Crains New York - January 7, 2013 - (Page 3)

Developer turns flops to gold MAN OF ACTION: While others sat on the sidelines, Ziel Feldman scooped up distressed properties. IN THE BOROUGHS BROOKLYN Parsing the tech campus Residents, advocates fret over changes to Roosevelt Island BY GALE SCOTT As the former site of a city jail, a lunatic asylum, a poorhouse and a hospital for smallpox victims, Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island has a checkered past that includes having been the place where mobster Dutch Schultz was arrested, and where both William M. “Boss” Tweed and Mae West did jail time. Now plans to build a $2.1 billion, 2.1 million-square-foot school on a 19-acre site near the island’s southern end are promising to give the place an entirely new cutting-edge image. So everybody’s happy, no? Not exactly. Though the project enjoys the enthusiastic backing of the Bloomberg administration, many of those who live on the two-mile sliver Roosevelt Island of land between Manhattan and Queens have their reservaPOPULATION tions. They fret about everyWIDTH at widest thing from years point of heavy construction traffic and strains on the transportaACRES tion system to the potential loss of the island’s unique, peacefulbackwater lifestyle. What’s more, advocates for the poor and disabled are concerned about the fate of hundreds of patients at city-run ColerGoldwater Hospital. According to the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp., the Goldwater facility will be razed to make way for Cornell NYC Tech. And then there’s a pro-Palestine group upset that Cornell is partnering with an Israeli university, Technion, which it accuses of aiding “Israeli war crimes,” a charge almost everyone dismisses. Add it all up and perhaps it’s not surprising that debates at Community Board 8, which on Dec. 19 approved the project, were heated. “We’re a community of just 14,000 people in a state with 20 million,” said Matthew Katz, immediate past president of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association. “But we like to scream and yell and foam at the mouth.” Cathy Dove, vice president of ODDS & ENDS buck ennis 14K 147 With a pipeline full of reborn condo projects, Ziel Feldman is man of the hour BY AMANDA FUNG In the next three months, roughly 54 apartments at one of the most famous flops of the real estate bust,the slender 50-story luxury condominium tower One Madison Park, are expected to finally hit the market. Their debut comes less than a year after developer Ziel Feldman stepped in and scooped up a slice of the $240 million debt on the property at a hefty discount and then, in partnership with giant Related Cos., he seized control of the tower, with its commanding views of the popular Flatiron district park, in a bankruptcy auction. “When the market crashed, I started seeing opportunity,” said Mr. Feldman, founder of HFZ Capital Group, sitting in his sleek, contemporary-art-adorned Madison Avenue office. At that point, he also started buying, quickly morphing into one of the city’s biggest owners of oncetroubled condo projects.Today,just See DEVELOPER on Page 17 800 ft. Sandy jobless claims irk biz State rallied workers to file for benefits, triggering fees for hard-hit employers BY CHRIS BRAGG After Superstorm Sandy left tens of thousands of New Yorkers unemployed, the Cuomo administration launched an aggressive effort to sign them up for jobless benefits, dispatching staffers from Red Hook to the Rockaways. Indeed, a few weeks after the late-October storm, records show, the number of New Yorkers seeking first-time unemployment benefits approached the state record of early 2009, during the depth of the recession. Now it seems New York businesses already struggling from Sandy could be stuck with the bill from the spike in unemployment. Businesses could be hit in this year’s tax bills with up to a $750 charge per employee who received state jobless benefits, according to George Wentworth,a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project.New York and New Jersey—unlike Connecticut—do not exempt businesses in their states from paying for unemployment claims related to disasters, he noted. In the days after Sandy, the state Department of Labor widely promoted efforts to sign up displaced workers for Federal Disaster Unemployment Assistance, even telling claimants that they could begin collecting more than $400 a week without providing pay stubs showing previous income. It turns out, however, that federal rules require that states first see whether unemployed residents are DOCKED: Layoffs raise rates on storm-struck businesses. eligible for state unemployment benefits before putting them on federal disaster re- benefits because of Sandy, while lief rolls. only 8,400 have applied instead for More than 53,000 people in benefits from the federal program, See ANOTHER SANDY BILL on Page 17 New York have applied for state buck ennis See TECH CAMPUS on Page 16 January 7, 2013 | Crain’s New York Business | 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crains New York - January 7, 2013

IN THE BOROUGHS
IN THE MARKETS
THE INSIDER
SMALL BUSINESS
BUSINESS PEOPLE
OPINION
REPORT: ECONOMIC OUTLOOK
GREG DAVID
FOR THE RECORD
REAL ESTATE DEALS
CLASSIFIEDS
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
SOURCE BREAKFAST
OUT AND ABOUT
SNAPS

Crains New York - January 7, 2013