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

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.

Are there bike-share bicycles built for two so we can team up and get through this together?
One user per bike. And no, users are not permitted to ride on another user’s handlebars.

Are there bike-share Geniuses to help troubleshoot how to learn to ride a bike-share bike?
It is understood that only people who already know how to ride bikes will participate in the program.

Isn’t that discrimination against bicycle-deficient citizens?
We’re trying to do a responsible thing. It’s not for everyone.

Are extra points awarded for beating other bike-share racers to the next station?
The bike-share program is meant to provide affordable alternative transportation. It is not a race.

Then why, every time I look behind me, are other bike-share bikers chasing me?
They aren’t chasing you. They are traveling to their destination, which happens to be in the same direction you are traveling.

Can the bikes be used for jousting?
No one wants to be knocked from a bike with a lance to the chest during his or her commute.

Can we put the bike in the back of a cab and be driven to the next station?
That defeats the purpose of the bike-share program, but technically yes.

Is it true a rival gang of bike-share bikers has been vandalizing our bike-share gang’s stations?
The bike-share program does not have gangs. We consist of independent, socially responsible, environmentally conscious constituents trying to get from one point to another without harming the environment.

Then why are other bikers flashing me gang signs?
Those are hand signals alerting other bikers to where they are going.

If we pull a hammy mid-ride, can we get extra injury time added to our rental period?
That’s not how it works. Maybe this isn’t for you. Have you considered other forms of public transportation?

Is there a bike-share pit crew if we crash, or if we get bike-jacked (or bike-jousted!), or if our bike-share bike accidentally ends up in a river or an elevator shaft?
If you crash or suffer any setbacks, no matter how implausible, please call 911.

How do we know the bike-share program isn’t some elaborate Ponzi scheme?
It’s not a Ponzi scheme.

But isn’t that exactly what someone running a Ponzi scheme would say? How do we know we aren’t pouring money into a fraudulent investment vehicle, one that has us all duped with these shiny, trouble-free bikes, and once the caper has achieved transportation utopia, in which traffic buildup has disappeared, smog and noise and stress have dwindled to acceptable toxic levels, strangers of competing ethnicities and careers take turns merging, stopping for pedestrians, calling out “good morning,” returning bikes to docking stations and wiping them clean just to be better citizens—how do we know, once that is achieved, that you won’t up and disappear with our money?
Just take the bus.

Shannon Richardson (Twitter)

Actress Shannon Richardson, best known as the pregnant Texas woman who allegedly tried to poison Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama and frame her third husband for doing so, has racked up a considerable resume in the entertainment industry.

The 5'9" mother of five, according to her CV, attributes her numerous roles to her ability to play anyone from age 18 to 30, and counts Southern accents and salsa among her skills.

Her IMDB profile, which is probably an autobiography, lists a lot of details about her personal life. For example, did you know that she has two tattoos, (a tribal design on her lower back and butterflies on her stomach) and plays the flute? Or that she may or may not have given bone marrow in 2011?

We didn't either! We're also not sure we believe her.

Nevertheless, we're interested in her acting career. Here, The Observer takes a look at her most impressive roles:

The Walking Dead—Zombie
As “Zombie,” Ms. Richardson has taken on one of the most important roles in the TV series. Norman Reedus, the show’s most beloved zombie killer, told EW that the zombie scenes are intensifying by the season, calling for only the truest of thespians to fill the slate. “They’ve introduced a way to make the zombies scary again,” he said. “They’re terrifying. The new threat is just unreal.”

The Vampire Diaries—Student
The kids on the CW show went to high school so obviously only the best students would do. Ms. Richardson, 36, played a 17-year old like a champ.

The Change-Up—Becky
Ms. Richardson lists this formidable role on her resume but the movie’s IMDb page doesn’t even list a “Becky” so we don’t even know what’s going on here but she was probably awesome.

The Blind Side—Student
Who let her near Sandra Bullock!?

