As New York City’s unemployment rate continues to climb above 10 percent, proposed spending cuts by both Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg are threatening to make life tougher for anyone who depends on government programs for food, cash grants or job training.

Potentially hardest hit: the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries. Emergency food providers had already seen the state’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program – which provides about $30 million a year to New York’s food banks – sliced by $2.3 million in mid-year budget cuts last year; Paterson is now proposing $1.2 million in additional cuts for 2010… [read more]

See also my budget overview article, and my colleagues Helen Zelon and Eileen Markey’s articles on education and housing cuts, respectively.

Economists say the nation’s recession is technically over, but whether or not the economy is actually on the mend, the recession’s impact on New York City and state budgets is only just beginning. Over the last three months, Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have mapped out a set of austerity budgets that would slash billions in spending – with many of the reductions coming from education and social services.

This year marks a watershed for both City Hall and Albany, but for different reasons, says James Parrott, chief economist at the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, which earlier this month issued extensive briefings on both the state and city budgets… [read more]

In what’s becoming a bit of a Coney Island tradition, City Hall officials shlepped out to Brooklyn in a slushstorm today to make the long-rumored announcement that the Italian firm Zamperla has been tapped to open a new amusement park in Coney to replace the dearly departed Astroland. Actually, two new amusement parks: Luna Park (named in part to honor the classic Coney park that burned down in 1946, in part because that’s what they’re all called in Italy) will open on the old Astroland site this summer, and the less-historically-monikered “Scream Zone” will follow in 2011.[read more]

What this means for you, the reader, is lots more articles like these, running on City Limits’ now-daily-updated website. (Did I mention the new website?) I’ll still be writing for the Voice and elsewhere, and will still be posting links here and via Twitter, for those of you who prefer your news to come to you, rather than having to hunt it down and kill it.

I’ll be assigning out some articles as well, so if you’re a journalist with a great story about the lives of (and city services for) low-income New Yorkers, drop me a line.

As Haiti continues to dig out from the earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, local microlenders are gearing up to begin rebuilding the country’s shattered economy.

International aid groups have been “focusing on supplying food and shelter,” says Daniel Jean-Louis, a business professor at the State University of Haiti and Quisqueya University who also works as a consultant for local business groups in Port-au-Prince. “Nobody has talked yet about businesses resuming and people getting back to work.”… [read more]

The sweeping bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that moved through Congress over the last year received relatively scant media attention, taking a distant back seat to the healthcare reform bill and its attendant public uproar. And, much like the healthcare debate (Extra!, 10/09), coverage of climate-change legislation ended up obscuring the issues as much as it explained them, viewing a Democratic compromise bill through the lens of right-wing and corporate criticism, while marginalizing progressive critics who said the legislation was insufficient to the task at hand…. [read more]

Normally, the Tampa Bay Rays complaining that their home stadium is a dump wouldn’t be news here in New York, given that 1) people have been complaining about Tropicana Field since before the Rays even debuted there in 1998 and 2) the Rays only enter New Yorkers’ radar in the odd seasons when they threaten to break through the Yanks-Sox oligarchy in the A.L. East.

All that changed this week, however, when Peter Gammons, former star of ESPN and the $20 bill, mentioned in his MLB.com column that “there are smart people in the Major League Baseball offices wondering if there’s hope of even discussing a potential move of the Rays to New Jersey or Southern Connecticut over certain protests from the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Phillies.”… [read more]

The saga of the last surviving Brooklyn ballpark wall just keeps getting murkier and murkier. The latest news: Con Ed, which since the 1920s has owned the Gowanus property that once was a series of ballparks named Washington Park, tells the Voice that it is going to tear down part of the brick wall that runs along Third Avenue — but debate still rages over whether that section is a historic baseball artifact or just, you know, a wall… [read more]

I’d say more, but the letters in response really say it all.

What’s missing, so far at least, is outrage at this. There has been no Jack Cafferty moment, no news reporters looking at the horrors and wondering how, in our modern world, this can still happen.

I know the reason, of course. The cry during Katrina was “How can this happen in the United States?” and, of course, Haiti isn’t in the United States. It’s in the Third World, where, presumably, in the American mind this sort of stuff is acceptable — the corollary of “How can this happen here?” of course, is “This is supposed to happen there!” But it’s still odd when you think about it that compassion, at least of the “We should prevent this” type as opposed to the “We should send $20 to the Red Cross” type, stops at national borders, especially when you consider that Port-au-Prince is only slightly further from my home in Brooklyn than New Orleans is — not to mention that there are way more Haitians in my immediate neighborhood than Louisianans.

Which brings me to the other media omission: Despite all the focus on Haiti’s crushing poverty, I haven’t yet seen many reporters wondering how it got to be that way. It’s a complicated historical issue, obviously, but no one (outside of Canada, anyway) has even asked the question — not even bringing in a Haiti development expert (and lord knows there are plenty) to explain why it is that the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is relatively richer and more resilient to disasters than its neighbor to the west. The closest I’ve seen so far is a brief aside in the ABC News article linked above, citing Cuba for its “very good emergency management infrastructure,” without investigating why that might be the case.

Now, maybe it’s just too early for the media to turn its attention to this topic — maybe by the weekend, we’ll have tons of articles exploring Haitian history and North-South economic relations and racism and the differing features of Spanish and French colonialism. But somehow I’m not holding my breath.