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Developer Jesse Keyes turns unconventional into bold statement

If there was ever a case of a building perfectly mirroring its developer, it would be One Seventh and Jesse Keyes. Both are angular, ultra-chic, smart and aggressive. Both are also making their emphatic debut on the New York architecture and style worlds.

Built on a 45-degree angle at the juncture of four different streets where Seventh Ave. South meets Varick and Carmine Sts., One Seventh resembles a hulking helm of a slick, futuristic boat or space-age flying machine. Six stories tall with just four units, the corner building shaped in an angular prism has a façade of manganese ironspot brick and Solarban 80 double-paned glass.

 The side of the building on Seventh Ave. South that parallels the rush of autos making their way to Tribeca or the Holland Tunnel has bold racing stripes and competing slabs of vertical windows. On the mellower Carmine St., Juliet balconies face the local cafes, old-time Spanish restaurants and bootleg record stores. One Seventh blends seamlessly with its intersection and has gainied total community board support.

 "No developer would take a chance on this site, which was operated as a gas station since the 1920s and unused for almost a decade," says Keyes, 35, an investor in the swank Goldbar and a partner in La Esquina, one of New York's hippest eateries. "They said it was too small or that the shape wouldn't work. I saw it as an opportunity. We took design risks with this project that architects generally do with museums and public spaces."

 Designed by Rogers Marvel Architects, the same firm recently awarded the Governors Island commission, One Seventh is allegedly the world's first full-floor triangular residence. To make the project work financially, Keyes' development firm REcappartners worked with zoning attorneys Charles Rizzo & Associates to help get a variance to build higher than the allowed three floors. On top of the building, Keyes built a penthouse duplex with two outdoor terraces, both of which lean toward the corner angle.

"The question we had to answer was, how does one live in a triangle," says Keyes, who plays a hand in every design decision. "When I picture who is going to live here, I see an investment banker with an artist inside or an artist with a lot of money. I see the banker sitting totally naked in a chaise longue at the apex of the 45-degree angle, looking out at the cars driving down Seventh Ave., on the phone with his friends, thinking: 'How am I going to own this town tonight?'"

With hardly any marketing, they have two offers for the four units. One from a banker, the other from the son of a Spanish film producer. Prudential Douglas Elliman's Kevin King, a two-year agent who happens to be the long-time maitre d' at Balthazar, heads up sales. The three 1,371-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartments are listed for $1,995,000. The 2,106-square-foot, three-floor penthouse with 961 square feet of outdoor space costs $4.45 million.

"We're waiting till the units are completely finished until we formally sell the apartments," says King. "A finished product will show how unique this project is and assure we get what it's worth."

Jesse Keyes comes from both sides of the tracks. His parents were hippies. His mother, a lesbian, split from his father but stayed in Redwood City, Calif., supporting her two children as a gardener. As Jesse puts it, they lived on the "wrong side of the tracks." Ironically, she tended gardens near Jesse's father's estate in Woodside, Calif.

"Mom was a real hippie, and dad was a pseudo-hippie," says Keyes, who was called "Blanquito," or little white boy by his Pueblo Mexican barrio neighbors. "Half the time I was in my poor Mexican 'hood with my mom and the other half with a swimming pool, Mercedes, Porsches and horses with my dad."

Keyes talks openly about his desire but inability to communicate with his Spanish-speaking neighbors. He talks openly about almost everything, especially his drive to never stop learning or moving.

"There's a point where you grow up in suburbia that you say I'm either going to get stuck in this for the rest of my life or do something fascinating or interesting," he says. "I was visiting a friend in Mexico City when I was 17 years old. We were in his family's penthouse and I was looking over the slums of the city, whose people needed major help at the time. I thought to myself, we as capitalists need to do better for these people. It was then that I knew I needed to focus on this for the rest of my life."

For Keyes, that meant Princeton, a year in Spain to learn the language, a Fulbright Fellowship and a master's in architecture in Catalonia, a Kinne Fellowship in the Dominican Republic, a job with the prestigious Boston Consultant Group, a master's in real estate from Columbia University, a doctoral candidacy and teaching fellow at Rutgers University in Urban Planning, and roles in the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns.

