September 19th, 2012
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June 12th, 2012
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Also, here are a few direct links to recent articles of mine:
February 1st, 2012
Why the Islanders’ exhibition game in Brooklyn probably doesn’t mean they’re moving there, and why it wouldn’t do much for Brooklyn if they did:
Things have been mostly quiet on the New York Islanders arena front since their public vote for a new home in the 516 crashed and burned spectacularly last summer. That all changed yesterday afternoon, however, with the announcement that the team has scheduled an exhibition game against the Devils at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for October 2, just four days after the new home of the Brooklyn Nets (keep saying it, you’ll get used to it) gets its official inauguration by way of a concert by the team’s co-owner… [read more]
January 13th, 2012
Why oil pipelines are “job creators” but unemployment benefits aren’t. (Not yet online, either sign up for a cheap $15 one-year digital subscription or cool your heels for a month or so.)
When debate heated up in November over the Keystone XL pipeline–a 1,700-mile-long structure that would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands deposits to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast–reporters soon found themselves chasing the answer to a question: How many jobs would be lost if the pipeline didn’t happen?
Wall Street Journal senior editor Mary Anastasia O’Grady suggested on Fox News (10/28/11) that the pipeline would create “118,000 indirect jobs” from “feeding and housing all of these people who are gonna work on the pipeline,” a number that her Journal editorial board colleague Collin Levy repeated in a web item (11/7/11) accusing the Obama administration of “dithering” on the pipeline decision…
January 4th, 2012
In the latest Village Voice Education Supplement, I investigate why college is getting so crazy expensive, and what if anything can be done about it:
College tuition is, as any Occupy Wall Street demonstrator will tell you, too damn high. Average fees at public universities hit $8,244 this year, according to College Board figures, and a staggering $28,500 at private schools; add on another 13 grand if you want room and board or such fripperies as textbooks. Little wonder that State University of New York chancellor Nancy Zimpher recently warned at a White House education summit that “the general public might be reaching the tipping point” in their ability to pay for college… [read more]
December 19th, 2011
Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood has seen the city’s most dramatic increase in unemployment since the economic crash, leaping from 6.0% to 15.3%. Why has it been so especially hard hit, and what can be done to improve matters?
Three years into the Great Recession, and the dramatic rise in unemployment that began in 2008 shows little sign of abating. While the unemployment rate has eased slightly in recent weeks, much of that is the result of jobless who’ve given up even searching for work. In New York City, meanwhile, the employment news is not promising: The city’s jobless rate of 9.0 percent is unchanged from last year, now ranking higher than the national rate, and more than double what it was at the end of 2006. And the pain is not shared equally among the boroughs: Where relatively few Manhattanites are seeking work, in patches of the outer boroughs unemployment rates are well into the double digits… [read more]
November 23rd, 2011
If you’ve been sitting there wondering “What does the new baseball collective bargaining agreement mean for the Mets’ possible trade of David Wright?” then wait no longer, your prayers have been answered:
The new five-year collective bargaining agreement signed by baseball owners and players yesterday features a list of tweaks to rules big and small: Among other things, fair/foul calls can now be overruled by instant replay, teams can activate a 26th man for doubleheaders, and those shatter-prone maple bats are outlawed for all new major leaguers — meaning that one day baseball history will mark, along with “Mariano Rivera: last player to wear #42″ and “Burleigh Grimes: last player to throw a legal spitball,” someone’s name alongside “last player to legally pierce his teammate’s chest with a bat splinter.”
The big-ticket items, though, are around the June player draft and free agent compensation, which have each undergone some major refinements… [read more]
November 22nd, 2011
City Limits launches its new affiliate site The Brooklyn Bureau today, featuring two articles by yours truly at the top. The main feature is a look at downtown Brooklyn redevelopment seven years after a controversial rezoning, which can charitably be termed a work in progress:
Joe Chan had every reason to be confident. The former aide to deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, newly installed in 2006 as head of the business-run Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, had just watched as the Bloomberg administration pushed through a rezoning of a 22-block stretch of downtown Brooklyn intended to convert the once-sleepy government office and discount shopping district into a third central business district to complement midtown and downtown Manhattan. Already, developers had announced plans for several mixed-use towers to complement the existing MetroTech complex that opened in the early 1990s. As Chan told a reporter at the time, his mission was clear: “If our views are obscured, we’ll know we’ve done a good job.”
Seven years after the City Council approved the rezoning, the downtown Brooklyn skyline and streetscape alike have indeed changed, though not exactly in the way that Chan or his former bosses had envisioned… [read more]
Meanwhile, an accompanying sidebar takes a closer look at some of the shopkeepers who have been displaced by the changes to their neighborhood:
When the city approved an ambitious rezoning of downtown Brooklyn in 2004, Yaakov “Jack” Fuzailov didn’t think it would negatively affect his barbershop on the corner of Bridge Street and Willoughby Avenue. After all, he figured, he had a five-year lease and a verbal promise from his landlord of a five-year renewal. Even when construction for a new subway underpass tore up the streets in front of his shop, he struggled through, waiting for the day when his customers could return. “I was working for free, because I thought I could build a future,” he says. “Thinking that it will be better tomorrow.”… [read more]
November 7th, 2011
Remember last Friday’s New York Times front-page story on how poverty rates aren’t as bad as we’d feared? Today the Census released the figures behind that piece, and it turns out even where the Times was right, it still missed the point:
If you’ve been trying to follow the debate over the new measure of poverty released by the Census Bureau this morning, you’re probably completely confused by now. So far in the last few days we’ve seen:
- On Friday morning, the front page of The New York Times offered up the Census data as a ray of sunshine amid the economic gloom: “Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say,” read the headline, with the accompanying story—by longtime Times poverty reporter Jason DeParle and two others—noting that the Census’ new Supplemental Poverty Measure would likely make half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappear… [read more]
October 18th, 2011
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long insisted on reserving the right to require childless food stamp applicants to work for their benefits — even turning down the offer of a federal hardship waiver that 46 states have been granted. And now, according to interviews with poor New Yorkers and their legal advocates, he’s apparently putting that threat into practice:
When Brownsville resident Robert Rodriguez went to the city’s Pine Street food stamp center in East New York last month to recertify his eligibility for food aid, he was brought up short by what he saw in the waiting room.
“There’s a big sign in there telling everybody they gonna have to start working for the food stamps,” he recalls. “Last time I noticed, you had to work if you get cash money, but I never knew no shit about no food stamps.”
It’s a story that is increasingly being repeated among the city’s 1.8 million people receiving food stamps: With no public announcement, the city has begun requiring them to either prove that they hold down jobs, or enroll in city work programs — and face having their benefits cut off if they don’t comply… [read more]
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