The Post reports that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn wants to spend $20 million giving developers of unsold condos up to $50,000 a unit if they’ll turn “market rate” homes in Harlem and Brooklyn into “affordable housing” homes.

In one example, a developer would take the payment for selling a home supposedly worth $500,000 for $300,000. (more…)

Union leaders, contractors and real estate developers are trying to reach a new “project labor agreement” (PLA) to cut costs on private construction projects in New York City.   But while Mayor Blomberg is reportedly anxious to participate in a news conference announcing the tentative deal, the city itself isn’t even trying to share in the savings on public construction projects. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the town of Avondale, AZ, will use a $2.5 million grant from the federal government’s “Neighborhood Stabilization Program,” signed into law by the president in July, in part to “build two additional rental units for low-income families.” (more…)

The Times today reports that the amount of commercial real estate on the market in Manhattan has doubled since last year, and that rents are down “20 to 30 percent from the going rents at the end of the summer — to around $75 to $80 a square foot annually in Midtown and around $45 a square foot downtown.” (more…)

Today’s Times has an article about the city’s efforts to lure more of the biotech industry to New York by subsidizing real estate in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It inadvertently makes the case for across-the-board tax cuts. (more…)

Yesterday, another New York art auction went poorly, with a Christie’s sale bringing in $146.7 million against a “low” estimate of $240.7 million. “Of the 82 works for sale, 36, or more than 40 percent, of the auction went unsold,” the Times reports. The sale, the third poor performance of the week, bodes poorly for New York City’s high-end real-estate market. (more…)

The city has released some new figures on the New York City residential condominium market, while analysts at the private firm Portfolio and Property Research (via WSJ and Crain’s) have released some projections for the metro-area office-building market. Taken together, the new numbers likely mean more bad news for the city budget. (more…)

Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, also a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, and Wharton’s Joseph Gyourko have an excellent explanation (free registration required) of the likely futility of proposed government efforts to stop the slide in housing prices. (more…)

In an op-ed called “Keep the Money Flowing,” the Daily News’s Errol Louis says that the idea that “federal, state, and local governments all need to cut spending” is a “dangerous myth.” Louis quotes economist James Galbraith in saying that state spending cuts, specifically in New York, “will accelerate the decline of the economy.” Louis argues that “we need sensible spending, delivered on an emergency basis — and only government is big enough to handle the task.” In addition to warning against drastic cuts in public services, Louis suggests that states and cities start job-creation programs to make up for private-sector job losses. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg said in 2003 that “if New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart. It isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product.”

If so, then the latest figures on luxury spending don’t bode well for consumers’ continued ”demand” for New York City in the face of a global economic slowdown. (more…)