On a recent spring day, Prospect Lefferts Gardens shook with such force that some neighbors believed there was an earthquake, they said. The bricks of a co-op building in the Brooklyn neighborhood broke off and crashed into the courtyard, and new cracks wormed their way into some residents’ homes. 

“It’s as if a train were running through the house,” said Dean Foster, 75, who lives on Rutland Road and Bedford Avenue. 

It was not an earthquake but vibrations from a pile driver digging steel beams into the soil at 1935 Bedford Ave. without proper safety monitors in place to protect the surrounding homes, according to city records and a Department of Buildings spokesperson.

Pile driving involves using a heavy-duty machine to force beams into the earth to create a stable foundation for a future structure, causing intense vibrations to travel from the source of the driving. 

“If we opened the cabinet door in the kitchen, the glassware would have fallen out,” Foster said in his home, located two blocks from the construction site.

Nestled between historic houses and two 90-year-old co-op buildings, the lot has become the site of a bitter battle between its newest owners and neighbors, whose homes have been damaged and lives disrupted during heavy construction, according to photos and videos reviewed by THE CITY.

Bobby McCullough, 42, began contacting 311 with complaints of cracks in their apartment building when construction ramped up in the first week of May, service requests show. 

“That was the first time I was fearful for my immediate safety,” McCullough said. “The building was shaking at a level that I was concerned about something falling, not off the shelf, but like a part of the ceiling.” 

Suzanne Cooke, who has lived in the co-op building for 13 years, said her daughter works late nights and has been disturbed by the construction while she sleeps during the day. 

“It’s startled her and woke her out of her sleep,” Cooke said. “There’s items in our space that fell off shelves.” 

McCullough said they were standing in the courtyard of the co-op as bricks from the adjacent building broke off and crashed to the ground. They were on the phone with a city building employee when it happened, who instructed them to call 911 immediately. 

Firefighters responded to the scene for bricks falling from the co-op building, according to a fire department spokesperson. Firefighters told the contractors to stop pile driving, but they did not listen, McCullough and other residents said.

“Ten minutes after they left, work continued,” McCullough told THE CITY. 

History of Violations

The entity Bedford 1935 Daf LLC, owned by Yonit Tzadok, purchased the lot on Feb. 28, 2025, according to property records, becoming the site’s third owner in nine years. A partner to the owner, Izchak Naftalin, filed permits to build a 10-story building on the lot in July 2025, according to records and media reports. Neither Tzadok nor Naftalin responded to inquiries from THE CITY. 

The current owners have paid $16,000 to the city in fines since January for various infractions, including failure to maintain a safe job site, failing to obtain proper permits and violating a stop work order, according to building department records. 

On May 5 the city issued Lead It Builders LLC, another contractor on site, a violation with a $5,000 fine for pile driving without safety monitoring devices, which is pending. 

Past development attempts on the lot have failed in recent years, and it has a history of unauthorized demolition work from a prior developer, as previously reported by THE CITY. In 2021, the Department of Environmental Protection issued $68,000 in fines for multiple violations of asbestos-removal safety rules.

In the last two years through early January, another owner of the lot, — 1935 Bedford Ave LLC, which sold the lot to the current LLC owner — ran up $27,321 in fines for a variety of code violations, including unsafe job site and inadequate site fencing. As of this week, they’d paid off $19,196 with $8,125 unresolved, records show. 

Residents told THE CITY they have struggled to keep up with whether stop work orders are in effect, as they go back and forth with lodging complaints against the contractors, who eventually get the stop work orders rescinded, or violate the orders and write a check to the city for the fines.

“The stop work orders come and go very quick,” McCullough said. 

Between February and May 2026, the city issued and rescinded two stop work orders for driving piles without monitoring protocols in place. Another stop work order issued on April 30 with no explanation was rescinded the next day. 

On Wednesday the city ordered all work to stop again, after an inspector responding to yet another complaint and found no designated superintendent while construction was ongoing, which creates a “hazard,” according to the order.

Gary Vinbaytel, who is named as an associate of the project’s owner according to city records, denied the city’s and neighbor’s claims that he is pile driving without the proper monitors.

“They fabricate everything,” he said in an email to THE CITY, referring to the lot’s neighbors. “All our construction is in accordance with all DOB regulations, monitoring and regiments. We follow each step very carefully and have sophisticated monitoring in place.”

He added, “These neighbors have prevented any construction from proceeding for a decade with multiple prior owners.”

Shaking and Cracking

Residents began complaining to the building agency of their homes shaking and cracking in February 2026. 

Anya Glowa-Kollisch, 42, board president of the Hawthorne Street co-op adjacent to the lot, said they have tried for nearly a year to get the project owners to sign an agreement for providing proper safety equipment, calling the work “exhausting.” 

“We have no idea how much damage has already been done to our building,” Glowa-Kollisch said. “It’s not that we don’t want development. This isn’t a NIMBY situation. We understand that things change and that there’s a need for housing.”

“What we want is for it to be done safely,” they added.

An engineering report Vinbaytel had prepared and submitted to the city as a requirement for the project recommended contractors micropile — drilling small-diameter columns into the ground that creates low vibrations but typically takes longer to install — instead of pile driving, stating it could cause vibrations that would affect adjacent buildings.

Cal Hadley’s family has owned his home on Fenimore Street since 1974. The house, built in 1935, is about 20 feet away from the construction. 

He said the pile driving “would work if we were on a deserted island someplace, and no other building was around for miles.” 

“But this is Brooklyn,” Hadley said. “Everything is in such close proximity to each other.” 

“No one’s saying that, ‘Well, we don’t want any buildings,’ but when you do this — and that’s what we’re focused on — why are you causing damage to other homes?”

‘Incredibly Stressful’

The residents THE CITY spoke to described their neighborhood as tight-knit and multicultural with historic homes. Now known as Little Caribbean, the area has been rapidly gentrifying, desired for its good transit options, historically designated homes and proximity to Prospect Park. 

Nicole DeCicco, 42, has used the nearby park as a refuge from her shaking building. 

“I typically partially work from home, and I haven’t been able to sit here and do work,” she said. “We’re getting woken up. They’re doing drilling at like 7 o’clock in the morning.” 

McCullough has lived in the co-op beside the lot for a little over a decade, which they said they cherish for its “building elders,” who have lived there for over 40 years. 

“It’s incredibly stressful to feel like the well-being of the building as a structure hinges on our awareness as just ordinary residents,” McCullough said. 

They are unsure what they will do about the cracks in their walls. 

“I can’t even get there,” they said. “I’m simply, I am trying to stop more from happening.”

Additional reporting by Greg B. Smith.

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Demolition might conjure images of bulldozers, sledgehammers and wrecking balls slamming into structures that crumble dramatically. 

But in New York’s Good Cause Eviction Law, the definition of “demolish” is not straightforward. What does it mean to demolish a home? And can a landlord demolish just an apartment, or an entire building?

Those are questions looming over tenants whose landlords opted not to renew their leases by citing an intent to demolish. It’s one of the few reasons a landlord can evict rent-paying tenants in unregulated apartments under the 2024 law, which caps rent increases and requires landlords to offer most tenants renewal leases.

“We don’t know what demolition of an apartment means,” said Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society who worked on the law. “It’s a live question.”

