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

(Photo: Anna Silman)

Earlier today, multiple bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing at least two and injuring dozens more.

New York City has already stepped up its own security efforts in case there is a plot to attack additional cities, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced.

“[T]he NYPD has stepped up security at strategic locations and critical infrastructure, including our subways," the mayor said in a statement.

"Some of the security steps we are taking may be noticeable, including deployment of Critical Response Vehicles and additional police personnel, and others will not be. We have 1,000 members of the NYPD assigned to counter-terrorism duties, and they – along with the entire NYPD and the investments we have made in counter-terrorism infrastructure – are being fully mobilized to protect our city.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo issued his own statement announcing that all state agencies are on "a heightened state of alert as we learn more about this incident," the facts of which are still emerging.

"I have directed state agencies, including the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, State Police, the MTA and the Port Authority, to be on a heightened state of alert as we learn more about this incident," Mr. Cuomo said.

(Photo: Anna Silman)

"New York National Guard on Sunday sent three vehicles and 6 soldiers to support the Marathon, and they are on hand to assist with emergency response and work together with local authorities following this incident."

Several other cities, including Washington D.C., have begun taking similar steps to secure landmarks and high-trafficked areas.

In Times Square, bystanders were frightened by the news and the heightened police presence.

Kirsten Andrews and Lauren Adamo, visitors from Maine, had been following the news for the past hour in their hotel room and came out to observe the scene in the square.

“I wanted to come down and talk to a cop and see if they have a plan in motion if anything happened right now, because it would be chaotic," said Ms. Andrews. "I’m wondering why subways and buses are still running."

Ms. Adamo was concerned about the possibility of more explosions. “My stepdad’s in the military and he says all big cities are under threat right now,” said Ms. Adamo. “It’s a little unsettling.”

By contrast, the recent shooting of 16-year-old Kimani Gray in East Flatbush led to days of scattered street violence, an Occupy influx, extended posturing on MSNBC and widespread press coverage.

The difference this time? An election, and post-Bloomberg anxiety.

For more than two decades, Gotham’s mayoral politics have been framed by racial conflicts as expressed over policing methods.

In 1989, with an election approaching, the racially motivated killing of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst triggered a surge in support for challenger David Dinkins. The candidate, who had been trailing, went on to defeat three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the mayoral primary.

Mr. Hawkins’s murder has cast a long shadow over New York politics ever since.

When Rudy Giuliani, running as the law and order candidate and enjoying strong police backing, defeated David Dinkins in 1993, the outgoing mayor’s supporters threatened the city with ongoing disorder. This seemed no idle threat at the time, given the deadly Crown Heights riots of 1991.

In a city suffering from 2,000 murders a year, Mr. Giuliani refused to cave in to Al Sharpton’s “riot ideology,” the threat that if Al and his pal Charlie Rangel weren’t propitiated, the city might see a repeat of the violence that erupted during 1995’s 125th Street massacre, when protests over the eviction of a beloved black record shop boiled over into a murderous rampage. Though not charged with a crime, Mr. Sharpton was implicated for whipping up the hate.

Mr. Giuliani cut off Messrs. Sharpton and Rangel, but then he had to pay the price politically when the reverend and the congressman exploited tragedies such as the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, in which the aggressive and usually effective NYPD Street Crimes Unit mowed down an unarmed African immigrant in a hail of gunfire.

But for all the tumult, when Ruth Messinger ran against Mr. Giuliani in 1997 and tried to make race and policing an issue, the tactic fell flat in a city enjoying an unprecedented reduction in crime. Mr. Giuliani and his first police commissioner Bill Bratton had, with great success, replaced the passive policing of the Koch and Dinkins years with the activist and innovative “broken windows” approach.

Mr. Bloomberg split the difference. His police commissioner, Ray Kelly, continued broken windows policing and intensified the use of stop and frisk to further drive down the crime rate. He also defused the threat of riots by making nice with Al Sharpton. Mr. Bloomberg used cutouts such as the Carnegie Corporation to pay off Mr. Sharpton and other ministers, thus buying the relative peace of this past decade. But none of the mayoral candidates other than Republican long-shot John Catsimatidis have even a fraction of Mr. Bloomberg’s money. The upshot is that the city is entering a period of uncertainty when it comes to racial politics.

With the exception of the most radical of the mayoral candidates, Comptroller John Liu, whose one-time policy director honeymooned in North Korea, candidates have tried to take moderate positions on the Kimani Gray incident.

The Kimani Gray case, however, may turn out to be a damp squib. The facts suggest that, unlike Mr. Hawkins, Gray makes an unmarketable martyr. The story that has emerged, largely uncontested, suggests that Gray, a young wannabe gangster with ambitions to become a Blood, was approached by two police officers—neither of whom was white—who thought he was holding a gun. Police say he was, and he pulled it despite police orders to “freeze” and then was shot seven times, both in his front and his back, suggesting he was facing the police when they began shooting and was turned around by the force of the shots.

