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

Brooklyn politicians hope that landmarking LICH will keep SUNY Downstate from closing it.

Cobble Hill really wants to keep its hospital. Ever since the State University of New York trustees voted unanimously to close the Long Island College Hospital in Cobble Hill, local politicians—and just about everyone else involved—have been desperately trying to keep the medical center open. A group of unions and doctors won a temporary reprieve, but the prognosis for the hospital is not good.

SUNY chairman H. Carl McCall claims that "There is no plan whatsoever with respect to real estate," but local councilman Brad Lander, who represents the 39th District, snaking from Cobble Hill to Borough Park, thinks otherwise.

"It's hard to pin down motives," Mr. Lander told Crain's New York Business, "but it doesn't seem like all the avenues have been explored to make this facility profitable and have it continue to function as a hospital." He estimated the value of the real estate at $500 million, if converted to housing, as is allowed by the current zoning designation.

But besides converting it to housing, the issue of what can be done with LICH is a thorny one. And if Mr. Lander and a coterie of Brooklyn politicians have their way, the range of possibilities for the buildings will get a lot smaller.

The current zoning designation for the hospital is R6, the same as the surrounding neighborhood, and the predominant development type in R6 zones is the workaday townhouse. Though a tower-in-a-park-style development would be possible under the current zoning, a would-be developer would have to sacrifice about 20 percent of the floorspace to do it.

To hedge against this possibility and remove the incentive for SUNY Downstate to sell the campus for cash, Mr. Lander, along with Councilman Steve Levin, Borough President Marty Markowitz and a few state senators, are calling for the land use protections in place in the rest of Cobble Hill—a 50-foot height limit and the historic district landmarking—to be extended to the hospital's campus.

LICH's two main blocks south of Atlantic Avenue, between Henry and Hicks streets, would be the biggest prize for any would-be developer. But LICH's main building north of Pacific Street is also massively overbuilt according to the current zoning—if it were torn down and rebuilt, the developer would have to downsize the building by more than 200,000 square feet.

The biggest threat (at least, if you see development as a threat) might not be a wholesale razing of the site, though, but rather an obscure land use move: demolishing most but not all of the building, in order to keep from having to comply with the underlying zoning.

According to section 54-41, a little-known provision of the New York City zoning code—the same provision that L&L intends to use to resculpt a post-war office tower at 425 Park Avenue into a Foster + Partners masterpiece—land owners are allowed to reconstruct overbuilt buildings without downsizing, so long as they keep 25 percent of the existing floorspace and the new building doesn't violate any zoning provisions that the old one did not.

And while the 50-foot height limit wouldn't stop a future landowner from using 54-41, inclusion in the Cobble Hill Historic District might, as it would require the notoriously fickle Landmarks and Preservation Commission to sign off on any renovation.

Mr. Lander and others are hoping this designation would dissuade SUNY Downstate from trying to sell off the property in the first place—but what happens if they call hospital advocates' bluff and do it anyway?

The Observer spoke with Ross Moskowitz, a land use attorney at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, who pointed out that if the landmarking goes forward but efforts to save the hospital are unsuccessful, the protections could backfire.

"There could be unintended consequences," said Mr. Moskowitz. For example, "the building could sit dormant and be an eyesore in the community"—or the building could simply be converted to residential use without any alteration to the façade, leaving the less-than-stunning structure, built in 1972, in place forever.

Brad Lander, speaking with The Observer, said that they were in it to win. When asked if landmarking the building could backfire, preventing the uninspired brick building from being remade into a more attractive building, Mr. Lander called the choice between the possible residential alternatives a "lose-lose."

"As opposed to tearing it down and building newfangled ugly condo towers?" the councilman asked. "You're offering me two very bad scenarios, and saying, are you afraid you're choosing one very bad scenario instead of another?"

Brad Lander says, "Where's the bus?" (Kit Dillon)

On every straphanger's gift list this winter. (Kit Dillon)

The bus stop is a lonely place, made lonelier without the reassurances of time. Like Estragon said, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” Much better to wait underground for the subway where your time is allotted to you by little digital clocks hanging from the ceiling.  No more leaning out and staring into the endlessness of a dark tunnel looking for light. Your train is 4 minutes away, at least on those lines fortunate enough to have the timers.

