NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: Broker Fee Ban Shows Modest Rent Impact, Federal Tax Law Threatens State Budget, and Final Chance to See Manhattanhenge This Year, and Hot Train Cars

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

A month after New York City banned broker fees for most renters, a StreetEasy report shows rents rose only slightly, easing fears of a major spike. Meanwhile, state officials warn the new federal tax law could leave a $3 billion hole in New York’s budget. Friday and Saturday bring the year’s final Manhattanhenge sunsets, with prime views on cross streets like 14th and 72nd. And in transit news, riders are dealing with sweltering subway cars, a judge has approved Mayor Adams’ plan to remove protections from a Bedford Avenue bike lane, and work continues on a $16 billion rail tunnel linking Midtown and New Jersey.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, July 11th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. It's been exactly a month since a new law. Eliminating broker fees from most New York City renters took effect. WNMC's David Brand reports on the rental market impact. Opponents of the law warned of a major unintended consequence. A spike in rents after landlords absorbed.

costs they previously passed on to tenants. But a new report from the online listings platform Street Easy finds that has not been the case overall. The report finds rents increased by an average of about 5% for apartments that were previously listed with a broker fee. That's less than one percentage point higher than the average increase for no-fee apartments. The median rent for apartments listed on Street Easy was $4,000 a month in June. The company's economists and other housing experts say it's still too early to judge the full impact of the new law. New York State officials say the new federal tax and spending law will blow a $3 billion hole into the state's budget. W&M.C. Jimmy Veilkine reports. State budget director Blake

Washington says the so-called Big Beautiful Bill will cut billions of dollars from the state's Medicaid program starting next year. The program is jointly funded by the state and federal governments. It provides health care to low-income and disabled people. Washington says hospitals will also take a hit. The word that comes to mind is just destabilization. It is a system-wide impact to the provider network. Washington says Governor Kathy Hockel will talk with Democrats who control the state legislature about how to respond. Republicans in Congress say the bill lowers taxes and cuts down on Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse. Today and tomorrow are our last chances to catch Manhattan Hinge this year. The phenomenon occurs when the sun lines up perfectly with New York City's grid, framing the sunset with high rises.

The best views are on streets with a clear view west of the Hudson River, like 72nd and 14 streets. Tonight, the American Museum of Natural History will close West 79th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue for public viewing. That's at 7. The museum's event is free. The sun sets just before 8.30 this evening. Here's our Friday forecast. and cloudy now. Patchy fog this morning, be careful out there. Otherwise, mostly sunny. 86 today for a high with a calm wind, fog overnight, low around 73. And then tomorrow morning, more patchy

fog, slim chance at mid-afternoon showers and thunderstorms, partly sunny in mid-80s. Seventy-cloudy now. It's Friday. That means it's time for a weekly segment of On the Way. Covering all things transportation. That's after the break. It's time for On the Way, our weekly segment on all things considered, breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us is WNYC's transportation reporter Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Caliphay. It has been hot, hot, hot in New York City these last few weeks. And you know that experience when you're sweltering on a subway platform, your train finally arrives and then bam, you're in there, and it's hotter inside the car than it was outside because the AC is broken in the subway.

Oh, yeah. Well, Ramsey's here for you. Ramsey, you obtained four years' worth of MTA data of completely. for broken air conditioning on the subways? What did you find? So this data is between 2020 and the summer of last year. And there are thousands of complaints of broken air conditioning on subways across the entire system. So what I decided to do was to rank those train lines by complaints and to see which line is, quote, the hottest.

And the results didn't surprise us. And that's because, appropriately enough, the one train ranked number one for the train lines with the most complaints for bused aties. This is something Stephen and I and One Train riders have known for a while now. Right. I mean, partly we've knew this before because we spent time looking at the infrastructure behind the subway system, specifically going to the train shops that repair the One Trains. Mechanics at the 240th Street train yard in the Bronx told us that those One trains are just so old that when the AC system breaks down, if just one part of it breaks down, the whole thing is shot.

Whereas, like, newer trains can actually kind of balance it. If one part breaks, the rest of the system keeps running, not the one train. Interesting. And partly, these shops are so old and antiquated and in disrepair that it's even hard to work on the trains because it's not the whole station, the whole train yard isn't even accessible to be working on trains. It's kind of a mess. Yeah, yeah. And look, those cars were built in the 1980s.

They're actually the oldest actively used train cars in the system. And here's one last fun data point. there was a single train car that tallied the most complaints for a hot subway car during this year period. It's train car 2449.

I know that one. We're looking for it and that's on the one line. I tried finding myself but failed in my mission. So listeners, this is for you. We want to know if this car is currently in service

and whether it's AC woes have been addressed. We can't find it and the MTA won't tell us where this car is. And whether they're actively making strap hangers, commutes, they're miserable or not.

We don't know. So please, Please, find train car 2449. And if you do, sign up for our newsletter, gotthmus.com slash on the way, fill in a curious commuter, and let us know, do you have a photo? Do you have a temperature gun and maybe you could get a reading for us? This is what we're asking for.