"My father is good friends with Gore from St. Albans," says Keyes, whose great-grandfather on his father's side was Democratic Senator Morris Sheppard from Texas who championed Prohibition and women's rights. "My goal was eventually to work in Housing and Urban Development [HUD]. After those two losses, I planned to teach and research through my 30s. But academia, especially in our current political climate, was not as fulfilling as I thought. Building strong architectural projects is a way to make my mark and some money. Eventually, I will get back into affordable housing and giving back in some way."

Keyes' next project is already a major coup for him and New York. Working with Habita, a Mexican group known globally for designing and operating some of the world's chicest boutique hotels, Keyes will open a Mexican-themed, mixed-use hotel and condo project in a location below Houston St. on the East Side. Mexican architect Enrique Norton, who designed One York on Canal St. in New York and the Guggenheim in Guatemala, is an equity partner in the project.

"I want to make a unique statement and be part of the next big place," says Keyes, whose groomed beard and middle-parted hair give him the look of Al Pacino in "Serpico." "You hope it doesn't become something like what happened in the Meatpacking District, which had little thought and planning and became oversaturated with the same product, bars and restaurants. There should be mixed use there. And the Hotel Gansevoort is a mistake. I don't know how they got that built."

Slightly controlling, obsessive about details, and intellectually strategic, Keyes even wrote the copy for the One Seventh marketing materials. (I haven't met a developer yet who does that.) He prefers to focus on one project at a time as opposed to stretching himself thin and losing touch with the day-to-day decisions that these high-design projects demand.

"Scalability will be hard because for each project I'm looking for a specific art and message," says Keyes. "In any case, when you get bigger you lose control over certain levers, and I don't want that to happen."

Still, according to Thaddeus Briner, the architect for One Seventh, formerly of Rogers Marvel (and I.M. Pei's firm) and now on his own, Keyes is a very good client. "This was a dream project," says Briner. "It combined a really challenging site with an extremely progressive client. Those don't come along very often."

Resource :   https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/developer-jesse-keyes-turns-unconventional-bold-statement-article-1.339485

Lawyerly Lairs: Biglaw Name Partner Lists Longtime Home — For $4 Million

The elegant exterior of 850 Park Avenue — please ignore the annoying traffic barricades (via Google Street View).

Associates at Schulte Roth & Zabel who bill big hours fare well. Partners at the Am Law 100 firm, known for its expertise in hedge funds, do even better.

And William Zabel, founding and name partner at SRZ, presumably does the best of all. So it should come as no surprise that he and his wife live in a luxurious, multimillion-dollar Manhattan co-op — which they just put on the market, for a shade over $4 million.

Here’s the news, as reported by The Real Deal:

Bow-tied super lawyer William Zabel is looking to upsize.

The attorney who was behind the massive Bernie Madoff settlement is leaving the Park Avenue apartment where he has lived with his wife for 38 years. The 850 Park Avenue unit is listed for $4.2 million.

If you’ll allow me to quibble, it would be more precise to describe Bill Zabel as the lawyer behind the Jeffry Picower settlement. There were many, many settlements of Madoff-related matters, which have kept Madoff trustee Irving Picard and his BakerHostetler colleagues busy for several years. Zabel’s client, Jeffry Picower, happened to be the biggest beneficiary from the Madoff scam — and the Picower estate settled the claims against it for a whopping $7.2 billion. (Picower himself died in 2009, apparently after experiencing a massive heart attack while swimming at his Palm Beach estate.)

That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? Let’s move on to a happier subject: Bill Zabel’s remarkable legal career. The Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate has long been a leading light in the world of trusts and estates — but he’s most proud of his pro bono work, and justifiably so. From his SRZ bio:

For more than 50 years, Bill has been an advocate for social justice in the United States and abroad. His civic and philanthropic activities have included, among many others, authoring the amicus brief on behalf of the ACLU in Loving v. Virginia, investigating the cases of those who disappeared in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet’s “Dirty War,” serving as chair of Human Rights First, chair of Immigrant Justice Corps, trustee or director of New York University, The New School, Mailman School of Public Health, The JPB Foundation (vice chairman), The Lymphoma Foundation, chair of the Princeton University Planned Giving Committee, Sakharov Archives, Lincoln Center Theater and The Academy of American Poets.

