Tishman Speyer tells CB8 to mark its calendar

Community Board 8 land use chair Charles Moerdler has received a long-awaited RSVP from Tishman Speyer. The firm will attend the committee’s next meeting set for Thursday, March 23 at 7 p.m. to discuss their plans for a 340-unit affordable housing development at 160 Van Cortlandt Park S.

Firm managing director Gary Rodney agreed to the date after Moerdler suggested it in an email last Thursday.

“I implore you to do what you can to attend,” Moerdler wrote Rodney Feb. 9.

“We understand the community has additional comments, and plan to attend the March 23 land use committee meeting to discuss our plans again,” Rodney replied.

“Please note, however, that our building designs and development plan details have not progressed much further than what we last presented to you five months ago.”

Just a few days earlier, such a sudden change of heart was a remote possibility.

Moerdler had renewed his invitation to Tishman Speyer last week after his committee adopted a resolution Monday evening calling for CB8 to alert officials at the city’s housing agencies of Tishman Speyer’s reluctance to attend a second community board meeting.

Land use committee member Dan Padernacht found himself hastily scratching out the resolution during the Feb. 6 land use meeting in the hopes of ending CB8 and Tishman Speyer’s long stalemate.

Since the firm presented rough sketches of the proposed development to the land use committee in September, Rodney’s team has occasionally been in touch with CB8 staff, most recently informing them of asbestos abatement work that began on the property last month. It’s expected to last until March.

Demolition permits for the gutted-out former Church of the Visitation, rectory, and parochial school at 160 Van Cortlandt Park S. were filed last week.

Though the project does not require discretionary action from CB8, the land use committee has anticipated a more detailed presentation from Tishman Speyer in an open forum where members of the public can provide comment.

They turned to their chair for his likely ability to orchestrate one, but he has not made it his focus.

The committee ultimately opted for a bit of Padernacht’s “vinegar” to draw Tishman Speyer to the table, though Moerdler had hoped “honey” would do the trick – his own analogy.

In the end, the resolution was “a peg to take to Rodney,” Moerdler told The Riverdale Press last week.

“I put it on a very personal basis to him,” he said.

The vote on the resolution — and Moerdler’s abstention from it — also augured a change in tone among committee members, who have long trusted in Moerdler’s steady hand at the wheel in dealing with land use matters that come before CB8. His experience as a litigator stretches back through the second half of the last century.

But when it comes to the former church site, Moerdler is straddling an unusual confluence of official duties as both a volunteer chair of CB8 and a gubernatorial appointee to the New York City Housing Development Corp.’s board of directors, which votes on issuing bonds to finance housing developments across the city. The members also approve individual loan applications after developers have undergone a rigorous review of their project’s costs and anticipated revenue.

Means and ends

Rarely has a development backed by HDC bond financing appeared in the northwest corner of the Bronx, where one- and two-family zoning predominates. A narrow strip of blocks abutting the south side of Van Cortlandt Park is one of the few areas north of Fordham Road zoned for taller buildings, as is the case in much of the rest of the borough.

Moerdler has been guided by the conviction that “there are people in this (part of the Bronx) who work hard and ought to be in the middle class, and yet there is no housing available.”

“I am a strong proponent that New York City cannot survive and be the empire city of the world unless it takes care of all the people in it, and that means providing decent housing at every level to those that are not in the millionaire category,” he told The Press last week.

Before arriving in Kingsbridge, Tishman Speyer’s new affordable housing platform, TS Communities, made its New York City debut in 2021 when it took charge of Edgemere Commons,. That is an enormous affordable housing project spanning 9.3 acres in Far Rockaway, Queens.

The prospect of Tishman Speyer seeking HDC financing for 160 Van Cortlandt Park S. was apparent from the beginning, setting in motion a unique conflict of interest for CB8’s land use chair.

Further details of Tishman Speyer’s bid for bond-financing from HDC — and Moerdler’s role in the process — have come to light in The Riverdale Press in recent weeks.

Public documents reveal 160 Van Cortlandt Park S. and Edgemere Commons have been candidates for mortgage loans from HDC since at least last November.

Subsidies from the city’s department of housing preservation and development will likely figure into HDC’s calculations, plus other possible funding streams like low-income housing tax credits, New York State Homes and Community Renewal programs, and private lenders.

A spokesperson for HDC said the finance agency “works closely with the city to determine which projects best meet the city’s affordable housing needs taking into account a wide range of factors.”

Tax-exempt bond-financing is an important tool in defraying the cost of construction, which ballooned in New York City in 2022 to end the year up 14 percent annually.

Tishman Speyer’s application advanced Nov. 30 when HDC’s board members voted unanimously to approve the issuance of $1.6 billion in new tax-exempt private activity bonds expected to finance housing construction and rehabilitation projects in 2023, with Moerdler also voting yes. The former church site is one of dozens of developments in the running to receive bond financing from the issuance, according to a memo HDC president Eric Enderlin sent to board members a week before the vote. Tishman Speyer is expected to close on a $115.2 million mortgage loan for the project sometime this year.

HDC held a public hearing on these and other properties under consideration to receive bond financing Nov. 16, two weeks ahead of the bond issuance vote. The three staff members presiding over the hearing waited for members of the public to login, but to no avail.

They adjourned after 18 minutes, according to the transcript. No one showed up to the hearing.

Little room for
interpretation

“I would say two things,” said Christina Carlson, who lives a block away from 160 Van Cortlandt Park S. and has recently butted heads with Moerdler over his handling of the topic in CB8 meetings.

“First is there are clearly issues with the way public notices are made public,” she said.

“I don’t think CB8 is under any obligation to post a notice about HDC’s hearing. But the fact is Chuck (Moerdler) voted in favor of those bonds. He could’ve said something about it.”

Moerdler, for his part, was eager to put CB8 members at ease when he first learned who had acquired the majority parcel of the Church of the Visitation site from the Archdiocese of New York in August. He and Rodney served alongside each other at the HDC for three years beginning in 2014, when former mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Rodney to be the housing finance agency’s president.

“They are the Rockefeller of the real estate construction industry,” Moerdler told CB8’s executive committee.

He has widely publicized his dual roles on both public bodies at CB8 meetings the last six months. But the vote on the bond issuance is a detail he hasn’t mentioned.

Rules drawn up by the city’s Conflict of Interest Board prohibit community members from voting on matters involving another governmental entity they serve simultaneously. They also bar community board members from chairing a committee that regularly reviews any such matter.

The COIB has received an average of just over 300 complaints about violations annually over the last four years, 22 percent of which resulted in a public finding of a violation. Its enforcement actions include public warning letters and the collection of fines for serious violations.

Moerdler said last Friday he was planning to reach out to the Conflict of Interest Board, but hadn’t yet done so.

“It is really essential that you keep your nose clean,” he said. Yet the idea of abstaining from future CB8 votes left him contorted.

“If I abstain, it diminishes the force of my persuasive abilities, because at the end I’m not going to vote. On the other hand, if I don’t abstain...

“They think I’m nuts if I take that position.”