CUNY School of Law’s Community Legal Resource Network And the Incubator for Justice Present a 2 Credit CLE Course and Networking Event on    Not for Profits and Social Enterprise:   Starting and Managing your Public Interest Company Learn about the mechanics, ins and outs of starting a not-for-profit corporation or other public interest [...]

Housing Development Fund Corporation cooperatives (HDFCs) in New York City often face financial challenges. In this post, I would like to address specifically the challenge presented by real estate taxes. While HDFCs can receive real estate tax exemption and abatement through the J-51 Exemption program, these abatements eventually expire. Because the non-payment of real estate [...]

New York City’s property tax assessment program has been controversial lately because of news story after news story about problems with high profile assessments. One story was about the remarkable under assessment of the Yotel hotel at 42nd Street& 10th Avenue. Yotel  opened and has been doing a brisk business since June, 2011, but was [...]

Affordable housing has always been a huge issue in New York City, and now it’s emerging as a central issue in the 2013 Mayoral campaign. For many people though it’s like talking about the weather: we all discuss it but no one seems to be able to do much about it. I have a special [...]

If you are a condo or co-op owner in New York City, you finally got back an important tax break that expired for you over 7 months ago, but unless you were watching it you probably didn’t even notice. That’s because even when it wasn’t in effect everyone, including the tax collector, acted as if [...]

There was a huge real estate market development recently that surprisingly has attracted little media or market attention. But it will. It’s going to have a huge impact on our New York City real estate market because it affects the basics of how real estate financing works and how existing mortgages are serviced. What’s more, [...]

Ben Flavin’s 2013 Real Estate Predictions  It’s traditional to adopt a New Year’s improvement resolution. If you’ve been thinking about buying real estate, here’s my real estate predictions for 2013, which argue that you’ll improve your financial health if you don’t wait too long to pull the trigger on your property transaction. These predictions are [...]

You can’t put a price on the dozens of lives lost, or the thousands of lives so devastated, by Hurricane Sandy. But, of course, we do put a price on it; just as lawyers do in civil tort claims. So it was in 2001 when a Partnership for New York City study put the total [...]

With all the discussion of the automatic end to tax breaks that are half of the so-called fiscal-cliff in Washington that everyone agrees we don’t want to go over, there has been surprisingly little attention being paid to the automatic tax increases for condo and co-op properties in New York City that we’ve already gone [...]