American Deli restaurant (commercial)—Crazed Customer
And now it all makes sense.

(Getty Images)

Looks like a pencil is mightier than a $73 million system.

The city’s new emergency response system crashed for 12 minutes on Wednesday, it’s first day of use.

At 4:21 p.m., respondents stood by as hundreds of computer screens abruptly went dark, the Daily News reported.

Telephone operators began scribbling emergency messages onto slips of paper. From there, they handed off the papers to runners, who delivered them to the appropriate radio rooms.

“It was pandemonium,” one NYPD telephone operator told the Daily News. “There weren’t a lot of runners,” the operator said. “We were all waving our slips in the air.”

City Hall spokesman John McCarthy, however, countered that it was not a total “system failure.”

“911 operations were not jeopardized,” Mr. McCarthy told The Observer. “Telephone calls were simply handled manually, and everything was prompt.”

The new system comes with a $73 million price tag for the city. Its first day failure marks yet another questionable tally in Mayor Bloomberg’s $2 billion emergency communications overhaul, which appeared at the height of controversy during Hurricane Sandy last fall when 911 call centers experienced a near-meltdown.

Despite the slew of 911 mishaps, Mr. McCarthy assured The Observer that New Yorkers “won’t have to worry about this again” in the future.

Citi Bike Dock in Brooklyn Credit: (Ned Peets)

Have no fear, the bike condom is almost here!

New Yorkers have always worried about the germs that infest modes of public transportation. With the launch of the Citi Bike program, people have something new over which to fret.

Enter the bike condom. Originally created for germaphobic gym-goers, these covers can be placed over the handlebars of a bicycle to prevent the spread of bacteria from user to user. The handlebar condoms are incredibly popular in Barcelona, another city with an extensive bike share program. (Let's hope they don't come lubricated.)

Another public transportation invention similarly aimed at germophobes -- the Metro Mitt -- never really caught on. Then again, there are always antibacterial wipes, Purrell and gloves—items that are all available at your local Duane Reade and not nearly as disgusting.

Under Bloomberg, more enter the shelters but fewer get out. (Jori Bolton)

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.”

Anne, Jordan and Tyler Pierre.

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.

Routine means showers in the morning and at night (depending on the hot water situation). It means home-style Haitian cooking for dinner, even if that involves dining out—an expensive proposition, but difficult to avoid when you don’t live in any one place long enough to lay in a supply of groceries or retrieve your pots and pans from storage. It means buying cleaning supplies and paper plates and a tablecloth for every new housing placement, no matter how temporary.

It means the boys’ hair is neatly trimmed, their Adidas sneakers unscuffed, their backpacks stiff with relative newness. Ms. Pierre, a compactly built woman who wears patterned acrylic nails and keeps her braids under a neat kerchief, is vigilant about appearances. One morning on the B35 bus to 4-year-old Tyler’s preschool, she noticed that the knees of his red school sweatsuit were slightly soiled. “He’s always on his knees,” she said apologetically. “I just washed these.” When they arrived, she asked about buying a second school sweatsuit, a purchase that would almost certainly make life harder rather than easier, given that they’d been living out of only a few bags and using a nearby laundromat’s wash-and-fold as de facto clothing storage. After 10 months, even their homelessness has taken on aspects of routine. The strange beds, the strange streets, mapping the new bus routes to the boys’ schools in the morning—it is about as familiar as an unfamiliar thing can be.

In January of this year, the city’s homeless population exceeded 50,000—the highest number since the Great Depression. But while previous homeless crises were largely defined by individuals who fell out of the social fabric long before they went homeless—unemployed, unemployable, or with serious health or substance abuse problems—the current crisis is defined by families, who make up some three-quarters of the city’s shelter population.

The number of families in shelters has nearly doubled in the last decade—as of this month, the shelter population included more than 10,000 families and nearly 21,000 children, according to city data. Homeless families have been the fastest-growing segment of the shelter population during Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, soaring from 6,921 when he took office in January 2002 to 11,984 in January 2013, according to data provided by Coalition for the Homeless.