His involvement in the Loving case — which returned to prominence in the past few years, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, followed a year later by the critically acclaimed Loving film — is a highlight. As Zabel told the Financial Times:

[H]is proudest civil rights achievement was Loving v. Virginia. Years later, after a speech he made when accepting the Robert F Kennedy Prize for advancing racial and social justice, three women of mixed race approached him. “They said they wanted to thank me because they wouldn’t be alive today if their parents couldn’t have married,” he says. “That was priceless.”

Bill and Deborah Zabel’s apartment, though, does have a price: $4.2 million. It also comes with a sizable monthly maintenance bill — $5,653, bigger than most people’s mortgages — and because the building allows for no more than 30 percent financing, the buyer will have to put down almost $3 million, assuming it goes for list price (which isn’t guaranteed, given the challenging market for high-end homes). In exchange for all that, the new owner will enjoy three bedrooms (one of them currently used as a library), two-and-a-half bathrooms, and a tony Park Avenue address.

Let’s take a look around, shall we?

Amazon Presents a Prime Opportunity to Transform a City’s Housing Market—but Where?

Mike Kane/Getty Images; iStock; realtor.com

Amazon’s announcement that it plans to build a second headquarters somewhere in North America to employ tens of thousands of well-paid workers has set off a frenzy of let’s-make-a-deal maneuvering among the nation’s urban officials, all desperately vying to land the online retailer. The winning city will be announced sometime in 2018. Suspenseful much?

So why are cities tripping over themselves to win the contract? It’s simple: The new Amazon HQ could become a true game-changer for most metros.

What’s at stake is as many as 50,000 workers—with an average salary topping $100,00—moving in over the next 10 to 15 years. That’s larger than the population of many small cities, and it doesn’t even include workers’ families and the array of support companies that will crop up wherever Amazon goes. It’s a big boon to local businesses and the coffers of cities which can collect higher tax revenue from its new residents. Plus, Amazon has pledged to invest about $5 billion in the construction and operation of its new facility. (It will maintain its original headquarters in Seattle as well.)

This kind of investment could turn a smaller, second-tier city into a superhot metropolis. It could reverse the fortunes of a long-struggling metro. Or it could be a feather in the cap of one of the country’s already desirable cities.

The new headquarters will, by necessity, profoundly transform the area’s housing market.

Rental and home sale prices are likely to rise sharply as builders race to put up amenity-laden condo and apartment towers near the new HQ, along with creating new master-planned communities of single-family homes in the suburbs, say real estate and corporation relocation experts.

“This projected is so highly coveted that even being on the short list will jump-start a lot of [residential] development activity,” says John Boyd, principal of the Boyd Company, based in Princeton, NJ, a corporate relocation specialist.

What sorts of cities are most likely to make Amazon’s short list?

Cities might throw every tax incentive imaginable to lure Amazon, but the online giant is looking for very specific qualifications for its second home. (Company officials declined to speak with realtor.com®, but the retailer outlined what it’s looking for in a request for proposals last month.)

The inventor of 1-Click shopping is seeking metros with more than a million people, for starters. These areas must also be stable, business-friendly, and attractive to potential employees. (The latter tips the odds against a Rust Belt city such as Detroit, despite its resurgence.)

The site will need to accommodate about 30 buildings and be within 30 miles of the population center and 45 minutes of a major airport. It will also need easy access to major highways and public transit.

But the thing Amazon will need most is lots of skilled workers, say corporate relocation experts. That means they’ll want to be close to top universities, and be in a place where young talent wants to live.

“All the major cities that are competing for this … are all markets that are consistently ranked as one of the most millennial-friendly,” Boyd says.

Despite such tall demands, it’s likely that Amazon will receive free land on which to build its headquarters and won’t pay a dime of property, corporate income, sales, and other local and state taxes, says Chicago-based attorney Andrew Scott, who specializes in corporate site selections at Dykema.

Cities can offset some of those losses by taxing the new residents the internet giant will bring in. And that money can go toward building new schools, expanding existing public transportation systems, and adding new government services for residents.

“Whatever city lands this thing, their reputation is going to go through the roof,” Scott says. “A lot of folks will say, ‘if this is good enough for Amazon, it’s certainly good enough for my company.'”