For several tenants in New York City, the right to remain in their homes hinges on the answers — like for roommates Feryal Nawaz, Carla Orlandi and Parisa, whose landlord refused to renew the lease for their East Village apartment, citing a plan to demolish it.

The roommates, all 27 years old, were excited to stay in their three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment. They’d become close, hosting movie nights and decorating for each other’s birthdays. Their home became a central gathering place for friends; they kept deflated air mattresses in a corner of the living room for guests staying over.

Over many previous months, the roommates had rebuffed their landlord’s offers of several thousand dollars to leave early. But then the landlord officially said they had to leave when their lease is up at the end of June. Facing the uncertainty of the Good Cause Eviction Law, the roommates have been reaching out to tenant hotlines, lawyers and their local representatives to seek insight before they make plans to either move out, or head to court.

“There’s so many loopholes in these laws,” said Parisa, who declined to share her last name. “If it’s really meant to protect us, you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer. You shouldn’t have to go to court and fight and hope and pray.”

The roommates said they’d make a decision about next steps by the beginning of June.

“As May still plays out, I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” Nawaz said. “I want to make sure that we put up a fight regardless, even if we do end up leaving.”

David Hazout, an agent of the LLC that owns the roommates’ apartment building, declined to comment. A lawyer representing the LLC had sent the roommates renovation plans that show the kitchen and one of the bathrooms would be relocated within the unit. Permits filed with the Department of Buildings in March show plans to renovate 10 apartments in the building, records show.

But does a renovation count as a demolition? And what is the definition of a “housing accommodation”? That’s the opaque term the Good Cause law uses to refer to where tenants live. 

Shafeeqa Kolia, a spokesperson for Sen. Julia Salazar, sponsor of the Good Cause law, said the provision was intended to refer to the demolition of a whole building. Kolia said the Senator’s team would look into drafting legislation to clarify the definition of “demolish” in the law.

Absent a legislative update, those key questions must be answered in court.

Defining Demolition

Already, there are at least two cases in Housing Court that are grappling with what “demolition” really means.

One case concerns some tenants of two apartments in an East Village building, just three blocks north of Fawaz, Orlandi and Parisa. In March 2024, those other tenants got notice from their landlord that their leases would not be renewed. In that notice, the landlord indicated the “housing accommodation” would be demolished; in later court documents, the owner said they would renovate the apartments. 

The tenants’ lawyer, who declined to comment for this story, cited the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of demolish in court documents: “pull or knock down (a building)”… “to tear down,” “to destroy,” “to flatten,” “to raze” and “wipe off the face of the earth.”

The lawyer argued a single apartment cannot be demolished, and that a demolition is not the same thing as a renovation.

Tracy Ferdinand, the judge presiding over the case said that an individual apartment — not an entire building — could be considered a “housing accommodation,” but left open whether a renovation counts as a demolition.

The landlord submitted architecture reports and cost estimates for the renovations. But the judge, too, resorted to a dictionary definition of demolish — this time, from Merriam-Webster — to cast doubt on whether those documents established plans to demolish the apartments, and ultimately said they failed to do so.

The case will go to trial. But whatever the court decides, it likely won’t affect other tenants fighting similar evictions. Legal precedent can only be set through appeals courts.

That means another case in Housing Court may end up with a totally different outcome compared to what happens in the East Village tenants’ case. The second case concerns the tenants of five apartments in an Upper West Side building, whose landlord would not renew leases because of demolition plans. (The tenants declined to comment for this story.)

The building is a Renaissance Revival-style townhouse in a historic district, and the lawyer representing the tenants, James Fishman, pointed out demolition would require the approval of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. He, too, argued that demolition was not the same as renovation, and that a single apartment in a building could not be demolished.

“I think the whole point of the statute is to protect tenants in their apartments, and this is kind of a loophole,” Fishman said.

Neither the landlord nor the attorney representing the landlord in the Upper West Side case responded to requests for comment.

Worth the Fight?

While “demolish” stays undefined as it relates to the Good Cause law, risks remain for tenants who want to try to stay in their apartments while a landlord is claiming demolition.

“You have to decide whether it’s worth fighting when we don’t know for certain how the statute is going to be interpreted,” said Davidson, the Legal Aid lawyer. She said she’d ask the landlord for records of permits and architectural plans for any proposed demolition.

Sherwin Belkin, an attorney who represents landlords, said he would tell any clients who would want to evict tenants under Good Cause that they’d need to pursue at least a gut renovation.

“You’re leaving the four walls of the apartment and maybe some of the partitions, but I wouldn’t leave in much more. The more you leave, the more there’s issues about whether or not you’re demolishing,” Belkin said. “Your best case is to create a blank box.”

Housing lawyers do not expect courts to come to a final determination on what “demolish” means for at least a year as cases and appeals proceed.

In the meantime, tenants like Nawaz, Orlandi and Parisa are left to navigate uncharted waters.

“It does suck being the guinea pig, but I’m not entirely mad about it,” Nawaz said. “I do think this is probably happening to a lot of people out there … It’s not just about us.”

The roommates suspect the landlord will renovate the apartment — as has been done with other units in the building — and increase the rent. They’re already paying about $6,200 for their apartment. 

They’re also worried about the prospect of finding a new place. Nawaz and Orlandi have been in the apartment for almost three years, the longest they’ve lived in a place since college, they said. Parisa moved in last year after coming from Atlanta and not knowing anyone in New York, but made fast friends with the two others.

Above all, the three roommates are frustrated about the ambiguity in the Good Cause Eviction Law.

“This was supposed to be put in place to help out the tenants,” Orlandi said. “But they made the lines so blurred and all the words so vague that no one knows — not even lawyers, not even ChatGPT — no one knows what that even means.”

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They’ve popped up all across the city, scores of new building plans by different companies in very different neighborhoods, with one thing in common: They all have exactly 99 apartments.

In the past two years, developers have filed permits for more than 150 residential buildings with that precise number of units, per city data.

Why? Because at that size, savvy builders looking to take a major tax break for residential developments can avoid paying a higher minimum wage to construction workers — while minimizing the number of affordable apartments they must include.

“It feels very counter to the overall goal of what we’re trying to achieve here, which is that we’re trying to build more housing,” said Justin Pelsinger of the development firm Charney Companies, which is not working on any 99-unit projects.

Just 1% of proposed developments that have registered to use the tax break have 100 units or more, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). Several proposed 99-unit buildings are clustered on the same lots and share a common facade so that they appear to be a single, larger building.

For labor leaders, the trend is a big problem. Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, described the practice as “a scam,” and said he raised the issue earlier this year with city officials in an attempt to close the loophole. 

“The sad part of it is, who suffers? The people suffer because they’re building less affordable units,” LaBarbera said.

But developers say their approach is just a reasonable, if creative, solution to make their budget math work under the constraints of the relatively new tax exemption program: 485-x. It came into effect in 2024 to replace another tax break program that helped spur the majority of new residential construction in New York City between 2010 and 2020.

The program is meant to create new housing developments with a combination of market-rate and affordable apartments — that is, units with rents determined by the income level of the tenant — using only private dollars, without government funds.

That program, 485-x, requires developers of buildings with at least 100 apartments to pay construction workers a minimum hourly wage of $40.