Even as the problem has become more widespread, it has become harder to see. It’s not so much a figure sleeping in a doorway, but a mother lugging around duffel bags, a child’s grades slipping, a family rushing home to make a 10 o’clock shelter curfew.

The current situation may mirror the Great Depression in numbers, but today’s deprivation is played out not against a backdrop of 1930s austerity and thrift, but one of profligacy that revels in extravagances of all sorts, from $20 cocktails to $90 million condos. In Bloomberg’s New York, the streets may still be potholed, but every new bathroom seems to be clad in Calacatta marble.

Ever since clawing its way back from the brink of economic collapse under Koch, New York City has undergone a dramatic transformation. But to lower-income New Yorkers untouched by the city’s new prosperity, it often feels like a cruel taunt that has only made life more difficult.

Jordan and Anne on the walk home from school.

Brooklyn is now the second most expensive place to live in America (after Manhattan), with townhouses that sell for $12 million and jars of pickles that sell for $9, but nearly half of its population can’t afford to live there. According to a recent study from the Center for an Urban Future, almost 40 percent of the borough’s population works in low-wage jobs, making less than $27,000 a year. At that salary, affordable rent (affordable is defined as costing no more than 30 percent of income) tops out at $675 a month. Minimum-wage workers can’t afford to pay more than $375 a month—a virtual impossibility.

A lot of people make do, of course. They triple up with relatives, live four to a room, work two jobs, display the scrappy ingenuity and hardscrabble bravado that we like to think of as quintessentially New York, until something goes wrong.

The huge increase in families seeking shelter is proof of how precarious the lives of New York’s working poor are. Family shelters house working parents and recently working ones like Ms. Pierre, a full-time home health aide until June. They are families who have long struggled to make ends meet but for whom homelessness is a new—though increasingly intractable—predicament. Last year, families spent more than a year on average in the shelter system for the first time since 1987. Advocates attribute their inability to leave to the fact that, in contrast to the last three decades, there are no longer subsidies available to help them move out of shelters and into permanent housing.

The current reality stands in sharp contrast to the ambitious plan Mayor Bloomberg presented in 2004 to reduce the shelter population by two-thirds and end chronic homelessness within five years by addressing “homelessness at its core, rather than at the margins.” It partly focused on preventative measures like eviction protection, which were widely lauded, but more controversially, it wiped out the paths to permanent housing, replacing them with temporary housing, on the assumption that families just needed a little help getting back on their feet.

“They thought that having paths to permanent housing was drawing people into the shelter system, so their approach to ending homelessness was to eliminate the path to permanent housing,” said Councilman Brad Lander, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies.

Determining how much of the blame should be laid at Mayor Bloomberg’s feet is a complicated question. While he and his policies have certainly presided over an unprecedented rise in the homeless population, the recession, the mounting cost of living and the national rise in homelessness are significant confounding variables.

Nonetheless, in the twilight of his last term, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have retreated from the battle, leaving the next mayor to solve a problem that has grown to monstrous proportions. In March, he blamed the surge in homelessness on the loss of state funding for Advantage—a program that issued temporary rental subsidies to thousands of shelter families from 2007 to 2011—but the Department of Homeless Services has not suggested any new programs to deal with the void left in its wake.

Still, the mayor’s approach to the spiking shelter population has also struck many as less than compassionate. New York magazine quoted him as saying “you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”

Anne in the foyer of the shelter on Clarkson Street where the family used to live.

Anne Pierre doesn’t have a jet or a limousine. It was hard for her to rouse the boys on their first day at the new shelter, but the morning was full of promise. There was hot water, Ms. Pierre had a plan to try to get them eligible for shelter again, and she had heard about a home health aide service that might be hiring.