Amazon claims its investments in Seattle—where it has more than 40,000 employees—pumped about $38 billion into the city’s economy from 2010 to 2016. It also claims to have spurred an additional 53,000 jobs in the city as a result of its investments. (It has more than 380,000 workers and countless outposts, offices, and warehouses worldwide, with more opening each year.)

How important is housing to Amazon?

The question of just where all of these workers are going to live is usually the last piece of the puzzle, Boyd says.

Officials typically take stock of the housing within a 70-mile radius of their new site, he says. They look at what sorts of homes currently exist; what kinds of buildings could be repurposed, such as old malls and factories; and the supply of land to build rental and condo towers in the city and single-family homes in the suburbs.

These could be former industrial zones on the edges of a metropolis—areas that have fallen into disarray over the years or aren’t fully built out.

If Amazon’s new headquarters settle on the outskirts of a city, it could create a thriving “second-city-type area,” says Chief Economist Danielle Hale of realtor.com. “It will become a new center that people want to live around.”

Wherever Jeff Bezos‘ all-powerful company touches down, the apartment market is likely to spike, says Annie Radecki, senior manager at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Many of the firm’s younger, single workers are likely to prefer to rent inside city centers, particularly job hoppers who want to hedge their bets and might not intend to stay at Amazon long. Older workers, even older millennials with families, are more likely to veer toward single-family living in the suburbs.

“Right now, [developers and builders] assume Amazon is a gold rush,” Radecki says. But “it’s going to make affordability worse. Traffic will go up. Schools will get overcrowded. Services take time to catch up.”

And it might actually take longer to build new housing than the second headquarters. The problem is that the chosen city will need to create tens of thousands of new or retrofitted housing units in a short period of time, says Robert Dietz, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders.

“That’s a tough ask,” he adds.

It’s tougher still when you factor in the national shortage of skilled construction workers—exacerbated by the rebuilding needs in hurricane-ravaged Houston and Florida.

What happens when a metro receives an influx of workers?

For a clue on the impact Amazon might eventually have, it’s helpful to look at Texas—in particular, Dallas. The city lured companies from all over the world with low taxes, an inexpensive cost of living, and affordable real estate. It boasts good universities and an educated workforce, making it catnip to employers seeking to leave costly, coastal metros and the high wages they have to pay there.

The Dallas metro area began seeing an influx of companies relocating and expanding there in 2008, when AT&T relocated its corporate headquarters, and about 700 jobs, from San Antonio, nearly 300 miles away. Since 2010, more than 200 companies have moved into the region with many more expanding in it. That’s added about 500,000 jobs to the area.

Not surprisingly, there’s been a corresponding population surge in the Dallas area, which includes Fort Worth, Arlington, and other smaller cities. It rose by nearly 1.36 million people from 2006 to 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

“The cost of housing has definitely been affected,” says Dallas-area Realtor® Debbie Murray, of Allie Beth Allman & Associates.

And home prices have surged. In 2008, the median home price in the Dallas metro was $145,800, according to National Association of Realtors® data. Fast-forward to 2016, and the median home price jumped nearly 56%, to $227,100. Nationally, prices rose only about 19.8% over the same period.

The influx of new companies is now revitalizing smaller cities and suburbs around Dallas, too, turning places like Frisco, Plano, McKinney, and Allen into destinations in their own right, Murray says. Many companies are opening operations in these places, and workers are reluctant to live more than a 30-minute commute away.

“It completely changed the market,” Murray says of the influx of new residents. “It’s crazy.”

What’s the catch to Amazon moving in?

Amazon’s bounty isn’t likely to be shared by all—particularly by lower-income renters who might be forced out of their communities by rapidly rising housing prices.

“There’s going to be some pushing out,” says Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC–based think tank.

He worries that minorities, especially, will suffer the negative effects of gentrification in Amazon’s future home city, as their neighborhoods see an influx of wealthier skilled workers flooding in. And after presumably giving the online behemoth a massive tax break, city government will have to strain to provide services for the new residents (even though those residents will pay individual taxes).

“Cities shouldn’t sell the farm to bring in a company because that tax revenue is needed … so they can have adequate transportation systems for people to get to work, so they can have quality schools and universities,” Perry says.