If a project has less than 100 apartments, only 20% of its units must be income-restricted, or “affordable,” and permanently rent-stabilized. No wage minimums apply.

The proportion of affordable apartments goes up the more units a 485-x building has. For buildings with 100 to 149 apartments, 25% of the total must be rent-stabilized and affordable for a family of four making about $129,600.

For buildings with at least 150 apartments in certain areas of the city — including Lower Manhattan and parts of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront — a quarter of the apartments must be permanently rent-stabilized and affordable for families of four making about $97,200. There are also higher wage requirements. 

Developers, architects and consultants say the requirements for minimum wages and affordability levels, taken together, increase costs and limit incomes of the development projects. They’re finding ways to work around them in order to build much-needed housing.

“For a bigger building at the edge of 99, you can goose the unit count down by combining the units,” said John Woelfling, partner at Dattner Architects. “So you’re not providing more housing, you’re just providing bigger units.”

Elie Pariente, principal at EMP Capital Group, said his company plans to construct several projects with 99 apartments each, some with multiple 99-unit buildings on the same lot, though he didn’t specify where. He said if his developments were any larger, and thus subject to the 485-x requirements, he wouldn’t be able to lean on his longstanding relationships with certain contractors.

“A lot of the trades that we normally use wouldn’t work,” he said. “If we were to go for more than 99 units, we would have to hire brand-new trades and brand-new contractors that we’ve never worked with before.”

Of the 299 proposed developments that have registered to use the tax break, about 10% of them contain exactly 99 apartments, according to data from HPD. 

Between April 2024 and 2026, developers have filed permits for more than 120 additional buildings with exactly 99 apartments, but those do not appear in HPD’s registration data, according to a review by THE CITY.  

This is a notable leap from the 13 buildings with 99 apartments that developers proposed between 2008 through 2023, a previous analysis by the Real Estate Board of New York found.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on building 200,000 affordable apartments over a decade, using union labor. The early results of the 485-x program — which was authorized by the state in 2024 — may raise questions about how feasible that goal is, but City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said officials are monitoring the program’s implementation.

“We will continue to work with our partners in Albany, labor, tenants and the City Council to build a more affordable city — including by both building new housing and ensuring that the people building it have good, safe, quality jobs,” he said in a statement. 

More Buildings, More Costs

Some of the developments Pariente is working on are single buildings with 99 apartments, such as one that will be located on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. Others, he said, will have multiple 99-unit buildings on the same lot.

“Different lots lend themselves to the 99-unit concept more than others,” he said. “The larger the lot, the more flexibility you have subdividing it.”

Such developments — say, three 99-unit buildings acting as one — have duplicative elements, which can add both up-front costs and be more expensive to maintain than a comparable individual building with 297 apartments in it.

“We’re now putting in added walls, added trash rooms, added stairs, added elevators, so we’re basically losing square footage that would have been available for units, and putting it into these new structural elements that are some of the most expensive and highest-carbon elements in a building,” said Toby Snyder, senior associate at FXCollaborative Architects, referring to energy-intensive materials and processes. 

Examples abound: On the Upper East Side, a building under construction appears as one tower, but is technically two, each with 99 apartments. In Highbridge, not far from Yankee Stadium, a developer planned twin buildings nestled together on one leafy street corner, with 99 apartments each.

In Boreum Hill, a developer filed permits for three buildings with 99 apartments each. In architectural drawings, the buildings appear seamlessly connected. One lot in Downtown Brooklyn will see five buildings with 99 units each.

But breaking apart a development into separate 99-unit segments on one lot meets its limit on small lots in dense areas. For instance, in Midtown and Long Island City — all neighborhoods recently rezoned for more housing — a lot that could accommodate a tower with several hundred apartments would likely be too small to split the building apart into several 99-unit buildings.

“If we’re not building those larger projects where the zoning and density allow for it, then we’re leaving units on the table, and we’re not really solving for our affordability or housing crisis,” said Basha Gerhards, executive vice president of public policy at REBNY.

Labor leaders are critical of the 99-unit playbook. 

“Of course the developer is going to say, ‘Oh, the numbers don’t work,’ because they’re trying to justify the scheme that they’re engaged in,” LaBarbera said. “They don’t want to pay fair wages. They want to profit, profit, profit.”

Kevin Elkins, political director of the carpenters’ union, said developers risk losing their tax breaks as they move forward with multiple, clustered buildings each containing 99 apartments.

“A lot of these buildings are sharing the same mortgage. They’re sharing the same amenities. They’re sharing the same tax lots. It’s so clear what’s going on,” Elkins said. “We will be providing, if necessary, evidence that this is one building, that workers weren’t paid the wages they were supposed to be paid.”

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine would ultimately be the enforcer of the prevailing wage portion of the tax exemption, though his office hasn’t received any related complaints.  

Exception to the Rule

There is one exception to the 99-apartment trend, based on city data. Developer TF Cornerstone will rely on the 485-x tax program and still go big, with 1,060 apartments planned across three buildings on the Greenpoint waterfront, and 278 apartments planned in Chelsea.

Jon McMillan, TF Cornerstone’s senior vice president and director of planning, said those developments are possible because the company has long been a union contractor, and by using its own money, it doesn’t have to rely on others for financing. But the process hasn’t been easy.

“This is very, very challenging for us. We want to move forward with these two projects but they don’t work for us nearly as well as projects we’ve done in the past, or as we’d like for projects to work,” McMillan said. “We’re doing these buildings at a lower rate of return than we normally do and than is sustainable, but we want to keep our organization busy.”

Still, there’s a chance more developers could use 485-x to construct larger apartment buildings in the future, like those finishing projects under a previous tax exemption program. And some are waiting on higher-level changes before moving forward, including the lowering of interest rates, costs of goods and materials and tariffs. 

“If we were in a lower interest rate environment and commodity pricing came down, and insurance pricing was not at record high, could we make something work with the $40 wage floor?” said Eli Weiss, principal at Joy Construction Corp, whose projects typically contain 150 to 175 apartments. “Absolutely.”

Additional reporting by Kennedy Sessions and Haidee Chu.

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Jin Tao Wu has survived Japan’s invasion of China, the rise of the Communist Party and the massacres of the Cultural Revolution. 

Now, thousands of miles and many decades later, the 93-year-old sits in a beige-walled public housing apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, confronting what he sees as the biggest crisis of his life.

The New York City Housing Authority has told Wu that he and his 90-year-old wife, Qiong Zhong, who has dementia, must vacate their apartment in a seniors-only development as soon as possible, relocate another development for up to four years, and then move yet again into a new non-seniors-only building.

“I’m not going to move,” he said recently, speaking in Cantonese through an interpreter. “I’m 93. If you’re going to move to a general [public] housing, it’s not going to be good. It’s not going to be healthy. It’s not going to be safe. I feel I don’t have that many years left.”

Wu and his wife are among 24 households in NYCHA’s Chelsea Addition refusing the authority’s demand to relocate twice while their building is demolished and replaced. The authority insists the dual moves are necessary first steps in its grand plan to demolish 18 NYCHA buildings in Chelsea and replace them with 15 new towers. 