There were those little frustrations that can threaten to bring down a day—a late departure, unfamiliar streets, several people’s detailed though utterly unhelpful directions to the bus stop, and Tyler, impish even on a few hours of sleep, dropping Ms. Pierre’s hand and jogging backward down the sidewalk for a half block. But just as easily, the morning righted itself.

Having set off hesitantly toward the rumored bus stop, Ms. Pierre recognized a park, its pocked red running track dotted with figures in tracksuits. The park was not only familiar, it was just a few blocks from Jordan’s school—the school, she declared with amazement, was walkable. “Thank you God, his school is walkable,” she said, an exclamation she repeated in a tone of happy disbelief several times on the walk over.

For the rest of the journey, Tyler was charged with telling the family which way to turn at intersections and when it was safe to cross the streets. Though he is notorious for clowning and for a tendency to blurt out whatever he is thinking despite the social consequences, he went about the task obediently enough.

“Tyler has all of me,” Ms. Pierre says. “He’s like me when I was a kid. Don’t care if you get in trouble. Jordan is different. Jordan, Jordan watch everything. He talk around people if he like you. He plays with other kids, but he like to be by himself too. He needs time by himself and Tyler doesn’t want to give it to him, and they end up fighting.”

Anne Pierre rides the subway home. She spends much of her day in transit.

At a corner store across from Jordan’s school, P.S. 631, they stopped to buy breakfast sandwiches. Jordan fidgeted as they waited for the sandwiches. “It’s 9:05,” he said, looking at Ms. Pierre.

“I know,” she said.

School had started at 8:30, his third-grade regents exams were the following week, and he had missed school the day before because children need to be present when their parents reapply for shelter. As soon as Ms. Pierre had paid, he bolted out of the store, but not without hugging her goodbye. She watched until he disappeared behind the door.
“I have to see him go inside, in front of my eyes, or I worry,” she said. She meets him after school, too. “I’m one of those—I’m not going to say crazy mothers, I’m going to say worried mothers.”

Ms. Pierre worries a lot. She worries about where they’ll be living next, she worries about Jordan’s asthma and she worries about her 19-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who Ms. Pierre brought to the U.S. from Haiti as a 1-month-old infant when she herself was only 17, was living with them on Legion Street before they lost the apartment. She is now living with a girlfriend whom Ms. Pierre says is abusive and lies about whether Anna is home when the boys try to visit. Most of all, she worries on the days when she has to go to the intake center, the days when everything seems impossible and she has to plead for a new placement in a system that she doesn’t want to be in and whose rules she only half understands.

She did not, for example, understand that she could lose her Section 8 voucher for not finding a new apartment quickly enough after the last one was disqualified. Nor did she understand that, having lost it, she could not get it back (with more than 100,000 families, the waiting list is now closed). She had not understood how difficult it would be to find a new apartment by herself (the first broker she approached demanded a month up front as a deposit before showing her anything), and she had not understood that having a 4-year-old would be a problem.

Jordan and Anne studying a house in Brownsville.

But working 40 or more hours a week had meant little time to conduct an apartment hunt, which meant that she especially resented being shown decrepit one-bedrooms passed off as two-bedrooms by landlords taking advantage of the short supply of Section 8 housing. She was passed over for all the apartments she did apply for. One landlord explained that if she just had older kids, it wouldn’t be a problem, but a 4-year-old meant window grates and radiator covers and other modifications that he wasn’t willing to spend extra money on.

Other rejections were more vague, but they amounted to the same thing: by June, she didn’t have a place to live, and without a Section 8 voucher, she didn’t have the money to pay for one anyway. She was making $9 an hour—a step up from the $7.25 an hour she made when she started four years earlier, but her income was less than $20,000 a year even when she worked 48 hours a week, which she did as often as she could.

When Ms. Pierre and the boys entered the shelter system, she thought it would be temporary and even turned down an offer for public housing because it was far from Jordan’s school. But things went quickly downhill. The one-bedroom apartment she was assigned to in a dingy building on Clarkson and Nostrand was not ideal, but things would have been okay if Anna, who had just graduated from high school—one of the few in her class to graduate with a Regents diploma, Ms. Pierre noted proudly—had not moved out.