And, of course, even Bezos’ monster corporation could suffer the vicissitudes of an economic downturn.

“Any time you have that number of jobs resting on one company, your fate really depends on what that company does,” says real estate consultant Radecki. And with advancements in automation, artificial intelligence, and the rise in telecommuting, “you may announce 1,000 jobs today and then later automate 900 of them.”

“There [are] huge technical shifts going on,” she says. “What Amazon’s looking for today may not be what they need in five to 10 years.”

A bigger city would be able to absorb large job losses easier as it would have other high-paying industries to prop it up. But it could devastate the economy—and housing market—of a smaller one.

“Cities need to understand the risk of attracting Amazon,” Radecki says.

The post Amazon Presents a Prime Opportunity to Transform a City’s Housing Market—but Where? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

from https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/how-amazon-hq-will-transform-housing-market/

Developer Jesse Keyes turns unconventional into bold statement

If there was ever a case of a building perfectly mirroring its developer, it would be One Seventh and Jesse Keyes. Both are angular, ultra-chic, smart and aggressive. Both are also making their emphatic debut on the New York architecture and style worlds.

Built on a 45-degree angle at the juncture of four different streets where Seventh Ave. South meets Varick and Carmine Sts., One Seventh resembles a hulking helm of a slick, futuristic boat or space-age flying machine. Six stories tall with just four units, the corner building shaped in an angular prism has a façade of manganese ironspot brick and Solarban 80 double-paned glass.

The side of the building on Seventh Ave. South that parallels the rush of autos making their way to Tribeca or the Holland Tunnel has bold racing stripes and competing slabs of vertical windows. On the mellower Carmine St., Juliet balconies face the local cafes, old-time Spanish restaurants and bootleg record stores. One Seventh blends seamlessly with its intersection and has gainied total community board support.

"No developer would take a chance on this site, which was operated as a gas station since the 1920s and unused for almost a decade," says Jesse Keyes, 35, an investor in the swank Goldbar and a partner in La Esquina, one of New York's hippest eateries. "They said it was too small or that the shape wouldn't work. I saw it as an opportunity. We took design risks with this project that architects generally do with museums and public spaces."

Designed by Rogers Marvel Architects, the same firm recently awarded the Governors Island commission, One Seventh is allegedly the world's first full-floor triangular residence. To make the project work financially, Keyes' development firm REcappartners worked with zoning attorneys Charles Rizzo & Associates to help get a variance to build higher than the allowed three floors. On top of the building, Keyes built a penthouse duplex with two outdoor terraces, both of which lean toward the corner angle.

"The question we had to answer was, how does one live in a triangle," says Keyes, who plays a hand in every design decision. "When I picture who is going to live here, I see an investment banker with an artist inside or an artist with a lot of money. I see the banker sitting totally naked in a chaise longue at the apex of the 45-degree angle, looking out at the cars driving down Seventh Ave., on the phone with his friends, thinking: 'How am I going to own this town tonight?'"

With hardly any marketing, they have two offers for the four units. One from a banker, the other from the son of a Spanish film producer. Prudential Douglas Elliman's Kevin King, a two-year agent who happens to be the long-time maitre d' at Balthazar, heads up sales. The three 1,371-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartments are listed for $1,995,000. The 2,106-square-foot, three-floor penthouse with 961 square feet of outdoor space costs $4.45 million.

"We're waiting till the units are completely finished until we formally sell the apartments," says King. "A finished product will show how unique this project is and assure we get what it's worth."

Jesse Keyes comes from both sides of the tracks. His parents were hippies. His mother, a lesbian, split from his father but stayed in Redwood City, Calif., supporting her two children as a gardener. As Jesse puts it, they lived on the "wrong side of the tracks." Ironically, she tended gardens near Jesse's father's estate in Woodside, Calif.

"Mom was a real hippie, and dad was a pseudo-hippie," says Keyes, who was called "Blanquito," or little white boy by his Pueblo Mexican barrio neighbors. "Half the time I was in my poor Mexican 'hood with my mom and the other half with a swimming pool, Mercedes, Porsches and horses with my dad."

Keyes talks openly about his desire but inability to communicate with his Spanish-speaking neighbors. He talks openly about almost everything, especially his drive to never stop learning or moving.

