Urban redo-al bid
Could these office towers help solve NYC’s housing crisis?
THE city desperately needs more rental housing. Hundreds of obsolescent older office buildings stand near-empty. So why not use one problem to solve the other?
The way is to give landlords property-tax abatements to help pay the high costs of converting useless old offices to rental apartments. The city’s largest commercial landlord, SL Green, is quietly promoting such a strategy which, although forgotten by many, worked spectacularly well in the past.
Its time has come again — but only if woke Albany legislators get over their ingrained hatred of real estate companies and show some common sense.
Worked before
Gov. Hochul and lawmakers are duking it out over a hornet’s nest of housing issues, such as whether to restore tax incentives for new construction that includes affordable housing — a benefit that cratered when the 421-A program expired in 2022.
It was a death blow to newhousing creation. In 2023, a mere 9,090 units were going up citywide, compared with more than 45,000 in 2022.
But now, SL Green is floating the eminently practical idea of giving developers tax breaks, not necessarily to put up brand-new buildings, but to convert existing but useless offices to new homes, provided that the conversions include a meaningful number of affordable units.
Robert Schiffer, SL Green executive vice president of development said, “It would be seismic for the city’s Class B and C buildings” — meaning scores of antiquated office addresses that no longer appeal to tenants.
A similar approach helped to save the Wall Street area from ruin a quarter-century ago, when former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, with state backing, gave tax relief to owners of over-the-hill downtown office buildings to redesign them for housing.
Between 1995 and 2006, the socalled 421-g program catalyzed conversion of a staggering 13 million square feet of useless downtown offices to nearly 13,000 apartments and brought a sea change to a part of town that once closed up at 5 p.m.
They were all market rate, unlike in the current plan being discussed.
SL Green doesn’t have a formal lobbying campaign. Rather, it’s “educating key stakeholders, such as elected officials, community groups and housing advocates, about the benefit of such an approach,” Schiffer said.
The company is “walking them through” the opportunity that could transform, for example, the company’s 750 Third Ave. between East 46th and 47th streets.
Affordable apts., too
The obsolescent, 34-story office building that opened in the 1950s is now 80% vacant.
“We’re helping to frame the issue” in a way that might ultimately lead to legislation,” Schiffer said.
SL Green wants to turn 750 Third into 543 units, of which 25% would be affordable.
The project would likely cost a quarter-billion dollars, Schiffer estimated. But it would bring sorely needed new housing and life to Third Avenue, the sick man of the Midtown market, where office vacancies top 30% and scores of stores and restaurants have closed.
Doesn’t the strapped city need every tax dime it can get? In fact, tax abatements for conversions would cost the municipal coffers relative peanuts. At 750 Third Ave., for example, the city would forego $10 million in annual property taxes.
But the city is projected to collect $16.1 billion in property tax revenue in the second quarter of 2024 alone, said the city comptroller’s office.
Although the Albany talks are proceeding amid a fog of conflicting agendas, City Planning Commissioner Daniel Garodnick told me, “A tax abatement [for conversions] is right now under consideration as part of the budget conversation.”
Woke obstacles
Such a step would not benefit SL Green alone. Rudin Management, which owns half-empty 845 Third Ave., built in 1963, also is watching. So are the owners of 111 Wall St., an entirely empty, 1960s-vintage, 24story tower that was redesigned for modern use, only to be staggered by the one-two punch of the pandemic and crushing interest rates. The owner, InterVest Capital Partners, wants to convert it to 1,300 apartments.
Mayor Adams is trying to make office-to-homes conversions easier with an “Accelerator” program to cut through red tape. It’s also working on a zoning revision to widen the areas where residential conversions are allowed.
But tax abatements depend on convincing far-left legislators who’d replace free-enterprise real estate with Soviet-style Five Year Plans if they could.
The Big Apple is rooting for Albany’s obstructionists to get over their Marxist fantasies and do the right thing.
Morgan Wallen may not have gone to college, but the country music superstar has a Ph.D. in partying.
