Neil deMause: The Website

With the city council set to vote on the rezoning of Coney Island this week, I try to boil the issue down to 350 words:

On Wednesday, after a five-year battle that’s included everything from “giant rat” exhibits to protesters dressed as Norse gods carrying mermaid tails, the City Council will finally vote on a redevelopment plan for Coney Island. Since rezoning proposals don’t generally top most people’s summer reading lists, here are answers to some questions about the Battle of Coney… [read more]

More New Yorkers are struggling, but good luck getting info from the city on how to get help:

When Judith Rubinstein was named NY1’s “New Yorker of the Week” recently, she was immediately deluged with 70 phone messages. They weren’t congratulations — that’s what Facebook is for — but rather viewers calling for the help that her organization Connecting To Advantages provides in accessing public benefits, from tax rebates to food stamps.

The callers ran the gamut, from seniors needing help with utilities to laid-off middle-class workers with mortgages and no way to pay them. “And a 19-year-old with a baby,” Rubinstein recalls, “who said, ‘I went to the food stamp office, and they said they couldn’t help me until I was 22, but I was sure they were wrong.’ And in fact, they were wrong.”… [read more]

Why we need a public health insurance option, in 360 words or less:

When my friend was laid off recently, she was happy to learn that, thanks to Obama’s stimulus package, she’d get to keep her family health insurance at a cost of $330 a month.

OK, maybe “happy” is pushing it… [read more]

Some historical perspective on why the time may be right to cut bait on some big New York development projects:

When the state Senate — back when we had a functioning state Senate — held hearings on Brooklyn’s beleaguered Atlantic Yards project last month, angry construction workers packed the hall to decry the delays that have plagued the plan since developer Bruce Ratner first floated it nearly six years ago. “Build it now!” they chanted. “No more hearings!”

After a week in which more bits continued to flake off of Ratner’s mega project — architect Frank Gehry was ignominiously axed as too expensive, and the initial “Jobs, Housing and Hoops” plan has now been whittled down to, I believe, an $800 million Nets arena and a pair of souvlaki carts — some folks are moaning that we’re seeing a return to the Dark Ages when nothing could get built in the city… [read more]

In the wake of the Prop 8 ruling, could the Beyond Marriage movement provide a solution?

Only in America could we take a battle around love and sex and family and turn it into a debate on parliamentary procedure. But there it was: Minutes after California’s Supreme Court upheld the anti-gay-marriage Prop 8, someone popped up on my TV proclaiming: “The real issue here is whether voter referendums should be able to overturn the rights of minorities!”

Um, no. No offense to constitutional scholars, but it seems like the real issue is about two things: acceptance and rights… [read more]

I tackle the plague of stores closing their doors and what can be done about it. (Once again, not my headline; “shuttered stores” are already beyond help…)

Now that tent cities are out of fashion — or at least consigned to unfashionable places like Sacramento — the surest sign of hard times is shuttered stores. There are the glaring examples, like the Union Square building that chose as its anchor tenants Virgin Megastore and Circuit City (whoops!), but the rows of rolled-down gates are visible in every neighborhood: Entire blogs are now devoted to chronicling the devastation, and wondering where to turn for their free-WiFi fix… [read more]

My biweekly sojourn in Metro addresses the hair-trigger panic that seems to be gripping us (and if Krugman is to be believed, probably isn’t going away on its own any too soon):

The Defense Department bright lights who decided to swoop Air Force One low over Manhattan last week, it’s now clear, did us all a favor: By panicking an entire city about the prospect of another 9/11, they gave us a welcome respite from panicking about swine flu.

Panic, in fact, is the default mode these days, whether what’s setting it off is the threat of global pandemic or merely of our car warranties not being honored… [read more]

More on what those empty seats at Mets and Yankees games mean:

I went to a Mets game last week, and speaking as a Yankee fan, I have to admit that in the battle of the ballparks, the Mets won. Citi Field is far from perfect, but at least it feels like you’re at a baseball park — unlike the new Yankee Stadium, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a new Marriott with a really garish big-screen TV in the lobby.

What I noticed most, though, was something I’d never seen at a baseball game: The upper deck was packed to the gills, while the acres of hyper-pricey seats down below were half-empty… [read more]

A look at some of the reasons the jobless report are blocking them from finding jobs that will lift them out of poverty:

Say you’re a New Yorker, and you’re poor. You’re hardly alone: The latest figures show that close to one in four people in this city live without enough cash to afford basic needs, and it’s only likely to get worse as “finding a job” begins to seem like a relic of a quaint era, like buggy whips or analog cell phones.

So what, then, does it take to get yourself back on your feet, and why are so many people unable to do so? In a report last week by the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, the jobless gave some answers… [read more]

I’ve been wondering about how to reconcile the need for consumer spending to save the economy and the need to stop buying so much useless crap for a while now, and wondering where I’d find a guru to make sense of it for me. Finally, I found a spiritual leader of one kind:

It’s not an easy time to be an American consumer. At every turn, we’re told that our free-spending ways have brought us to the brink of economic disaster. And now that we’re again hiding money in our mattresses, what’s the solution? As Uncle Sam ordered from the cover of last week’s Newsweek: “I Want YOU To Start Spending!”

Fortunately, the Rev. Billy has a way out… [read more]