If all goes as planned, the new buildings will house the displaced residents of Chelsea Addition and the Fulton, Elliott and Chelsea Houses, and add another 2,500 market-rate apartments and 1,000 permanently affordable ones.

Under this $1.2 billion project, the mega-developer of the nearby Hudson Yards, The Related Companies, and their partners, Essence LLC, would handle demolition and construction. NYCHA would maintain ownership of the properties but turn over management of the buildings to their private sector partners.

The first phase of the plan, which requires the demolition of Chelsea Addition and one nearby building, was slated to start this spring. But the entire plan is on hold as one lawsuit contests the legality of all of it and another fights the eviction of the seniors who are resisting moving, including Wu and his wife.

‘There Was War’

For Wu and his wife, NYCHA’s proposed move is a traumatic prospect, after a long and momentous journey from the cities of China’s Guangdong province to the streets of Manhattan.

Wu was born in 1934. When he was still a child, the Japanese army invaded China, in a brutal occupation until their surrender to the Allied Forces in September 1945. During the conflict, Wu received just three years of intermittent elementary school education. 

“No middle school. No high school,” he said. “There was a war. We were fighting Japan.”

Four years after the war’s end, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power. When he was in his 30s, Mao unveiled the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge what he declared were capitalist influences compromising his vision. Across China, fighting between factions erupted, and in 1968, a series of massacres took place in Guangdong Province where Wu lived.

Wu declined to further discuss his years in China except to say, “I’m 93 years old. I’ve seen quite a few kings.” Asked if there were any he admired, he replied, “Not one of them.”

He married Qiong Zhong and the couple had one daughter, Li Ching Wu. All three emigrated to New York City, with Jin Tao Wu and his wife arriving when he was 60 in 1994. Soon he found a job cutting string in a Garment District factory.

Wu retired a few years later and the couple’s sole income became Social Security. They lived in Chinatown off Canal Street, which is where they resided on Sept. 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the resultant fallout blanketed the surrounding neighborhoods, including Chinatown, with toxic dust.

Later the couple signed up for NYCHA’s waiting list and snagged an apartment in the Taft Rehab Houses on W. 117th St. near Columbia University. This was Wu’s first experience with the Housing Authority’s general population developments — and it did not go well.

In the summer of 2021, Wu heard knocking at his door.

“I opened the door and they pushed their way in and robbed the place,” he recalled. “I called 911. The police couldn’t catch him. They asked if we were scared. Of course we were scared.”

He says his neighbor knew the robbers and wouldn’t cooperate with police. Because of that, he says, NYCHA granted their request to transfer to an all-seniors development. In August that year, they moved into a cozy one-bedroom in Chelsea Addition.

The building sits across from athletic fields where children from a nearby public school fill the air with their voices during recess on school days. The street is otherwise quiet, as their fellow tenants are all over 60 and there’s a security guard assigned to patrol the building and the surrounding area seven days a week. Many of Wu’s neighbors are, like him, immigrants from China who speak little English.

“It is better here. It is peaceful. No harassment,” he said.

It is also where he and his wife expected to spend their final days. They live off of a combined Social Security income just short of $1,500 a month while paying NYCHA around $450 in rent — the required 30% of income all public housing tenants pay.

Their circumstances do not allow them to venture far from their apartment.

Wu’s wife, suffering from dementia, has on occasion become lost in the neighborhood. Wu presents a five-page document listing 44 medications that he must take for a daunting conflagration of medical conditions that includes heart disease, kidney disease, asthma (related to his exposure to 9/11 toxic dust) and diabetes. He relies on a walker. 

The couple’s daily regimen is overseen by home-health aides who monitor them 24 hours a day, seven days a week in shifts. They occasionally go out to nearby restaurants but must rely on the publicly subsidized and often unreliable Access A Ride. 

“If we don’t have transportation, we don’t go,” he said.

NYCHA v. Wu

Last summer Housing Opportunities Unlimited, a non-profit hired by the developers overseeing the NYCHA project, began knocking on doors of Chelsea Addition residents, slipping notices under doors and calling them, advising that they needed to immediately sign an agreement to relocate to a nearby general population NYCHA development.

“I got lots of notices,” Wu said. “They came and knocked on the door. They called. They were always calling.”

The non-profit showed Wu an apartment in the nearby non-senior-exclusive Chelsea Houses, but he said the bathroom was only accessible through the sole bedroom, an arrangement the home health aides would not accept, he said. He declined to sign NYCHA’s relocation documents, mentioning the robbery that took place in the general population NYCHA development on W. 117th ST.

In October, NYCHA filed suit against Wu, claiming that he had violated the terms of the lease by refusing to consent to relocation.

Their daughter, Li Ching Wu, who is raising a family in Queens and works long hours at a Chinese restaurant, says she is upset about the twilight-of-life disruption her father and mother have been forced to endure.

“Of course this isn’t good. They’re already so old, how are they supposed to pack themselves up?” she told THE CITY. “The government already says it wants to help the elders. Why does it have to use senior housing for development?”

Li Chin is worried about her parents’ safety now that NYCHA wants them to move back to a regular development, noting, “Even young people get robbed in the streets. Of course I’m at least a little worried about my parents.”

And she says two moves would likely confuse her mother.

“My mom has to readjust to an entirely new environment and learn to recognize it,” she said. “She already doesn’t remember many places nearby. But you can’t stop her from going outside — or sometimes you don’t even catch her going outside. It’s guaranteed trouble when she can’t recognize her way back.”

“Everyone’s already of such old age,” she added. “If the government needs to take back the building, they should just let them live out the rest of their lives there and take the units back gradually, one at a time, when they pass over to the other side. That way the elders aren’t thrown into such chaos.” 

In December NYCHA withdrew its violation-of-lease suit against Wu and more than a dozen other Chelsea Addition holdouts, shortly after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David Cohen denied the authority’s motion for a preliminary injunction forcing tenants to sign their relocation agreement.

That lawsuit is now pending before an appeals court that last month suspended the project while it considers the case. After that happened NYCHA began offering to relocate residents of Chelsea Addition in other seniors-only buildings.

Thomas Hillgardner, a lawyer for Wu and the 23 other holdouts, contested the notices in a separate suit filed in civil court in March. That litigation is also pending.

Recently THE CITY visited the couple in their apartment. Wu’s wife sat in silence, gazing at the floor. Dried lettuce and scallion hung on the back of the apartment’s entry door as an old country tradition commemorating the New Year. Against one wall of the living room, boxes filled with food were stacked next to a bag of yams spilling across the floor. Wu’s walker rested nearby.

When THE CITY suggested taking a photo of the couple, Wu asked to put on a nicer shirt first. He and his wife then sat on the couch and posed in silence.

Outside their window the blue-glass towers of Hudson Yards — a huge project of the Related Companies, the developer preparing to demolish and rebuild the Wu’s building —- glimmered in the distance.

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A Billionaires’ Row penthouse that sold for $87.7 million. Sting’s pad overlooking Central Park, bought for $65.7 million. A Trump Tower apartment owned by Donald himself.

These properties might seem like exactly the type of real estate that stands to be hit with a newly proposed “pied-à-terre” tax, which takes aim at high-priced homes that aren’t people’s primary residences. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week that the tax would apply to units worth $5 million or more and would raise an estimated $500 million a year to throw at the city’s gaping budget hole.

