City Limits examined 311 data related to heat and hot water complaints over the past three years, and found the highest number were in areas populated by communities of color and lower-income individuals. They include Washington Heights, followed by several neighborhoods in The Bronx, including the community district where the deadly Twin Parks fire occurred.
“Although HPD and DOB are responding quickly to 311 complaints and sending out inspectors, there is a very troubling lag time and delay in terms of closure of these complaints,” Councilmember Pierina Sanchez said.
There are some 16,000 scattered-site supportive housing units across the city, rented and overseen by nonprofits contracted to provide services to tenants. But outdated contracts that trail actual market rents mean the organizations—and the state and city agencies that fund them—are propping up some of the city’s worst housing.
“Our goal is to intervene and disrupt the eviction process,” one organizer said at a rally outside Bronx Housing Court Thursday. “We’ve always known the eviction moratorium is a temporary measure [but] it made it possible for our members to dream of a world without evictions.”
“In New York, bike share is our only mass transit network that does not receive public financial support. This limits where the system can expand, on what timeline, and how it is priced.”
New York City’s new housing commissioner is returning to public office after a years-long stint working with a quick-to-evict Bronx developer recently subject to a state investigation, raising concerns among tenants and advocates in the borough.
‘The incident has sparked a national conversation about housing injustice and raised a critical question that we must all ask ourselves: Why must it take a high death toll to acknowledge the dangers of substandard housing?’
The effectiveness of New York’s plastic bag ban could serve as a portend for other, similar bans on single-use plastics either already approved or under discussion at both the city and state legislative levels. To get a better sense of how its implementation is going, City Limits’ CLARIFY interns spoke to more than 50 bodega owners and store workers in the outer boroughs to see if they’re still using plastic, and if so, to tell us why.
‘The heart of the problem is Bronxites can move north and south and straight to Manhattan, but they cannot move across The Bronx and throughout the outer boroughs with ease.’
To learn more about these new officials and their plans for their time in office, City Limits partnered with students from the Department of Journalism & Media Studies at CUNY’s Lehman College, who contacted their district representatives for audio interviews.
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.
