Everyone who rides buses or subways knows that service is down and fares are heading up. But why is this happening? And does it spell danger for the city’s economic future?
Transit cuts don’t just mean fewer trains. There’ll be less room on trains that are running. And that could compound other problems underground.
Concerns about the racial contours of city hiring have resurrected issues that bedeviled past mayors, but over which Mayor Bloomberg has largely avoided confrontation.
If New York City faces another catastrophe on the scale of September 11, city residents now are more prepared for the aftermath. The question is: Are our primary care health centers, churches, businesses and other community institutions charged with taking care of us? On June 2, that question brought together a spirited group of 36 community leaders and professionals living, working in or representing Manhattan’s Community District 5, which roughly encompasses the area south of Central Park between Lexington Avenue and 8th Ave from Columbus Circle to Union Square. During a six-hour meeting, the group drafted a plan–one of only five district-level plans that have been crafted in the city– to enhance the area’s emergency preparedness by coordinating the sharing of medicines, health professionals and other resources.”There should be criteria to access the resources so no one can hoard [them]” a middle-aged woman told the group, which sat clustered around her in a nearly empty auditorium. “There should be criteria for how you access what you need and organizations should be held accountable for the resources that they use.”A man who sat nearby – David Fortino, the Region II program manager of Citizen Corps, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that coordinates volunteer emergency response teams – raised an additional issue.
The Fires By Joe Flood, 325 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.95In 1961, President Kennedy hired Robert S. McNamara away from his job as president of the Ford Motor Company to, essentially, manage the conflict in Vietnam just as he had the American automotive industry. As secretary of defense, McNamara – a Harvard MBA – hired top analysts from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit problem-solving think tank, to help.“Systems analysts were soon wielding more influence over American defense strategy than any five-star general or chief of staff,” writes Joe Flood in his fascinating new book, “The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City – and Determined the Future of Cities.” It was only a matter of time, Flood explains, before New York City would attempt to manage its fires just as McNamara was managing the war: New York was simply, and merely, another system.
A federal judge’s decision to appoint a special master to oversee the New York City Fire Department’s compliance with a court-mandated revision of hiring practices has once again put the FDNY’s racial makeup in the headlines.But New York’s Bravest aren’t the only city workers with a disproportionate racial skew. According to figures obtained by City Limits about the municipal workforce as of the end of 2009, several other departments are notably white. At the same time, other agencies are disproportionately black. (See chart below.)The Census Bureau, which treats race and Latino origin separately (meaning Latinos can be of any race), estimates that New York City is about 35 percent non-Latino white, 28 percent Latino, 23 percent non-Latino black and 12 percent non-Latino Asian. Overall, the city workforce is 38 percent white, 36 percent black, 18 percent Latino and 6 percent Asian, according to statistics from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (which, unlike the Census, considers race and Latino origin to be mutually exclusive).
Some banks are asking their customers to call on lawmakers to halt or amend the financial reform bill. Tell us: Is yours?
In the lobby of STRIVE, an employment-training program in East Harlem, the messages are clear, stated in a bold, black font on posters that greet the overwhelmingly black and Latino clients as they get off the elevator and enter the lobby: “Please Remove Your Hats.” “Please Do Not Wear Pants Below the Waist.” “Please Do Not Wear Headphones.”Inside the classroom, says STRIVE’s chief operating officer, Angelo Rivera, attitudes are a primary target. “You have to inflict some kind of discomfort and pain so they can own up to what their issues are,” he says. “That whole attitudinal piece will make you or break you in the world of work.”But in a month of instruction, STRIVE students also get two days on civics.
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.
The mayor’s proposed city budget, which City Council just began examining, shows a nearly flat spending plan riddled with painful choices.
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