Health and Environment

AIDS Activists Sue To Stop Budget Cuts

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The city budget fight is headed to a new venue: U.S. District Court. On Tuesday veteran AIDS activists at HousingWorks filed a motion for a restraining order to halt Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to slash funding for the city’s AIDS services agency. Justice Cheryl Pollak of the Eastern District will hear arguments in the case Thursday morning. Bloomberg’s budget – currently in the home stretch of negotiation with the City Council – calls for a $10 million cut to the HIV/AIDS Services Administration, which would translate to 248 fewer case workers for very poor, very sick people who get help with housing, food and medical care through HASA. “Those benefits save lives,” Leroy Rose, a HousingWorks client who has AIDS and receives HASA benefits said in a statement.

Bronx

Why Wait For The State? City Racing To Budget Deal

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Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council are aiming to strike a handshake agreement on a city budget by Friday, three days before the state’s self-imposed deadline to complete its long overdue spending plan, according to people with knowledge of the budget process.The rapidly approaching deadline had advocates crowding the steps of City Hall and lobbying councilmembers on Wednesday. At around noon, as the Council’s budget negotiating committee was set to meet, advocates for after-school programs sat on the sidelines as supporters of immigrant assistance programs packed the steps. A lobbyist for day care workers chatted with reporters. Said Greg Faulkner, chief of staff to freshman Bronx Councilman Fernando Cabrera, in a phone interview: “You can’t walk through the hallway without people pouncing, which is what they should do.”Click here for a list of Council members.Gov. Paterson has set a deadline of Monday, June 28 to complete the state budget that was supposed to be done by April 1. The lack of a firm state budget means the city must guess at how much state aid will come its way.

Bronx

Back To Basics: Challenges at the Community College Door

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For her mere 20 years, Gina Ortiz speaks with the polish and poise of a person used to impressing her elders. She says she loved the small public high school she attended—Riverdale-Kingsbridge M.S./ H.S. 141 in the west Bronx. She aspired to attend Boston University or Northeastern, en route to a career in government or law enforcement. Those schools didn’t accept her, so, with her regents diploma in hand, she enrolled at John Jay College to begin her postsecondary education. Well, sort of.

Bronx

No Entry: Why Is Teen Unemployment So High?

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The woman sweeping floors at the McDonald’s on 204th Street had gray hair tracing her temples, and her colleague at the register looked to be at least 50. Down at the Micky-Ds on Fordham Road, the woman making french fries could have been a grandmother, and she was not the oldest one behind the counter. At the restaurant on East 170th, the employee on break had a wrinkled face; those on duty were younger, but few could pass for 30. The man taking orders on East 167th Street looked to be pushing 50. On Jerome Avenue, the entire staff—at the registers and the grill—seemed to be beyond their 20s.If there’s a typical teenage job in America, its pushing Happy Meals and Big Macs under the golden arches.

Government

In This Fight, Public Advocate Is The Underdog

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When the New York Times delivered its all-important endorsement to then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio in last year’s race for public advocate, the paper noted that the winner’s chief task would be “demonstrating whether this position truly serves New Yorkers.” If the subtext wasn’t clear then, it was brought into sharp focus when the mayor’s charter revision commission announced that its agenda for this year would include the possible elimination of the public advocate position. A little-understood office that was itself created in a 1993 charter revision (out of the wreckage of the title of City Council president, which had been stripped of most of its power by a Supreme Court ruling), the public advocate is supposed to act as an independently elected “ombudsman” to keep watch over the mayor and City Council. That means the future of the office could rest in the hands of de Blasio, the former councilmember, federal housing official, and Hillary Clinton campaign manager who won the job after a tight four-way primary race and subsequent runoff against former public advocate Mark Green last fall. As chair of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, de Blasio had been a vocal critic of many of Mayor Bloomberg’s policies, particularly his refusal to allow able-bodied single adults to receive food stamps unless they’re working, and what de Blasio considered an insufficiently robust approach to reducing poverty.

Bronx

Question Facing Beeps, Public Advocate: To Be Or Not To Be

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The New York City Charter Revision Commission meets Thursday night to hear testimony about whether borough presidents and the public advocate should vanish or get more power.The hearing at 6 p.m. at Staten Island Technical High School, 485 Clawson Street, is the third in a series of five “issues forums” where the 15 commissioners are hearing from experts on topics where charter changes are possible. Forums on term limits and voter participation have already been held. Sessions on public integrity and land use remain. Testimony on Thursday will be heard from Baruch College Professor Doug Muzzio, Hofstra Law School’s Eric Lane, former chair of Manhattan Community Board 2Manha Brad Hoylman, former deputy mayor and current CUNY official Marc V. Shaw, and Gerald Benjamin of SUNY New Paltz. Public comments will be taken after the experts have testified.

Bronx News Network

Affordable Housing Project Aims For Six-Figure Incomes

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The 5 million square feet of new apartment space that the city wants built on the Queens side of the East River will include 3,000 apartments of affordable housing, according to a request for proposals released this week by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.The proposed complex at Hunter’s Point South is “in accordance with the Mayor’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, which responds to the changing housing needs of New York’s communities by committing to the new construction or rehabilitation of 165,000 housing units by 2014,” the RFP reads.But in an illustration of the complexities underlying “affordable” housing, most of the city-subsidized units at Hunter’s Point will reserved for families making more than the average city family. Sixty percent of the 5,000 apartments at Hunter’s Point South are supposed to be affordable; the rest are market rate. But two-thirds of the affordable housing being constructed there will be reserved for people making between 81 percent and 165 percent of the area median income, or AMI. For a family of four that income range translates to $63,000 to $130,000.One-third of the affordable housing will be available to families making less than 80 percent of the AMI, or $63,000.The city will subsidize all the “affordable” units, and those units are required to be affordable permanently. If a developer wants to build more than the required 3,000 affordable units, the RFP states, those units “should be skewed toward the upper tier in furtherance of this project’s middle income goals.”Area median income is defined by a federal government formula, which yields an estimated median of $79,200 for a family of four.

Bronx

Tenants & Pols Protest Handling of Housing Vouchers

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It’s been six months since the New York City Housing Authority went back on a promise to help 2,600 low-income New Yorkers pay the rent. In that time 27 families that left the city’s shelters for homes of their own have returned to the shelters, homeless again, according to Judith Goldiner of the Legal Aid Society. And thousands who thought they had a life line are still waiting for help.Nilsa Melendez is one of them. The 44-year-old receptionist fled an abusive marriage and has been living in a shelter with her 14-year-old daughter since November 2008. In August 2009 she finally got a Section 8 rental assistance voucher.

Bronx

Reviews: A City on Fire

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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.

Bronx

New York’s Eccentric Road Signs

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Every time a new mayor or borough president gets elected, the city pays around $350 to update each of the affected signs. Photo by: Cody Lyon

A city with as much gall as ours doesn’t wimp out, even at road signs. By: Cody Lyon

Drivers, cyclists or pedestrians traveling New York City roads, bridges and tunnels face a bewildering array of signs – 1.3 million of them in fact. There are greeting signs between the boroughs, like the one – along a Brooklyn border – saying goodbye with a dialect: “Leaving Brooklyn ‘Fuhgeddaboutit.’”