Seven workers’ organizations have compiled a database on wage theft during the pandemic totaling $130.5 million owed to workers. The preliminary data from just seven groups dwarfs the nearly $3 million Gov. Kathy Hochul boasted of the state having recovered for workers last year. A preliminary version of this data has been shared with City Limits.
“As Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to deliver the speech that could define her first full term, she has an opportunity to set a path of real progress on housing. But she will have to break the patterns of past leadership—and her own first year in office.”
Advocates say the findings add new urgency to the state’s efforts to transition its energy sources away from fossil fuels, and as environmental groups renew calls for state lawmakers to pass legislation that would ban gas hookups in new construction statewide.
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
As 2022 comes to a close, City Limits looks back at images that defined some of New York City’s biggest news stories and most pressing policy issues.
It’s been an eventful year in New York City housing. Mayor Eric Adams launched a new plan for housing production and a controversial approach to street homelessness. At the same time, the city’s homeless shelter population reached historic highs this year, fueled in part by an increase in migrants from the southern border and by soaring rent costs, including the biggest price hike for rent-stabilized apartments in nearly a decade.
Over half of New York City food stamp applicants are forced to wait for their benefits to arrive as staff at the understaffed Human Resources Administration fail to keep pace with demand. The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has declined to issue a waiver that would relieve the backlog.
Yevgenia Albats, a Russian investigative reporter who is currently the Distinguished Journalist in Residence at the NYU Jordan Center, recently spoke to City Limits’ youth reporting interns about what it’s like to be a journalist in a country that does not have a free press.
More than 73,000 NYCHA households are behind on rent, what officials say will force the public housing authority to draw from operating reserves and make other cuts in the year ahead—and could potentially hamper its repair plans. Meanwhile, the state’s already-exhausted Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) to aid New Yorkers in rent arrears is unlikely to reach NYCHA.
The Human Resources Administration (HRA) is promptly processing just 46.3 percent of applications for SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, the agency told councilmembers at a committee hearing on the impact and cause of the bureaucratic delays.
El pasado 29 de noviembre, Lawyers for Civil Rights presentó una enmienda a la demanda que añade como demandados a la compañía de aviones que transportó a los inmigrantes (Vertol Systems Company, Inc.) a su director general, al “zar de la seguridad pública” de Florida Larry Keefe, al jefe de gabinete del gobernador DeSantis, y a Perla Huerta, la principal reclutadora de inmigrantes en el terreno.
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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