Thinking of New York City, I guess the definition of ‘best location’ helps determine the quality of the restaurant. But I certainly can think of many prized locations in the city that do indeed deliver some of the worst food and service. Often the best restaurants in these prize locations are grossly over-rated. Just because you have a great location are you entitled to give those dreaded tourists the worst possible experience? I think Cities should fine rotten restaurants in great locations for bad service and quality, or at least give them a rating on the front door, a badge of shame…..

“In real estate it truly is all about location,” says Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman and leader of the LUXURYLOFT team. “It is unfortunate when a retail establishment abuses a prize location. It is done so at the detriment of the town or city. Thankfully blogs have helped identify the worst offenders. Maybe an I-Phone APP for this is an idea, warning un-informed tourists not to enter a rotten restaurant?”

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Yes, these incomes would definitely qualify you as rich in Oklahoma City or a small town in Vermont, but it is VERY far from rich in a city such as New York City. It may indeed be necessary to raise taxes on the rich, but it is even more important, if we are to be American, to be fair. A BIG CITY FEDERAL TAX CREDIT is long overdue. Big cities drain national resources significantly less than smaller cities. They are much more efficient. but they are much more expensive to live in as well. Housing costs are often double, triple or even qudruple that of smaller cities and towns. Food, education, pretty much everything is more expensive. Yet Washington is incapable of recognizing this fact? Thats a national disgrace!

New York City residents should stand up for their rights now and demand a re-definition of the term ‘rich’ to take into account city-by-city cost of living immediately.

“A New York couple who earns $ 250,000.00 a year can afford an apartment that costs about $ 750,000.00 if they were to obtain a mortgage,” says Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman and leader of the LUXURYLOFT team. “Where in New York City can you find a RICH PERSON’S apartment for $ 750,000.00? In Manhattan especially, earning $ 250k per year does not make you rich by any standards. Washington is completely out of touch with the real world.”

The ‘Bush tax cuts’ are set to expire at the end of 2010. Regardless of the  increase in the tax rates, this is what we suggest:

1)  Introduce a BIG CITY Federal Tax Credit based on the city you reside in calculated by the differential in cost of living. IE: Those earning $ 250k in Tupelo, Mississipi should not pay the same tax rate as those living in Manhattan.

2) Identify the large tax avoiders, those with access to the most ’sophisticated’ accountants and lawyers who often pay taxes at half the rate the rest of us do, while earning ten times more.

3) Why ZERO estate taxes for just one year: revoke this stupid law that amounts to a windfall for a lucky few (at the expense of all of us) and introduce lower estate taxes for all…..or use the lost estate tax revenue of 2010 to pay down the national debt!

4) Raise the retirement age to adjust for the fact that we are living longer.

5) Make everyone pay SOME Federal taxes…even if its a little. No-one should get a free ride. We should all contribute. That way more people would vote too.

6) Cut the waste. Introduce more tech-based efficiencies to government. Fire corrupt government employees + jail them with double time.

7) Corporations and private equity are sitting on $2.5 TRILLION dollars in cash, but they are not hiring. Provide tax credits for hiring. Every individual employed, becomes a contributor to the economy by not only consuming and spending, but also reducing their need to tap into federal funds (our tax dollars) to foot their unemployment bill. Its cheaper than keeping them un-employed…..by far.

Re-evaluate illegal immigrant reform now:  Charge all illegal immigrants a one-time fee ($ 250?) to become legal. 11 million x $ 250 can help to pay down the deficit. 11 million consumers, paying taxes (if they are collected!) will help fuel the economy. Make learning English a pre-requisite for citizenship. 1 common language unites a country and eliminates the cost of bi-lingual government (it costs BILLIONS every year!).

9) Don’t focus on raising tax rates! Focus on collecting the taxes owed. Our constitution is quite clear about us all being created equal, no?