This was a problem because Anna watched Tyler when Ms. Pierre was at work. Not having anyone to watch Tyler meant that Ms. Pierre couldn’t start the next assignment her job offered her, and they gave it to someone else, which meant that she didn’t have any income for several weeks. She applied for public assistance, but before it came through her phone got cut off, which meant that she couldn’t get another work assignment because they wouldn’t give her one without a contact number.

It was simple and complicated at the same time. In a matter of months, she lost her house, her job and, it sometimes seemed, her daughter, who had dropped out of her college classes—she wanted to become a police detective someday—and moved in with the girlfriend, a woman Ms. Pierre described as a “bad influencer” who discouraged Anna from going out or talking to other people. With limited contact, Ms. Pierre and the boys have taken to walking past the girlfriend’s apartment on a regular basis, hoping to catch a glimpse of Anna.

“The last time I see her, her face has changed,” said Ms. Pierre. “Jordan is telling me we have to do something. I just keep waiting for her, but I’m afraid if she stay much longer, it will be too much damage. She’ll become someone else.”
Now everything Ms. Pierre wanted or needed seemed to rest on something else that she wasn’t able to do. When she reapplied for shelter, she was told she would not be eligible for a long-term placement without documentation of where she’d been living for the previous two weeks. She had been staying at Anna’s girlfriend’s place, but the girlfriend, whose name the apartment was under, refused to write the letter.

PS 631

Without a stable place to live, it had been hard to apply for jobs, but without a job, it seemed unlikely that they’d ever get a stable place to live. She misses her job, or at least the life it gave her.
“It’s freedom. When you work, it’s freedom,” she said. “You have money. When I worked, if I wanted something, I could buy it.”
Ms. Pierre’s plan, if she can “fix the house,” as she puts it, is to become a certified nursing aide, which she sees as more stable than being a home health aide, and ultimately to become a licensed practical nurse.

“From CNA you could go to an LPN. By the time I’m 40, I want to do it,” said Ms. Pierre, who is 37 now. “I would love to be a nurse, and I know I can do it. I know if I be a nurse, I could put my kids in a better school, a Catholic school.”
There is a class that she is planning to take as soon as they become at least eligible for long-term shelter again, because, she explained, it’s rumored to be difficult and “the head is supposed to be on the shoulders when you’re studying to be a nurse.”

She just wasn’t sure how she’d fix the housing situation beyond getting the letter and a long-term shelter placement, an improvement over their current itinerant state, but one that would still leave them homeless and at the mercy of the system, the bag searches, nightly sign-ins and strange rules (at Amboy, no blenders or TVs larger than 19 inches). But if she could get her Section 8 back, she’d move to Staten Island and start over, as much as a thing like starting over is possible.

“I’m tired of the same things over and over again,” she said. “I want to change things. I’ve been here so long, going through the same ups and downs so long. I want to go where I could work, pay my bills, take care of my kids. Maybe Staten Island—the boys and I went there and we liked it. It’s different than Brooklyn; it’s quiet, the spaces are bigger. I thought I was going to be afraid of the boat, but I just sit on the boat and I enjoy it.”

Anne Pierre on the subway.

When asked to account for the rapid rise in homeless families, Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond, echoing Mr. Bloomberg, pointed to the loss of the Advantage program, which was canceled in 2011 when its state funding was cut. Given that the Bloomberg administration had earlier stopped the long-standing practice of prioritizing homeless families for Section 8 and public housing, calling it bad public policy to let anyone entering the shelter system skip ahead in line (a claim advocates call highly specious), there was literally no way for shelter families to leave unless they could find an affordable living arrangement on their own.