Jumaane Williams, the councilman representing the heavily Caribbean area of single-family homes and apartment buildings where the shooting took place, was already prominent as a critic of the city’s “stop, question and frisk” policing policies, and he has emerged as the chief community spokesman in the case. Mr. Williams has both revved up the rhetoric and tamped down the sometimes violent protests that followed the killing.

Sounding at times like the Al Sharpton of the Giuliani years, Mr. Williams has warned that because Police Commissioner Kelly—with whom he has frequently clashed—ignores the “root causes of the problems in East Flatbush, I fear this will be a long and bloody summer ahead.”

All of the major candidates have called for modification to stop and frisk, but like Mr. Williams, they’re short on specifics. Their problem is that stop and frisk is unpopular with half the city’s population, but is also enormously effective. In the wake last December of the horrific Newtown killings in nearby Connecticut, there was an enormous hue and cry for better gun control, and the call often came from the very pols most opposed to stop and frisk.

Yet stop and frisk—far and away the most effective means of getting guns off the streets—has served to reduce not only crime but the state prison population well. The problem is that it’s also an affront to the dignity of ordinary people going about their business in high-crime areas.

The difficult task of reconciling the legitimate demand for respect and the need for the police to protect the population at large will, at least for a time, be in the hands of the left-wing activist United States District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin. She will no doubt rule on behalf of her allies in the ACLU, who have been fighting the most successful criminal justice reforms in the history of the country for the past 22 years.

But her verdict will certainly be appealed, and that leads back to the role of Mr. Williams. He’s been a bitter critic of Mr. Kelly, but he’s neither acknowledged the disproportionate benefit to minority communities from the city’s approach to policing nor laid out a means by which public safety can be better reconciled with the right of ordinary citizens not to be harassed by the police.

In a recent speech, former Commissioner Bill Bratton compared the use of stop and frisk to chemotherapy. He noted that too high a dose can kill a patient, but the proper amount can save lives. The courts, wrapped up as they necessarily are in abstraction, are unlikely to be able to strike that balance. It will be the task of Mr. Bloomberg’s successors to work out the new framework.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the leading mayoral candidate at the moment, says she would like to retain Ray Kelly as police commissioner but also impose a monitor to oversee stop and frisk. Rival Bill de Blasio wants to replace Mr. Kelly, possibly with Bill Bratton.

The Kimani Gray case may fade, but the intertwined issues of crime and race will remain high on the electoral agenda. If the politicians fail to thread the needle, the danger ahead is that New York could regress to a Chicago-like situation, where the well-to-do areas are reasonably well-policed while the minority areas are left to fend for themselves regarding crime. The liberal champions of equality will have once again produced greater inequality.

editorial@observer.com

Days after a court threw out the mayor’s ban on oversized sugary drinks, Mr. Bloomberg was back on the soapbox, proposing a new law that would force merchants to hide their tobacco products. Mr. Bloomberg believes that if kept out of sight, tobacco will be kept out of the minds of impressionable young people.

He’s right. Government has every right to do what it can to discourage a new generation from taking up tobacco. A smokeless society is a healthier society, and Mr. Bloomberg has made it clear that he won’t be satisfied until cigarettes became a weird artifact of another, less-enlightened era.

Smokers inevitably will complain that the mayor is once again resorting to nanny-state methods to achieve his goal. But that’s far too simplistic. Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal is a form of education, a reminder to young people that tobacco use is a menace to public health. Its absence from plain sight drives home the point.

Less controversially, the mayor wants to crack down on merchants who sell smuggled cigarettes, thus evading taxes, and seeks to establish a minimum price of $10.50 for a pack of cigarettes or small cigars. That’s hitting users where it hurts—and that’s the idea.

Society picks up the terrible cost of tobacco use when smokers become ill from the poisons they inhale. Mr. Bloomberg is right to do what he can to make sure that young people get the message—smoking kills.

Advocates for tighter regulation, especially Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have been pointing out that in most states, those who purchase weapons at a gun show are not required to submit to background checks—and in places where such checks are required, they are not rigorously enforced. That loophole is absurd: why is a gun sale at a show any different from a sale in a conventional gun shop? And yet gun rights advocates have continued to resist calls to create or enforce background checks at gun shows.

Here in New York, however, this loophole has been closed, thanks to timely work by State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The attorney general has come to an agreement with the vast majority of gun show operators in the state to enforce a state law that requires background checks at shows.

New York has seized the lead on gun regulation in Newtown’s aftermath, even as neighboring states continue to fight all the old battles while accomplishing very little.

It should be noted, however, that the gun show operators did not come to the table with Mr. Schneiderman of their own accord and out of a sense of public responsibility. They did so because the attorney general exposed them as part of the problem.

Well before the Newtown massacre, Mr. Schneiderman authorized an undercover operation at the state’s gun shows to determine if the sellers at gun shows complied with required background checks—New York is one of only a handful of states with such a requirement. The sellers did not. In fact, they casually sold guns—including assault weapons—to undercover agents who said that they had outstanding orders of protection against them.

The attorney general pressed criminal charges against the offenders, leading to a series of convictions. But rather than pursuing civil cases against the sellers as well, the attorney general’s office extracted this new, broad agreement to ensure that more than 80 percent of the state’s gun show operators will enforce the required background check.

