At an animal rights debate last week, five mayoral hopefuls voiced their support for a change in city oversight of animal shelters.
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio set his sights on Animal Care and Control of New York City, the organization that runs the city’s shelters. “AC&C has been a mess,” Mr. de Blasio said. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
Until now, Bill de Blasio’s housing platform has mainly consisted of sniping at frontrunner Christine Quinn. But no longer: this afternoon Mr. de Blasio announced measures he would take mayor to curb what he calls the “full-blown crisis” of affordable housing. (Old habits, though, do die hard: Mr. de Blasio did take another shot at Ms. Quinn, saying, “Letting the real estate industry keep calling all the shots with our affordable housing policy isn’t going to deliver what working people need”—an allusion to her tax credits-for-affordable housing plan, which seems cribbed right from REBNY and Steve Ross’s proposals back in 2011.)
Mr. de Blasio started out, as all candidates do, with a promise for the number of affordable housing units he’d create: 100,000 “new affordable units,” plus preservation for “nearly 90,000″ others. Read More
This morning on the cold, bright steps of City Hall, several photographers huddled, shivering, waiting for the Two Ten Footwear Foundation conference to begin. The charitable foundation of the U.S. footwear industry was gathered to kick off Two Ten’s Footwear Cares National Footwear Community Service Week (whoof, what a title) in New York, where 14 shoe companies would be dedicating their time and resources to packing meals for the New York Food NYC, God’s Love We Deliver, GrowNYC, and the Occupy Sandy Recovery group.
A smattering of unlikely bedfellows trickled in: Kenneth Cole, Katie Butler of Nine West, two mayoral candidates–Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu–former Council speaker Peter Vallone, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, along with several other representatitves from the fashionable footwear industry. Read More
With less than six months to go until the primaries, the New York Observer and the 92nd Street Y have teamed up to host an evening of discussion with all of the major mayoral candidates. The event starts in one hour and, if you can’t make it to the 92nd Street Y to see it in person, you can watch live online right here. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
New York City public advocate and Democratic mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio added his voice to a growing chorus of commentators (including The Observer) who have noted similarities between Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s affordable housing platform, announced in her State of the City address earlier this week, and a plan proposed by the real estate industry in 2011. The proposal would cap property taxes for whole buildings if they agreed to set aside a certain percentage of their units to let at below-market rate rents. Read More
Former mayoral hopeful and social media lothario Anthony Weiner once infamously declared to Mayor Bloomberg over dinner that his first year in City Hall would be spent “tearing out your fucking bike lanes.”
It is a prospect that terrifies urban planners and bike advocates, who worship the public space rejiggering championed by current DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Mr. Weiner is obviously out of the running, but some other mayoral candidates have expressed concern about these streetscape changes, as well, most recently Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who called the commish a “radical” recently. But would he really go through with it? Read More
For those of us living in the outer boroughs, navigating Manhattan during the holidays can serve as a great reminder as to why we migrated off the island in the first place. New Years Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving…the term “amateur hour” was practically invented to describe the hoards of revelers who descend upon NYC like a plague of locusts to “celebrate” these annual events by getting as drunk as humanly possible and clogging up the sidewalks and public transit systems.
Now, most of the time, this does not pose too much of a problem for Brooklynites and Queens residents, who would just as soon stay in their district anyway, throwing Skrillex-themed rooftop parties.
But the 4th of July poses an issue for non-Gotham-dwellers: since 2009, the incredible light show thrown by Macy’s has been held on the Hudson River, making it almost impossible to view from the top of a Brooklyn Heights townhouse. Read More
Some of us aren’t Scrooge McDuck-wealthy. Some of us don’t have the time/wherewithal/patience to deal with the crowds on the West Side Highway who gather to view the Macy’s July 4th Fireworks every year. Read More
If you live in New York, and you’ve picked up a newspaper, you’ve no doubt read about the New York City Police Department’s pesky problem of stop-and-frisks, the tactic used by police to…randomly stop-and-frisk whoever they feel may or may not be carrying something on them that makes them worth arresting. Does it help? Is it racial profiling? It is a total, outright, so-blatant-as-to-be-downright-impressive-in-scale violation of every fundamental civil liberty you assumed most people to have had but are now coming to realize simply don’t? Read More
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, outside a firehouse on the north shore of Staten Island, Bill de Blasio slipped between a throng of sweaty, angry protesters and was quickly ushered to a microphone stand.
“This mayor loves to brag how devoted he is to the numbers,” said Mr. de Blasio. “This is the fastest growing Read More
