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 Matt Chaban 2/15/12 7:30am

Best Laid Plans

(Jason Seiler)

Obama to Cities: Drop Dead—the Life and Death of a Great American Urban Policy

From his corner office on the 35th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building downtown, Adolfo Carrion could once survey much of his domain. The regional administrator for HUD Region 2, Mr. Carrion was responsible for the federal government’s housing and urban development projects in New York and New Jersey. Stretching out before the floor-to-ceiling windows is lower Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are off to the left. Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty peek out from behind the towers of downtown. Out across the harbor to the right is Jersey City and, off in the distance, Newark. Glory and destitution in one vista.

Peering down, it is easy to see a century’s worth of transformational urban development. The redbrick monoliths of the New York Housing Authority, the brainchild of Robert Moses and the WPA, abound. Idyllic towers propagated by LaGuardia, Rockefeller, Lindsay and a thousand other urban dreamers, these are the projects that deteriorated into The Projects. Ringing the Battery and over the bridges to Long Island are the FDR, the West Side Highway, the BQE and the rest of Moses’s great interstate network. After four decades, Battery Park City is nearly complete, built on the landfill dredged up by the World Trade Center. More than $20 billion in Liberty bonds is at work rebuilding the Trade Center and other pieces of lower Manhattan, ravaged on 9/11.

Yet for all this work, it is hard to recognize a marquee project, a bright shining beacon of the Obama administration on the scale of those that came before. Read More

By David Freedlander 1/31/12 9:18am

books

Tea Party members hold a Tax Day protest. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Teatime: A Wave of Books Anatomizes the Tea Party Movement

The most memorable moment from the first major Tea Party rally in front of New York’s City Hall, in April 2009, wasn’t the woman chain-smoking cigarettes by a guard rail, there, she said, to defend “smoker’s rights.” Nor was it the machismo menace that hung in the air, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs held by untrod-upon-looking junior insurance executives in for the afternoon from Glen Cove. It wasn’t even the palpable anger at Mayor Bloomberg, who (presumably) sat in his office a few feet away and, his efforts toward gun control and bike paths notwithstanding, was the only chance Republicans had of holding onto City Hall that November.

No, the most memorable moment of that afternoon was the speaker who took to the microphone and urged everyone present to put down their tricorner hats and give a round of applause to the people who had made the rally happen: the New York City Parks Department, the sanitation workers, the police guarding the barricades.

These were “the working people,” the ones lionized by this movement for the screwing they had been taking from the Obama administration and  assorted powers-that-be, but they were also government workers, their salaries and pensions paid for with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, their very existence dependent upon public largess.

In the two and a half years since that gathering, there have been hundreds like it across the country. In 2010, Tea Party protesters and their ilk not only took out the Democrats in Congress, but even managed to squelch the ambitions of a few Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative by the latest right-wing litmus test.

But by late 2011, Glenn Beck, once the Cassandra of this crowd, had been shuffled off the stage. The town hall meetings that first alerted the mainstream media to this new substrata of the body politic are now filled not with conservatives yelling at Democratic congressmen to keep their government hands off of Medicare but with liberals yelling at the Republican reps to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The debt ceiling has been raised, budgets have been passed. The likely Republican presidential nominee is as far removed from this tumult in the streets as the average CEO is from the jobs he outsourced.

Into this breach have slipped a couple of books that attempt to explain this new world we now find ourselves in. Read More

By The Editors 7:37pm

opinion

Stop SOPA and PIPA

There seems to be a growing consensus that the SOPA and PIPA may be DOA. That’s OK by us.

The recent Internet-led protest movement against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act clearly has had a profound effect on support for these chilling pieces of legislation. What’s astonishing is that the protests appear to have caught Washington by surprise. According to a report in PC World, neither supporters nor opponents of the bills “anticipated the response by Internet users.” Likewise, the rallying effect of protests led by Wikipedia, Google and other companies stunned the nation’s lawmakers.

Sadly, it is clear that Washington remains firmly entrenched in the 20th century Read More

By The Editors 11/30/11 10:30am

opinion

Gun Folly in D.C.

Republicans around the country, especially those in leadership positions in the House of Representatives, regularly deliver homilies about shrinking the federal government and giving more power back to individual states.

Those heartfelt positions, however, come with an asterisk. Republican leaders in the House may like the idea of state’s rights—but they’re not so keen about local control when states like New York decide that it’s a bad idea for people to carry concealed weapons, because, well, you just never know when a whack job might open fire on a crowded street. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 9/27/11 2:20pm

Art

25 Photos

The Rubell's forthcoming museum will be located adjacent to their hotel.

(e)merge Art Fair Strives to Stir D.C.'s Art Scene

“I’ve never done a hotel fair before,” Petra Leene, the director of Amsterdam’s Amstel Gallery told us, sitting on her bed in a room on the second floor of the Capitol Skyline Hotel, in Washington, D.C. “I thought the purpose of a hotel fair was that you slept in your room. I didn’t know!”

It Read More

By The Editors 8:00am

opinion

Mr. Schneiderman and the Banks

The Obama administration wants to reach a broad settlement with some of the nation’s banks over some sketchy foreclosure practices they have allegedly engaged in during the past few years. But New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is resisting pressure from Washington to sign on to the proposed settlement. He and several colleagues argue that the settlement would make it more difficult for them to prosecute banks suspected of wrongdoing.

Mr. Schneiderman’s position is admirable. If he believes the settlement is not in the best interests of New York consumers, he should continue to resist. Read More

By The Editors 8/02/11 7:44pm

Opening Shot

Boehner and Obama.

As the Debt Ceiling Rises, the Dow Drops

It would almost seem that the stars had finally aligned. After weeks of stalled talks and contentious meetings between House Republicans and Democrats that escalated into a public spat between Speaker John Boehner and President Obama, a bill finally made it through the House and into the Senate, where it was speedily approved Tuesday morning Read More

By The Editors 7/26/11 7:31pm

opinion

C’mon Washington, Let’s Get the Deal Done

President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner made their pitches to the American public on Monday night. Both men made valid points. Both men engaged in political posturing.

It’s time for them to stop talking to us and to engage each other in the spirit of cooperation that the President cited in his presentation. Read More