But if that $5 million worth is defined by the city’s tax valuations, condos that sell for 10 times that amount and more could avoid the tax, according to experts and city Department of Finance data. To capture pied-à-terre tax revenue from them, the government would need to use a different threshold.

The finance department’s “market values” and “assessed values” for condos and co-ops are notoriously low, calculated based on rents in the area rather than actual sales prices. 

A condo at supertall 432 Park Ave. that sold for $26 million in 2021, for example, has an “assessed value” of just $785,477. And the condo’s “market value,” as calculated by the DOF, is just under $1.9 million, a fraction of its actual worth. 

The governor and state lawmakers are hammering out the details of the pied-à-terre tax proposal, so how the city might assess the tax is still unclear.

Hochul has said about 13,000 New York City properties would be subject to the tax. In response to an inquiry for this story, Hochul’s office told THE CITY Tuesday that they’d make sure the tax would apply to superluxury properties like those found on Billionaires’ Row but declined to share further details. 

But whatever the state lands on, it would need to account for the city’s loopy property tax system in order to include many owners’ glitzy second (or third, or fourth) homes.

Take 432 Park Ave.’s 96th floor penthouse, which sold for $87.7 million in 2016. Its “market value,” based on DOF’s math, is $3.8 million, according to city tax records. Its “assessed value” is $1.6 million.

A CITY review of property records at that supertall luxury tower did not find a single residential unit that would qualify for the pied-à-terre tax under its “assessed value,” and only one — bought for $91 million in 2017 — that would count as a $5 million condo under its official “market value.”

Even radically lowering the pied-à-terre threshold would leave some luxury crash pads free and clear. 

A 2019 state bill that never became law proposed using a $300,000 assessed value threshold for a pied-à-terre tax. Under that measure, about 20% of the condos at 432 Park Ave. would still avoid being hit by the tax, according to a review of DOF data by THE CITY.

Prelude to Property Tax Reform?

Hochul and Mamdani announced the new “pied-à-terre” tax on April 15, an apparent détente in their “tax the rich” tug-of-war. Soon after, President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform to attack Mamdani, saying “the TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are So Wrong.” 

Trump, who made Palm Beach, Florida, his official primary home in 2019, would in theory be the kind of non-resident targeted by the tax. But according to the DOF, his unit No. 66N at Trump Tower is assessed at only $2.6 million.

The condos’ distorted valuations — and the question of how to implement the new tax around them — are extensions of the much-discussed inequities of the city’s property tax system, long the focus of calls for reform, including by Mamdani.

“I think the pied-à-terre tax is the canary in the coal mine for property tax reform,” said Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who introduced the version of the tax in 2019 when he served in the legislature. “The owners of these trophy properties are paying a lower effective tax rate than single-family homeowners.”

The gap between posh co-op and condos’ real-world and taxable values is a vestige of the 1980s, when apartment ownership was rare. Rental buildings were converting to ownership via co-op apartments, but those buildings still kept some rental apartments, many of which were rent-regulated. That history is why state law directed DOF to consider theoretical, would-be rental income for many buildings that now have few or zero rental apartments.

But decades later, as superluxury supertalls came to dominate the Manhattan skyline, such condos can effectively function as overseas bank accounts for housing vast wealth. Many are held by limited liability corporations, which mask owners’ identities. 

Because of their low valuations, fancy condos pay lower effective tax rates than rental buildings by a large margin; rates for big rental buildings are nearly five times higher, according to an estimate from the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group. In general, lower-valued homes face a substantially higher effective tax rate than more expensive ones, a city tax commission report found. 

The musician Sting bought an apartment at 220 Central Park South for $65.7 million in 2019. Its current assessed value is just $1.89 million, records show. 

That’s because its valuation, and thus its property taxes, is based on nearby aging rental buildings that house rent-stabilized apartments.

A City Hall spokesperson said conversations about the pied-à-terre tax are ongoing.

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Trump administration officials took a victory lap Tuesday in Brooklyn to celebrate a natural gas pipeline that would serve customers in New York City and Long Island. But Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose environmental agency greenlit a key permit for the pipeline after three previous rejections, was a no-show at the event.

The Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) natural gas pipeline, developed by the Oklahoma-based Williams Companies, would run from Pennsylvania to just off the coast of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, with about 17 miles buried in New York waters. The pipeline, which could be in service by the end of 2027, would connect to a larger network that begins in Texas.

“Building NESE Pipeline, delivering natural gas right here to Floyd Bennett Field, is a pure, momentous, gigantic win for New York and for America,” said the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and former candidate for governor Lee Zeldin. “The capacity of being able to deliver natural gas to up to 2.3 million more families is something for all of us to be able to celebrate.”

Zeldin was joined by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of the Department of Energy Chris Wright. (Also in attendance was Hochul’s current Republican challenger in the gubernatorial election, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.)

Though Hochul was invited to the event, she spent Tuesday in Troy, touring a new housing project, and at Syracuse University for the unveiling of former President Joe Biden’s official portrait. A spokesperson for Hochul declined to comment, instead referring to a statement she released when the state Department of Environmental Conservation granted the pipeline’s permit.

The pipeline received a water quality permit from New York in November, after the state had denied the permit for the same project three times before — in 2018, 2019 and 2020 — all when Andrew Cuomo was governor.

Though the project appeared dead in the water, it was revived as part of a deal Hochul reportedly struck with the Trump administration in order to save the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project, which the federal government had sought to shut down mid-construction. (Hochul had denied there was a deal, only that she was open to new projects.)

President Donald Trump has consistently backed more oil and gas projects and worked to impede renewable energy development, including offshore wind. New York had been counting on developing offshore wind projects to meet its energy needs without carbon emissions, but has been stymied by Trump’s policies and broader economic forces.

Hochul has embraced relying on fossil fuels for longer than what the state’s climate law has called for, given the federal government’s hostility to renewables and the necessity of meeting demand for energy. (She’s also attempting to change the state’s climate law itself as Albany negotiates the budget.)

“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans,” she said in a statement released when her Department of Environmental Conservation granted the pipeline’s permit. She said DEC “reviewed impartially” the project application.

On Tuesday, the Washington Republicans who appeared at the “ceremonial groundbreaking” event seemed to be in alignment with Hochul about why the pipeline — which was also opposed by several environmental groups and elected officials — was important.

Zeldin, a former elected official from Long Island who in 2022 unsuccessfully challenged Hochul for governor, said the pipeline was “extra personal” for him, as he “saw firsthand the need for increased natural gas supplies to downstate New York.”

He spoke of New Yorkers that left the state because of affordability concerns — a point Hochul has raised in the context of the climate law — and pointed to the pipeline as evidence that “maybe we can turn the tide.”

Burgum and Wright extolled the economic and potential cost-savings benefits of the pipeline (although National Grid customers will be on the hook for the pipeline’s costs).

Wright thanked “the many local politicians here in New York State and New York City who fought to better energize the citizens of New York, of Long Island and of broader New York State.”

“We’re gonna add to this. NESE is an awesome, absolutely awesome, step forward,” Wright added. “The energy subtraction, fear-mongering policies of the Biden administration are over.”

Alex Schott, spokesperson for the Williams Companies, wrote in an email, “We’re grateful for Gov. Hochul’s ongoing support for the NESE project, and we’re excited to be back to building in New York.”

