City Limits articles from December 2003

City Limits archives from December 2003

No more excuses.(child welfare)(Editorial)
December 1, 2003... LET'S STOP PRETENDING these are freak incidents. As I write this, New Jersey child welfare authorities are trying to figure out how it could be that the seemingly cohesive, loyally churchgoing Jackson family of Camden allowed their four...

Mortgage 101.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... The lenders in Debbie Nathan's "Buying a Piece of Hell" [November 2003] may not have been as bamboozled as they make out. Since most lenders are bundling mortgages into the secondary mortgage market, there comes a point when they no longer take...

Misleading choices.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... Philip Mangano, executive director of the Interagency Coalition on Homelessness, is right in his desire to focus HUD dollars on long-term shelter residents and the creation of more permanent and supportive housing, as reported in Cassi...

Take el "a" tren.(FrontLines)(Mexican subway musicians)
December 1, 2003... LISTENING TO GABRIEL RAMIREZ LOPEZ play music with his son and nephew on the subway, most passengers maintain their commuter faces. Here and there, though, the masks crack open a bit. One woman closes her bloodshot eyes. A lanky man hums along....

Sour disposition: tenants ask HUD to reconsider how it sheds unwanted property.(FrontLines)(U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)
December 1, 2003... JUST A BLOCK from Harlem's nouveau-chic 125th Street, where wig shops and soul food joints now share the sidewalk with MAC cosmetics and H&M, Ennis Francis Houses stands as testament to an earlier time. Unfortunately, it shows. Apartment walls...

Shotgun wedding.(First Hand)
December 1, 2003... Eric The whole problem started with living in shelters. I had my apartment; he didn't. German: So I let him move in with me. But they told us in order for us to live together both receiving public assistance, we'd have to be on the same budget,...

Stirring the pot: an advocacy group refocuses on food.(FrontLines)
December 1, 2003... HIRAM BONNER'S fans line up early outside the Community Food Resource Center's kitchen on West 116th Street. The tall, velvet-voiced Bonner--trained at the Cordon Bleu Institute in London--arrived in February and promptly threw out the cans...

Housing: tenants get bitten by activism (bed) bug.(FrontLines)
December 1, 2003... THERE ARE BED BUGS in the Prince George Hotel, and the tiny, tick-like vermin won't go away--not for the fumigators who come to kill them twice a week, and not for tenants like Goshka Grabowska, an artist who spent her summer in a state of...

Civil rights: bias in the bathroom.(FrontLines)
December 1, 2003... A LANDMARK EVICTION CASE moved forward this fall when the New York Supreme Court ruled that the Hispanic MDS Forum (HAF), a local nonprofit, could proceed with a discrimination suit against its former landlord, the estate of Joseph Bruno. What...

Sanitation: burn this!(FrontLines)
December 1, 2003... NEW YORK CITY has moved a step closer to building its first municipal incinerator in more than four decades. In October, the Department of Sanitation announced it would entertain proposals for new technology to handle Staten Island's trash and...

L.A. Confident: after helping build a West Coast movement for community-friendly corporate subsidies, an activist is working to win real deals for New Yorkers.(Inside Track)(Adrianne Shropshire)
December 1, 2003... FOUR YEARS AGO, a grassroots coalition pulled off a remarkable coup. City Hall lavishly subsidized a gargantuan development project near the shore: The developer was to receive more than $400 million in public subsidies, with another $90...

Called safe: foster homes are supposed to be havens for abused children. Each year, hundreds of New York kids find out the truth is a lot more frightening.
December 1, 2003... The girl was 5. She set a kitchen garbage can on fire. Her mom, who had abused cocaine when she was pregnant with the girl, hit her with a belt. And then the girl and her 7-year-old brother both missed about 45 days of school apiece. Last...

Miracle on 33rd street.
December 1, 2003... This Christmas, poor New Yorkers will send more than 200,000 letters to the North Pole. More affluent New Yorkers will intercept them at Manhattan's General Post Office. Some kids will get things like computers, coats, bikes and hope. The rest...

The new kids in school: Teaching Fellows barn on the job, and students pay a price. Is there a better way?
December 1, 2003... THE OBJECTIVE OF THE LESSON in this sixth-grade class at a Bushwick middle school is to "be able to use similar figures to find out the length of an unknown side." The teacher gives the class a quiz, where the students have to find the length...

Citizen planners: the real political power of high-tech public meetings and the "deliberative democracy" movement.(The Big Idea)
December 1, 2003... IT WAS A SPECTACLE to warm the hearts of democrats. Last July, about 4,300 New Yorkers gathered to deliberate over the future of the World Trade Center site. The organizers hired a recruiting firm to ensure as demographically diverse a group as...

To afford a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, someone working 40 hours a week must earn $18.15 an hour--that's a 141-hour week at minimum wage.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... To afford a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, someone working 40 hours a week must earn $18.15 an hour--that's a 141-hour week at minimum wage. This provocative report calculates a "housing wage" for each metro area in the country by...

Large urban school districts are plagued by shortages of qualified and proven teachers, but they've got no one to blame but themselves, this study argues.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Large urban school districts are plagued by shortages of qualified and proven teachers, but they've got no one to blame but themselves, this study argues. Researchers looked at the hiring processes of four (unnamed) city districts--one from...

Low-wage workers are rarely on the front page and don't often make it into broadcast news at all, according to this media analysis.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Low-wage workers are rarely on the front page and don't often make it into broadcast news at all, according to this media analysis. What coverage they get comes largely from the metro pages of the major dailies in five large urban...

Action and reaction: what did a heady decade of anti-racism activism win?(To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City By Martha Biondi Harvard University Press; 360 pages; $39.95 REMARKING ON THE destruction wrought during the 1943 Harlem riot, James Baldwin commented, "It would...

All in the family.(All in the Family Nurturing the One, Supporting the Many: The Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... All in the Family Nurturing the One, Supporting the Many: The Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn By Peg McCartt Hess, Brenda G. McGowan and Michael Botsko Columbia University Press, $26.50 WHEN THE ADMINISTRATION for Children's...

Twilight zoning: new land-use rules will end industry's days in Greenpoint-Williamsburg--an economic mistake the city might never be able to reverse.(NYC Inc. getting in the city's business: a project of the center for an urban future)
December 1, 2003... IN THE "MIXED USE" neighborhood of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, industry may not be in the mix much longer. Under the rezoning framework, representatives of the Department of City Planning announced to a crowd of hundreds at Greenpoint's...