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Inside was a truly cavernous melange of incredible displays of every imaginable food type….fresh fish, vegetables, ice cream, books, wine….EVERYTHING ITALIAN. The presentation is beautiful, although a bit chaotic with the drones of people everywhere. For anyone on vacation its a dream come true. For anyone wanting a gastronomic escape on a rainy day, its amazing. Real Estate wise it fuels the neighborhood around Madison Square Park to the point where I would estimate values will rise 5%….easily. The service is super-slow, almost bad, but this is to be expected at the very beginning. they had better work on it hard before they lose repeat business though.

Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman and author of the LUXURYLETTER says: “Overall it’s a winner!”

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“We have repeatedly cautioned anyone to use real estate quarterly reports to get the best gauge of what is really happening in the markets right now,” says leonard Steinberg of Prudential Douglas Elliman, and leader of the LUXURYLOFT team. “We issue a monthly report that reports on SIGNED CONTRACTS as well as closed sales to get a more balanced perspective of what is selling for what RIGHT NOW. Closed sales often went to contract many months and sometimes even years before closing. Pricing is a reflection of what the market is will ing to bear to-day, not that of the past.”

When reading Tuesday’s report on home prices from the S&P/Case-Shiller index, use caution.

The Case-Shiller index uses data that is several months old—it’s a three month moving average, which means that Tuesday’s report shows home sales for April, May and June.  That’s when the home buyer tax credits were largely still in effect.

So it’s not surprising that Tuesday’s reading showed that home sales gained by a non-seasonally adjusted 1% in the three month period ending in June from the period ending in May.

July’s weak sales figures—existing and new home sales were both at very low levels—means that sellers are going to be reducing prices if they want to sell homes. Real-estate agents across the country are describing a rare standoff in housing markets, where buyers and sellers aren’t seeing eye to eye on price.

So when you read of a ‘double dip recession’ chances are we are already in the dip and by the time the press reports it as actual, chances are we will be on the way out…

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Developers are readying two residential towers that will rise above most of Midtown. The massive mixed-use development planned west of Penn Station would transform Manhattan’s skyline as viewed from New Jersey. Downtown, the transformation is already happening, with the warped, metallic skin of Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower looming over the neighborhood around City Hall and, at Ground Zero, 1 World Trade Center already rising to 36 stories.

Some of the proposed alterations to the city’s skyline have been opposed. Vornado Realty Trust’s plan to build a tower near Penn Station attracted criticism from people wanting to preserve the Empire State Building’s iconic spot.

But the new projects are being propelled by powerful forces. The City Council’s near-unanimous approval of the Vornado project is a sign that elected officials are much more concerned about producing jobs than aesthetic concerns. “They were saying New York needs new buildings,” says Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum. “Before that, I would’ve said that New Yorkers like their city just fine the way it looks right now.”

“Politics trumps everything in development,” says Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman and leader of the LUXURYLOFT team. “When politicians need to create jobs, huge buildings that employ thousands become desirable, something that also caters to the Unions. Remember the midtown Jean Nouvel tower that was proposed a few years ago? Jobs were not a political issue then, so the Tower was scrapped.”

From a residential perspective new towers are definitely in demand, especially in the Midtown area: they offer the views, services and amenities that this buyer craves. Aside from the Bloomberg Tower and the Time Warner building, there are not too many options.

From the commercial perspective, businesses are demanding super-efficient high-tech spaces with high security and quality space. It is very difficult to retrofit existing buildings to achieve this.

And if you don’t think this will happen, look at West Chelsea to-day compared to 10 years ago…..100 Eleventh Avenue, 456 West 19th Street, 200 Eleventh Avenue, 231 and 245 tenth Avenue, Gehry’s IAC building, HL23, The Caledonia, all viewed from the Highline Park…..

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ON YAHOO NEWS to-day…..Forget the Dow and the GDP. Here’s the latest economic indicator: The U.S. birth rate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a century as many people apparently decided they couldn’t afford more mouths to feed.

The birth rate dropped for the second year in a row since the recession began in 2007. Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for HealthStatistics show.

“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.

The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families.

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.

“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.

