Stroock Presents: GOAT Town, Episode 4: Office-to-Residential Conversions in NYC – Magic Bullet or Merely One Piece of the Puzzle?
Creative Housing Solutions Pop Up Across Oregon
Business Better Podcast Episode: Affordable Housing in Chinatown, Los Angeles: How To Better Serve Your Community
Affordable Housing on the Front Range: Inclusionary Housing Ordinances and the New Middle Income Housing Authority
Orrick Public Policy Podcast #25 – A Conversation with the California State Senate Majority Leader Robert M. Hertzberg
Inside DC: Highlights and Implications of the FY 2022 Budget
[WEBINAR] Housing and Land Use Legislative Update
[WEBINAR] Advancing the Policy Discussion Around Housing
[WEBINAR] Innovative Partnerships to Overcome Housing Challenges in Communities
BOSTON—City Deploys Sensors to Combat Rat Infestations - Boston officials announced the implementation of a new rodent-tracking sensor system throughout the city to provide data on hotspots and measure the effectiveness of...more
Across the United States, empty office buildings have become a common sight. According to Moody’s Analytics, office vacancies are at their highest since the 1990s. The COVID hangover has left us with an abundance of vacant or...more
A recent bill introduced in the California State Senate would impose a tax on commercial buildings that have prolonged vacancies. Authored by California State Senator Caroline Menjivar, SB 789 is intended to discourage...more
Vacancy rates across the state are showing improvement, particularly in San Francisco, which reflects California’s housing shortage. Demand also remains strong, and supply is growing, suggesting confidence in the sector...more
On December 5, 2024, the New York City Council approved with modifications the NYC Department of City Planning’s (DCP) City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the third and final of Mayor Adams’ City of Yes initiatives. The new...more
Land banks and community land trusts (CLTs) are non-profit corporations each formed under Ohio law. They share similar missions to unlock the potential of vacant, abandoned, and/or tax-delinquent (VAD) properties....more
For over a year now, the City of Yes (“CoY”) zoning update, which aims to bring back more flexibility and density in development across the City, has been a hot topic of conversation in the New York City development sphere....more
Earlier this summer, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aimed at spurring the redevelopment of existing underutilized or vacant commercial properties and converting them for residential...more
The Massachusetts Affordable Homes Act (H. 4977), signed into law on August 6, 2024, includes provisions intended to promote residential housing construction. These provisions: (1) require municipalities to permit accessory...more
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order that aims to jumpstart infill housing development projects. The executive order was coupled with a $94 million award to 15 counties to also support building on...more
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he is moving forward with an education platform driven by artificial intelligence (AI) designed to help students and families navigate the...more
This article summarizes some of the most significant amendments to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that were enacted in 2023. Some housing laws that relate to CEQA are discussed in the article, “Recently...more
Assembly Bill (AB) 3068 (Haney, Quirk-Silva, and Wicks) would provide for the streamlined ministerial (i.e., no CEQA) approval of qualifying adaptive reuse projects involving the conversion of an existing building to...more
New York recently adopted the Affordable Neighborhoods for New Yorkers (ANNY) Tax Incentive and the Affordable Housing from Commercial Conversions (AHCC) Tax Incentive programs, as well as a host of other new and modified...more
CHICAGO — City Council to Consider Requiring Testing, Guidelines for City Government AI Tools- Chair of Chicago City Council’s Committee on Economic, Capital & Technology Development Gilbert Villegas (Ward 36) introduced a...more
We previously published a legal alert on October 12, 2023, about the extensive housing package that Governor Gavin Newsom signed on October 11, 2023, consisting of 56 bills to help address California’s decades-in-the-making...more
The Biden administration is launching a multi-agency effort to encourage states and cities to convert more empty office buildings into housing units, with billions of federal dollars available to help spur such transitions....more
Governor Newsom recently approved multiple state housing bills passed by the State Assembly and Senate. The following is a summary of a few of the key bills that are expected to benefit multi-family, mixed-income housing...more
A roundup of news and multimedia from the Unfamiliar Terrain team: San Francisco - These three new blocks of housing are among S.F.’s best. They’re for the formerly homeless (S.F. Chronicle): Exploring three recently...more
A federal appeals court on Monday overturned Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas in new construction, agreeing with restaurant owners who argued the city bypassed federal energy regulations when it approved the...more
San Francisco leaders have a new plan to make it easier for developers to convert office buildings to housing downtown and in swaths of SoMa and Union Square....more
Since January 2021, multiple proposals were introduced in the New York State legislature to permit underutilized hotel and/or office buildings, many of which have become financially distressed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to...more
On Jan. 19, 2021, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo proposed an amendment to Section 277 of the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL) that would “authorize flexibility in zoning to address high commercial vacancy rates and...more