“The increase is really tightly tied to the loss of Advantage. We were able to make progress and could have continued to help more households, but we will never get back the $150 million investment,” said Mr. Diamond. DHS provided statistics showing that in March of 2011, right before Advantage ended, there were 8,317 homeless families, 7 percent lower than the previous peak of 8,991 in 2009. He said that many fewer applicants are coming to the intake centers now, 8 percent less than last April, indicating that the crisis is abating and that DHS is “making good progress” even without any path to permanent housing. “The mayor has transformed the system,” he said.

Asked how families could leave the shelters without housing subsidies, Mr. Diamond said that “work works—the revolution across the board has been work.” He then went on to describe “enhanced training on the importance of work,” job-training programs and subsidies of the paychecks of homeless workers to encourage employers to take them on—none of which are new programs.

But a number of advocates claim that the Advantage program wasn’t working in the first place, primarily because the subsidy only lasted for two years; families who couldn’t make it on their own after that time just got channeled back into the shelter system. Ralph da Costa Nunez, the president of the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, who started out in the Koch administration, pointed to an increase in recidivism under the Advantage program (according to Mr. Diamond, 25 percent of families in the program returned to the shelter system).

“If you’re going to have a subsidy, you need to have a subsidy with a plan, not a subsidy with a dream,” said Mr. Nunez. “It’s a poverty problem, not a housing problem.”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, questioned the DHS assumptions that training people to become fast-food workers and home health aides, jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour, would solve the problem. “How do you square the circle?” he asked. “These families are too poor to afford rent. Even in East New York or the South Bronx, rent is at least $1,000 a month.

“The mayor and his administration are people who craft their policies based on data, but in the area of homelessness, all their policies seem to be based on ideology,” he added.

Given that the city is mandated to provide shelter as the result of a 1980s court decision, and that Mr. Bloomberg appears to have no plan to transition residents out of shelters besides training for low-wage employment, it’s hard to imagine that anything will change.

Indeed, in the absence of any housing subsidy, shelters seem to have become New York’s answer to the lack of low-income housing. But shelters are an exceedingly expensive alternative. It costs, on average, $3,000 a month to house a family in a shelter, significantly more than the rent on a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhoods where many are located. The city also pays for homeless families’ storage lockers. And shelter life for any family is less than ideal, what with the room inspections, curfews, sign-ins, bag searches and often a ban on guests.

What’s more, said Mr. Nunez, while the costs of shelters was once higher because it included other resources to help families, many of the new shelters that have rapidly opened to meet the need are run by private operators who just provide rooms. And, seeing that they can essentially triple the rent with shelter tenants, landlords are pushing out the working-class families currently living in their buildings, perpetuating the cycle.

One of Ms. Pierre and the boys’ favorite topics is the house on Legion Street, which, while no palace (the mold was so bad that they once had to throw out a mattress that had been touching one of the walls), serves as a touchstone of what life used to be like and might be again. They talk about the food that Ms. Pierre made there—rice and beans, baked macaroni, oxtail, sweet plantains, corn on the cob. They talk about how Jordan used to ride the school bus and how much they miss Anna.

(Photo by Kim Velsey)

When they lived there, the kids would watch for Ms. Pierre from the back window, where they could see her getting off the train. “They used to fight about who would open the door for me, and I had to hug them all at the same time,” she said. “If not, it was going to be a problem.”

But when Ms. Pierre picked up Jordan from school that afternoon—she was running late, as she often is, and he chided her gently—they did not talk about Legion Street.

“When I was in school, I kept thinking of that apartment,” Jordan said. He meant 199 Amboy, and as they walked back there they discussed how clean it was and how they had been given a fresh shower curtain liner when they arrived, something you usually had to buy yourself. How they hoped they could become eligible again so they could stay, even if they hated the bag searches. They talked about how it was so close to Jordan’s school that he wouldn’t even need to take the bus, at least not until Ms. Pierre started working again.