Outside the event, about a dozen protestors associated with the Stop the Williams NESE Pipeline Coalition held signs and chanted, “No dirty pipelines! Renewable jobs!”

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Earlier this month, real estate giant RXR and its partner TF Cornerstone filed for a permit to tear down the Grand Hyatt Hotel famously built by Donald Trump and replace it with a 95-story office building that will cost $6.5 billion to construct.

The project won City Council approval back in 2021, but is finally advancing now  amid signs that — despite differences with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his tax-the-rich agenda — Wall Street and the financial sector are eager to pay record rents for new office space. 

“The demand is there,” RXR CEO Scott Rechler told THE CITY. “I had a meeting Thursday with brokers who work with financial service companies and they told me their clients are growing so fast that when their leases are nearing an end they always need more space than they currently occupy.”

During the pandemic, the headlines spotlighted a series of Wall Street firms that relocated elsewhere, especially to Miami. Efforts to defeat Mamdani’s push for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations have led to stories predicting companies would flee New York.

But the numbers tell a different story. Wall Street employment in the city is at a record. Available office space on Park Avenue, a key location for those firms, is almost nonexistent in the most attractive buildings. And developers are planning three new towers on Park, confident there will be financial firms to fill them.

“There is really only one driver of the decisions financial companies make and that is where the people they want to work for them are and where those people want to live and work,” said Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of the real estate firm CBRE’s Tri-State region and a broker who has worked on scores of the most important office deals in recent decades. “And New York is still a magnet for those young people.”

It is true that Wall Street firms are expanding elsewhere in the United States and the city’s share of securities industry employment is also at a record low. But that is not an exodus.

Securities firms now employ a record 209,000 workers in the city, according to the final 2025 job number released his month by the state Labor Department. Wall Street profits and bonuses also set records last year, which has led to billions in unexpected income tax collections for the state, which gets 20% of all its tax revenue from the industry, and the city. 

Real estate deals show how committed these firms are to the city.

The vacancy rate on Park Avenue is only 7% and the most modern buildings are 96% occupied, according to research from the real estate firm JLL.

“Park Avenue is where people want to be,” said JLL broker Joe Messina. “It’s a wide thoroughfare with great views and great light. And everybody is there including your peers and your clients.”

New office towers are underway at 350, 405 and 570 Park Ave. The building at 350 Park is for the giant hedge fund Citadel, which abandoned its historic home in Chicago in 2022, moving its headquarters to Miami, but relocating a substantial number of people to New York.

Park Avenue and the rest of Midtown East have gotten a major boost from JPMorgan Chase’s decision to build what is essentially a campus that includes a new $3 billion, 60-story headquarters for about 10,000 employees. Chase also owns 250 Park Ave. and nearby 383 Madison Ave. where it is spending $1 billion on a renovation. In all it controls 6 million square feet of office space. (Chase is a corporate sponsor of THE CITY.)

Financial firms that work with Chase, the nation’s largest bank with $4.4 trillion in assets, as well companies that provide legal and other services to Chase, want to be near the campus as well.

“They have really reinvigorated the whole area,” Messina said.

Some of the city’s biggest financial firms are buying their office buildings, a more permanent commitment even than signing a long-term lease, notes Tighe, naming Wells Fargo, and the private equity firms KKR and Blackstone.

High office prices: ‘No one blinks’

175 Park, which will be the tallest office building in the Western Hemisphere, is in talks with financial service firms and law firms and other professional service firms. It will be very expensive to rent space there.

“Two years ago when people came to our marketing suite to see what we planned, I would mumble when they asked the cost,” Rechler said. “Now I just tell them and no one blinks.”

Some on Wall Street are doing one thing and saying another as they work to defeat Mamdani’s tax plan.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in his widely read shareholder letter released this week noted that the firm had reduced its number of employees in the city from 30,000 a decade ago to 24,000 today while increasing its workforce in low-tax Texas from 26,000 in 2015 to 32,000 today. 

The numbers are somewhat misleading since he is including retail employees working at bank branches. Chase wouldn’t disclose to THE CITY branch employment numbers but it boasts 485 branches in Texas, a state with more than 30 million people compared with a little less than 300 in New York, a city with some 8 million people.

But Dimon is growing the bank’s footprint elsewhere.

“This trend will likely continue,” he said in the letter. “Companies need to remain competitive in this very tough, fast-moving world. And higher taxes mean lower returns on capital and less competitiveness by their nature.”

Chase isn’t alone in expanding elsewhere. Goldman Sachs is constructing a new building in the Dallas area, bringing its headcount there to 5,000, its largest office outside of New York.

‘We expect respect’

As a result, the city’s share of all securities jobs in the U.S. has fallen from a third in 1990 to just over 17% today, according to the annual report on the industry from the state comptroller.

The mayor’s rhetoric and tax plan have top executives on edge.

“The tone and the treatment in New York is a problem,” said Tighe. “We are a funding source for all the things that are happening in the city. You don’t need to send us a thank you note but we expect respect and a seat at the table.”

The Mamdani Administration insists Wall Street and other businesses should pay more.

“Despite the hyperbolic rhetoric coming from some in the business community, the reality is that Wall Street is doing as well as it ever has,” said Cassio Mendoza, a spokesperson for the mayor. “Meanwhile, working New Yorkers are struggling to afford housing, child care, and groceries. The Mamdani administration is focused on growing the economy equitably so that New Yorkers across the five boroughs benefit from our city’s immense economic prosperity.”   

There is one major downside to Wall Street’s love in the city. The Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations achieved an economic goal that had been the Holy Grail of the city for decades: To diversify the economy so that it didn’t plunge into a recession every time Wall Street faltered.

For the moment, New York is once again an industry town.

“Now we are back to relying on Wall Street to drive the New York economy,” said Rahul Jain, state deputy comptroller for New York City.

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While New Yorkers feel the crush of a housing crisis, newly built affordable apartments in New York City can remain empty for more than a year.

That’s according to a new report released Friday by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps build affordable housing, which analyzed its portfolio of over 800 affordable housing projects nationwide, including 50 in the five boroughs. 

Enterprise found that across more than 4,500 affordable apartments in New York City, a median of 439 days passed between when a building’s apartments were finished to when new tenants moved in. The shortest leasing timeline was about 8.5 months, while the longest was over two years.

It took Ayah, a 29-year-old mom who spent three years living in a city shelter with her 5-year-old son after leaving an abusive marriage, about two years to secure her current apartment in Jamaica, Queens.

“Even though I’m so grateful to be in my own space, it just felt like I had to jump through so many hoops and it just felt so exhausting and absolutely humiliating,” said Ayah, who requested her last name be withheld for safety concerns. “The entire experience was extremely grueling.”

The median time for New York City tenants to move into affordable housing — that is, government-subsidized and income-restricted apartments — is almost three times as long as the national median time of 156 days, the Enterprise report showed.

The report comes as several housing experts and affordable housing operators have called on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to streamline the process of placing New Yorkers into these affordable apartments — for the sake of people who desperately need homes, and for the bottom line of property owners and investors who help finance the housing.

Though there are many impediments to filling buildings with tenants, developers cited long processing times to get residents approved and overcoming multiple layers of bureaucracy as the most common roadblocks.

