City Limits articles from May 2003

City Limits archives from May 2003

Under siege.(effects of George W. Bush tax policy )(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... BAGHDAD IS NOT the only city under siege from Washington. And I'm not even talking about President Bush's disgusting refusal to provide more than minimal aid to New York City as it recovers from its own attacks. (Hey--why not pay Bechtel to...

Letters.
May 1, 2003... ARMED WITH SKEPTICISM Regarding "Up in Arms" [April 2003], your article on Blacks and Latinos in the military: The armed forces may be willing to accept and enlist our brothers and sisters, but I do challenge the notion that the military...

Correction.
May 1, 2003... In the April 2003 story "Off the Waterfront," urban planner Laura Wolf-Powers was incorrectly identified as a staffer of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development. She is an assistant professor at the Graduate...

Payday of reckoning. (Frontlines).(protection against high-interest loans)
May 1, 2003... WHEN THE UNIVERSITY Kim Saunders used to work for started paying her monthly instead of weekly, she knew she needed help with her car loans. So she called Advance America, which had filled mailboxes across Saunders' North Carolina neighborhood...

AIDS SRO tenants' radical demand: a lease. (Stanley's Last Stand).(single-room occupancy)
May 1, 2003... EVERY 28 DAYS, Stanley moves. From the Lincoln Hotel in Brooklyn, to the Davidson in the Bronx, to the Marion on the Upper West Side, the 53-year-old has dragged his clothing, his TV and his medicine (he has AIDS) from one city homeless hotel...

Young and restless. (Urban Legend).
May 1, 2003... IF GOVERNOR PATAKI has his way, thousands of students in New York's public university system could see their tuition bills rise by 37 percent next year. But they're not taking the hit sitting down. More than 1,000 students of the city and state...

Rent laws could be Mitchell-Lama's last hope. (Legislating Stability).
May 1, 2003... TENANTS' FIGHT TO RESTORE muscle to New York's rent laws took a step forward on March 12, when Republican state senators introduced a bill that would extend rent regulations through 2008 and eliminate vacancy decontrol, a contentious provision...

Code enforcement, Hollywood style. (Housing).(One Third of a Nation)(Movie Review)
May 1, 2003... THE TYPICAL Lower East Side tenement of the 1930s was a firetrap, with broken fire escapes, cockroach and vermin infestation, overcrowded apartments and trash-strewn hallways. The city's Tenement House Department had only 224 inspectors to deal...

Investigations continue, director resigns. (Praxis).(Praxis Housing Initiatives)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... SINCE CIIY LIMITS last reported on questionable expenditures made by directors of Praxis Housing Initiatives, a nonprofit housing and social services organization for people with AIDS [April 2003], the situation has heated up. First, the office...

Each house is an island. (Waterfront).
May 1, 2003... IN HIS PLAN to boost the city's housing stock, Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed to the city's waterfront as a great opportunity for development. While residents of many of the city's communities welcome this as the answer to reviving their...

No hablar in the ER. (Health Care).(language assistance at hospitals)
May 1, 2003... AN AGREEMENT BY two Brooklyn hospitals to provide better language assistance services for their patients has non-English speakers across the city asking, "What about us?"--and putting their own local medical centers on notice. In early...

City tries to 86 Local Law 36. (Predatory Lending).
May 1, 2003... When Mayor Bloomberg vetoes a bill, he means business. In late February, he showed the members of the City Council that they not only need enough votes to override his veto, but they need a lawyer, too. Three months after the City Council...

Pro bono blowup: City Hall asks top law firms to fight for the city--and against civil rights. (Inside Track).
May 1, 2003... ONE YEAR AFTER Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo began lobbying the city's law firms, asking them to assist the city Law Department in handling its caseload, more than two dozen private firms--among them the largest and most successful in New...

Leave home without it: credit card companies cancel on Muslim New Yorkers.
May 1, 2003... Say that you are one of those fortunate people who manage to pay off most of their credit cards every month. Then imagine your surprise when one of your cards is cancelled for no apparent reason. You'd be outraged, especially if you found out...

Invisible men: meet the muscle behind New York's new wave of affordable housing. With low pay, no benefits and no respect, construction workers are paying for our homes.
May 1, 2003... Carlos Ramos builds the city's new affordable housing, but he can't live in it. He doesn't make enough to pay the rent. When Ramos saw a new apartment building going up, he did what he usually does: shaped up, hung around, talked to the...

The moving spirit: two black churches preach in praise of gay members. In communities gripped by AIDS, will other congregations follow their path?
May 1, 2003... In many ways, this is what you think of when you think "black church." This is the kind of place where folk get to testifying or shouting, or allowing their bodies to shake in rhythmic, transcendental fits commonly referred to as "the holy...

Money: the great equalizer; nearly 50 years after Brown, we still don't get it: resources--not race--make separate unequal. (Intelligence the Big Idea).
May 1, 2003... STACEY D. HEYWARD is a black American single mother of three children who works as a day care paraprofessional and attends college. She and her family live in the South Bronx. Hers is a neighborhood beset by crime, poverty and every imaginable...

How to be a starving artist; step one: stop whining. (Intelligence City Lit).(The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet)(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet Edited by Mickey Z. Soft Skull Press, 245 pages, $15 DURING MY SENIOR YEAR of college, I told a professor that I planned to become a professional poet. I would go out into...

Aspiring Fighters: Memoir of a Visionary.(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... By Antonia Pantoja Arte Publico 384 pages $26.95 WHENEVER I SET FOOT in a bookstore, I am reminded that there is no shortage of books by people testifying to their own effectiveness--from Giuliani's Leadership to former CEOs who make...

It's Hardly Sportin': Stadiums, Neighborhoods and the New Chicago. (Now Read This).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... By Costas Spirou and Larry Bennett Northern Illinois University Press: $28.50 The fight launched by residents of Hell's Kitchen to oppose a new stadium on the West Side certainly has precedents. In Chicago, the White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks...

A Disjointed Search for the Will to Live. (Now Read This).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... By Shaka N'Zinga, Soft Skull Press: $13 Alternating between lyrical love poems and strident treatises on African-American anarchist philosophy--not to mention riffs on childhood memories--this prison memoir and polemic is a celebration of...

New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970. (Now Read This).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... By Eli Lederhendler Syracuse University Press: $29.95 Jerusalem professor (and Bronx native) Lederhendler ably explores the massive changes that guided the postwar lives of New York's Jews: the twin movements of secularization and...

Fast forward: a Chicago program that propels ambitious newcomers into the principal's office is influencing New York's reform agenda. (Intelligence Making Change).
May 1, 2003... KATE GARRISON IS HAVING a great year--even though she works long hours and eats lunch when others are already thinking about dinner. Garrison, 31, is the first-year principal of South Brooklyn Community High School, a new alternative school...

Sick transit: New York can't afford not to build a 21st-century public transportation system. (Intelligence NYC Inc.).
May 1, 2003... New York, New York, it's a helluva town The Bronx is up and the Battery's down The people they ride in a hole in the ground On the Town, 1947 THE ABILITY TO RIDE through holes in the ground is, in fact, what made New York a...