No, I haven't heard anything official, but it is a certainty that Tishman Speyer will ask for a huge MCI for the plantings the company has been doing (and in many cases redoing) all year. This massive project involved at least 200,000 plants, 10,000 trees and more than 3,000 shrubs, and it is still continuing, with newer plants, trees and shrubs either replacing earlier plantings (some of which have died) or filling in areas that lack such greenery. According to MCI law, TS cannot ask for such a MCI unless it is combined with considerable repaving work--and, of course, we know that's been happening all summer, and now fall, long. While a MCI cannot raise rents of rent-stabilized tenants more by 6% per year, it can, if large enough, be spread over several years. So RS Stuy Town/Peter Cooper residents can look forward to an 18% increase in their rent, if this MCI is allowed to happen. Market-rate tenants are not safe from an increase, either, as surely Tishman Speyer will raise the rent on market-raters, justifying such an increase by the "renovations" it has done to the complex. Tishman Speyer will also use tales of property owner woe in these troubling economic times to try to rationalize even further that the huge MCI increase needs to happen to save their investment (actually, the investment of other people's money, but that's another issue).
The Tenants Association and tenants need to coalesce and fight this MCI request when it happens. These plantings were not necessary. In many cases, they were wrongly done and money was wasted (and still is) trying to correct mistakes. In other cases, older groundskeeping was purposefully let go to waste, so that an "improvement" would be mandated. (Case in point: the Oval area, which was beautiful when Met Life left, but deteriorated badly under TS management.) In many areas, pavings of roads and pathways also were not necessary, or if they were, they followed fairly recent previous pavings that were sloppily or inadequately done. Tenants should not have to pay for the bad work done by firms hired by the landlord.
The joke is that not long ago previous landlord Met Life decided to cut down trees in order to "open up the oval for a more expansive view." You can read about this project here. So continues the bizarre planning at Stuy Town/Peter Cooper. One project accomplishes one thing, the next project overrides that project, then a new project destroys that project, and on and on it goes. The only thing that is a constant is that the tenants suffer.
7 comments:
By law only items that have reached the end of their useful life can be MCIed. Therefore, all paving that is requested to be MCIed had to be a certain age. The list of ages that items must be is published by the DHCR. Furthermore it must be completely replaced. Therefore for a paving MCI to go through, all of the paving must have been replaced in the entire block and lot, and been a certain age. In addition, it can only be be charged one time, ie if they mess up and do it over they can only charge for one paving, not multiple pavings.
Thanks, factchecker. We await what Tishman Speyer will try to do here.
So long as the Scumberg Administration is in power, Tishman Speyer will get their way on everything. We have to get rid of Scumberg and all the little Scumbies in City Hall who collaberated with his power grab.
Absolutely no repaving has been done in PCV
All of PCV was repaved BEFORE Stuyvesant Town. You might have missed it.
Everything that I've studied at DHCR says that they can't MCI the plants, and with all the other stuff, they don't need to. They've got enough MCI projects going to push plenty of leases into luxury decontrol territory. Let's MAKE Albany take note of this and ACT on tenant protections, including these ridiculous perpetual MCI charges !
This website is using scare tactics similar to Sarah Palin in the Presidential campaign.
No tactics here.
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