Will Union Demands Impede Affordable Housing?
The relationship between the city’s powerful labor unions and the real estate industry has been showing serious signs of strain lately, and one of Brooklyn’s biggest housing organizations says the rift could affect the creation of affordable housing even as it improves wages and, potentially, diversity in the industry. There’s been a spate of stories…
The relationship between the city’s powerful labor unions and the real estate industry has been showing serious signs of strain lately, and one of Brooklyn’s biggest housing organizations says the rift could affect the creation of affordable housing even as it improves wages and, potentially, diversity in the industry. There’s been a spate of stories over the past couple of weeks about how unions want livable wage clauses tied into projects that require rezoning or that benefit from city and state funding—projects, in other words, that often include affordable housing. The head of the Fifth Avenue Committee, which develops and manages affordable housing (the group’s current projects include Atlantic Terrace and the Red Hook Homes), says she supports the idea of using union labor—especially when unions commit to expanding and diversifying membership—but is wary of how it might impact the construction of affordable housing. We support unionization but we wouldn’t want it to negatively impact the number of affordable units being built, says Fifth Avenue Committee Executive Director Michelle de la Uz. De la Uz said the majority of the current government funding structures don’t include enough money to cover union wages for affordable housing and that government would have to commit to increasing funding for affordable housing projects by between 25 and 40 percent to ensure the use of union labor. Ironically, perhaps, the unions are also demanding that all redevelopment projects include affordable housing. Clusterf—!
Unions: Redevelopment Projects Should Have Affordable Housing Guarantees [NYDN]
2:22pm be careful you’re dating yourself. It did crack me up though! good one
Please learn to spell “socialist” and “inevitable” Benson. Or have your rentboy do it for you.
2.08;
You posts are such drivel. There isn’t a speck of reasoned argument in your posts: just the usual emotional class-warfare nonsense.
Karl Marx is dead: get over it.
Benson
Easy for you to say, Benson–you’ve got that sweet job with the Governor. But don’t think we forgot you were once a lowly Butler!
No, I’m not in a union, 1:37. Were I, however, not so fortunate as to be in my chosen profession but in one of those (typically manual labor) job fields where aching limbs, calloused hands, and a sweaty brow were regarded as lesser virtues than an MBA hanging on the wall, you bet your bottom dollar I’d be a union member.
This is the kind of shit that squeezes out the middle class. The middle class in this country is just becoming less and less. I am disgusted at these huge corporations and big shot developers. They want every fucking dollar better yet penny they can get. MORE and MORE and MORE money it’s never enough for these greedy bastards.
It is great to see and hear the sounds of the socialist complex crashing in NYC. Unions, “coalitions”, “activists”, etc: all looking for either the taxpayers’ money and/or the power of the legislature to force people to do things there way. But note what happens when they are hoist on their own petard, as we see in this case.
Ms. de la Uz is such a hypocrite. This is the leader of an organization that thinks nothing of holding a “block party” to try to publicly intimidate an individual owner into not converting their 3 family home into a single family home (and in the process remove these two apartments from rent control). No skin off her and the FAC’s back, and she’ll look the other way when the thugs at the “block party” try to “persuade” the new owners from converting.
But try to convince Ms. de la Uz to use Union labor, and see what happens!!! She’ll only do it if the taxpayers (that is, you and I) hand her more money.
What a hypocrite. It is such a pleasure to watch the whole socilist complex in NYC, once so strong, come to its ineviatble crash – the crash of its own contorted logic.
Benson
Side Note:
I saw the union picketers, and that big inflatable rat they put on the sidewalk, about 2 months ago in that same spot pictured above.
johnife: Are you a member of a union?