City Limits articles from November 2002

City Limits archives from November 2002

Throwing bricks. (Editorial).
November 1, 2002... NATURALLY, IT TOOK an ugly outright crisis before the people who could do anything about it could be bothered. It took nearly a year and a half after family homelessness hit record levels before the Bloomberg administration or the City Council...

Letters.
November 1, 2002... BIASED BUREAUCRATS In your article on teacher testing "Pass Discrimination" [June 2002], you quote state education official Edith Hunsberger saying that "the qualities the Liberal Arts and Science Test measures are vital classroom...

Correction.
November 1, 2002... In the article "Dov Tales" [September/October 2002], we erroneously reported that state Comptroller H. Carl McCall made donations of $2,500 and $3,000 to Assemblymember Dov Hikind's political committee. McCall was present at two fundraisers but...

A train runs through it. (Frontlines).
November 1, 2002... EVERY DAY, RESIDENTS OF HUNTS POINT, Parkchester and Co-op City watch trains roar right through their neighborhoods. Then they travel for miles to get aboard. It wasn't always that way. From 1872 to the 1930s, the New York, New Haven and...

Breaking the law: legal services consolidates--and feuds. (Frontlines).
November 1, 2002... OVER THE LAST couple of years, neighborhood legal service programs across the country have begun consolidating operations, shutting down offices and moving their home bases out of the communities that founded them. In most cases, they haven't...

Rent wars' masked man. (Urban Legend).
November 1, 2002... A LOT OF NEW YORKERS have gotten to know Rent Wars. Roughly 30,000 people watch the cable show or check out the web site each week. But the program's creator, Ronin Amano, a quirky tenant activist, lurks stealthily behind the scenes. The burly...

A housing bond-doggle. (Frontlines).
November 1, 2002... WHILE MAYOR BLOOMBERG has talked up the need for housing downtown, the mechanisms his administration has put in place for making some of the new apartments affordable closely resemble a decades-old plan that by many accounts never quite...

Wish we weren't here. (Homelessness).
November 1, 2002... IT'S A CRISIS OF MISPERCEPTION. New Yorkers tend to see the homeless as a bunch of older men, Kim Berrios says, scruffy guys walking around with shopping carts and burping up booze from cardboard boxes. "People don't realize--the majority of...

Breaking free. (First Hand).
November 1, 2002... It's another day trapped inside this hellhole they call the EAU, the Emergency Assistance Unit. The date, June 9,2002, might as well be stamped onto my tombstone because when I walked in here with my father, I died. I finally realized that I...

City covers superfund costs. (Environment).
November 1, 2002... ANXIOUS ABOUT CONTINUING water shortages in New York City, and uncertain when Albany legislators will renew the state superfund program, city environmental officials have agreed to foot the bill to clean up a contaminated site in Jamaica. The...

Obituary.
November 1, 2002... Betty Kapetanakis 1952-2002 VASILIKI "BETTY" KAPETANAKIS, executive director of the North Star Fund, died on Monday, July 29, after a garbage truck hit her as she crossed the intersection of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. She...

Shaky credit: between a recession and regulators, can small credit unions survive? (Inside Track).
November 1, 2002... JUSTINE ZENKIN AND CARL Honegger have a tough job. As directors of the Neighborhood Trust Federal Credit Union, they are under pressure to improve the financial health of their five-year-old institution, which serves 4,100 members in Washington...

PINS city: there's a court where parents can go to scare their teenagers straight. Now tell that to a kid on the street.
November 1, 2002... THE VERY LAST THING Family Court's overworked judges wanted to see was more parents filing cases against their wayward teenagers. Parents whose children play hooky, or run away, or stay out past curfew, can take them to court, accusing them...

Wretched refuse: we don't want it. They have to take it. The truth about where your garbage goes.
November 1, 2002... WHERE DOES IT GO? That's all I wanted to find out. Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg and I embarked on a mutual odyssey of sorts. While he went looking for a new place to put the city's garbage, I went chasing after mine. On any given...

Brief relief: in the past year, some New York city nonprofits saw an unprecedented outpouring of philanthropy. Now how are they going to finish the job?
November 1, 2002... "Everyone felt the need to send their kids to something this summer," explains Annetta Seecharran, executive director of South Asian Youth Action (SAYA). She picks up a toy from the floor, here in a room outfitted with child-sized table and...

No strings attached; Washington's newest poverty plan: end government aid as we know it. (Intelligence the Big Idea).
November 1, 2002... TALK TO AN ADVOCATE for the poor for long enough these days, and you'll likely hear an unexpected admission. "It's strange to say it," they will begin, "but states now almost seem like our friends." After years of fearing a "race to the...

Summer in the city. (Intelligence City Lit).
November 1, 2002... Heat Wave by Eric Klinen berg University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 305 pages AMONG THE SIZABLE PORTION of media observers and academics who viewed the 1990s as a time of renewal for major U.S. cities, it's a matter of gospel that...

If we had a billion dollars: what New York could buy with its blue cross bonanza. (Intelligence Making Change).
November 1, 2002... SIX YEARS AGO, when Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, New York's largest nonprofit insurer, announced its intention to convert to a for-profit, publicly traded company, consumer and health care advocates lined up to make the best of a bad...

Performing miracles: when it comes to neighborhood revitalization, community arts groups have a thing or two to show business. (Intelligence NYC Inc.).
November 1, 2002... AS AN ECONOMIC TOOL, culture is a hot ticket. Across the nation, cities have turned to the arts as an economic development strategy. At last count, no fewer than 90 U.s. cities had put forward plans to use culture to revitalize distressed...