New York City is not a place for waiting. We’re terrible at it, and the City Council knows it. Today, joined by transit advocates and riders, a group of council members introduced a resolution calling on city agencies to install “bus clocks” in all of the 3,300 shelters across the city. Clocks that would display real-time bus arrival information, not simply those flimsy timetables many bus poles now unreliably, even flagrantly, post. It’s a move that will finally see the city catching up with such other metropolitan innovators as Albany, Syracuse, and Champaign, Ill. They've even got an online version in Boston—Boston!

“Bus Time and subway countdown clocks have been tremendously helpful technologies for straphangers,” Bronx Councilman James Vacca, chair of the Transportation Committee, said. “Knowing when the next bus or train will arrive gives straphangers time to pick up coffee or the morning paper rather than standing around with no information.”

That’s the point, of course. A moment with no information, in a city like ours, in a time like this, is a matter of life and death! Or at least a blown meeting or missed first date. Of course, we know, waiting now, that a bus will come. It always does. But we don’t know when and that lets the mind wander into strange and uncharted territory. What if the bus never comes? What are we waiting here for? Is it all worth it? Why are we here? Tough questions for the 2.5 million average weekday bus riders. Tough questions for anybody.

The MTA has a new system, known as Bus Time, currently accessible from a smart phone app, that was first installed as pilot program on the B63 line in Brooklyn. It has since expanded to a few more lines in Staten Island and the Bronx, and by the end of 2013, it will be available for all bus routes in the city. But as the concerned City Council members point out, smart phones are not as ubiquitous among the city’s elderly and low income residents, which creates a very real accessibility issue.

“There are few things as frustrating as waiting for a bus without knowing when it will show up, especially if you’re already running late for work or the weather isn’t cooperating,” Councilman Steve Levin said. “Installing countdown clocks in bus shelters is an easy step that the MTA can and should take to ensure that all riders know when to expect the next bus.”

Currently the city bus shelters are built and maintained by CEMUSA, a world wide leader in, what it calls, "iconic street furniture," better known as bus-stop-meets-billboard.  According to the franchise agreement with the city, which includes a clause about installing and maintaining future systems as they are developed, CEMUSA is already in a position to install countdown clocks without serious contractual changes.  As for the costs of the initial installation, the council hopes that some of the financing can come from discretionary appropriations and toggling agreements with advertisers, in which time information is alternated regularly with advertisements.

"With Bus Time going citywide," declared Brad Lander, "it's time for the MTA, New York City, and CEMUSA to overcome bureaucratic and inter-agency hurdles and make bus clocks a reality in New York City."

“We are issuing a call to expand the human capacity of the bridge,” Councilman Brad Lander of Park Slope declared at the Manhattan entrance to the 129-year-old span yesterday. An average of 4,000 pedestrians and 3,100 bicyclists cross the Brooklyn Bridge every day, according to the Department of Transportation. A good many of them have close encounters of the two-wheeled kind.

Along with a few colleagues in the council, Mr. Lander wants the city to consider expanding the narrow boardwalk atop the beige bridge to accommodate more passengers. The plan calls for tripling the crossing’s width, to the current size at the piers. This would create twice as much room for pedestrians as well as a dedicate lane for bikes.

Currently, the two mix in the narrow strip, with many near misses as bikes swerve around slow walkers and photographers unwittingly back into oncoming traffic for that perfect shot of the new Frank Gehry building.

“Everyone knows that the Brooklyn Bridge is such a popular tourist destination, we want to make sure the bridge is safe” Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents Lower Manhattan, said. “To maintain a healthy New York, it’s important to expand the walkway.” Because nothing is worse for your health than a big fat tire print.

The council members admit they have yet to explore the feasibility of the project, though they acknowledge the engineering challenges and cost could be considerable. At the same time, a new walkway was added to the Williamsburg Bridge when it was rehabilitated by the Bloomberg administration, so the pols are hopeful the same could be done here. It could even become a matter of debate during the upcoming mayoral elections.

“We’re not engineers,” Mr. Lander admitted.

But when they represent some of the most bike-crazed constituencies in the city, something must be done. “The Brooklyn Bridge belongs to all New  Yorkers,” North Brooklyn Councilman Steve Levin said. “It was an amazing engineering feat in its age, but in 2012 it’s time to update it a bit.”

