City Limits articles from September 2003

City Limits archives from September 2003

Marriage, united way style.(Editorial)(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... UNITED WAY OF NEW YORK CITY'S new restructuring plan is doubly ambitious, aiming to save its own skin while helping New York's poor more effectively than it has before. To accomplish that, the venerable charitable organization is promoting a...

Evaluation wanted.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... The article by Rachel Blustain regarding dual-track child welfare services [July/August], while giving much detail, unfortunately did not once mention the word "evaluation." The new legislation does not include a requirement for a...

Prevention plan is kids' best hope.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... For many months last year, this is what a single mother in the Bronx named Rose Mary Grant had to do every week, just to see her 11year-old son, Issa, as described in a keenly observed story in the Westchester County Journal-News: "Starting...

Stories from Irish survival guides.(Front Lines)
September 1, 2003... TONY CASEY IS TALKING ABOUT HIS GRANDFATHER, who raised him in Ireland. Perpetually grumpy from 14-hour shifts in the barbershop, he had few tender words for his kin in that little house in Listowel. Eventually it was time for Casey, then...

Too many volunteers? Why AmeriCorps is melting down.(Front Lines)
September 1, 2003... RASULI LEWIS has been with AmeriCorps since its inception a decade ago. So this March, when word filtered down that funding might not be available for the 85-member AmeriCorps project that he runs at the Harlem Children's Zone, he knew not to...

A year-round coach.(Urban Legend)
September 1, 2003... UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE of the television cameras, Ron Grunberg was having a tough day. The editor of two city street papers, BigNews and Upwards, Grunberg was trying to hustle his soccer team out the door and to the airport for the...

Careless cutoffs: despite Medicaid revamp, families fail to reenroll.(Front Lines)
September 1, 2003... CHILD HEALTH PLUS has been a savior for Bonnie Ray since she signed up her 4-year-old son for state-run health insurance. Without it, she says, he would not be able to go to the doctor or take medication when he gets sick. But in March,...

Coney Island Creeks along.(Environment)
September 1, 2003... THE SHELLFISH and the fishermen are about to get a second chance at life in Coney Island Creek. For 60 years, the gas manufacturing operations of the Brooklyn Borough Gas Works contaminated the creek and its shores with dozens of hazardous...

Mitchell-Lama drama.(Housing)
September 1, 2003... NEW LEGISLATION to protect residents of city-run Mitchell-Lama apartment buildings was announced with much fanfare on the steps of City Hall on July 22--but not everyone is cheering. Some longtime tenant activists say the law, which applies to...

The growth dividend: the city opens Williamsburg and Greenpoint to redevelopment--and won't promise affordable housing.(Inside Track)
September 1, 2003... NOT SINCE THE DAYS of urban renewal have New York City neighborhoods faced such sweeping transformations. The City Planning Department is proposing to rezone about a fifth of the land in Greenpoint and Williamsburg--property now mainly devoted...

The politics of paint: the New York City Council is poised to pass tough new lead paint poisoning protections. But we've yet to reckon with new science showing that "safe" levels of lead are harming kids.
September 1, 2003... Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Maria Salvatierra doesn't know Ohio pediatrician Bruce Lanphear, but if the two ever met, their conversation might turn quickly to low IQ, tooth decay, juvenile delinquency and delayed breast development. Hardly...

Help wanted: two years after 9/11, New York has 330,000 unemployed, over 2 billion federal recovery dollars--and no plan for getting back to work.
September 1, 2003... "IT WAS A SITUATION where all income disappeared," remembers James Connor, chief executive of the Manhattan branding and marketing agency the James Group. It was a second shock wave following September 11,2001: His four-person business ground...

Rent stabilization: who's benefiting from a $280 million downtown real estate bailout?
September 1, 2003... RESIDENTS OF THE PRICEY high rises of Battery Park have a powerful experience in common with those in the tenements of the Lower East Side: Both witnessed firsthand the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But when it...

A home for work: where there are day laborers, more and more cities run workers' centers to get them on good jobs and off the streets. So why doesn't Woodside, host to hundreds of jornaleros, have a place for them to go?
September 1, 2003... A community organizer named Juan Valentin walks up and down Roosevelt Avenue in Queens on a June morning, handing out leaflets that he carries in his leather satchel and speaking to groups of Latino men. "We live here. We pay rent here. We buy...

Safe sex ed: the feds want to stop funding HIV prevention--and start tracking sex partners.(Intelligence The Big Idea)
September 1, 2003... THERE'S AN OLD WAR STORY about working as a community organizer in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. During a meeting in which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was showing off a new education initiative aimed at African...

Twenty-one areas in the city health department's latest Community Health Profiles have uncleaned Superfund sites, and all have higher-than-average rates of diseases associated with exposure to toxic waste.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Twenty-one areas in the city health department's latest Community Health Profiles have uncleaned Superfund sites, and all have higher-than-average rates of diseases associated with exposure to toxic waste. This Public Advocate report--meant to...

Believe it or not, New York City's street-based prostitutes have some complaints about their job.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Believe it or not, New York City's street-based prostitutes have some complaints about their job. This report, compiled from a 30-person focus group, asked sex workers to speak for themselves about what policymakers can do to help. They...

The good news is that most non-mayoral city agencies provide benefits to their employees' domestic partners.(New Reports)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The good news is that most non-mayoral city agencies provide benefits to their employees' domestic partners. The bad news is that they aren't equal to those provided to spouses, and it takes twice as much paperwork to access them. According to...

Deconstructing the ghetto: racism, not geography, binds America's urban slums.(Intelligence City Lit)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... How East New York Became a Ghetto By Walter Thabit New York University Press; 291 pages; $29.95 A Way Out. America's Ghettos and the Legacy of Racism Edited by Joshua Cohen, Jefferson Decker and Joel Rogers Princeton University Press; 130...

Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Ed. by Louis Kontos, David Brotherton and Luis Barrios Columbia University Press, $24.50 From the Jets to the Bloods to the Latin Kings, gangs have long symbolized the roughest parts of urban America. Still, argues this collection of...

Hispanas de Queens. Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... By Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta Cornell University Press, $16.95 This ethnographic account of Latino women in Corona, Queens, deftly illustrates the evolution of informal networks into organized social and political groups. Readable and...

Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Ed. by Elaine H. Kim and Laura Hyun Yi Kang The Asian American Writers' Workshop, $19.95 This collection of poetry and short fiction dealing with immigration and identity compiles writing from over two dozen emerging Korean authors. The...

Signs of progress: rolling back the awning regulations could cost merchants a Lotto business.(Intelligence NYC Inc.)
September 1, 2003... IT SOUNDED LIKE a classic little-guy-gets-dumped-on-by-big-bureaucracy tearjerker: First came the pictures in the papers and on TV of familiar-looking awnings advertising "beer, cigarettes, Lotto, sandwiches, 24 hours, delivery," accompanied...

Corrections.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
September 1, 2003... In "Safe and Sound" (July/August), Dr. Mary