They had reached the intersection of Blake and Amboy by then, and they stopped to lean against the fence of a little house kitty-corner from the shelter. Ms. Pierre said the shelter didn’t want people hanging around in front.
They discussed the food they would buy for school lunches when Ms. Pierre started working again and the apartments they had seen on Staten Island—how big and clean they were and how they had entire basements where you could store things.

Then Ms. Pierre started cataloging all the other things she would need to pay for: gas, light, clothes, rent. Even at $10 an hour, it was clear that the accounting didn’t quite work out.

Ms. Pierre was silent for a moment, the hopeful logic on which their conversation had cheerfully sailed broken, but then she turned to face the little house on whose fence she was leaning. She examined its hodgepodgey exterior, with its staid brick facade, red and white awning and granite porch too fancy for the house it was attached to. “This house is nice,” she said finally.

kvelsey@observer.com

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 for the first time the night before. “I used to work at CBGBs in the day,” he said, pointing down the street to where the legendary punk venue once was, reminiscing for a minute. Things are different now.

“You can’t go to sleep nowhere. Can’t sit on a bench in a park. Can’t even have a beer—you get arrested. Everything is trespassing,” he said.

From the Bowery, we ventured uptown to 32nd Street, where we spotted a blind man with a black bowl asking people for help. “Have a blessed day,” he said to passersby. In the half hour we watched him work, only two people, a construction worker and a suit, stopped to drop a dollar.

A few blocks away, on the steps of the 34th Street post office, several other people passed the time, apparently without anywhere else to be. An elderly man crouched in a fetal position and picked at his arms, shaking uncontrollably as he focused on his efforts. His shirt said “New York.”

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!

So with the city’s new ads to cut salt consumption, the possibilities for scaring the pants off New Yorkers were seemingly endless. How about some x-rays of salt molecules burning holes in various internal organs? Or, like, a giant anthropomorphic pretzel beating the shit out of someone with a salt-shaker?

Instead, the new subway ads rolled out this week have taken something of the opposite tack, reminding New Yorkers to, you know, read the labels on stuff. Labels? That's some scary stuff, bro.

The new ads feature two loaves of bread and a zoomed in image of the labels on the packaging, one which has higher sodium content. The tag-line advises New Yorkers to “Compare Labels. Choose Less Sodium."

Yeah, cause nothing gets New Yorkers to change their habits like percentages, sciencey words, and having to read stuff.

Bloomberg wants $19 billion. (NYC Mayor's Office)

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.

The Mayor's request to Congress includes a breakdown of the City's losses caused by the storm, including $5.7 billion dollars in lost gross city product and $4.5 billion spent by city agencies in the storm's wake. Mr. Bloomberg wrote that "the city will struggle to recover in the long term unless expedited federal funding is supplied." How much funding? Bloomberg is angling for $9.8 billion in additional money to supplement the $5.4 billion in FEMA assistance and the $3.8 billion dollars of damage that was covered by private insurance. FEMA money does not cover challenges like long-term housing solutions and shoreline restoration.

The number tops Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's post-storm estimate of damage totaling somewhere between $15 billion and $18 billion.

The damage in the greater New York area is expected to be much larger, with Governor Andrew Cuomo saying that he would be asking for at least $30 billion in aid several weeks ago. Governor Cuomo met with members of New York's Congressional Delegation today in Midtown Manhattan to discuss his request for aid.

Read Mayor Bloomberg's letter below:

                                                                                    November 26, 2012

Dear New York Delegation Member:

As you are well aware, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive damage to the City of New York, impairing our infrastructure and displacing tens of thousands of people. While the impact of the storm will be felt for some time and the challenges are great, I am confident that the City will rebound and emerge stronger than ever.

Throughout this period the City has worked productively with New York State, and I am hopeful that together with our partners in the federal government, we will be able to secure the necessary resources for a successful recovery. Therefore I am requesting your assistance in securing supplemental and expedited funding for the City of New York.