The birth rate dipped below 20 per 1,000 people in 1932 and did not rise above that level until the early 1940s. Recent recessions, in 1981-82, 1990-91 and 2001, all were followed by small dips in the birth rate, according to CDC figures.

The Great Recession “is definitely a deterrent” to people having more children, said Dr. Michael Cabbad, chief of maternal health at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where births declined from about 2,800 in 2008 to about 2,500 last year.

Even Cabbad’s son said he’d like to have more children “if his business plan works out.”

Nearly half of low- and middle-income women surveyed a year ago by the Guttmacher Institute said they wanted to delay pregnancy or limit the number of children they have because of money concerns. Half of those women also said the recession made them more focused on contraceptive use. Guttmacher researches reproductive health issues.

Besides finances, experts said a decline in immigration to the United States also may be pushing births down.

The downward trend invites worrisome comparisons to Japan and its “lost decade” of economic stagnation in the 1990s, which was accompanied by very low birth rates. Births in Japan fell 2 percent in 2009 after a slight rise in 2008.

Not so in Britain, where the population took its biggest jump in almost half a century last year and the fertilityrate is at its highest level since 1973. France’s birth rate also has been rising; Germany’s birth rate is lower but rising as well.

Cherlin said the U.S. birth rate “is still higher than the birth rate in many wealthy countries and we also have many immigrants entering the country. So we do not need to be worried yet about a birth dearth” that would crimp the nation’s ability to take care of its growing elderly population.

The new U.S. report is a rough count of births from states. It estimates there were 4,136,000 births in 2009, down from a year ago’s estimate of 4,247,000 in 2008 and more than 4.3 million in 2007.

The report does not give details on trends in different age groups. That will come next spring and will give a clearer picture who is and is not having children, Ventura said.

Last spring’s report, on births in 2008, showed an overall drop but a surprising rise in births to women over 40, who may have felt they were running out of time to have children and didn’t want to delay despite the bad economy.

Women who postpone having children because of careers also may find they have trouble conceiving, said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based demographic research group.

“For some of those women, they’re going to find themselves in their mid-40s where it’s going to be hard to have the number of children they want,” he said.

Heather Atherton is nearing that mark. The Sacramento, Calif., mom, who turns 36 next month, started a home-based public relations business after her daughter was born in 2003. She and her husband upgraded to a larger home in 2005 and planned on having a second child not long afterward. Then the recession hit, drying up her husband’s sales commissions and leaving them owing more on their home than it is worth. A second child seemed too risky financially.

“However, we just recently decided that it’s time to stop waiting and just go for it early next year and let the chips fall where they may,” she said. “We can’t allow the recession to dictate the size of our family. We just need to move forward with our lives.”

“This trend could result in smaller houses, apartments, and so much more,”  says Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “It could also result in larger cities becoming more and more desirable.”

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Why not introduce a NATIONAL HOUSE-TRADE BANK/DATA BASE, whereby someone could trade their home and mortgage for someone else’s similar home/mortgage value in the City they need to move to? Whereas both properties would still retain an inflated value in to-day’s market, over time this will correct itself, but more importantly, it will minimize the significant expense of foreclosure to the economy and speed up hiring.

“This could boost the economy by helping those un-employed to take a job, thus reducing stress on the government funding, and also reduce the number of foreclosures and sales happening below market values,” says Leonard Steinberg, managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman and leader of the LUXURYLOFT team. “An employed person spends more, thereby boosting the economy a third way. It’s time for politicians and banks to get creative and practical!”

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FROM CRAIN’S: After exiting the Big Apple last year, high-end grocer Balducci’s is now planning to make a comeback. The gourmet chain, known for its enticing assortment of meats, cheeses and Italian delicacies, is eyeing several locations for small, quick-service stores, as well as for a 10,000-square-foot flagship.

