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HW
EXCLUSIVE STORY
Chris
Halliburton Brings Warburg to
Harlem
A
native New Yorker, Chris graduated from
Tufts
University
where he majored in political science and psychology. Among 22
students recruited from top 20 colleges nationwide for posts at
Aetna Life & Casualty, he moved to
Manhattan
and spent many years designing and implementing pension/retirement
plans as well as employee benefit programs for major corporations.
From the financial world he transferred his business savvy to the
film industry where he represented directors and produced music
videos and commercials extensively throughout the
US
and
Europe
. Chris pursued his passion for real estate as a profession after
running his own thriving film production company.
Greg Thomas:
What
are Warburg’s goals for its uptown office?
CH:
To establish a foothold in the upper
Manhattan
market on the brokerage end. We want to be the major player
in the real estate brokerage market. Right now, in the balance of
this year, we’ll introduce ourselves to the community, develop
goodwill and rapport, and establish ourselves as a resource. In my
experience in Harlem, it has been difficult, at best, to find
someone to go to who would give you not only a well-thought out and
researched answer to your question about real property, but also
provide a place in which to discuss it. We will welcome you to come
in and ask questions and to get answers to your questions and not be
upstairs on the second floor or in the back of some other space or
down on 57th St. or 86th St. or 79th St. where you
can’t really walk around the corner and ask: “I’m having
problems with this property next door to me, would you know what’s
going on with it?”
HW:
What kind of investment is Warburg making in the uptown
office? What’s Warburg spending to establish this office?
CH:
It’s a 15-year commitment. It’s a many- million-dollar
commitment.
HW:
What has been your observation on what’s been going on in
Harlem
real estate and the changes that have occurred over the last 10-20
years?
CH:
It was only a matter of time before
Harlem
became attractive to developers and financial institutions as a
place to build new housing and renovate existing housing because
there’s just a finite amount of it on the island as a whole.
You just have more and more people that want to be here,
whether that’s on a full-time basis or just having an apartment
here.
Over the years, you
had speculators, church and community groups, and individual
investors that actually lived in Harlem and came from outside of
Harlem
that saw what was going on or felt that something was going to
happen and were buying properties left and right.
It’s interesting how over the arc of time just how the
value of the properties have increased; not only the active
properties that have tenants in them, but ‘shells’—buildings
that just have four walls and sometimes no roof and they’ve just
become very valuable.
The other social
phenomenon that has been taking place has been the desire to have a
better quality of life regardless of the perception of where you
live. People are moving
to areas and buying homes based on ‘what I get when I close my
door’—what’s on the inside and not necessarily what I have to
do on the outside. There’s been the trend in the last 10-12 years
of people not wanting to commute four hours a day, leaving for work
before the kids get up and when you come home, they’re already
asleep. So, now,
instead, they’re thinking about buying a brownstone, renovating it
and they’re a lot closer to their jobs.
HW:
What about those who have been living here, or renting here, and are
being priced out of the market? (i.e. gentrification)
CH:
Fortunately, the local “authorities” (Assemblyman Keith Wright,
Sen. David Patter-son, Congressman Charles Rangel or the Abyssinian
Baptist Church, or the NYC Housing Partnership, HPD, etc.) have done
a fairly good job of keeping and creating middle-income, affordable
housing on different scales for the existing community; the
long-time residents. What, unfortunately, has happened is that some
of the residents may not have kept up with what are the bands of
income defined under affordable housing as they have increased.
With some of the affordable housing programs, the incomes are
$60,000 for a single and $150,000 for a family or four and that’s
based on the guidelines that were set years ago that were just
increased based on keeping pace with inflation and cost of living
increases.
HW:
What about low-income housing?
CH:
There has been the creation of affordable housing units on
the rental side to address some of that and there have been some
affordable housing units created for home owner-ship purposes that
have been addressing the lower-income brackets.
But, what needs to happen is that some of the programs that
were instituted in the 1970s (i.e. The TILL Program [that
established Mitchell-Lama] or Housing Development Fund Program) need
to be revamped as a vehicle to address the home ownership needs of
the lower-income bracket. Back
then, it [TILL] was set up as an affordable program so you could buy
a two bedroom apartment for $500. And now that we’ve come 25 years
since, maybe that program should be reconfigured; let’s use
certain logical percentages so that the people who are the tenants
can make a reasonable profit—but let’s not forget the fact that
they were subsidized in the sense to get this and then turn this
property over to the next group of people so that maybe a person or
a family of three or four that have been living in a housing project
but now have gotten to the point where maybe their gross family
income is $75,000, they could then go take that property and pay
$100,000 for a three-bedroom apartment instead of someone selling it
out on the market for $250,000 or $300,000. So, that way, you’re
getting somebody from the housing project into home ownership the
same way they did it 25 years ago, as opposed to letting the program
just go wild and run free.
It would be a way
to not only maintain the fabric of the community, but to help people
move from being renters to owners and it’s all the guise of a
program that was set up by the city anyway. You could make it a
win-win situation for everybody, as opposed to a situation that will
ultimately be exploited.
HW: Could you tell us an anecdote from the past three years about
a place you have brokered where there was a family that made the
transition to being in an apartment and finally become homeowners?
Or are most people that you deal with already homeowners and
are just upgrading?
CH:
I had a woman of African and Latino descent [in March] who
was renting in the 110s or 120s and really wanted to buy a house and
had to enlist the help of her father to do it.
I found them this house that needed to be renovated that she
really liked and it had a squatter in it—it was a man masquerading
as a woman. Most
people would not take on such a chore to buy as property with a
tenant and depend on the court systems to get the person out so they
could occupy the space. It took a while—a lot of due diligence and
a lot of supporting documents that I had to submit to the bank to
help her get to the point where she would be able to finance this
thing. When her mother
and father and she came into the conference room of the lawyer’s
office on the day that we were closing, it was just a really great
experience to see him and his wife and his daughter and how happy
they were that she was actually going to have a home. It was a great
feeling for me and a great moment to be involved in, particularly
after all the things we had gone through to get to that point.
It probably took
about four months to get the house; that’s not inexorably long,
but it was very concentrated work that went into it, with engineers,
contractors, appraisers, and analyzing and getting the comps to
justify it and working with the bank and the Dept. of Buildings
about the violations, etc. She’s
now living on
136th St.
right around the corner from
Harlem
Hospital
; they have control of three floors and are working on getting the
squatter out of the fourth floor and construction will start soon.
Writer:
Greg Thomas
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