Real estate

A New York real estate broker was sentenced to nine months of house arrest this week for paying a former shelter operator hundreds of thousands of dollars in a yearslong bribery scheme to profit from city funding meant for homeless people.

The broker, Sheina Levin, 61, owned a real estate company in Brooklyn. As the ranks of homeless people swelled in the city in recent years and the need for shelters grew more urgent, she paid a prominent shelter operator, Victor Rivera, more than $830,000 in kickbacks so his organization would lease property she controlled, federal prosecutors said.

Mr. Rivera, the former chief executive of the Bronx Parent Housing Network, pleaded guilty last year to federal crimes related to the bribery scheme and was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison . Mr. Rivera’s financial entanglements with Ms. Levin, as well as wide-ranging accusations of sexual assault and harassment against him, were first revealed in a New York Times investigation in 2021 .

Ms. Levin was sentenced on Wednesday after pleading guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud for her role in the pay-to-play scheme, which stretched from 2019 to 2021.

“Her felony conviction and the sentence imposed today show that those who put personal greed ahead of the needs of vulnerable city residents will face serious consequences,” said Jocelyn E. Strauber, commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, which investigated the case with agents from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

In court filings, Ms. Levin described how Mr. Rivera first solicited bribes from her while they were working together to sublease several buildings she controlled in the Bronx as homeless shelters.

As the subleases were being arranged, Mr. Rivera demanded that he personally receive a cut of Ms. Levin’s rental profits, and she complied, she said.

“I knew that doing so would enable the subleases to go forward and that these payments were improper,” Ms. Levin said. “Mr. Rivera knew that I would make a profit on these arrangements due to my direct lease agreements with the owners of those properties.”

Prosecutors said Ms. Levin disguised the payments to Mr. Rivera as consulting fees to a bogus company run by his son, and that he used the kickbacks to make mortgage payments on his home.

After Mr. Rivera helped found the Bronx Parent Housing Network two decades ago, he built the organization into one of the largest shelter operators in New York, netting $274 million in city money from 2017 to 2021. But as the money flowed in, Mr. Rivera treated the nonprofit group as his personal domain, The Times found, collecting an annual salary of $453,000, driving a Mercedes-Benz leased by the organization and steering millions of dollars in contracts to friends and associates.

Mr. Rivera demanded kickbacks from some of those associates as well, including a construction company and a security guard firm, according to prosecutors. But the bribes he received from Ms. Levin, his one-time partner in a separate housing venture, were the most substantial.

The felony charge Ms. Levin pleaded guilty to carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. But prosecutors recommended that she be sentenced to house arrest and two years of supervised release because they said she made “sincere efforts” to aid the investigation into Mr. Rivera.

She also agreed to forfeit more than $790,000 and pay more than $838,000 to the Bronx Parent Housing Network.

In a statement, Ms. Levin’s lawyer said Mr. Rivera “manipulated her dedication to servicing the homeless population into supporting his own personal corruption.”

“Ms. Levin acknowledges her terrible mistake in going along with Victor’s demand for kickbacks,” said the lawyer, Michael Farkas, “and she is committed to making full amends for her conduct.”

America is in the midst of a building boom — but if you’re not affluent, you might not know it.

By the end of this year, more than 1.2 million new rental apartments will have been built in the United States since 2020, with nearly a million more expected in 2024 and 2025, according to a new report from RentCafe . Among 296 U.S. metro areas studied, the New York area is projected to have by far the most new rental units completed in 2023 — a total of 33,001, including 9,825 in Brooklyn, 4,430 in Queens, 3,770 in Manhattan and 2,215 in Jersey City.

Following New York is Dallas, where 23,659 rental apartments are expected to be completed this year, bringing its three-year total to just over 100,000 — the most of any metro during that period. Nearly as many will open in Austin (23,434), followed by Miami (20,906). The Miami area also has the greatest demand among all metro areas studied, with an average of 24 renters competing for each apartment.

The 20 metro areas with the most new units expected in 2023 are shown on this week’s chart. And therein lies the problem: 60 percent of all new rentals are in these 20 metros, but only 41 percent of U.S. renters live there. And nearly 90 percent of these new rentals are high-end units — affordable only to the well-off.

Typical renters don’t have enough affordable options now, and it appears they won’t in the near future, either. The study predicts that development of new units will slow in coming years, reined in by high interest rates and inflated costs of materials and labor, which make future projects more expensive to finance and complete.

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