Government

Sewage, Cement And Staten Island's Future

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The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant is designed to handle 60 million gallons of sewage per day. Photo by: Marc Fader

Projects to upgrade a sewage plant and construct a cement facility open the next chapter in a complex—and controversial—industrial history. By: Jake Mooney

The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island’s North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island’s residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.

News

Housing Costs Devour More Family Budgets

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Despite neighborhoods littered with vacant homes and sale prices that dropped dramatically in the past three years, more Americans are spending more of their money on housing expenses than ever before. A report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found 18.6 million American households –renters and homeowners alike – spend more than half their income on housing, up from 13.8 million in 2001. Dedicating more than 30 percent of income to rent or mortgage is considered unhealthy. The study, Harvard’s annual State of the Nation’s Housing report found that as the housing market slowly recovers, it is getting harder for low-income people to afford their homes. More homeowners and renters are devoting half or more of their income to housing costs than ever before.

Bronx

Homelessness Strikes More NYC Children

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The recession pushed an alarming number of New York City families, many of them with children, into homelessness in 2009, according to a new report by Citizen’s Committee for Children. The number of families applying to live in city homeless shelters increased about 27 percent to nearly 24,000 between 2008 and 2009, according to the annual report, Keeping Track of New York City’s Children .The trend mirrors the spike in adult street homelessness reported in March by the city’s Department of Homeless Services. Their annual one-night survey found a 25 percent year-over-year increase in the numbers of people living on the streets of New York, to about 3100 people.Keeping Track is a compendium of statistics describing the quality of life that New York City’s children enjoy. Many children enjoy little, the report notes.The number of children entering foster care declined almost every year between 1998 and 2008, the report shows, down more than half, to 16,200. And the city’s four-year high school graduation rate has steadily edged higher since 2005, increasing almost 10 percent.But several major problems persist, the report found:26 percent of all New York City children live in poverty.Children here are three times more likely to be hospitalized for preventable illnesses – such as asthma, pneumonia, and acute respiratory infections – than children in the rest of the state.The number of youth younger than 20 arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges was at a 12-year-high in 2008, with about 88,900 arrests.All indicators of child well-being in New York are worse among black and Latino children, the report found, with one of the greatest racial disparities being in the number of children born into poverty.

Bronx

Hard Math: Charter Schools Race For Space

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The state legislature’s eleventh-hour vote last month to expand New York’s charter schools will add 114 new charters to the 99 currently operating in New York City. But while the new law paves the way for new schools, and perhaps for millions in federal education funding, it doesn’t create new space for the new schools—or for the current charters, which are bursting at the seams as they add students, year by year.When a new school opens, it generally begins with one or two grades – typically, kindergarten and first – and “grows up the grades” over time, adding a new kindergarten cohort every year, as older children progress. This means that schools that aim to encompass K-8 begin small and eventually expand to a much greater size. City Department of Education (DOE) officials say that 62,500 students will attend charter schools this fall. But rough estimates by the New York City Charter School Center suggest that about 140,000 students may eventually attend charter schools in New York City, once all of the charters reach capacity.

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

HUD Proposes Landmark Changes to Public Housing

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In a move signaling the biggest changes since the advent of public housing 70 years ago, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told Congress last week that it wants to radically overhaul how the nation houses its poorest citizens.The proposed changes aim to increase the social and physical mobility of public housing residents and turn existing public housing developments into mixed income communities with market rate tenants. The changes also aim to attract private investment to those existing public housing developments. Such investment would help pay for costly, long-delayed repairs, which the agency projects total $20 billion. Public housing that receives such investment would remain under the control of the local housing authority for 30 years.In testimony before the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee last week, HUD Commissioner Shaun Donovan outlined the Preservation, Enhancement and Transition of Rental Assistance Act (PETRA). Under the voluntary program, local housing authorities would no longer get one stream of federal funding to run dedicated developments and another to administer portable voucher programs. Instead all public housing residents who meet income limits would be given rental vouchers.

News

Report: Fraud Common Among Top Debt Buyers

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In addition to shoddy mortgages, deed theft and usurious payday loans, there’s another predator sucking money out of low income neighborhoods of color: debt buyers. According to a study released this week by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project these firms – which buy credit card, fines or other debts with the aim of collecting them from debtors – regularly file fraudulent lawsuits against low income, elderly and disabled New Yorkers. In many cases, the report alleges, debts have already been paid off or forgiven. A spokesman for DBA International, an industry association did not return a phone call and email request for comment. Between January 2006 and July 2008 the top such firms operating in NYC collected more than $1 billion through court judgments.

ARTS and CULTURE

Pot Smoke, Dead Elevators & Killer Paint: Life in the Towers

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On a warm Saturday morning a few weeks ago, a group of older tenants at the River Park Towers in Morris Heights, a neighborhood in the South Bronx, set up a plastic table across from their building. A handful of women stacked small, store-bought cakes wrapped in plastic on top of it and sat down to wait for customers.Someone wheeled in a PA system and a steady stream of 90s hip-hop tunes began to draw neighbors out of their apartments. Soon, a crowd of tenants and their children were sitting outside, enjoying the sunshine and talking about the conditions of the place where they live.”This is about taking back our building, ya’ll,” one woman shouted into the microphone. The story of New York City is often understood as a neat movement from peak to gutter and back up again. The city suffered in the seventies, muddled through the eighties, endured crisis in the early nineties and, at least until the recent recession, has enjoyed a steady ascent colored by declining crime and increasing real estate investments.The problems the city has, meanwhile, are discussed and dissected in isolation.

Bronx

Check Cashers Get New Respect

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Lakeisha Williams has a bank account. That doesn’t mean she always uses it. The home health aide from West Harlem sometimes can’t wait the few days it takes for her paycheck to clear. So she sacrifices about $20 to a check casher and gets her money immediately. “I ain’t got no problem with check cashers,” Williams says.Check-cashing stores have for years been easy targets for advocates of economic justice, who have argued that the industry provides an expensive service and takes advantage of people who can ill afford it.

Bronx

Poll: New Yorkers Fear Becoming Homeless

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A study released today by the Institute for Children and Poverty, a research and advocacy organization, finds homelessness is a major factor in the lives of New Yorkers. A third of New Yorkers think about homelessness everyday; 15 percent have hosted someone who might otherwise have been homeless in the past six months; and 20 percent of poll respondents “perceived themselves as being at risk for homelessness,” with black and Latino respondents and Bronx residents more likely to fear losing their homes. The study is the result of a random telephone survey of 1,000 people conducted in January, according to ICP. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percent. According to the survey, New Yorkers felt city government needed to do more, with sevenof ten rating the job as poor or fair.