Jake Stevens' wife was killed by a drunk driver who got off. (Matt Chaban)

Each year, there are upwards of 3,500 serious injuries resulting from traffic accidents. The NYPD has ten times as many officers, yet it only assigns 19 of them to look into such incidents and investigates less than 1 in 10 as a result. Even then, investigations take place only when those involved are dead or believed to be dying. Sometimes they die without an investigation because on the scene, officers believe the injured will make it.

Members of the City Council and families who have lost relatives on the road arrived on the steps of City Hall this morning to decry what they consider a lack of enforcement and announce the introduction of a set of bills and resolutions they hope will impel the police department and the Bloomberg administration to take action.

Brooklyn Councilman David Greenfield gave a succinct appraisal of the situation.

"It's actually a perverse system," he said. "In the city of New York, what we're telling you is you can be a reckless driver, you can be a drunk driver, you can be an unlicensed driver, you can mow people over and nothing is going to happen to you. The reason is, we don't have the proper people power to handle it. At some times in the night, in the entire city of New York of eight and a half million people, you have one officer on for the entire city who is in charge of doing these kinds of investigations. God forbid you should have two serious accidents."

The problem for the council is that it has little control over the police department, so the new proposals are more public requests than public demands.  There is the possibility to overwhelm Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly with a wave of favorable public opinion (see: stop and frisk) but that does not always work (see: stop and frisk).

"The mayor and Commissioner Kelly could do everything we're asking for today if they wanted," Brooklyn Councilman Brad Lander said. They also could have done it yesterday, or the day before, or years ago, when advocates started asking for it in the face of accidents. It is clear they do not want to, and may not ever, even as the council tries.

"Many like to criticize, but traffic fatalities are at the lowest level in city history and we now have 30,000 fewer injury crashes per year–30,000 fewer per year–than we did a decade ago," Bloomberg spokesman Marc LaVorgna said in an email. "Those results did not happen by accident–it’s due to the aggressive enforcement and safety work of the NYPD and the traffic engineering work the Department of Transportation."

The issue seems to be not whether or not the streets are safer—indeed they are, and the administration may now find itself a victim of its own success—so much as family's inability to get information, and thus solace, about their loved ones. At times, the department has been accused of obfuscation and obstruction. The NYPD public affairs department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

The council believes the city can do more, and it has started with a package of legislation proposed by Brooklyn Councilman Steve Levin—this is a big issue in the borough it seems, not least because it is the most populous and straddles the line between lots of walkers and lots of drivers; Councilwoman Tish James was also on hand.

To begin with, Mr. Levin wants the number of officers trained in accident investigations way up, from the 19 currently assigned to the Accident Investigation Squad to at least five officers per precinct. He also wants the city to investigate all serious accidents, defined as those causing considerable injury to a limb—an issue outlined in state law. He would require officers to track the speed, sobriety and responsibility of the driver in an accident, a factor not always considered, as well as requiring officers to file a complete crash report and the department to publicly outline its crash response plan.

"The New York City Police Department is ignoring state law, and New Yorkers want to know why," Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Lander and Bronx Councilman James Vacca, chair of the council's Transportation Committee, are also proposing a task force made up of representatives from various city agency's and groups to come up with recommendations for the department in tackling traffic accidents.

"Our traffic investigation system is fatally flawed," said Queens Councilman Peter Vallone Jr, chair of the public safety committee. "If someone backs through an intersection at 50 miles an hour but doesn't kill anybody, right now, they're only facing a traffic ticket, and only if a police officer saw it. As a former prosecutor, I can tell you, that is reckless endangerment."

Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said a survey his group did found no police departments in the U.S. or Europe that did not conduct an investigation of all serious accidents.

Two New Yorkers had join the politicians to share their story of roadside tragedy, a son who lost a father and a husband, his wife.

Jake Stevens recalled how a drunk driver ran over his wife. "This drunk driver who killed my wife last year is going to get away with a driving violation" for driving without a license, he said. Because no investigation was done, it is also difficult for families to seek civil damages.

Jay Deter lost his dad Ray last year, when he was hit by a 24-year-old driving a Jaguar, suspected of speeding down through Lower Manhattan, where Ray Deter was on his bike. "He was hit so hard, he shattered the windshield, shattered the moon roof, before landing on the ground," Jay Deter recounted, his hands shaking. His dad lived for six days in a coma before eventually succumbing to his injuries. By then, all signs of the accident had been erased. The only charges filed were for possession of marijuana.