That's awesome. We have one of those guns. There you go. There you go. It's a scavenger. On the way, scavenger, how much it? All right, moving on from hot cars to a hot button issue in Brooklyn. A judge now says Mayor Adams can move forward with removing protections from a bike lien on Bedford

Avenue in Bedstye in South Willingsburg. Why is this one bike? lanes stirring up so much controversy. So what the Adams administration is doing is modifying the existed protected bike lane and turning it into an unprotected bike lane pretty much meaning parked cars will move back to the curb and the bike lane will travel alongside traffic. You see those all around the city. But the modification is a major reason why a judge sided with Adams. So earlier a street advocacy group filed a lawsuit against his admin to pause the work and said that he

didn't have the power to immediately make these changes because it was a quote major transportation project. But the judge on the case said because the lane is a modification and not a removal, it actually doesn't constitute a major transportation project. So this is a big win for Adams who was attempting to appease this Hasidic voting block in South Williamsburg where this bike link goes through in his independent bid for re-election. So back in May for some context, there was a three-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl who was hit by an e-bike rider as she tried to cross the street and into that lane. It prompted, you know, big outrage, a video of that. that collision actually went viral on social media, and then Adams met with the community and considered alternative designs. You know, this incident, though, really does fit in with a pattern we've seen with this administration, you know, that seems to be very pliable when it comes to bike and bus lane infrastructure.

And when a powerful donor or, in this case, a voting group opposes the project, the Adams administration is very willing to roll back or even undo or maybe halt a project that, you know, they don't like, for example. And at this point, you know, it's Adams' first term is coming to a close. It's really, you know, no surprise that these things keep happening. We could rattle off street names and projects that have been delayed or postponed. We've talked about on this program. But I think the bigger issue is that Adams won the election pledging to be the bike mayor. And it's just been, you know, one disappointment after another for advocates and safe street folks that these projects keep getting, you know, rolled back. So maybe for Adams, it doesn't see him, he doesn't see that these transit issues are maybe a winning ticket.

least in this moment. The community in South Williamsburg has pushed back against those bike lanes for years and Adams has noticed. So why is this significant, Sean? I mean, it could mean now that the mayor can make modifications all across the city should he choose to do so since a judge has now reinforced that major transportation project definition. Interesting. Okay, onto something that Steven you've been reporting about for years. This week, you toured several construction sites that are part of the Gateway Project. That's the $16 billion project that will essentially add a new rail tunnel between Midtown Manhattan and New Jersey for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains. Officials say the new tunnel needs to open before Amtrak's 115-year-old East River tube can be closed to fix damage from Hurricane Sandy.

What did you see? So there's really a lot going on on both sides of the river. In New Jersey, they're beginning to tunnel underneath the palisades right below all these homes. On the Manhattan side, if you go to the end of the high line now, you can look down and see this trench that they're digging that will eventually be filled. in with the new tunnel. But one of the most fascinating things that folks can see, which is in the Hudson River right now,

it looks like a floating barge. It's actually what's called a coffer dam. Let me explain. When you get up close, you can see what looks like barrels around it that actually creates a box of still water in the middle of the fast-flowing Hudson River. So the water is very calm,

and that's where workers are injecting concrete into the riverbed so they can eventually cut through it with drill, because you can't just drill through the muck. And that's where they're going to lay this new train tunnel. Here's Benjamin Engel. He's the senior program manager for Gateway,

describing what the riverbed is like. The river is, we've described it as chocolate pudding. It's very soft. It's also very dark like chocolate pudding. And what we want to do is harden that for the tunnel blurring machine to travel through. Traveling through chocolate pudding will be very, very difficult and won't be effective.

I'll travel through chocolate pudding. So as yummy as the Hudson River chocolate pudding sounds, Engel says it's really a nightmare for trying to drill through. Which is all to say, this is very complicated work. It's really actually 10 projects, five of which are currently underway. And it all has to be carefully coordinated. So the New Jersey drilling meets up with the New York drilling. Everyone stays on schedule. This tunnel is expected to open in 2035.

So, you know, I'll see you in a decade, Sean. I hope we can discuss the opening right here on the way. Absolutely will. Okay, in the last minute we have here, I want to get to this. Every weekend our on the way newsletter, we answer a question from a curious commuter. This one is from Dean in Queens. When can Omni incorporate 30-day passes? Well, it's a good question because Omni is coming soon. MTA is fully transitioning to that system in the fall, which spells the end of Metro cards. One of the benefits for those yellow and blue cards is the 30-day pass. Transit officials haven't said, if we're going to have an alternative, there will be a 30-day pass because they keep arguing that seven-day tap thing that we have with Omni, efficient, it's tap as you go, you don't have to worry about money that you haven't spent. So as of now, we don't have any ideas of what could come with the 3080 pass. There's no plan, whether or not it'll happen, but there could be potential bonuses in the future.

Okay. Well, thanks to Dean for the question, and thanks to WNYC's, Ramsey-Kulife and Stephen Nesson. You can stay in the know in all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gotthmus.com slash on the way, my friends. Thanks so much. Thank you, Sean. Thanks for listening. You and YC.

Catch us every weekday three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More soon.