Just got back from filming/taping a half-hour appearance on the TV/radio show Democracy Now! about the new Yankees stadium - U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Good Jobs New York director Bettina Damiani were on hand as well, but I got to throw in a few soundbites about how much it will all cost the public. You can watch/listen to the proceeding via the Democracy Now! website here.
When the New York City Department of Education announced last fall that it would start admitting schoolkids to gifted and talented classes solely on the basis of standardized tests, it said the new system would be fairer to all. Initial reports show it isn’t exactly working out that way:
Brooklyn mom Natalie Barratt had a bad feeling when her four-year-old son Luke Serrano emerged from his February testing session for admittance to the city schools’ gifted and talented programs. “The teacher who had administered the test wasn’t clear if he’d finished the test,” she recalls. After weeks of phone calls with the Department of Education, she had Luke retested. His score this time: an 89, one point too low for acceptance into a G&T kindergarten class. For want of a single correct answer, Luke was officially non-gifted.
In past years, this would have been just one setback in the tangled swirl of bureaucracy and arm-twisting that is commonplace in navigating the city’s Department of Education. This year, however, is different… [read more]
What do ocean trawling and mass transit have in common? unintended consequences.
There’s a word for it in the fishing world: “bycatch.” That’s the unfortunate tendency, when you’re trying to net one type of seafood — say, shrimp — to end up hauling in a lot of stuff you didn’t want or need — crabs, tuna, sea turtles, a Cousteau to be named later. It’s why eating wild-caught shrimp is considered the ecological equivalent of driving your SUV across the Alaskan tundra with the air conditioning on.
It’s also useful for understanding what the MTA faces in figuring how to raise bus and subway fares by 8 percent next year, to make up for the crash in tax revenues resulting from the popping of the real estate bubble… [read more]
There’s nothing more exciting than a new formula for calculating the poverty rate! Or at least so says New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who last week became the latest to put forth his own ideas (okay, actually those of Mark Levitan, a longtime NYC policy analyst) for revamping the poverty line. And there’s even a chance it’ll end up making a difference in policy towards the poor. Kinda. Maybe.
The new poverty measure unveiled by city officials at the recent NAACP convention presents New York City with a yardstick not just to count the city’s poor, but also to gauge the effect of anti-poverty measures and gain new perspective on New York’s residents – including the realization that poverty among the elderly and the employed is significantly worse than previously recognized.
The question now, say both city officials and poverty experts, is how the new statistic will be incorporated into city policies… [read more]
More on the great Brooklyn supermarket showdown, this time with more thoughts on what the conflict means for hopes of a livable city:
The scene on Fort Greene’s Myrtle Avenue on Thursday was certainly bursting with cheap irony: John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket czar and likely 2009 mayoral candidate, being protested by local residents for taking away their only neighborhood supermarket. Catsimatidis, you see, is also a developer, and had torn down a strip of stores including an Associated (no relation to Catsimatidis’ Gristede’s chain) to make way for condo towers. Two years later, the site is still an empty lot; to add insult to injury, the demonstrators charged, the builder is now backing away from promises that the new buildings would include affordable housing.
If you live in one of the city’s supermarket-enriched zones, this might seem amusing — crying over Penn Station or Yankee Stadium is one thing, but an Associated?… [read more]
A flurry of recent media appearances for me, none of it, oddly, connected with this past week’s Yankee Stadium All-Star Game media frenzy:
I report from downtown Brooklyn on the supermarket king who tore down a neighborhood’s only supermarket to make way for luxury condos. (Also: pictures of cute kids!)
It’s undoubtedly not how John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Gristede’s owner and rumored 2009 mayoral candidate, would have liked his bespectacled, slightly pudgy face get public recognition: aloft on a pole held by a Brooklyn pre-teen, beneath the words “SHAME ON YOU!!”
The occasion was a protest by Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), the Brooklyn-based low-income group, over a much-delayed development project that Catsimatidis has in the works on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene… [read more]
In part two of my debunking of overinflated economic impact studies, I examine the claims that New York City will see an influx of tourist spending as a result of the “Waterfalls” public art exhibit:
I was riding the B train across the Manhattan Bridge recently when an especially civic-minded conductor thought to point out Olafur Eliasson’s “Waterfalls” art installations visible out either window. One passenger near me got up to take a peek, then sat back down, shaking her head: “It looks like the Brooklyn Bridge sprung a leak.”
That seems the popular verdict on the $15 million project (mostly funded by private donations, though the joint city-state-run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation kicked in $2 million): This is a waterfall?… [read more]
I’ve been digging into claims of economic windfalls from sporting events for quite a while, so why quit now? Today, I investigate New York City’s claims that the All-Star Game will generate $148 million for the local economy, this time with the help of an eminent tourism expert:
Don’t be so sure, says John Crompton, author of a 2006 paper detailing what he calls “mischievous procedures” in economic impact studies that reflect their genesis as more PR documents than scientific treatises. “The All-Star Game, there’s no question people will come to town for that,” he says. Nonetheless, he questions how many of the “new” visitors will merely displace existing tourists who’ll avoid New York because the hotels are full during All-Star week: “If there was no All-Star Game, would those hotels still be at 80% [capacity]? If the answer is yes, then you haven’t added to the economic impact, you have merely displaced some other folks who would have come if there was no game.”
The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is hideously behind schedule, but the bigger problem is what the city will end up with when it’s finally done:
Last week’s Port Authority report on progress (or lack thereof) at ground zero was a great moment for fans of political schadenfreude, with news of how virtually every aspect of the rebuilding is a shambles, with the new PATH station and 9/11 memorial massively behind schedule, and the whole project more than a billion dollars over budget. Meanwhile, the Cortlandt Street IRT station turns out to be inconveniently located mere inches from where two new skyscrapers are set to be built — who knew?[read more]
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