“Broadly speaking, let affordable housing owners just fill these buildings with people in need,” said Patrick Boyle, senior policy director at Enterprise. “It’s important to be sure the process runs fairly so people have sort of an equal chance at being placed, but when you layer in too much process, you’re hurting the people that you’re trying to help.”

The city government is looking to cut red tape that complicates the process. The day he took office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani convened the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) Task Force to figure out how to quicken the pace of building and leasing up housing. The task force is due to issue a report with recommendations by April 11, but City Hall indicated it’d be out in the coming weeks instead.

“All options are on the table as we review these recommendations and work to get New Yorkers into available affordable housing units as quickly as possible,” said mayoral spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach.

‘It’s Disheartening’

The city housing agency’s own data encompasses a wider universe of projects than Enterprise’s analysis and shows a shorter — but still alarming — timeline to get buildings fully leased up: a median of 210 days to complete approvals for affordable housing applicants.

Enterprise’s analysis found there have been more delays in leasing the buildings in its portfolio over time: 13% of Enterprise’s projects experienced delays between 2013 and 2016, while all of them did between 2021 and 2024.

Delays can cost millions of dollars for affordable housing owners, many of which are nonprofits operating at a loss or close to it. And those delays could disincentivize investors to finance more affordable housing in the future, Boyle said.

It takes time and many steps to get affordable buildings ready to be listed on Housing Connect, the platform where New Yorkers can apply for apartments and homes through a lottery. And then there are other layers of approvals and long processes to find and greenlight eligible residents. That means some operators of homeless shelters that also run affordable housing projects aren’t able to place residents of their shelters directly into the apartments.

Some would-be residents need additional approvals, especially if they hold a rent voucher, like the city-funded CityFHEPS.

Ayah, the mother who obtained a voucher to move from a shelter, knows the extended timeline all too well. She found landlords were reluctant to rent to her, and when she did tour places, many weren’t suitable for her son who has special needs. When she finally nailed down an apartment, she had to wait more than a month for final inspections and paperwork processing related to her voucher. 

“This process, if I didn’t have my child in front of me, and constantly looking at like, ‘This is my reason, I have to get out of here and create a stable environment for him,’ I would’ve been crushed under how impossible it was and how the system was designed to just break people like me,” she said. “It took [being a] survivor to a whole different level.”

CityFHEPS requires tenants to submit documentation for city approval and there must be an inspection of the apartment before they can move in.

Christina Harsch, director of leasing and compliance at Wavecrest Management, said at least a third of tenants coming in through the lottery have a voucher and nearly all people coming in through homeless referrals have one. 

“Processing those applications — I can’t get anyone in faster than four months,” she said. “As a marketing agent, that’s deeply frustrating. And as a citizen, it’s disheartening.”

Harsch said an affordable building for seniors in The Bronx with over 200 apartments took two years to lease up. In that time, she said 88 people who originally applied either said they were no longer interested, moved into nursing homes or died.

Aiming for Easier Placements

Alicia Glen, former deputy mayor for housing under Mayor Bill de Blasio and managing principal of development firm MSquared, wrote in The Daily News in March that she regularly sees 14-month timelines to fill affordable housing buildings — much longer than in other cities.

“One of the key differences is that these cities do not rely on a centralized lottery system,” she wrote. “Everywhere else, developers largely manage their own affordable leasing.”

One example Glen cited was a building in Inwood with nearly 700 apartments, about 40% of them affordable. Although 70,000 applicants applied for those 281 affordable apartments through the housing lottery, just 168 had tenants in them seven months later.

HPD Commissioner Dina Levy told the City Council during a March hearing that the agency was considering an overhaul to its processes for getting New Yorkers into affordable housing.

“We plan to revamp both our housing lottery and our homeless placement systems,”  she said. “Incremental fixes here will not go far enough. We’re taking a hard look at every part of the process and if necessary, we will migrate to a more efficient and nimble system.”

Ilana Maier, a spokesperson for HPD, pointed out that nearly 15,000 families received affordable housing in fiscal year 2025: “It’s life-changing — a shorter commute, a bedroom of their own, a place where they can finally exhale.”

In the meantime, pending the possible overhaul, HPD has taken some steps to make it easier to place people into apartments — measures that have started to make a difference, housing providers and leasing agents told THE CITY. 

For example HPD last year slashed the paperwork required for tenants to apply for affordable apartments, and allowed for affordable re-rentals to go on the open market for eligible apartment-seekers, rather than leasing through a complicated “mini-lottery” process.

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Peering at New York City’s landscape more than 400 years in the past — when the marshes, ponds and streams crisscrossed our string of islands — can help planners and policymakers better understand the city’s flooding future.

Researchers at the New York Botanical Garden looked at where water used to be, where there’s water now and where — thanks to climate change — water will be in the coming years. Those places are called Blue Zones.

The five boroughs contain more than 500 of them, according to a new paper published Wednesday in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the first comprehensive analysis of its kind. The Blue Zones cover more than one-fifth of New York’s land.

“Everybody was startled, including us, that it’s more than 20% of the city,” said Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden and an author of the paper. “That combination, you can’t really argue with it — places that were wet, are wet and will be wet in the future.”

Lucinda Royte, lead author of the paper and manager of urban conservation, data tools and outreach at the New York Botanical Garden, said the Blue Zones indicate where it’s most pressing to address flood risks and increase resiliency. 

“It can be a pretty good guide about where we’ll see flooding in the future as a result of coastal flooding from storm surge and sea level rise, and inland flooding from rainfall events,” Royte said. “It can help us plan a little bit better about where we need to make some infrastructural changes in the city before a flooding crisis happens.”

About 1.2 million people (about 12% of the city’s population) and 11% of buildings are in Blue Zones. With the report, the Botanical Garden launched a digital tool that shows block-by-block information about historical ecology, current flood vulnerability and future flood risks.

Both LaGuardia Airport and JFK Airport are located in Blue Zones, on former salt marshes and marine ecosystems that were filled in. About a third of public housing developments, home to some of the poorest New Yorkers, are in Blue Zones, too.

Royte herself lives in a Blue Zone: Gowanus, Brooklyn, which was historically a salt marsh with Gowanus Creek flowing through. The concept of Blue Zones hit home for her when Hurricane Ida brought floodwaters to her neighborhood.

“My entire block was underwater,” she said. “I saw ponds and streams and wetlands return.”

Notably, the paper notes that some of the Blue Zones will become uninhabitable in the future, which points to the urgent need to build more housing, transit and other services elsewhere in the city — a conclusion other studies have made.

‘Water Doesn’t Care’

Blue Zones raise a red flag about the scale of the flood problem New York City faces, and will face, thanks to climate change, which promises to bring higher seas, more intense storms and more rainfall in the coming years. 

“It shows how large scale this is and it lets you look at the city as a landscape,” Royte said. “We currently view the city through its political boundaries. We care about neighborhoods and zip codes, but water doesn’t care about those boundaries.”

Of the Blue Zones, nearly two-thirds of the land area is at risk of coastal flooding from storm surge and sea level rise. About 5% of the Blue Zone land is at risk of flooding from rainfall, and 36% could see both coastal and rainfall flooding.