We estimate total public and private losses to New York City from Sandy to be $19 billion. After subtracting private insurance of $3.8 billion and FEMA reimbursement of $5.4 billion, the net cost to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy will be approximately $9.8 billion. This assumes a FEMA reimbursement rate of 75 percent of covered costs and necessary Congressional appropriations. Federal legislative action will be required to address the budget gap that will result once available FEMA funds and insurance proceeds are drawn down. This funding will be needed to address the significant local expenses that have been and will be incurred, including costs that are ineligible under FEMA such as hazard mitigation, long-term housing solutions, and shoreline restoration and protection.

Initial cost assessments include the following components:

• $4.8 billion in uninsured private losses
• $3.8 billion in insured private losses
• $4.5 billion in losses to and costs incurred by City agencies
• $5.7 billion in lost gross City product
• $0.2 billion for US Army Corps of Engineers

The City will struggle to recover in the long term unless expedited federal funding is supplied. Congress has long funded the response and recovery from natural disasters in supplemental appropriations. In the past decade Congress has authorized supplemental appropriations after hurricanes, floods, and tornados including $120 billion worth of aid in several bills passed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

New York City agencies worked around the clock to implement preparatory measures to mitigate the effects of the storm as well as respond to its aftermath. Because of the sheer impact of destruction, many City agencies are only now beginning to focus on the recovery. For example, the Department of Transportation is estimating $1 billion in incremental costs, including nearly $800 million for street reconstruction alone. Additional federal assistance is required to ensure that the storm costs, currently estimated at $4.5 billion for City agencies, do not compromise the services and operations that New Yorkers rely on the City to provide.

Whether it was a small retail store in Coney Island that lost its inventory in a flood or a restaurant in Staten Island forced to close due to a loss of power, Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated $5.7 billion in lost gross product in the City. These businesses are crucial to the City’s economy and to the communities that rely on their services, and the work of recovery will not be complete until they are back in business.

Four weeks ago, as Sandy was approaching our shores, President Obama committed federal resources to this storm and its recovery. Since then we have worked closely with his Administration on everything from cleanup to temporary housing. With our combined efforts, I am confident that we can secure the funding needed to ensure the swiftest and smartest recovery for New York City. Thank you for your leadership on this issue.

Sincerely,

Michael R. Bloomberg

Mayor

 

Screengrab

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:

• Zoom the map using either the on-screen controls or your mouse.
• Find additional layers in the Layers list, where you can turn them on or off. Scroll to see all layers.
• Zoom to an appropriate view for each layer by clicking the "Zoom to area" links in the Layers list.
• View selected layers in Google Earth by clicking the "Download KML" links in the Layers list.
• Share the map in e-mail by clicking the Share button and copying the URL provided there. The URL will restore your current view, including the set of layers that you have turned on.
• Embed the map on your website or blog by getting a snippet of HTML code from the Share button.
• Share the link on Google+, Twitter or Facebook by clicking the appropriate button in the Share window.

We've embedded the map below.

MayDayNyc.org

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:

Banks cooperating on surveillance are like elk fending off wolves in Yellowstone National Park, he said. While other animals try in vain to sprint away alone, elk survive attacks by forming a ring together, he said.

The general call of the wild feeling regarding Occupy against the banks isn't isolated to elks versus wolves, either. Speaking of anti-bank protests in 2011, the former head of Bank of America's security said they were akin to forest fires that were "suppressed and put out." Institutions are still warily watching the smoldering trees because "there’s also the opportunity for spontaneous fires to spring back up again."

Other banks wouldn't detail what they were planning for upcoming protests. Pinkerton director McNary told Bloomberg that to do so would "portray a position of weakness," which "invites attack."

A full schedule of May Day actions in New York City can be found here. Events include a 2 p.m. march and music making with the Occupy Guitarmy, led by Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello. In the morning there will be a "Pop-up Occupation" in Bryant Park with free food and a free market, among other things.

Put your weak and injured at the center of the herd, banks.