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Inverness Village Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

BofA Sides with Elderly Borrowers in Ditech Bankruptcy

Editorial: Forcing Landlords into Bankruptcy Will Destroy NYC
Restaurateur’s Real Estate Firm Files for Bankruptcy

Wealthy New Yorkers Are Ditching City’s High Taxes for Miami
U.S. Reform Plan for Fannie, Freddie Seen by September
The Trump administration’s hotly anticipated blueprint for overhauling mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may not be published until September as the U.S. Treasury juggles several other pressing issues, the housing regulator told Reuters. Mark Calabria, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees the government-sponsored enterprises, said in an interview it was his “hope” that they would have exited or be ready to exit conservatorship before his term ends in 2024. However, Calabria is not operating toward a hard deadline, he noted. “That’s my time horizon,” he said, referring to the end of his term. “I’m under no expectation to try to get all this done. ... So if in four years, nine months they’re not out of conservatorship, I’m not pushing them out.” Calabria’s comments will temper market expectations for a speedy overhaul of Fannie and Freddie before the 2020 presidential election.

New York, New Jersey Pursue Another Battle in SALT Deduction War
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are again suing President Donald Trump’s administration over a provision in the 2017 tax law that limited write-offs for state and local taxes, Bloomberg News reported. The lawsuit filed yesterday asks a court to stop recent Internal Revenue Service regulations that invalidated state workarounds to help residents maximize the amount of state and local taxes, or SALT, they could deduct. The effort is one of several to reverse one of the most politically contentious changes in Trump’s 2017 tax law, and it’s not clear if it will get any more traction. The 2017 Republican tax law limited the amount of SALT deductions to $10,000. Write-offs were previously unlimited. Democrats in Congress and state lawmakers said the change was intended to target Democratic-led states that tend to have higher taxes. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called it “economic civil war.” This is the second lawsuit northeastern states have filed in an attempt to nullify the SALT cap. The village of Scarsdale and the town of Rye, both wealthy New York City suburbs, also filed a lawsuit against the IRS regulations Wednesday. Last year, the states sued the Trump administration seeking to get the cap itself declared unconstitutional. That case, which many legal experts also say is a long-shot, is still working its way through the courts.
Landlords Challenge New York’s Rent-Control Law in Federal Court
Landlord groups yesterday filed a U.S. constitutional challenge to New York’s rent regulations, alleging that state and city governments had, in effect, taken over nearly a million rent-regulated apartments with its new law, the Wall Street Journal reported. The suit seeks to upend New York’s system of rent regulation that dates back to federal price controls during World War II. The new rent law makes it more difficult for apartment owners to increase rents and eliminates rules that allowed them to free up thousands of apartments from rent regulations. Courts have dismissed similar challenges in New York and other states, but building owners say that their prospects in court have improved since then, in part because of the severity of new restrictions on rental properties. The lawsuit doesn’t seek compensation for property owners, but rather asks that the courts find that the law violates constitutional protections and direct the New York legislature “go back to the drawing board and come up with something else,” said Andrew Pincus, attorney for the landlords.