City Limits articles from July 2003

City Limits archives from July 2003

Keeping the boat afloat. (Editorial).
July 1, 2003... IF ONLY IT WERE REAL VICTORY. We're damned lucky that Joe Bruno and the State Senate joined the Assembly in May to override Governor Pataki's veto of the legislature's budget. Otherwise, New York City (and municipalities statewide) would...

Letters.
July 1, 2003... NONPROFIT, NON-ACTION The real "dirty little secret of affordable housing" ["Invisible Men," May 2003] is not simply that the contractors do not pay their workers, but that the Community Development Organizations know about it and do...

Brooklyn transfer. (Frontlines).
July 1, 2003... NO NEW YORKER WAS HAPPY when the subway fare rose to $2 last month. But for commuters in central Brooklyn, the hike--compounded by a decades-old situation there--has nearly doubled the cost of getting around the borough and into Queens. ...

Get on the bus, gus: innocent passengers told they won't fly. (Frontlines).
July 1, 2003... LAST FALL, A MUSLIM businessman arrived at JFK International Airport ready to travel to Orlando. At the gate, a Delta Air Lines agent told him there was a "computer glitch" in his reservation and that it would take 40 minutes to fix. Until...

Saved by the bill. (Housing).
July 1, 2003... AFFORDABLE HOUSING proponents are breathing easier since the House and Senate passed a tax bill on May 23 that left out a dividend tax provision which would have threatened the development of low-income apartments in New York and nationwide....

Waiting online. (Firsthand).
July 1, 2003... My daughter's godmother lives in Queens. When I told her I wanted to come here from Peru, she said, "Don't! It's not what you think!" I used to read Fortune. I thought I'd get rich from dot-corns and bring my family in a year. I was wrong....

In this corner...the Teamsters: boxing buffs push to create the sport's first union. (Frontlines).
July 1, 2003... FOR THEIR FIRST FIGHT, Danny and Walter Kane went to the Aqueduct racetrack with their father and watched Roberto Duran pummel Sugar Ray Leonard over 15 rounds on the big screen. In the crowd, Duran's fans, dressed in white suits, walked the...

A market sale. (Real Estate).
July 1, 2003... THE APPLES, PEARS and peaches come from a farm in Pennsylvania; the collards and calallo from a local green thumb whose garden was once a rotting urban brownfield. They make their way into pots and onto plates across Central Brooklyn, thanks to...

A King is crowned. (Praxis).
July 1, 2003... THE PRAXIS board of directors named a new executive director in May--and he is no stranger to helping fix housing finance schemes. Longtime Democratic Party man Charlie King has set lofty promises for the troubled AIDS housing group's...

Work in projects: activists convince the Housing Authority to hire its residents--but winning jobs is just half the battle. (Inside Track).
July 1, 2003... CALL IT A TALE of two summers. A year ago, Kenneth Person, a 26-year-old resident of the James Weldon Johnson Houses in East Harlem, worked nearly four months doing demolition at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) construction sites in...

Colossal waste: how does the city handle recycling? By treating it like trash.
July 1, 2003... AFTER NEARLY 15 YEARS of working to get New Yorkers into the recycling habit--introducing composting, leaf collection, recycling centers and finally, in 1999, weekly pickups--the city's Department of Sanitation (DOS) announced last year that...

Hot trash: 'waste-to-energy' companies try to sell New York on garbage-zapping technology.
July 1, 2003... AS NEW YORK CITY CONTINUES to stagger under the burden of exporting 13,000 tons of household trash a day, the City Council Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee is prodding the Department of Sanitation to look to state-of-the-art technology for...

Close company.
July 1, 2003... the firm that collects when landlords don't pay taxes offered waterfront real estate to a favored buyer--not the highest bidder. A Bronx community group learns the hard way how New York is selling off its future. 1391-99 LAFAYETTE AVENUE...

Safe and sound.
July 1, 2003... We send armies of investigators into home to probe reports of child abuse or neglect--and leave scared and distrustful families behind. New York is now exploring what other states already know: Helping families can help protect kids, too. ...

The prevention pretension: foster care is failing, but child welfare advocates can't give in to Bush's block grant temptation. (Intelligence: The Big Idea).
July 1, 2003... IN THE PARLANCE of the Bush administration, phrases like "innovative financing" and "flexibility for states" usually mean "budget cuts." Why, then, have progressives kept their own rhetorical guns safely holstered since the president applied...

New reports.
July 1, 2003... They've done something right in Albany: New York's public disclosure laws for lobbyists are the nation's fifth best. And we need them, because the state has 3332 registered lobbyists (second only to California), who spent $92 million last year....

Homelessness reconsidered: assessing two decades of research and activism. (Intelligence: City Lit).
July 1, 2003... Reckoning with Homelessness By Kim Hopper Cornell University Press; 271 pages; $19.95 IN 1981, THE YOUNG ETHNOGRAPHER Kim Hopper and his colleague Ellen Baxter published the first extensive documentation of modern-era homelessness...

Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen. (Now Read This).
July 1, 2003... By David Hilfiker, MD Seven Stories Press, $18 It's easy to treat the premise of this book with skepticism: A doctor who works with homeless men with AIDS in Washington, D.C., explains the roots of urban poverty over 50 years. But...

Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York. (Now Read This).
July 1, 2003... By Lawrence Kaplan & Carol P. Kaplan Columbia University Press, $27.50 This cogent history of New York's Siberia details how the Rockaways went from being a virtually all-white resort area to a racially divided community with the most...

Stir it Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy. (Now Read This).
July 1, 2003... By Rinku Sen; Jossey-Bass, $25 The Ms. Foundation for Women sponsored this detailed guide on how to do everything from build membership to plan effective actions. Sen, who's been a community organizer for more than a decade, buttresses the...

Civics as a second language: the new ESL teaches immigrants how to stand up for themselves. (Intelligence: Making Change).
July 1, 2003... WHEN BELLA YAKUBOVICH and Alexandra Sviridova came to a City Council hearing a few weeks ago, they did not have on smart jackets or expensive lipstick like most of the women officials in the room. The two elderly immigrants from the former...

Working assets: why it pays to pay to keep people on the job. (Intelligence: NYC Inc.).
July 1, 2003... WHAT IF TAXPAYERS had a choice: We could pay people unemployment benefits when they lost their jobs, or we could put the same amount of money into a program that required them to continue working for their benefits, allowed them to take home...