Twenty years ago, Assemblyman Al Vann promised to lead a grand coalition of blacks and Puerto Ricans that would run the city right–from the left. Now he’s lucky to hold onto a diminishing Bed-Stuy power base, and a united, powerful black Brooklyn is once again just a dream.
The Jose de Diego Beekman Houses in Mott Haven has been a sweetheart to everybody–except its besieged tenants. Billionaires like Bob Tisch made it a quiet hideaway for tax shelter cash. Murdering drug gangs like the Wild Cowboys made it their hole in the wall. Now its tenants are creating a bailout that may be the model for hundreds of similar projects across the country. It also happens to help out a high-powered Clinton fundraiser.
Alternative-to-incarceration programs reform criminals, save money and open up prison cells for more dangerous felons. So why has the city created a new screening process?
The tenants supposedly won the rent wars last summer. But a pair of landlord-bonanza Housing Court laws whisked quietly through Albany could result in 33,000 new evictions next year.
Investment from the city’s municipal and union pension funds could help spark a revival of New York’s beleaguered manufacturing base, but try telling that to City Hall.
For decades the Regional Plan Association padded the corridors of power and flexed muscle for its sweeping visions of regional development. But now the group must court communities if it wants to see its latest plan take wing.
A book review of The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century, edited by Thomas D. Boston and Catherine L. Ross, Transaction Publishers, 1997, 357 pages, $24.95.
Did a housing group’s chide transform Mayor Giuliani into Mr. Hyde?
A computer “one-stop shop” with data from five different city agencies for every residential building in New York City may never be released to the community groups for which it was created.
One of the state’s most respected environmentalists has issued a scathing report that questions the city’s ability to safeguard its water supply.
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