Much of the land in the Blue Zones is public, with government entities owning about two-thirds and the Department of Parks and Recreation specifically overseeing half of that.

“It’s so obvious that investing in parks will save lives and livelihoods,” said Amy Chester, director of Rebuild By Design, who reviewed the Blue Zones paper. Her organization last year released an analysis showing a majority of city parks will be at risk of flooding.

The Parks Department — whose proposed budget falls short of what Mayor Zohran Mamdani had promised — acknowledged its role in flood management.

“By working together and integrating the latest data and best practices into our planning process, we can create a stronger, more equitable park system that protects both people and nature for generations to come,” Parks spokesperson Judd Faulkner said in a statement.

In a statement, DEP spokesperson Doug Auer called the Blue Zones analysis “a useful tool in our collaborative stormwater planning efforts,” and pointed to work the agency is doing with other agencies to “identify where public lands can serve double duty for stormwater management and help restore natural urban drainage corridors.”

Many of the initiatives to make neighborhoods more resilient to flooding — including permanently moving people away from risks, adding storm drains and building rain gardens — are in the works, prompted by disastrous flooding after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy and 2021’s Hurricane Ida.

“We found, coincidentally, when you look at places that flooded during Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Ida, they line up pretty closely with historical hydrology,” Royte said.

The storm surge of Sandy flooded areas that had been beaches and tidal marshes, while Ida’s deluge flooded places that had been ancient ponds, wetlands and streams. 

Residents of Hollis, Queens, dealt with devastating flooding during Ida as well as during many other rainstorms, and learned their lowlying neighborhood was built atop a former pond.

The Hole, a neighborhood on the border of Queens and Brooklyn that sits below sea level, has continuously taken on water that can remain days after it rains. The city is now offering possible buyouts to residents there.

In The Bronx, the city is also working to unearth Tibbetts Brook in order to bring the subterranean waterway above ground, as it was over a century ago. That way, the brook can once again channel water, preventing it from hitting the sewer system and surrounding areas.

But Sanderson said more must be done: “I don’t think there’s any choice but to scale up. The climate is going to force our hand, and we’re already seeing that,” he said.

“You can use planning and ecosystems to help return some of that water to the sky and some to the ground and not assume all has to go through the wastewater treatment plants.”

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After 15 years, volunteers at a Bushwick farm found themselves locked out of the green space that has fed thousands over the years, and lately became a temporary home for asylum seekers. The property owner told them he doesn’t want “any headaches” — and now, the gardeners are hoping the city will move to make it an official, protected community space.

“We were really unaware that the situation had changed until Wednesday, when he showed up quite upset,” Spike Appel, a longtime volunteer of Bushwick City Farm, said of the property owner, Faramarz Roshodesh. “He grabbed our lock and threw it in his car.” 

The closure follows numerous problems on the property in the last few years. Following former Mayor Eric Adams’ order in late 2023 that limited how long migrant families could stay in a city shelter, asylum seekers were routinely sleeping on the farm grounds. 

“The city put out a lot of people into the street and we were kind of left with a handful of guys that kept hopping the fence to sleep,” Appel said. “I personally kicked them out probably a hundred times, waking them up in the morning.” 

Farm volunteers had testified repeatedly to the City Council, urging agencies to help the migrants find permanent housing. 

“BCF is now overrun with rats and trash, and it has been difficult to maintain the space clean and safe for everyone to use,” the volunteers wrote in a November 19, 2024 statement to the City Council Committee on Immigration and Welfare. 

“The space does not have enclosed structures … so during the winter months it’s inhospitable, but asylum seekers who find no better option end up sleeping in there,” the testimony continued.  

Beginning in 2011, volunteers have transformed the two combined vacant lots into a garden at the corner of Lewis Avenue and Stockton Street, where two dozen chickens, 60 raised beds for vegetables, an aquaponics system, and a communal space providing free food for the community. 

“It takes a long time to build what we built there, you can’t just pick it up and move it,” Appel added. 

Over the last three years, hundreds of asylum seekers have entered the farm, finding food, water, clothes, community and resources. It’s also been a place where Club A Kitchen, a mutual aid group, has distributed thousands of free meals to the community, including up to 1,800 a week during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the group. 

But the farm does not have a current agreement with Roshodesh, the owner, to use the space, complicating its status.

It isn’t the first time the farm has faced eviction. In 2017, Roshodesh sent a letter telling volunteers it had days to shut down, but after a protest and public outcry, he eventually decided to allow the farm to stay open.

That’s why, since 2017, longtime volunteers, like Mariel Acosta, have spoken at City Council hearings and reached out to local politicians, pushing the city to step in. Ideally, the group wants GreenThumb, the community garden operator for NYC Parks and Recreation, to take over the space.

“It’s confusing and convoluted, and I guess that’s the nature of bureaucracy, paperwork, going to meetings, and trying to get in touch with politicians,” said Acosta. “It’s just painstaking, and it shouldn’t be taking this long.” 

A spokesperson for the Parks Department said GreenThumb met with Bushwick City Farm leaders in 2025, but said there is currently no active discussion or plan for the city acquiring the farm.

For the city to buy the farm, Roshodesh, who did not respond to THE CITY’s requests for comment would have to agree to sell it. Then funding for the purchase would have to be secured — likely from a mix of public sources. The property would also have to go through the city’s lengthy Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) process, according to the spokesperson.

“I just don’t want any headaches,” Roshodesh told volunteers last week as he locked the farm gates. “This is too much. I’m done!” 

Fines and Taxes

In recent months, the farm hit an impasse as volunteers struggled to prevent people from sleeping on the grounds overnight, they said. 

Gardeners said that after weeks of reaching out unsuccessfully to the Department of Homeless Services about helping the men find shelters or housing, Appel said members of the local precinct council suggested getting a vacate order to prevent them from sleeping on the property. 

But when officials from the city Department of Buildings conducted their inspection, they fined the owner for having structures, including a gazebo, that were over 7 feet tall without a permit. 

That joint inspection with the New York Police Department and the Department of Sanitation resulted in multiple violations on the farm and its neighboring lot, 23 Lewis Ave., according to DOB records.

Inspectors reported two violations, fining Roshodesh and his company, Arrow Property, $1,250 for a 10-foot-tall gazebo that was used to distribute food without a permit, according to Department of Building records, and $2,500 for electrical wiring that took power from a public streetlight for use on the privately owned lot. 

Roshodesh is set to appear at an April 15 hearing with the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings to address the violations. 

The fines come as Roshodesh owes the city more than $550,000 in property taxes — $285,865 for the 23 Lewis Ave. lot and $267,771.20 for the 354 Stockton St. lot, according to Department of Finance records. 

Councilmember Chi Ossé, who represents the area, said he’s working with city officials, Roshodesh and the site’s volunteers to find a solution. 

“We are looking into the citation, speaking to all parties involved and see how we can chart forward,” Ossé told THE CITY. “I think community gardens are integral to this district, to this community and social opportunities for people at a time when things are very divisive.” 

For Acosta, the farm is important because of what it represents. 

“It’s been a space of pedagogy, of transmission of knowledge from elders in the community to us, who are like older millennials, to the youth who were little kids,” she said. “It’s very meaningful and a space of respite for an area that doesn’t have many green spaces.”

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