"There's a point where you grow up in suburbia that you say I'm either going to get stuck in this for the rest of my life or do something fascinating or interesting," he says. "I was visiting a friend in Mexico City when I was 17 years old. We were in his family's penthouse and I was looking over the slums of the city, whose people needed major help at the time. I thought to myself, we as capitalists need to do better for these people. It was then that I knew I needed to focus on this for the rest of my life."

For Keyes, that meant Princeton, a year in Spain to learn the language, a Fulbright Fellowship and a master's in architecture in Catalonia, a Kinne Fellowship in the Dominican Republic, a job with the prestigious Boston Consultant Group, a master's in real estate from Columbia University, a doctoral candidacy and teaching fellow at Rutgers University in Urban Planning, and roles in the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns.

"My father is good friends with Gore from St. Albans," says Keyes, whose great-grandfather on his father's side was Democratic Senator Morris Sheppard from Texas who championed Prohibition and women's rights. "My goal was eventually to work in Housing and Urban Development [HUD]. After those two losses, I planned to teach and research through my 30s. But academia, especially in our current political climate, was not as fulfilling as I thought. Building strong architectural projects is a way to make my mark and some money. Eventually, I will get back into affordable housing and giving back in some way."

Keyes' next project is already a major coup for him and New York. Working with Habita, a Mexican group known globally for designing and operating some of the world's chicest boutique hotels, Keyes will open a Mexican-themed, mixed-use hotel and condo project in a location below Houston St. on the East Side. Mexican architect Enrique Norton, who designed One York on Canal St. in New York and the Guggenheim in Guatemala, is an equity partner in the project.

"I want to make a unique statement and be part of the next big place," says Keyes, whose groomed beard and middle-parted hair give him the look of Al Pacino in "Serpico." "You hope it doesn't become something like what happened in the Meatpacking District, which had little thought and planning and became oversaturated with the same product, bars and restaurants. There should be mixed use there. And the Hotel Gansevoort is a mistake. I don't know how they got that built."

Slightly controlling, obsessive about details, and intellectually strategic, Keyes even wrote the copy for the One Seventh marketing materials. (I haven't met a developer yet who does that.) He prefers to focus on one project at a time as opposed to stretching himself thin and losing touch with the day-to-day decisions that these high-design projects demand.

"Scalability will be hard because for each project I'm looking for a specific art and message," says Keyes. "In any case, when you get bigger you lose control over certain levers, and I don't want that to happen."

Still, according to Thaddeus Briner, the architect for One Seventh, formerly of Rogers Marvel (and I.M. Pei's firm) and now on his own, Keyes is a very good client. "This was a dream project," says Briner. "It combined a really challenging site with an extremely progressive client. Those don't come along very often."

Resource:- https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/developer-jesse-keyes-turns-unconventional-bold-statement-article-1.339485

