The Transom

citibike-nyc-bike-share

Unanticipated Bike-Share FAQs

I’ve purchased a bike-share pass, but my bike does not move.
You have to pedal.

Where is the motor?
There is no motor. One of the goals of the bike-share program is to reduce noise and pollution.

Wouldn’t it create jobs if the bike-share program hired employees to pedal clients to their destinations?
You have to pedal yourself. There’s no way around it. Read More

Homelessness

Jori Bolton

The Return of Hooverville: The Deepening Crisis of Family Homelessness

By the time Anne Pierre and her sons arrived at 199 Amboy Street, it was after midnight. The heat of the unusually warm April day had all but drained away, but there was a mellowness to the air, a contrast to the sharp, cold spring nights that had come before. From the outside, the red-brick building looked clean and well-maintained, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for sure. In Ms. Pierre’s experience, the exteriors of homeless shelters were poor predictors of conditions inside.

Late though it was, the family’s arrival at the Brownsville shelter marked the somewhat triumphant culmination of a bureaucratic odyssey that had started two days earlier, when Ms. Pierre had reapplied for shelter at the family intake center in the Bronx. It was only somewhat triumphant in that 199 Amboy was just a 10-day placement, the latest in a string of temporary housing assignments that had become the norm since the family lost its eligibility for shelter in February. But as it turned out, 199 Amboy was the nicest place Ms. Pierre and the two boys stayed since entering the shelter system in June 2012.

As 9-year-old Jordan described their arrival, “When we saw it, we was shocked. It was nice. It was decent.”

Decent is the kind of good-enough existence that has seemed to elude the family for the last 10 months. But it felt potentially within reach again when they fell asleep that night at a little after 1 a.m., relieved if still wary, with the alarm set for 6 a.m.—the preparations necessary for the school day ahead as uncompromising as the dawn.

Like many other families who have recently swelled the ranks of the city’s homeless population, routine has taken on an almost talismanic significance for Ms. Pierre and her boys. They live an approximation of a life that involved, until recently, an apartment of their own—a two-bedroom on Legion Street rented for four years with the help of a Section 8 voucher. Ms. Pierre paid $350 of the $1,100 rent until a recurrent mold problem disqualified the apartment. Read More

Photo essay

6 Photos

When the Street Is Home

When the Street Is Home

While the cover story of this week’s Observer describes the plight of homeless families, the problem is growing among individuals as well.

On the Bowery last Friday, a man who gave his name only as Jay was cleaning his white Nike sneakers with a toothbrush. He had just stayed at The Bowery Mission Read More

skip the salt

pr008-13-image

Scare Tactics: City Unveils Tastefully Tame Anti-Salt Subway Campaign

From big soda to big, err, sodium, Nanny Bloomberg usually pulls no punches when it comes to New Yorkers’ health. And while a string of aggressive P.R. campaigns may have failed to halt our chain-smoking, Sprite-guzzling lifestyles, if nothing else, they have provided us with some terrifying subway ads.

These ads include smokers with gruesomely amputated fingers, fat oozing out of soda bottles and sobbing babies born to teen mothers bemoaning their hypothetical lack of high school educations. Help us, Doctor Zizmor! Read More

After Sandy

from the NYC Mayor's Office

Sandy Will Cost New York an Estimated $19 B., Mayor Wants Feds to Cover Half

As New York continues to grapple with closed subway stations and an overcrowded shelter system following Hurricane Sandy’s late October destruction, the City is looking for a little help from its friends in Washington. Mayor Michael Bloomberg sent a letter to members of New York’s Congressional delegation today, estimating the damage caused by late October’s superstorm at $19 billion in public and private losses. Read More

hurricane sandy

Screengrab

Hurricane Sandy: Mayor’s Office and Google Team to Create The Crisis Map

Mayor Bloomberg’s office has teamed with Google to create Hurricane Sandy: NYC. It’s a handy “crisis” map that links to the latest N.Y.C. Emergency Management alerts, various city-related Twitter accounts and advisories about Hurricane Sandy from the National Hurricane Center.

Residents may be particularly interested in the map’s color-coded evacuation zones–currently Zone A is under a mandatory evacuation order.

Here are Google’s tips on how to best use the map: Read More

General Strike

MayDayNyc.org

May 1 Protests Have Wall Street Jittery About Occupy ‘Wolves’

The Occupy Movement plans a general strike for May 1st. The movement claims this strike will include protesters in “125 U.S. cities” standing up “for economic justice.” Occupy Wall Street has announced that May Day will also mark the launch of 99 Pickets in New York. With 99 Pickets, protesters plan to erect “99 Picket Lines to expose, disrupt, and shut down the corporations who rule our city.” Occupy further states that 99 Pickets “will be an effective way for people to plug into the morning activities on May Day.”  This action apparently has Wall Street as nervous as pack animals beset by wolves.

Bloomberg reports  major financial institutions are readying for both May 1st and for Occupy demonstrations at the N.A.T.O. summit in Chicago on May 20 and 21 with “video surveillance, robots and officers in buildings.” In spite of the presence of robots, there’s a distinct Wild Kingdom element to the psychology behind the banks’ efforts. Speaking to Bloomberg’s Max Abelson, Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations director of global risk Brian McNary provided the Discovery Channel-flavored comparison: Read More