By Matt Chaban 11/08/12 11:28am

recovery mode

Let's eat. (EPA)

The Hurricane Sandy Diet: Joe Lhota, Ray Kelly, Janette Sadik-Khan and Other Leaders Share Their Stormy Snacks

Just before Hurricane Sandy hit, everyone was busy stocking up provisions to weather the maelstrom. Following the storm, there was a scramble to to find more to eat as stores were empty and restaurants closed. This is a city of gourmands, after all. For the city officials who were responsible for guiding the city through the disaster, this was no exception.

While we were compiling our oral history of Hurricane Sandy, Joe Lhota mentioned that even in the worst of the storm, he had managed to keep his daily dietary regimen intact. This got us wondering: what was everybody eating while they scrambled around getting the city ready and helping it recover? Here is what the protectors and providers of the city had on their plates and in their pockets. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/07/12 12:15pm

recovery mode

(Photo illustration: Ed Johnson)

The Committee to Save New York: An Oral History of Hurricane Sandy

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York’s top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words.

The Storm

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: I have an app on my iPad that monitors hurricanes on the East Coast. I have always lived on the water. I always watch the app. So when I first got involved in this—it was long before it even hit Jamaica—I knew when it started as a tropical storm, and a hurricane, and a tropical storm, and then a hurricane again.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC Office of Emergency Management: We follow the weather very closely this time of year as it comes off the tip of Africa, or wherever it develops. This particular storm came out of the southwest of the Caribbean. At 11 a.m. on October 22, we saw a tropical depression. At that point it’s just a depression, and you don’t know much about it. By 6 p.m., it was upgraded already to a tropical storm called Sandy. It continued to strengthen during the next day, and we kept track of it as it moved across Jamaica. Read More

By The Editors 9/11/12 6:52pm

Editorials

Housing Project

There were many telling details in Matt Chaban’s piece on the New York Housing Authority in last week’s Observer. One quote, however, really leapt out. A housing expert at City Hall explained everything you need to know about the authority’s chairman, John Rhea: “He’s focused on the product, not the politics,” the expert said, “and that has its perils.”

No wonder Mr. Rhea found himself on the firing lines recently. The Daily News carried out a campaign that had readers believing Mr. Rhea was an incompetent hack who was sitting on a billion dollars in unspent money while tenants suffered in conditions worthy of a Dickens novel.

As Mr. Chaban’s excellent report noted, the real story of Mr. Rhea’s tenure at the Housing Authority is, well, a little more complicated than critics acknowledge.

The Housing Authority truly is a city of its own. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/04/12 8:15pm

Troubling Developments

Housing, housing everywhere. (Courtesy NYCHA)

With Public Housing Under Attack, Can An Ex-Lehman Banker Save New York’s Last Affordable Apartments?

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests. Read More

By Eliot Brown 5/14/09 3:39pm

Council Members Upset Over Bloomberg Pick to Head Housing Authority

Six months after New York City Housing Authority chairman Tino Hernandez said he was leaving, Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday afternoon announced his replacement, John Rhea, an executive at Barclays. The appointment immediately drew criticism from many in the City Council.
It came because Rhea has no experience in housing. A few hours after his Read More