Weekly Roundup: Early spring, Borgnine mansion, slumping inventory, Case-Shiller attack, DIY tips, increasingly confident Americans, builders’ mood

Governor signs renewal of tax abatement into law

Construction permits take off from 2007 level

Market reveals early spring as pace of pending sales below $5 million is fastest in 12 years

And jump recorded in development activity of multi-family buildings in Brooklyn

Although nothing new, garbage disposals prove to be worthy of boasts

Cuomo seeking to buy out homeowners to remake coastline

Concessions dwindling for buyers of new condos

Will rents take off again?  Maybe: Low inventory continue to push up rents of studios, 2BR apartments last month

Region’s housing prices up 8.5 percent from prior December

Big uptick in supply seems unlikely

Her Greenwich Village duplex is coming around again

Late-night newswoman decamps to $5 million

Weekly Roundup: The Big Apple and beyond. Rates hit record low, lower Manhattan surges

Change is good: Weekly Roundup, which I will continue to post on Fridays, will now be combined with a shorter (and admittedly less work-intensive) version of  The Big Apple.  I hope you like the results.

Developers are beginning to build smaller

And condo conversions are coming back

By the sea, by the beautiful sea sees rising. . . interest

Lower Manhattan becomes one of city’s fastest-growing residential sections

Fed’s Beige Book finds continued ‘sluggish’ residential construction and sales in tri-state region

NYU launches subsidized housing information project with information on 235,000 rental units

Appraiser assesses impact on housing market of two memorable events

Region’s foreclosure rates continue to rise, exceeding the nation’s

Donna does it again. . . in

Weekly Roundup: Some buyers want it all. More!

Here’s your chance to catch up with news included to inform, enlighten and perhaps even entertain you. To read about The Big Apple, check out the other of today’s posts and look for Out and About early next week.

Author didn’t sleep there, but Long Island mansion slated for destruction evokes his memory

Investors, not first-time buyers, have propelled the housing market since July

Sales of million-dollar homes

Columnist Liz Weston dishes out prosaic advice

Liz Weston (Photo by Art Streiber in AARP magazine)

Reluctant as I am to admit that I have a free subscription to the AARP magazine, I have to confess my wonder at the contents of the most recent advice column by Liz Weston.

Since I believe that you get what you pay for in almost any arena, it occurred to me that the name under which she brands her column–“My Two Cents”–couldn’t be more appropriate.

My friend Cora lives in a studio, has three animals

Flickr photo by SkyWideDesign

A week or two ago, my friend Cora adopted a fluffy calico cat she named Blanche.  Perhaps a year old, Blanche joins Jiggy the pug and Derwood the gray-and-white American short-hair cat in the rent-stabilized studio that Cora has called home for decades.

Cora happens to be 66, and she is hardly alone–among humans as well as animals.  In fact, a new survey commissioned by AARP has found that 40 percent of Americans 65 and older own a pet.  Of those, 27 percent have a dog and 19 percent, a cat.