Sources told The Post that when the 30-year-old isn’t on tour, you can find him living it up at Nashville’s notorious neon-lit Lower Broadway bars, where scantily clad bartenders and honky-tonk cover bands are the norm.
“He seems to love getting in trouble on Broadway,” Jason Steen — who runs ScoopNashville.com, a site chronicling Music City arrests, including Wallen’s — told The Post. “That has just been his thing.
“He’s like a college guy. It’s nothing to see Wallen leaving the bars with folks and ending up at the Waffle House at 3 a.m.”
Wallen, Steen said, acts like “he’s the king of Broadway and nobody can stop him.”
Fateful chair chuck
Still, police put an end to Wallen’s fun this past Monday night, after he threw a chair from the sixth-story rooftop of Chief’s, a new bar and restaurant opened by fellow country star Eric Church.
He was reportedly laughing when he tossed the chair onto Broadway, where it landed three feet away from Nashville police officers.
Wallen was arrested and booked into jail, charged with three felony counts of reckless endangerment and one misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct. He posed for a mugshot with a big smile on his face.
It wasn’t his first time acting out on the boozy strip. In 2020, Wallen was busted for public intoxication and disorderly conduct after getting booted out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock & Roll Steakhouse. According to The Tennessean, he was 86ed for “kicking glass items” and cops deemed the singer a “danger to himself and the public.”
Wallen later wrote off the behavior as “horse playing”; according to USA Today, the charges were likely expunged.
Nashville’s Lower Broadway has, in recent years, become a tourist destination for bachelorette parties and “what happens in Nash Vegas stays in Nash Vegas” types looking to get wild at bars affiliated with country stars: Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row, Blake Shelton’s Ole Red, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen + Rooftop Bar and Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa.
The area attracts some 230,000 visitors each weekend, Steen said, although he noted that “most country stars wouldn’t be caught dead on Broadway except for their contracts [requiring them to spend a certain amount of time at bars they’re affiliated with].” But, he said of Wallen, “I can’t think of a bar that he hasn’t been spotted at down there.”
His own juke joint
In fact, Wallen is soon to open his own, called This Bar and Tennessee Kitchen, on Lower Broadway with TC Restaurant Group, which also partnered with country acts including Florida Georgia Line (FGL House) and Luke Bryan (Luke’s 32 Bridge Food and Drink).
Named for Wallen’s song “This Bar” and adjacent to the legendary Ryman Auditorium, the 30,000-square-foot spot is slated to be six stories tall, with three stages and a gift shop.
As Wallen posted on his website, “I sing about finding myself in ‘this bar’ and now it’s coming to life.”
It remains to be seen whether his latest arrest might get in the way.
Wallen’s reportedly something of a playboy. In February 2022, Page Six reported that model Paige Lorenze split from the singer after “getting all these messages on Instagram from girls saying, ‘I was with him. We slept together,’ ” according to a source, who also noted that Lorenze “suspected [Wallen] was cheating on her with multiple people.”
He started dating social-media influencer KT Smith in 2016, before finding fame, and the two got engaged and had a son — Indie, now 3 — together before splitting up three years later.
“Being thrown into the spotlight at such a young age is obviously going to come with some bad decisions,” Smith told People of Wallen. “He wasn’t the most faithful.”
Time to walk the line
Despite the whirlwind of trouble and rumors around him, Wallen — a preacher’s son who grew up singing in a Baptist church in small-town Sneedville, Tenn. — seems to have a Teflon coating.
After losing “The Voice” in 2014, he scored a recording contract with Big Loud Records in 2016. Transcending the country genre, Wallen’s 2018 debut album, “If I Know Me,” made the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, making it a crossover hit, while his next two albums — “Dangerous: The Double Album” (2021) and “One Thing a Time” (2023) — both debuted at No. 1.
“Morgan Wallen has built a solid fan base . . . I’d normally say he’d bounce back from this incident pretty easily,” Diana D’Angelo, owner of the p.r. firm Breaking Creatives, which has worked with Dolly Parton, told The Post.
“But this isn’t the first time he’s gotten in trouble. If he wants to be a legacy artist, I’d say he really needs to get help.”