Corruption, cronyism—much was wrong with old-fashioned machine politics. But compared to today’s campaigns of sound-bites and surveys, yesterday’s ward heelers fused genuine relationships between politics and people’s lives.
How do you get today’s high school students engaged in American democracy? One Brooklyn high school math teacher is campaigning to improve civic participation by turning pupils into pollsters.
Yes, says this writer, but it will require vision and renewed drive by the Bloomberg administration: Doing a few things better will not be enough.
In heavily Democratic Kings County, there’s little suspense in the presidential race. But Mitt Romney’s a heavy favorite in a few neighborhoods that favored GOP candidates in 2004 and 2008.
New York City boasts 138 farmers markets, and 58 news ones in the last six years. On a recent sunny Wednesday, a group of reporters from the CUNY Graduate School harvested scenes from the city’s outdoor supermarket.
While it regularly publishes precinct crime statistics, the NYPD largely refuses to release data on crime at the level of smaller patrol sectors. It’s unclear if Council Speaker Christine Quinn will allow action on a bill to require more disclosure.
Four years after the housing crisis transformed the presidential race, it’s barely mentioned on the campaign trail. But foreclosure is still an issue in New York, and some believe federally-chartered agencies can do more to help.
The primary battle between State Senator Martin Dilan and challenger Jason Otano was depicted as a referendum on the embattled Bushwick assemblyman and Brooklyn Democratic powerhouse Vito Lopez, a Dilan ally. But on the street, voters and volunteers saw different themes.
“The World Votes Here” aims to get a glimpse of the complex and interesting ways in which the city’s ethnic enclaves are participating in campaign 2012.
Amid the controversy over the management of New York’s public housing, NYCHA officials are contemplating historic changes to how the agency operates. Tenants are looking for more ways to weigh in on those ideas.
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