ARTS and CULTURE

Tough Love In The Big City

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For young people born without that proverbial silver Spoon in their mouths, New York City has never been An easy place to grow up. It’s a tough love kind of city.For every person who has described a rather idyllic Childhood in old New York, there are many more who Remember a harsher one, going as far back as the days of Jacob Riis, the social activist and photographer who chronicled The lives of poor young people in Lower Manhattan in The late 19th century. What he saw and showed the world influenced attempts at making their tenement lives better. In How the Other Half Lives, he observed:“Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.”A contemporary of Riis’ in the late days of the 19th century did even more.

Bronx

Drive For Nonpartisan Voting Confronts '03 Failure

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Those calling for an end to party primaries say that they exclude thousands of voters who do not belong to the Democratic party, whose nominees win most races in the city. Photo by: Jarrett Murphy

Those pushing the Charter Revision Commission to propose an end to party primaries say politics has changed since voters rejected a similar bid seven years ago. By: Jarrett Murphy

The city’s Charter Revision Commission on Wednesday night was nearing the end of three hours of expert testimony–most of it about whether nonpartisan elections would be good or bad for New York City’s democracy–when Commissioner Ernie Hart raised a practical question.If a proposal to have nonpartisan elections were put before the voters in 2010, how would the commission do to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2003, when voters rejected such a change by a 70-30 margin?That’s the kind of strategic quandary now facing the 15 mayor-appointed commissioners as they mull ways to improve voter participation in municipal elections, which has dropped almost without interruption since the 1960s. One measure–the percentage of New York’s presidential race voters who return for the mayoral race the following year–fell from 67 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2009.Wednesday’s testimony–only the second of five “issue forums” where the panel is hearing from policy experts on areas of the charter that might change–raised a host of thorny issues. How much of the turnout problem is due to the mechanics of voting versus the larger political culture?

Economy

The Search for the Smoking Gun

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During four decades of debate over the causes of black-male joblessness and unemployment, there have been two broad schools of thought. There were those who blamed the problem on the way the economy works, especially its racial contours and barriers, and those who attributed it to the way black men behave, to their culture.According to New York University political science professor Lawrence Mead, black joblessness is about a failure of low-skill black men to choose to work or live up to their employers’ standards when they do get jobs. “The immediate problem is work discipline, a willingness to cooperate, to be a reliable employee,” says Mead. “It’s collective psychology. It’s attitudes, and this is characteristic of poverty, where people want to work in principle.

Economy

Like A Canyon

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Just north of 125th Street, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture displays a timeline of black political activism. The familiar faces— Garvey, DuBois, King, Malcolm X, Jackson— are all there. So is a picture of a group of black protesters, men and women, in long coats, fedoras and pillbox hats picketing against discriminatory hiring practices by defense contractors … in 1943. One man is holding a sign that reads, “The Negro People Must Have Jobs.”The popular history of the black civil rights movement usually focuses on its quest for legal rights like the ability to attend previously all-white schools, sit at the front of the bus or eat at Jim Crow lunch counters. But bread-and-butter issues were always at the movement’s core, because black-white disparities in the job market have been present almost since what Hilary Shelton, director for the NAACP’s Washington bureau, calls “that very peculiar employment program, the African slave trade.”It wasn’t until the middle part of last century, however, that those disparities began showing up in the unemployment rate.

Economy

Chapter 4: High Hopes, Steep Challenges for NYCHA

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The Bible reading during the Mass near the empty NYCHA complex was apropos. “Like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it,” the passage from I Corinthians read. “But each one must be careful how he builds upon it.”