take advantage of I plan to tour through the area planned for rezoning with my onsite advisor. Additionally, this week I began to write my paper beginning with the introduction and abstract.

Thank you for your time.