In addition to the checks, 23 gun show operators agreed to implement a better system to track the sales of weapons at their shows and promised to monitor parking lots to make sure that rogue sellers are not conducting business in violation of regulations.

The agreement in New York has broader implications for the national debate on gun control. As the attorney general said, “Once we demonstrate how easy this is and how it keeps people safe, it weakens the arguments on the federal level that guaranteeing background checks are overly burdensome or face meaningful opposition.”

Many advocates of gun ownership have argued that local governments should enforce the laws that are already on the books before writing new ones. They have a point, as this case clearly demonstrates.

It also demonstrates that enforcing the law requires, sadly, extraordinary government action, like the use of undercover agents. Kudos to the attorney general for his leadership.

The Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, (212) 754-9494, 6:30-9:30pm, by invitation only.

Speaker Quinn.

The New York City Council passed a bill today that prohibits employers from considering an applicant's current employment status when making hiring decisions.

The bill would also put an end to job ads that say applicants must be currently employed. Under this measure, New York would be the first city in the country providing people with the opportunity to sue on the basis of unemployment discrimination.

“Imagine spending every day and night for months upon months upon months looking for a job–only to be told ‘don’t even bother … unemployed need not apply,’” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who supported the bill. “We cannot–and will not–allow New Yorkers who are qualified and ready to work have the door of opportunity slammed in their faces.”

The Council cited that 51 percent of unemployed New Yorkers have been job-hunting for over six months, but many job listings require candidates to already be employed.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose signature is required to codify any City Council-approved bill into law, has vowed to veto this one, according to Metro.

Hizzoner called it "one of the most misguided pieces of legislation" and claimed it would "damage lots of small businesses" to Capital New York.

Whatever side of the argument you're on, the city has an unemployment rate of 8.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that's a lot of people who need all the help they can get.

A tale of two skyscrapers?

The sky may be the limit when it comes to constructing cloud-skimming Manhattan luxury condos, but when a storm strikes, it's the sidewalks below that developers need to worry about. In the last month, our eyes and cameras were fearfully focused on One57's dangling crane boom, but it's not the first time that high winds have made it mortally dangerous to walk beneath an under-construction skyscraper. Back in April 2004, a freakish wind storm—gusts of 34 mph were recorded in Central Park—dislodged construction material from an upper floor of the still-under-construction Time Warner Center.

Perhaps the most remarkable difference between the two incidents was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reaction. In the case of the Time Warner Center, he chastised the developer and ordered work stopped immediately. After the One57 incident, he defended Extell, noting that high wind gusts often cause blameless accidents (which, to be fair, may well be the case and gusts during Sandy did reach 60 mph).

Michael Gross, chronicler of the city's most luxurious real estate, mentioned the discrepancy when we recently called him up to chat about his upcoming book on 15 Central Park West. Hearing Mayor Bloomberg's supportive, point-no-fingers response to the crane incident reminded Mr. Gross of the mayor's decidedly harsher words to the Related Companies. (Mr. Gross begged off discussing the matter further because he numbers among the 57th Street residents displaced by the One57 crane incident.)

A brief search of New York Times articles from the time of the Time Warner Center mishap revealed that the mayor did indeed have vastly different things to say about the two wind-related incidents.

''The law says that you have to batten down all construction material every single day before you go home, and this is a site where we've given four summonses out,'' Mayor Bloomberg said in the wake of the Time Warner incident. ''We are not going to have to walk down the streets and look up all the time at the building wondering whether something is going to come off it.''

He ordered work stopped until the developer came up with a plan "to protect against dangerous gusts."

Granted, the four summonses may help to explain the mayor's steely response. There had also been an earlier onsite death when a construction worker was struck on the head by a piece of falling debris.

In the case of the One57 crane, which was inspected the day before the storm, Bloomberg warned the public not to leap to any conclusions.

"It's conceivable that nobody did anything wrong whatsoever and it wasn't even a malfunction, it was just a strange gust of wind," Bloomberg said.  "Just because it was inspected, that doesn't mean that God doesn't do things or that metal doesn't fail. There's no reason to think at this point in time that the inspection wasn't adequate."

The dangling One57 crane, which displaced residents up and down the block for days, was still, as far as we know, a freak accident, although an extensive investigation is underway. And naturally, neighbors have started filing lawsuits.

Why did Bloomberg immediately defend One57 rather than scolding the developer like he did with Time Warner? Was Bloomberg trying to keep everyone calm and copacetic in the midst of a weather disaster? Did his response have anything to do with when the projects were developed (One57 on Bloomberg's watch, Time Warner on Guiliani's)? Or did the two gusts of winds somehow justify vastly different responses?

A representative for the mayor's office told The Observer that the difference in response was mainly a factor of the wind speed, writing that 30 mph winds "are rare, but not that rare," while 60 mph winds "are extremely rare."

Just to be safe, we're going to  steer clear of under-construction skyscrapers on all windy days.

kvelsey@observer.com