"The message we are sending by doing nothing is that nothing is going to happen to you if you break the law," Mr. Greenfield said.

This could be you... if the Parks Department's budget is cut.

Early this morning, a handful of city park advocates, a trio of council members, and a smattering of curious onlookers gathered on the steps of City Hall to talk parks, budget cuts and leafy green things.

“Funding for our parks must be restored,” cried City Councilmember Brad Lander, who was joined at the rally by park-loving compatriots Melissa Mark-Viverito and James Oddo.

The last few years have not been kind to the Department of Parks and Recreation, which has been the victim of a number of heavy-handed budget cuts since 2008. This year, the Parks Department faces a proposed budget cut of $33.4 million that, if approved, would lead to a cumulative loss of $62 million in funding—or 17 percent—over the last five years.

“New York City’s 2,100 parks are an irreplaceable treasure, providing places for New Yorkers to play, relax, run, bike, picnic, perform, gather, and connect to nature,” Mr. Lander wrote in a statement.

New Yorkers For Parks (NY4P) Executive Director, Holly Leicht, who helped organize the rally, said that cutting parks funding is “more serious than people realize,” because it is a “disinvestment in our parks and the city’s economic future.”

And she has a point. Grass cutting and tree trimming costs money! The Parks Department does not just spend its cash on park benches, Narnia-esque lamp posts and the occasional swan. The bulk of the funding goes towards maintenance and operations, including trimming trees, cutting off dangerous or low-hanging branches, repairing and maintaining surfaces, controlling insect populations, removing snow and cleaning up litter and bathrooms.

And weeds aren't the only ramifications of budget cuts. The rally comes on the heels of a recent announcement that four public pools—Mayor Wagner Pool in Manhattan, Howard Pool in Brooklyn, Fort Totten Pool in Queens, and Faber Pool in Staten Island—will remain closed for the summer if money is not restored to the budget. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed pool cuts for three years in a row according to the Staten Island Advance, which also includes closing the city pools two weeks earlier than normal. If Mayor Bloomberg gets his way, and the four pools remain dry this summer, the city expects to save a total of $1.5 million.

But is it worth it?

“No, I don’t think it is,” a young mother of two, who declined to give her name, said at the rally this morning. “It’s like, I take my kids to the park all the time. They like the park. But if it’s not safe, or clean, or, you know, maintained, then what I am gonna do?”

“I had no idea this was going on,” she added.

Of course, maintenance reductions go hand in hand with maintenance staff cuts and if the park's funding cuts are approved, up to 800 jobs are at risk, according to NY4P.

So can anything be done to prevent this? Will the city's wealthy elite finally step forward in support of the parks?  It doesn't look good, but for the superstitious, there's always crossing your fingers, blowing on dandelions, or plucking out ‘dem eyelashes. 

jschiewe@observer.com

Here to stay. (Getty)

Downtown Brooklyn developers and cooperators, with a hefty helping hand from the real estate lobby, threw everything they could at the Borough Hall Skyscraper Historic District, a new landmarking effort aimed at saving the area's historic highrises. In the end, the preservationists won out, as a City Council subcommittee voted unanimously yesterday to approve the historic district, all but ensuring its passage by the full council on February 1.

There were some interesting compromises that may not have fully assuaged concerns in Downtown Brooklyn but will hopefully go a way toward addressing any problems in the future. The co-op board at 75 Livingston Street was one of the loudest critics of the proposal. Brooklyn Councilmen Steve Levin, who represents the area, and Brad Lander, chair of the landmarks subcommittee, released a joint statement yesterday celebrating the passage of the district but also calling on the Landmarks Preservation Commission to go easy on the co-op.

"We want to particularly recognize the co-operators of 75 Livingston Street and praise them for their stewardship of the building over the past decade, as they have spent millions restoring their building after years of decline," the councilmen said. "Given their hard work and investment, we ask the LPC to work with the board of the building, and to show maximum appropriate flexibility as they move forward in their efforts to maintain the building without imposing hardships on the co-operators."

Another new wrinkle, one that will have citywide implications, is an announcement by the commission to revise how it reviews storefronts, another major issue for landlords. Instead of lengthy public reviews, these will be handled at the staff level. "These new guidelines will allow many more new and relocating stores—in Downtown Brooklyn and around the city—to obtain a quick, staff-level approval for exterior work," the councilmen said.