Balducci’s, which was founded in New York 64 years ago, currently operates six locations in New York state, Connecticut, Virginia and Maryland, along with three quick-service shops at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Starting this fall, it is planning to open as many as three small midtown locations, ranging from 1,000 square feet to 2,000 square feet in size

“We’re looking to put our foot in the market,” said Jason Pruger, the Newmark Knight Frank Retail broker who, along with colleague Ross Kaplan, is exclusively representing Balducci’s in its search. “Balducci’s is an iconic New York brand that we’re excited to bring back.”

For its larger Big Apple flagship, the chain is searching “affluent, dense residential neighborhoods” such as the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, Mr. Pruger noted.

Sizing down its first outposts is a good starting point for the chain’s re-entry here, according to industry consultants.

“Real estate being as expensive as it is in Manhattan, it’s not a bad idea to go smaller,” said Matt Casey, who runs grocery consultancy Matthew P. Casey and Associates.

Balducci’s shuttered its two last Manhattan locations in Chelsea and the Upper West Side in April of 2009. The grocer also operated a storied outpost on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village from 1972 to 2003. At the time of the Manhattan closures, the gourmet chain also terminated a Washington, D.C., store. It is now operated by New York investment firm Angelo Gordon & Co., which also owns New Jersey-based Kings Super Markets.

Jim Demme, the Angelo Gordon & Co. senior advisor who led the acquisition of Balducci’s, did not immediately return calls for comment. However, Burt Flickinger, a supermarket consultant, expects him, along with the operating power of Kings, to return Balducci’s to prominence.

“[Balducci's under Kings] will be a very formidable foe, particularly for A&P’s Food Emporium,” said Mr. Flickinger. He also noted that Kings “is of the best seafood retailers in the U.S. and is very strong in delis and will bring those skills to Balducci’s in New York.”

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After years of growth, the Census Bureau recently reported that median new home size fell to 2,135 square feet in 2009 after peaking at more than 2,300 earlier in the decade. That is a significant drop….almost 7%!

“As we see two economies emerge, the averages will shift,” says Leonard Steinberg of Prudential Douglas Elliman managing director of New York’s leading residential real estate brokerage. “Most middle and lower income homeowners do not use or need a formal dining room, let alone a double height ceilinged entrance hall: With new technologies come new efficiencies. A large screen TV used to take up about 12sf ….now it hangs on the wall. Architects are becoming more focused on engineering useful space rather than creating large spaces. Of course, the very wealthy will still have their Mc Mansions, but even in this arena we are seeing a remarkable shift towards energy efficiency and it has become fashionable to boast of a home’s eco-friendly features.”

So, how could New Yorkers shrink their space, considering homes here are significantly smaller (and thereby much more efficient than suburban homes):

1)  Use skinny plasma TV’s mounted on the wall.

2) Double up: a wall that has bookshelves built in to it uses the space of the wall. Better still, store the books away and use a KINDLE or I-pad to store thousands of books. If you dine formally once a year, think about making the dining room more of a great room/study that converts easily for formal dining.

3) Scale your furniture differently: Many, over-stuffed, over-sized furniture items achieve the exact same comfort levels as much smaller pieces that use up much less square footage.

4) Engineer your storage: Closets should be engineered for maximum usage. Use ‘void spaces’ those little pieces of space under stairs, above closets, etc where outstanding storage opportunities exist used creatively.

5) If you have those hideous through-the-wall AC systems, box around them to add storage as well as hide them from sight. Still better than those vile window units that are both ugly and super-inefficient.

6) Store under the bed, possibly utilizing this as a closet rather than just ‘junk space’….there are interesting applications for this.

The downside to shrinking homes? The cost per square foot will rise.

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The figures suggest that the Manhattan market, buoyed by a resumption of hiring and a healthy Wall Street bonus season ahead, has so far escaped much of the distress across the country. The National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday that existing home sales nationwide plummeted by 27% in July, following the expiration of federal housing tax credits.

“Everyone has an opinion as to where the market is heading: the reality is all these opinions are guess-work,” says Leonard Steinberg of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who was contacted for this article but not quoted. “Ask anyone in the financial markets if we are heading into inflationary or deflationary times and the answer is consistently yes….and no.”

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