After a two-month journey from South America to the U.S. Border and a two-day bus ride from Texas to New York City, immigrants who spoke with City Limits just wanted a bite to eat and a place to rest. “I just want to work and get ahead,” one recently-arrived man said.
Just six units remain occupied at the Arlington Village complex. Now, those who remain worry about what the owners’ plan to develop the site will mean for them. “What exists now won’t exist.”
Councilmember Julie Won issued a list of “land use principles” she said she will apply to new projects in her district that require Council-approved changes to the city’s zoning code—including a controversial proposal to build a 3,000-unit complex in southern Astoria.
The decision Friday marks the first time a New York court has ruled that minimum-income policies for people with full-rent subsidies violate city and state laws, said Housing Works senior attorney Armen Merjian, who represented the family trying to get into Parkchester Preservation Company’s apartments.
“Dissolving our building’s Mitchell-Lama status would be a small but significant injustice in an already deeply unequal city. Shareholders who have long benefitted from the program would be autonomously divesting some of the city’s affordable housing stock, and profiting from the conversion.”
“My whole crew is squatting,” Ronaldo Casanova told City Limits in April of 1990, when he was organizing fellow squatters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “We have no other choice or we’re out on the streets.”
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
“Shelters are not a stand-alone solution and just because we remove homeless people from our subways and streets doesn’t mean they have found a home.”
So far this year, city marshals have executed at least 1,527 residential evictions, according to statistics maintained by the Department of Investigation (DOI). The true number of legal evictions is likely higher because DOI updates its database only after a marshal reports an eviction, which can take days or weeks.
Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday doubled down on his claim that thousands of asylum-seekers have strained New York City’s homeless shelter system, causing his administration to break state law by keeping at least four families in an intake facility overnight.
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