"After close consideration," they concluded, "we believe that this new historic district will strengthen the character of Downtown Brooklyn, allowing for new development and growth, like the new retail space planned for the Municipal Building, while preserving the graceful, historic, early-generation skyscrapers that make it Brooklyn’s civic center."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

"The results are clear and dramatic," said Councilman Brad Lander, whose office produced the report. "More than half of B61's don't arrive on time during rush hour, that's unacceptable and is failing riders." The report, entitled "Next Bus Please" harnessed a gang of volunteers to gather the information during the three month period of July to September this year, surveying the peak hours.

A bus failing to arrive on schedule may not be like a unique occurrence, but for riders of the B61, the problems are particularly acute. Last summer four bus routes in Red Hook were closed, with the only consolation being the extension of the B61, and you don't have to be a mathematician to work out what a longer route, plus fewer of buses, equates to.

"There is a lack of transportation for the people of Red Hook, these people are taxpayers and they deserve to be treated like everyone else", Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez said through shivering teeth—waiting for the bus on a cold day like today is no pleasure. Those that rely on the B61 route are currently faced with two public transport options to commute to the city either, wait on a bus or use the $5 Ikea Water Taxi. With the recent closure of Smith Street subway station, matters have only grown worse.

Some of the suggestions listed in the report are to add more peak hour services; after this happens apply a limited-stop service to help riders get to their subway connections faster; and equip B61 buses with the M.T.A.'s Bus Time, a pilot program that uses GPS to provide real-time tracking of buses, so riders know when the bus will be arriving..

"Next we give this to the transit authority and sit down with them and see what we can do to fix this" said Mr. Lander.

"These recommendations are not pie in the sky, they've been applied on other routes and have shown to help the 2.4 million riders in this city," Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives said.

As the representatives and advocates spoke, behind them not one bus arrived, no doubt a scenario that was in the minds of the organizers when they planned to hold the conference at the stop.

Some of those in wait were regular users of the route. Angel Martinez told how he seems to be "waiting all the time", and how quickly the bus fills up when it does come. "It's frustrating, because sometimes you got to wait for the next one because it's so full," he said.

Rob Esposito takes the B61 in from Bensonhurst to go and take care of his aging uncle, he told The Observer. "You'll have grey hair by the time the next one comes," he said.

Just as the Observer was about to leave the stop at Forth and Ninth avenues, the irony of all ironies occurred: Two buses came at once.

sduffey@observer.com

Density is intensity. (DCP)

For years, planners and politicos have talked about transforming Brooklyn’s dingy Fourth Avenue into the borough’s own version of Park Avenue. That transformation is still in the works, but thanks to a handful of rezonings along the thoroughfare, the strip has gotten its fair share of mid-sized apartment buildings. Leaning more Robert Scarano than Rosario Candela, it is not exactly the sexiest strip. But one issue that has caused some real complaints within the community is the utter lack of street life.

Some people blame the Department of City Planning and its chair, that tall, blonde dame of design Amanda Burden, for not forcing developers to follow the tenets of Jane Jacobs and include a few storefronts in their buildings. Of the 10 new towers on Fourth, with 859 apartments scattered among them, only half bothered to include commercial spaces, that catalyst of city life—we’re a town of shoppers and latte sippers. Along with a handful of new hotels, a cinderblock wall or the exhaust of a parking garage is more likely to greet passersby than a new pet spa or tschotske shop.

City Planning argues that requiring retail from the start could have stymied the area’s growth, though the opposite seems to be true, as it has created an oppressive character on Fourth as uninviting as the auto body shops that predated the apartments. Park Slope Councilman Brad Lander, who represents part of the strip and worked on its rezoning while at the Fifth Avenue Committee, said no one is really to blame for this oversight, though.

“Almost nobody really thought—I don’t remember a single advocate talking about the need for ground floor retail,” Mr. Lander said today. “The consequences of not doing it are plain for everyone to see, but the Park Slope rezoning was really the first rezoning of any significance in the Bloomberg administration. It was missing a lot of things, like affordable housing and streetscape design.”

What passes for Park Avenue. (Streetsblog)

Now, the department is trying to rectify this problem with yet another rezoning on Fourth Avenue, running from Atlantic Avenue to 24^th Street, down near the Greenwood Cemetery. “This new proposal will help ensure the continued transformation of the avenue into a dynamic commercial corridor and provide much needed services to its surrounding communities,” Ms. Burden said in a release.

