The length of time it takes NYCHA to rent out available apartments has climbed in recent years, one of many factors exacerbating the city’s affordable housing crisis, lawmakers say. “They just say it’s not ready,” said one resident currently living in a homeless shelter who has been waiting more than 10 months to move into the NYCHA unit she was approved for.
In April 2015, Diana Florence was a longtime prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office thinking about retirement. But a phone call—about the death of an immigrant laborer at a building site—changed her plans. And it went on to upend how New York State addresses construction fatalities.
During the Fall 2022 semester, Lehman College journalism students conducted an investigation on the prevalence of toxic brownfield sites in The Bronx. Using public information, research into federal lobbying records and interviews with experts and residents, the student journalists set out to understand how this contamination happened and why progress towards remediation was so slow.
Schools are uniquely positioned to identify and support grieving children, but families and school staff say the system isn’t equipped to serve them.
Thursday night, the same day Mayor Eric Adams unveiled a preliminary budget focused on “fiscal discipline” and two days after Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her priorities for the year ahead in her State of the State speech, 70,525 people slept in a New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter.
For the past few months, City Limits has sought out New Yorkers in unique living arrangements to find out why they live where they live. We homed in on three people, all Bronx residents, with three very different accommodations: an old RV, a two-story houseboat and a room in a spartan warehouse.
The city’s trailblazing program guaranteeing legal representation to the city’s poorest tenants facing eviction has been falling short since the state eviction moratorium was lifted last year; many still face housing court alone. State officials told City Limits the program has declined more than 10,000 cases since March 2022.
Adams’ early commitments to open new “low-barrier” shelters comes into sharper focus as he closes out his first year in office, with yet another plan to remove homeless New Yorkers from trains and public spaces. New York City has about 600 new specialized shelters for street homeless New Yorkers, but data shows relatively few people are moving from the subways to the largely congregate sites.
In 2019, when the police were the sole enforcer, the NYPD issued 1,812 tickets versus 2,499 in the first nine months of this year, with almost half (48.6 percent) doled out in the last quarter. In just nine months, the NYPD and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) have issued 3,884 tickets to vendors, more than double the number of tickets made in 2019.
“Just Home”—a NYC Health + Hospitals (HHC) plan to convert an empty staff residence on the Jacobi Hospital campus into supportive housing for a few dozen people with serious medical problems discharged from Rikers Island—is a pressure cooker for many of the most fraught issues in the city: homelessness, mental health, development, and the risk of crime, whether real or perceived.
City Limits uses investigative journalism through the prism of New York City to identify urban problems, examine their causes, explore solutions, and equip communities to take action.
Founded in 1976 in the midst of New York’s fiscal crisis, City Limits exists to inform democracy and equip citizens to create a more just city. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by foundation support, ad sponsorship and donations from readers.
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Support local, investigative journalism that has informed and empowered New Yorkers for 45 years.