Tenants behind on rent in pandemic face harassment,… | Brinkwire

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BALTIMORE – Jeremy Rooks works the evening shift at a Georgia fast-food restaurant these days to avoid being on the street past dusk. He needs somewhere to go at night: He and his wife are homeless after the extended-stay motel where they had lived since Thanksgiving evicted them in April when they couldn´t pay their rent. They should have been protected because the state’s Supreme Court has effectively halted evictions due to the coronavirus pandemic. But Rooks said the owner still sent a man posing as a sheriff´s deputy, armed with a gun, to throw the couple out a few days after rent was due. The pandemic has shut housing courts and prompted most states and federal authorities to initiate policies protecting renters from eviction. But not everyone is covered and a number of landlords — some desperate to pay their mortgages themselves — are turning to threats and harassment to force tenants out. “Every day, they tried to basically get us out of there. It was basically like a game to them,” said Rooks, who wasn´t able to make his rent at the Marietta, Georgia, motel after his employer paid him late and his wife was laid off in the pandemic. “One of us had to stay in a room at all times because they wouldn´t redo the keys for us.” The evictions threaten to exacerbate a problem that has plagued people of color like Rooks long before the pandemic, when landlords across the U.S. were filing about 300,000 eviction requests every month. The data and analytics real estate firm Amherst projects that 28 million renters, or about 22.5% of all households, are at risk of eviction. Tenant advocates expect that number to increase significantly unless protections are put in place, and project that many of those affected will be African Americans and households led by women, both of which historically are more likely to be evicted. In a sign of what could happen nationally, Virginia has seen a crush of proceedings since eviction hearings resumed May 18. About 700 cases already have been heard statewide, according to Christie Marra, director of housing advocacy for the Virginia Poverty Law Center. On top of that, 2,200 cases are on the docket for the end of June and early July in Richmond, which has one of the country´s highest eviction rates. Rachel Garland, an attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, said her group has experienced a spike in calls from tenants who lost their jobs due to the lockdown and fear being evicted. Philadelphia had the fourth-highest eviction rate in the country. “Even if they can´t be evicted right now, if the courts are closed, the landlords are sending threatening emails, text messages, asking for rent, threatening to lock tenants out,” Garland said. Alieza Durana of Princeton University´s Eviction Lab said affected tenants face high rates of depression and suicide from the stress, along with mounting debt and homelessness. Additionally, court judgments and debt collection actions against renters are reported to credit bureaus, affecting their ability to access housing for years. Jose Ortiz, deputy director of Essex/Newark Legal Services, which includes New Jersey´s largest city, said he´s heard complaints from tenants who have been asked to exchange sex for rent and instances where landlords have threatened to alert immigration authorities about tenants living in the country without legal permission if they don´t pay their rent. “They are not working. They don´t have the income to pay their bills and they are afraid about what will happen once the eviction ban is lifted,” Ortiz said. “Are they going to be displaced? Is there going to be a mad rush to the courthouse to get these tenants evicted?” Tenants also are complaining about landlords locking them out and shutting off utilities. Unable to pay her April rent in full on her townhouse in Millersville, Maryland, Dawn McBride said she began getting texts from her landlord suggesting she find work at Walmart or Costco. She said the landlord then tried to get her to sign a rent-deferral agreement, but wouldn´t let her fully read it. She ultimately was handed a 30-day notice to vacate because her lease was month-to-month, a strategy landlords increasingly are using. “Honestly, it stresses me out a lot because it´s me and my children,” said McBride, who lost her pet-sitting job. “And, you know, I´m just like, `Where are we going to go?´” Some tenants facing eviction have turned the table on landlords and are organizing rent strikes. From New York to Chicago to San Francisco, tenants are banding together and demanding landlords negotiate with an eye toward forgiving their rent entirely until the pandemic ends. Many like Diana Hou, who lost her job with a political campaign and has helped organized a rent strike in her Brooklyn building with her half-dozen roommates. are pushing for legislation at the state and federal level to provide rent and mortgage relief. “Many of us are worried about our prospects of securing housing without income and with a looming debt of unpaid rent. For the majority of the house, not being able to secure housing would mean homelessness in the middle of a pandemic,” Hou said. Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, which represents 4,000 building owners in New York, said he doesn’t condone rent strikes but sympathizes with tenants’ plight. “Renters need a bailout,” Martin said, adding that landlords are supporting federal proposals that would cover back rent and future payments. Without those measures, he predicted a drop in property and real estate taxes that would sap state and city budgets. The federal government´s $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue package includes eviction moratoriums for most people living in federally subsidized apartments, as well as homes covered by federally backed mortgages. A second $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill passed in May by the U.S. House would provide about $175 billion to pay rents and mortgages, but has almost no chance of passing in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. State and local lawmakers across the country also are stepping in with assistance and proposals aimed at averting a wave of evictions. New Jersey lawmakers passed a $100 million rent relief bill, while in Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf signed legislation directing $175 million of the federal coronavirus rescue package to rent and mortgage relief. Boston is providing $8 million for rental assistance, Baltimore has designated $13 million in federal coronavirus relief funding to start a rental assistance program, and Philadelphia provided $10 million to help about 13,000 people with their rent. Other proposals would offer long-term payment plans for those unable to afford rent and programs like mediation before cases head to housing court. “We have to do something,” said Philadelphia Council member Helen Gym, whose bill would prevent evictions until two months after the state´s emergency order was lifted. “We can´t go back to business as usual in a city that evicts 18,000 people a year,” she said. “That is just not sustainable.”