Three fairly simple proposals are in the works. One would require all new developments to dedicate at least 50 percent of their ground floor to retail uses, with a minimum of blank spaces—columns and walls no wider than 12 feet—and a maximum of transparency, e.g. glass, “to maximize interaction, visibility and pedestrian-oriented environment,” as the department puts it in a brochure. The third provision encourages driveways and curb cuts be located on side streets.

“A couple of buildings certainly speak to the reality that some developers don’t care about their community,” Mr. Lander, the council member, said. “Whether it is their neighbors or even their residents, design doesn’t much matter. It’s building to the lowest common denominator.”

Then again, there are almost no shops lining Manhattan’s Park Avenue, either. Maybe it is just the stench of the Gowanus and the 18-wheelers barreling by that keeps Fourth Avenue from becoming the latest BroBo haven.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

It took two years and two staggering price cuts, from $46 million to $24.5 million, before Swiss currency speculator Daniel Forcart came around in December and signed a contract for the duplex. The price was $19.9 million.

Pretty much everywhere else in the world, this deal would have closed by now. But not in the world of New York City co-operatives. The board balked for reasons that remain unclear, whether because Mr. Forcart did not have the proper social credentials or the right price. It is impossible to know, because, like all other co-op boards, the one at 778 Park need not disclose its reasons for rejection. This, along with a handful of other nasty turns at buildings around the city, has brokers grumbling that co-ops are more intrusive and cockier than ever.

"It's an antiquated system not suited to modern life in a cosmopolitan city," Douglas Elliman's Raphael De Niro complained over coffee on Hudson Street recently.

During the real estate boom, condos colonized the city. Glassy spires shot up everywhere from Harlem to Brighton Beach, and dour old hotels were spruced up in bare-knuckled conversions (think the Plaza and the Stanhope). Even with tens of thousands of new apartments in the city, the buyable housing stock shifted only about 10 percent, from four co-op units for every condo to a ratio of three to one. With white flight running in reverse, yuppies and BroBos, along with their fashionably enlarging broods, swept across the boroughs in search of permanent housing. Thanks to all the new condos, it became easier than ever to avoid the onerous boards and their anvil application packages. And, best of all, those probing, embarrassing interviews.

As a result, some co-op boards, growing jealous of their chintzy brethren across the park or downtown, loosened their collars. New neighbors, ones who not so long ago would have been seen as "those people," who would have been lucky to be shown the apartment, let alone get an interview, found themselves with entree to some of the city's nicer buildings. This may not have been the case at the tippy-top, but brokers certainly say there was a relaxation of standards, not least because there was just so much money floating around. If letting some riffraff in meant your home was worth 10 times what you bought it for a decade ago, why not!

Then the music stopped, the panic set in, and this rarefied world teetered on the brink of collapse. Many of the city's co-op boards became stricter than ever before, requiring bigger down payments, more escrow and higher renovation fees. Picky, picky, picky. "Many of these buildings require a certain lifestyle, and you just couldn't have people sneaking their art and antiques out the service door just to afford the maintenance," said Mary Ellen Cashman of Stribling.

Yet there was also a countervailing force. As the fortunes, monetary and otherwise, of those in the coveted prewars continued to dwindle, some had no choice but to try and liquidate the homes they had worked so hard to get into. Many boards would never have allowed such things, damaging as a fire sale would be to their home values. With the power to set prices in their buildings, and the ability to reject at will, few boards thought twice about turning down buyers deemed to be paying too little, even as the sellers squirmed.

As this anxiety grew, there were also cases where boards relaxed their standards. After all, for a time in 2008 and 2009, it looked like the sky might never stop falling. Sure, boards were still fussy as ever regarding financial credentials--you've got only 10 times the price in liquid assets?--but the "panache" of the buyer, as one broker put it, was less relevant for once.

"Certain buildings are nervous, certain people were desperate," said A. Laurance Kaiser IV of Key Ventures. "And once those people get on the board, they're the worst of all! 'It's my candy store, and you can't have any of it.' The hypocrisy of it all."

And there is the rub. Now that the economy has begun to recover, and buyers are rushing the market once again, boards feel less desperate. They feel empowered--downright vicious, even. They can play a little catch and release, if the fish is not the perfect whopper. This, combined with the fact that co-ops have yet to loosen their still-spooked, post-Lehman financial rigor, means it is becoming more difficult than many brokers can remember to get their buyers past boards.

And it is not just the aerie likes of the Astor duplex. Consider the two brothers from an impeccable family, both recent London School of Economics grads. They had taken to a quirky penthouse duplex a block from the High Line in West Chelsea and gone to contract in December for $3 million, just over the asking price. Even though it was an all-cash offer, the buyers were never interviewed, and it took until April for the board to get around to telling them they would not be getting one.

It was the first time the buyers' broker had a client turned down in seven years--until it happened again later that week. "These are two very clean-cut, together young men, and if the board had seen that, I'm sure it would have changed their mind," the broker said. "Instead, all they saw was the application. All they saw was two 20-something guys who wanted to buy a penthouse in Chelsea and party all the time."

Yet for all the complaining New Yorkers do about co-op boards, this power grab could be their death rattle. Two bills are in the works at the City Council that would greatly curtail their authority. Intro 188, the "Fair Cooperative Procedure Law," which seeks to regulate the application process and require a yay-or-nay decision within 45 days, has members and representatives of the all-volunteer army up in arms.

"I have heard boards say that they don't have enough time to review the package and meet the buyers and deal with all of the building issues and still work their day jobs and spend time with their families, so they are just going to require that the brokers make certain that the buyers are qualified," Stuart Saft, president of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, wrote in an email. "It will be very interesting to see this play itself out. The boards seem to think that is the least the brokers should do considering that they are getting a $150,000 commission on $2,500,000 apartments." (And not only work and family, but those summers in the Hamptons and the holidays throughout!)

The Real Estate Board of New York, under pressure from its large broker membership, has recently flipped on the legislation. "There is the issue of the lack of a response, and I don't know if it's a big issue that happens very often, but if you get enough brokers together, it starts to sound like it," said Michael Slattery, senior vice president at the board. "If you've provided the information and gone through the interview, there is a sense you should be told up or down."

The board's support could finally push the bill, which has been kicking around the Council for a few years, out into the open for some debate--though it is not clear whether it would pass, and there is still a good deal of work to be done on it. As the bill's sponsor, Lew Fidler of Brooklyn, put it, "The bill needs to be tightened up in some areas and loosened in others."

The legislation that is far more controversial, and has only mixed support in the real estate community, is the "Fair and Prompt Co-op Disclosure Law," Intro 326. It requires co-ops to do the unthinkable: provide a written response outlining a board rejection.

"Does every corporation have to do this?" Corcoran broker Eileen Roberts said. "I would be in favor of that only if every business had to disclose every decision it made. Why should a housing corporation be treated any different?"

The bill surfaced before, in 2006, but never got very far amid widespread opposition. It has been taken up now by Brownstone Belt City Councilman Brad Lander, after he was notified by a cadre of civil rights groups. They argue that discrimination is still rampant in the city's co-ops. By forcing boards to spell out their decision, Mr. Lander hopes they might think more deeply about why they are rejecting a prospective neighbor. "It's a very simple bill," Mr. Lander said. "We're not changing the standards. It is still illegal to discriminate--just now you would have to discriminate and lie if you wanted to do it." He acknowledged that he only has the support of "a large group of civil rights groups" and a smattering of boards. "But I think they can be very persuasive on this issue."

Still, what if it were not about equal rights but really all part of some grand conspiracy by the brokers, to disembowel the co-op system simply so they can sell more apartments and make more money?

"It would make a huge difference," Mr. De Niro, the Douglas Elliman broker, said. "First, they wouldn't be able to turn down so many deals. And it would provide more information on what to put in front of them and what not to. You assume you have a slam dunk, and the next thing you know, everyone's wasted six months of their lives."

Some brokers blame their colleagues and not the boards. "Only a dodo would show everyone every single apartment," Mr. Kaiser, one of the city's most veteran co-op brokers, said. "You have to know where to take your client." Another broker said that a "silly bill" is not going to make anyone a better broker.

Others are ambivalent, so long as the bill does not hurt the cachet of the co-ops themselves. "I tell everyone we should embrace the co-op system, love it," Warburg's Richard Steinberg said. "It is the one thing, more than any other, that saved us from turning into Miami, because there were far fewer speculators."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo