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Javier E

Half of NYC Households Can't Afford to Live Here, Report Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...affordable-housing-nyc.html

nyc cost of living housing

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • A full half of the city’s households did not have enough money to comfortably hold down an apartment, access sufficient food and basic health care, and get around, the report said
  • Public officials have been particularly alarmed by a significant drop in public school enrollment, which accelerated during the worst of the pandemic and is driven in part by Black families leaving the city over concerns about the cost of living
  • The study found that New Yorkers are even worse off than after the nadir of the pandemic. The groups’ 2021 report found that just over a third of city households could not keep up with the cost of living at the time, a figure that has since risen
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  • Households in all five boroughs needed to be pulling in at least $100,000 to afford housing, food and transportation, and to have a shot at being able to plan for the future
  • In southern Manhattan, home to some of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country, families with two adults and two children needed to make at least $150,000 combined
  • The actual median household income in the city was hovering around $70,000
  • a considerable majority of households that could not keep up with the cost of living — 80 percent — had at least one working adult, and more than half of New Yorkers who could not make ends meet had a college degree or some college credit, if not a graduate degree.
  • The affordability crisis is particularly urgent for nonwhite New Yorkers, the study found. Latino, Black and immigrant New Yorkers were bearing the brunt of the affordability crisis, and residents of the central Bronx had the highest rates of economic instability.
  • And more than 85 percent of households where single mothers were taking care of young children were unable to keep up with the cost of living
ethanshilling

Richard Carranza Will Resign as N.Y.C. Schools Chancellor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hard-carranza-nyc-schools.html

US new york schools

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Richard A. Carranza will resign as chancellor of New York City’s public school system, the nation’s largest, in March, city officials announced Friday.
  • The abrupt move comes after disagreements between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr. Carranza over school desegregation policy reached a breaking point in recent weeks.
  • He will be replaced by Meisha Porter, a longtime city educator and current Bronx superintendent who will become the first Black woman to lead the sprawling system, which has over 1 million students and 1,800 schools.
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  • Mr. Carranza did not have a signature initiative, and he was not able to usher through major desegregation policy, despite his bold declarations.
  • Mr. Carranza’s announcement follows years of tension between the chancellor and the mayor involving who had the final say over major education decisions.
  • The two men repeatedly clashed over school desegregation policy in particular.
  • Mr. Carranza vowed from his first day as chancellor to tackle entrenched segregation in the city’s schools, while the mayor has largely avoided even using the word. New York is home to one of the most segregated public school districts in the nation
  • Mr. Carranza is the second senior cabinet member to leave Mr. de Blasio’s administration during the pandemic; health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned last August. She, too, feuded with the mayor over his decision-making process and said she felt increasingly marginalized.
  • In June 2018, the mayor and chancellor announced a plan to get rid of the selective admissions exam that dictates entry into the city’s elite high schools, including Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science.
  • Black and Latino students are extremely underrepresented in those schools, and low-income Asian-American children are overrepresented.
  • The pandemic, however, forced the mayor to announce some changes to selective admissions policies late last year, including abolishing a rule that gave students in some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods first dibs at selective high schools there
  • Earlier this week, the chancellor encouraged families to refuse standardized testing this year, after President Biden’s administration said states would have to give exams amid the pandemic.
  • Still, the reopening effort has been extraordinarily complex and fraught with logistical issues.The mayor closed all schools in November as virus cases rose, then reopened only elementary schools in December.
Javier E

The Cascading Complexity Of Diversity - The Weekly Dish - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...cading-complexity-of-diversity

violence silence gop future conservatism equity demographics anti-racism goals

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • the News Guild of New York — the union that represents 1200 New York Times employees — recently set out its goals for the newspaper, especially with respect to its employees of color. Money quote: “Our workforce should reflect our home. The Times should set a goal to have its workforce demographics reflect the make-up of the city — 24 percent Black, and over 50 percent people of color — by 2025.”
  • what I want to focus on is the core test the Guild uses to judge whether the Times is itself a racist institution. This is what I’ll call the Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?
  • systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.
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  • The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple
  • On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 - 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population. 
  • But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group
  • notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing.
  • We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean
  • Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be
  • Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews
  • 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic.
  • Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.
  • It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx.
  • My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself
  • Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations
  • It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented? 
  • that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity?
  • take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up? 
  • The more you think about it, the more absurdly utopian the Kendi project turns out to be. That’s because its core assumption is that any demographic discrepancies between a profession or institution and its locale are entirely a function of oppression.
  • That’s how Kendi explains racial inequality in America, and specifically denies any alternative explanation.
  • So how is it that a white supremacist country has whites earning considerably less on average than Asian-Americans? How does Kendi explain the fact that the most successful minority group in America are Indian-Americans — with a median income nearly twice that of the national median?
  • Here’s a partial list of the national origins of US citizens whose median earnings are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese.
  • But it is absurd to argue that racism is the sole reason for every racial difference in outcome in the extraordinarily diverse and constantly shifting racial demographics of New York City or the US
  • It’s true, of course, that historical injustices have deeply hurt African-Americans in particular in hobbling opportunity, which is why African-Americans who are descendants of slaves should be treated as an entirely separate case from all other racial categories. No other group has experienced anything like the toll of slavery, segregation and brutality that African-Americans have. This discrimination was enforced by the state and so the state has an obligation to make things right. 
  • You can argue that these groups are immigrants and self-selecting for those with higher IQs, education, motivation, and drive. It’s true. But notice that this argument cannot be deployed under the Kendi test: any inequality is a result of racism, remember?
  • In fact, to reduce all this complexity to a quick, crude check of race and sex to identify your fellow American is a kind of new racism itself.
  • It has taken off because we find it so easy to slip back into crude generalizations.
  • for all those reasons, attempting to categorize people in the crudest racial terms, and social engineering them into a just society where every institution looks like every other one, is such a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s a brutal, toxic, racist template being imposed on a dazzling varied and constantly shifting country.
  • this explicit reintroduction of crude racism under the guise of antiracism is already happening. How many institutions will it tear apart, and how much racial resentment will it foment, before it’s done? 
  • this cannot mean a return to the status quo ante. That would ignore the lessons of the 21st century — that neoconservatism’s desire to rule the world is a fantasy, and that zombie Reagonomics has been rendered irrelevant by its own success and unintended failures
  • What the right needs to do, quite simply, is to seize the mantle of cultural conservatism while moving sharply left on economics.
  • Here’s the gist of a platform I think could work. The GOP should drop the tax cut fixation, raise taxes on the wealthy, and experiment with UBI
  • It needs a workable healthcare policy which can insure everyone in the country, on Obamacare private sector lines. (Yes, get the fuck over Obamacare. It’s the most conservative way to achieve universal access to healthcare we have.
  • It has to promote an agenda of lower immigration as a boon to both successful racial integration and to raising working class wages.
  • It needs finally to acknowledge the reality of climate change and join the debate about how, rather than whether, to tackle it.
  • It has to figure out a China policy that is both protective of some US industries and firm on human rights.
  • It needs to protect religious freedom against the incursions of the cultural left.
  • And it needs to become a place where normie culture can live and thrive, where acknowledgment of America’s past failures doesn’t exclude pride in America’s great successes, and where the English language can still be plainly used.
  • No big need to change on judges (except finding qualified ones); and no reason either to lurch back to worrying about deficits in the current low-inflation environment.
  • I believe this right-of-center pragmatism has a great future. It was the core message behind the British Tories’ remarkable success in the 2019 election
  • The trouble, of course, is that GOP elites would have a hell of a time achieving this set of policies with its current membership. Damon Linker has a terrific piece about the problem of Republican voters most of whom “remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better.”
  • I see no reason why someone else couldn’t shift it yet again — not back to pre-Trump but forward to a new fusion of nationalist realism, populist economics, and cultural conservatism. By cultural conservatism I don’t mean another round of the culture wars — but a defense of pride in one’s country, respect for tradition, and social stability. There is also, I suspect, a suppressed but real desire for the normality and calmness that Trump has eviscerated.
  • What I was trying to argue is that the roots of critical theory are fundamentally atheist, are very much concerned with this world alone, and have no place for mercy or redemption or the individual soul.
  • Christians who think they can simply adopt both are being somewhat naive. And yes, I feel the same way about “liberation theology” as well, however sympathetic the Pope now is.
  • It seems to me the logical outcome of a broad application of critical theory will be a wider revival of white supremacy. Where there’s no possibility of redemption, resistance becomes inevitable.
brookegoodman

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Has Park Basketball Hoops Removed During Quarantine | Bleacher... - 0 views

bleacherreport.com/...oops-removed-during-quarantine

crisis us culture

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday the city will remove basketball hoops at parks where pick-up games continued despite social-distancing guidelines as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. 
  • Eric Levenson of CNN reported New York City has become the "epicenter" of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States for a multitude of reasons, including its high density of residents and the significant tourism levels that likely brought the coronavirus to NYC before other American cities.
  • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines suggesting people remain at least six feet away from each other in order to reduce the spread of the disease.
bluekoenig

The lost neighborhood under New York's Central Park - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture centralpark nyc

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    Under New York City's Central Park sits a neighborhood previously inhabited by an African American community after the abolition of slavery in New York. Seneca Village was created after former slaves were made uncomfortable or cast out of what was NYC at the time. Over time, it became very populated, becoming one of the first integrated communities with Irish immigrants moving in, sharing a similar goal of finding a new way of life. In 1853, however, the idea and plans for Central Park were proposed by the NYC elites who wanted something like Kensington Park for their own city, right overtop of Seneca Village and other homes. The cities newspapers portrayed Seneca Village as a no man's land filled with dirty people in shacks and huts living off the land, unimportant and easily removed, before forcing people out of their homes and leveling everything into a park. A recent archeological dig unearthed a rich history revealing it wasn't a shanty town but a rich middle-class community of educated and even rich individuals. Many fought to keep their property but due to their skin color they were entirely disregarded and forced out by the end of the summer.
hannahcarter11

Crowded N.Y.C. Jails Stoke Covid Fears: 'It's a Ticking Time Bomb' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-jail-covid.html

fears inmates

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A year later, jails are more crowded than they were when the pandemic began. And there has been an increase in infections in recent months that could pose a public health risk even beyond the jail walls.
  • About three-quarters of the people being held have not been convicted. Many are awaiting trial much longer than usual, as the court system continues to operate at a near standstill during the pandemic.
  • In lawsuits, prisoners and guards alike have called the living conditions inside unsanitary and dangerous.
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  • Those behind bars are at high risk for contracting and spreading the virus, and correctional facilities have been home to some of the largest outbreaks nationally. Often, those outbreaks have spread into the community at large, as people shuttle in and out of detention. Few of those being detained in New York have been offered vaccines.
  • Data kept by Correctional Health Services, which oversees care in jails, shows that infections and exposures in the jails crept up during January and February to their highest levels since last spring.
  • The Department of Correction said that there were not widespread or systemic shortages of soap or other sanitary materials, and that staff members are subject to discipline for not wearing masks.
  • In the earliest months of the pandemic, public defenders and local officials, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, pushed for city prosecutors and state courts to release the most vulnerable populations from behind bars and introduced an early release program for people being held on a jail sentence of one year or less.
  • But none of the measures that the city took to release people were implemented on a continuing basis and the jails population began to grow anew in the summer.
  • udges have also set bail and remanded people to pretrial detention in violent felony cases — which are not part of the state bail reform law — at higher rates than before the pandemic, according to a forthcoming report from the center. Alternatives to jail are being used less often. Public defenders said attempts to secure the release of people at high risk for contracting the virus have fallen short in recent months.
  • Arrests for violent offenses, including for charges related to the city’s increase in gun crime, have also contributed to the rise, city officials say.
  • Once people are in jail, they are at the mercy of a court system operating in slow motion. People are spending an average of almost three months more in jail than they did before the pandemic, city data shows.
  • Doctors say the court delays have a direct effect on the mental health of those inside.
  • The uncertainty “leaves people feeling less in control and potentially even more hopeless,”
aidenborst

Ranked choice voting: Why the process could take weeks to deliver New York City primary... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics history crisis Culture policy election Midterm New-York

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Democrats running for New York City mayor will square off in a crucial debate Wednesday night, but they won't just be trying to convince voters that they're the best candidate for the job -- being someone's second, third, fourth or even fifth favorite could be almost as good.
  • Unlike past elections, Big Apple voters will pick their party nominees for mayor on June 22 using ranked-choice voting, and it could take weeks to determine the winners.
  • This will be the first time voters will be able to rank their top five choices in order of preference for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council instead of selecting just one candidate for each spot.
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  • As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.
  • To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.
  • The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)
  • "In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.
  • While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.
  • Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.
  • Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.
  • In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.
  • In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."
  • "Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."
  • Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."
  • "We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"
  • "I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."
lmunch

Opinion: What makes Andrew Yang appealing to New Yorkers? - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Yang NYC Politics trump Culture

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • There is something about Andrew Yang that makes him the candidate to beat in New York City's mayoral race. With less than two months to go before the Democratic primary on June 22, Yang continues to outpace his many rivals in a notoriously tough city.
  • Yang, who had a brief stint in corporate law, has more substantial experience in business. He worked for a number of start-ups, headed an education company and in 2011, founded the non-profit organization Venture for America in an attempt to create jobs and bring high-tech work to cities that were suffering from the Great Recession. While the Obama administration listed him as one of the 500 "Champions of Change" and a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship," Venture for America so far has failed to meet its own goal of creating 100,000 jobs by 2025.
  • But Yang has gained traction by pushing unconventional ideas like a universal basic income. His presidential bid centered around his proposal to offer $1,000 a month to everyone over 18 — a policy he has reworked and narrowed significantly to try to tackle extreme poverty in New York. He has also proposed the Big Apple Corps, an initiative in New York that would hire 10,000 aspiring college graduates to tutor 100,000 public school students.
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  • Some critics compare him to Donald Trump in 2016, given his outsider status and lack of experience. They see a candidate who thrives on incessant media coverage rather than substance. One can imagine a future debate in which an opponent might turn to him, borrow a line from Walter Mondale in the 1984 Democratic debates, and ask: "Where's the beef?"
rerobinson03

Fight Over Closing Schools Reignites as N.Y.C. Positive Rate Tops 9% - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hool-closings-coronavirus.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 06 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Those concerns have intensified in recent days, as the United Federation of Teachers warned the city that it believed all schools should close if the positivity rate reached a certain threshold.
  • But in a repeat of a battle that has played out frequently over the few months, the mayor’s office has said it is determined to keep schools open.
  • And more than 100 schools were closed for a mandatory quarantine because of virus cases as of Tuesday.
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  • Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo appeared to support Mayor Bill de Blasio in his desire to keep schools open, announcing on Monday that the state would not stick with its plan to close schools if the positivity rate hit 9 percent by the state’s metrics, and would instead leave the decision to local leaders.
  • But the teachers’ union quickly poured cold water on that plan by saying it wanted schools closed if the city hit the 9 percent state mark.
  • As the virus has spread in the broader New York City community — and a rapidly rising number of schools have been closed when two or more positive cases emerged in the building, and no link could be established between them — the Department of Education decided to change its quarantine policy.
  • The change is most likely intended to prevent the situation the city found itself in last month, when as many as 201 school buildings were closed for two weeks at one point. The students in the 103 schools that are temporarily closed are learning remotely.
  • One faction of the United Federation of Teachers called on the union and the city to immediately close all schools for in-person learning, rather than waiting to see if the numbers worsen. “Too many students, families and staff will become sick,” if schools remain open, U.F.T. Solidarity, a left-leaning caucus within the union, said in a recent statement.
osichukwuocha

N.Y.C. Will Close Schools and Businesses in Areas Hard-Hit by Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-covid-shutdown-zip-codes.html

new york businesses crisis culture economics

shared by osichukwuocha on 04 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • For many weeks, public health officials had expressed concern that a second wave of the coronavirus would hit New York City, which until recently had achieved striking success in beating back the outbreak after a devastating spring that left more than 20,000 residents dead.
  • under the new restrictions, Mr. de Blasio would close all schools — public and private — in nine of the city’s 146 ZIP codes
  • as well as all nonessential businesses. Indoor and outdoor dining in restaurants in those areas will not be allowed.
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  • Those areas all have had positivity rates in recent days of more than 3 percent — and some as high as 8 percent — in contrast to the city’s overall rate of about 1.5 percent.
  • The new restrictions come just days after the city’s system, which has about 1,800 public schools, fully reopened.
  • And last month, the city ordered two yeshivas to close after coronavirus cases were detected. Some people in the Orthodox community, which includes several Hasidic groups, have privately raised concerns about social distancing and mask compliance in yeshiva buildings.
  • The restrictions would last for two to four weeks, if not longer, depending on the success of efforts to curb the virus, the mayor said.
  • We’re obviously going to watch carefully to see if people moving around from community to community is having an effect,”
  • “Shutdowns are tricky, and targeted ones have shown both pros and cons,” Dr. Popescu said. “The hard part is really communicating with people so that you’re not pushing them to seek resources outside that affected area and potentially just pushing that ring further.”
  • Local governments have not done an effective job of enforcement in these hot spot ZIP codes,” Mr. Cuomo said.
  • Local leaders said that surge was driven by denialism, wishful thinking around herd immunity and misinformation spread by President Trump, who in 2016 carried some precincts in these neighborhoods with more than 80 percent of the vote.
  • This is a community where a lot of people believe they have already had the virus, a lot of people believe they have herd immunity, so they really believe they don’t need to get tested,” Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein of Brooklyn said last month. “That is why it is so important to communicate with people on the ground.”
  • I don’t want to stay home, I have bills to take care of,” Ms. Camara said. “How am I going to pay my rent or afford food?
Javier E

For Obama's Second Term, Start Here - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bamas-new-term-start-here.html

inequality poverty children policy education

shared by Javier E on 25 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Since President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” the United States has spent some $16 trillion or more on means-tested programs. Yet the proportion of Americans living beneath the poverty line, 15 percent, is higher than in the late 1960s in the Johnson administration.
  • What accounts for the cycles of poverty that leave so many people mired in the margins, and how can we break these cycles? Some depressing clues emerge from a new book, “Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance,” by Susan Neuman and Donna Celano.
  • there’s a difference in parenting strategies, the writers say. Upper-middle-class parents in America increasingly engage in competitive child-rearing. Parents send preschoolers to art classes and violin lessons and read “Harry Potter” books to bewildered children who don’t yet know what a wizard is.
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  • Meanwhile, partly by necessity, working-class families often take a more hands-off attitude to child-raising.
  • some of the most cost-effective antipoverty programs are aimed at the earliest years. For example, the Nurse-Family Partnership has a home-visitation program that encourages new parents of at-risk children to amp up the hugging, talking and reading. It ends at age 2, yet randomized trials show that those children are less likely to be arrested as teenagers and the families require much less government assistance.
  • Or take Head Start. Critics have noted that the advantage its preschoolers gain in test scores fades by third grade, but scholars also have found that Head Start has important impacts on graduates, including lessening the chance that they will be convicted of a crime years later.
  • James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that the most crucial investments we as a country can make are in the first five years of life, and that they pay for themselves. Yet these kinds of initiatives are underfinanced and serve only a tiny fraction of children in need.
Javier E

Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-marijuana-arrest-policy.html

drugs crime police arrests

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 12 - Cached
  • The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.
  • Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose Police Department made about 50,000 arrests last year for low-level marijuana possession, said the governor’s proposal “strikes the right balance” in part because it would still allow the police to arrest people who smoke marijuana in public.
  • The governor’s announcement was cheered by lawmakers from minority neighborhoods as well as by civil rights groups, who are increasingly looking to Albany and to Washington in an effort to rein in what they see as overly aggressive tactics on the part of the Bloomberg administration.
Javier E

USNS Comfort Hospital Ship Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 3 Patients. - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-coronavirus-usns-comfort.html

navy Covid-19 patients nyc pandemic trump crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.
  • Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York. Doctors and nurses, who have had to use the same protective gear again and again, are getting sick. So many people are dying that the city is running low on body bags.
  • At the same time, there is not a high volume of noncoronavirus patients. Because most New Yorkers have isolated themselves in their homes, there are fewer injuries from car accidents, gun shots and construction accidents that would require an emergency room visit.
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  • Ultimately, Mr. Dowling and others said, if the Comfort refuses to take Covid patients, there are few patients to send.
  • The solution, he and others said, was to open the Comfort to patients with Covid-19.
  • Asked about Mr. Dowling’s criticisms, the Defense Department referred to Mr. Trump’s statements about the Comfort at his daily briefing. The president said only that the ship was not accepting patients with the coronavirus.
  • Late Thursday, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reached an agreement with Mr. Trump to bring Covid patients to the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, another alternative site operated by the military, with 2,500 hospital beds.
  • There was no word about doing the same with the U.S.N.S. Comfort.
  • Capt. Patrick Amersbach, the commanding officer of the medical personnel aboard the Comfort, said at a news conference that, for now, his orders were to accept only patients who had tested negative for the virus. If ordered to accept coronavirus patients, he said, the ship could be reconfigured to make that happen.
brookegoodman

New York mayor urges Trump to help as more US coronavirus hotspots emerge | US news | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...urges-trump-us-hotspots-emerge

trump us crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • New York City has recorded 85 deaths from coronavirus in 24 hours, with the number of patients on ventilators doubling, while hotspots emerge in New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit and early-hit states such as California and Washington continue to battle the virus.
  • “We are holding on,” said Mitch Katz, the head of the NYC Health and Hospitals system. “It is very rough, it is very challenging, but all of the hospitals are working above their capacity to meet the need.”
  • De Blasio described Donald Trump’s aspiration that the US could “get back to work” by Easter Sunday, 12 April, as “false hope” and said the city was prepared to be on a stay-at-home footing for its 8 million residents at least through May.
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  • He continued: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators and now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
  • Taking new measures to enforce social distancing, New York has taken down dozens of basketball hoops across the city and is planning to close wide boulevards in the Bronx and Brooklyn to traffic to allow pedestrians more space to move around while distancing themselves from each other.
  • In Chicago, city officials closed its famous lakefront to the public, after too many crowds were gathering on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mayor Lori Lightfoot told Chicagoans in a vociferous public plea: “Dear God: stay home, save lives.”
  • In Louisiana, the number of known coronavirus cases in Louisiana rose to 2,305 on Thursday, an increase of 510 cases in a day, and a total of 83 deaths, according to the Louisiana department of health.
  • Amid the statistics, personal stories are beginning to emerge. A two-month-old baby died of coronavirus in Nashville; in New York, Dennis Dickson became the first NYPD officer to die from the virus.
katherineharron

Why New York has been hit so hard by coronavirus (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • New York state reached a tragic milestone this week: It now has more Covid-19 patients than any country in the world, aside from the United States.
  • Of the 20,389 deaths in the United States, 8,627, or 42%, have occurred in New York. Its mortality rate is 4.7%, compared with 3.4% in the rest of the country, according to CNN's figures based on data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
  • New York is by far the nation's most populous city, with more than 8 million people, twice as many as Los Angeles. But New York also has eight or nine times more cases than any other city — so what gives? No other city or county has a fraction of the cases of New York City.
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  • New York City and its suburban counties — Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland — are responsible for 93% of the statewide case count
  • Covid-19 spreads most easily when people are packed together — in churches or cruise ships, in outdoor events like concerts or Mardi Gras, or perhaps in small apartments with multiple roommates or large families. New York's population density, about 27,000 people per square mile, is easily the highest in the country, though it's nowhere near the top for cities across the globe. Many cities — in Asia, for example — have a density of nearly 40,000 people per square mile.
  • Maybe it's because so much testing is being done in New York. If you test more, you find more, and if you find more, you test even more.
  • The high number of cases and rates likely do derive in some modest amount to each explanation above — plus the fact that the epidemic has been in New York City a week or two longer than many other places. A more mature epidemic is always a larger epidemic.
  • Still, a mortality rate of about 6% is quite high, even though most countries, particularly in western Europe, have seen mortality rates rise as the pandemic drags on.
  • Hopefully, the Covid-19 pandemic will force us to reckon honestly with the many shortfalls that have been exposed and build a fair, forward-thinking approach that allows doctors and nurses to care for people in need. Failure to do this will only further darken the memory of those who have died and the hearts of those who remain.
katherineharron

Relaxed restrictions across US will have a dire impact on coronavirus death toll, exper... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 05 May 20 - No Cached
  • Public spaces were filled with visitors over the weekend as some states began loosening lockdown measures, and experts now warn the easing could drive up the country's coronavirus death toll -- by nearly double, according to one prediction.
  • But easing restrictions now may come with a heavy price.
  • "How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be some form of normality, sooner rather than later?
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  • The US could now see 134,475 deaths by early August -- nearly double the prediction just last week of 74,000 deaths by a model from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
  • So far, the US has recorded more than 1,180,600 infections and at least 68,934 deaths. Over the weekend, parks in New York City and Atlanta drew crowds as residents began venturing out of their homes. In the city of Miami Beach, more than 7,300 warnings were issued to people who weren't wearing face covers, while more than 470 warnings were given to those who failed to practice social distancing.
  • California was one of the states where crowds gathered over the weekend as thousands of protesters descended on the state's Capitol and an Orange County beach to protest social distancing orders.
ethanshilling

See a Map of Vaccination Rates for New York City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-vaccination-rates-map.html

new york pandemic vaccine

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Just over a hundred days into New York City’s vaccination campaign, 30 percent of adults and half of those 65 and older have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
  • White and Asian New Yorkers have been vaccinated at higher rates than Black and Latino residents, who have been more likely to die from or be hospitalized with Covid-19 both in New York City and nationwide.
  • Some of the highest vaccination rates are in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods — places where residents were most likely to leave the city at the start of the pandemic.
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  • Twenty percent of Manhattan adults have been fully vaccinated, compared with 12 percent of Brooklyn adults. One of the clearest demographic trends in who is getting vaccinated is age.
  • There are more than 1.2 million New Yorkers age 65 and older, rivaling the entire population of Dallas. Older adults were among the first in line for the vaccine, and in general, areas of the city with more older residents have a higher percentage of vaccinations than others.
  • While about half of all of these New Yorkers have had at least one dose, about 70 percent of those over 65 are not yet fully vaccinated, suggesting the city still has a ways to go even as eligibility expands to younger groups.
  • Neighborhoods with mostly white residents, like the Upper East and Upper West Side, Riverdale in the Bronx, Breezy Point in Queens, mid-island and the south shore of Staten Island, are outpacing city averages.
  • The majority Black and Latino neighborhoods in large swaths of Queens, Brooklyn, upper Manhattan and the southern Bronx are in some cases 20 to 30 percentage points behind neighborhoods at the top of the list
  • Reasons for the disparities vary, and they will not all be clear from simply looking at a map. Many seniors are homebound or have had trouble navigating complex and confusing websites to sign up for the vaccine (obstacles not just for seniors, really).
  • For non-English speakers, language barriers can create fear and confusion. For poorer residents, it’s simply more difficult (and more expensive) to take a few hours or a day or two off work to get a shot.
  • The city is averaging 60,000 to 70,000 shots per day. At that rate, it will take months to reach the remaining seven million New Yorkers, including children, who are not yet eligible for any vaccine.
delgadool

Lawsuit Challenging NYC School Segregation Targets Gifted Programs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hools-segregation-lawsuit.html

politics crisis Culture

shared by delgadool on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A major new lawsuit filed Tuesday could force fundamental changes to how New York City’s public school students are admitted into selective schools, and marked the latest front in a growing political, activist and now legal movement to confront inequality in the nation’s largest school system.
  • it will likely prompt scrutiny of New York’s school system, considered among the most racially and socioeconomically segregated in the country.
  • If the plaintiffs are successful, the city could be compelled to restructure or even eliminate current admissions policies for hundreds of selective schools, including gifted and talented programs and academically selective middle and high schools.
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  • “This is the first case in the nation to seek a constitutional right to an anti-racist education,” said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers suing the city and state.
  • In the Detroit case, a federal court found last year that the district had been so negligent toward the educational needs of students that children had been “deprived of access to literacy.” The court then declared that public school students had a constitutional right to an adequate education. The plaintiffs later reached a settlement with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to fund more literacy programs in the Detroit public schools.
  • The city’s gifted and talented classes for elementary school students are about 75 percent white and Asian-American, and there are relatively few gifted programs located in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. White students, who make up just 15 percent of the overall district, are starkly overrepresented in selective middle and high schools.
  • “We absolutely think that all students across the country have a right to an anti-racist education,” Ms. Savage said, noting that the extent of New York’s segregation made it a “particularly powerful place” to bring the lawsuit.
  • The plaintiff’s request for relief includes the elimination of selective admissions processes for all grade levels, which would amount to the most dramatic change to the city’s school system in decades.
ethanshilling

Suburban Home Sales Soar in the New York Region - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...yc-suburbs-housing-demand.html

US new york housing

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Heading into the spring sales season, the housing market in the suburbs of New York has already gone into overdrive, with bidding wars becoming the norm and many homes selling within days of coming on the market.
  • The frenetic sales activity — a second wave after a surge last summer — has been fueled by multiple forces: historically low mortgage rates; pandemic-fatigued city dwellers desperate for more space; and many employers’ willingness to embrace remote work, allowing buyers to look in places beyond what would be considered an easy commute.
  • “This is the strongest market I have seen in two decades,” said Sara Littlefield, an agent in Connecticut with Coldwell Banker.
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  • “I’ve never seen the inventories as low as they are now,” Ms. Gaily said, noting that in Saddle River, which is in Bergen County, there are “maybe 40 homes” available right now, down from the usual range of 55 to 85 this time of year.
  • “The spring market really began in October — that’s how crazy it’s been,” according to Vicki Gaily, a real estate agent based in Saddle River, N.J.
  • As soon as pandemic restrictions eased, Ms. Gaily, the founder of Special Properties, a division of the real estate firm Brook Hollow Group, noticed a burst of pent-up demand, largely from people fleeing urban areas. “I haven’t had a day off since,” she said.
  • “If there is a silver lining in this devastating pandemic, it’s that it has allowed people the freedom to make lifestyle choices like relocating, or downsizing, or moving up,” Ms. Littlefield added, “and they’re taking that freedom.”
  • Buyers throughout Long Island are likely to face continued competition, too, along with rising prices, in large part because of the shrinking supply of available homes.
  • “In the last two months we’ve seen such a depletion of new inventory that sales growth has been nominal,” said Mr. Miller, the Manhattan-based appraiser who also follows the Long Island market.
  • “We would normally have five to six months’ worth at any one time,” said Seth Pitlake, an agent at Douglas Elliman in Merrick. “It’s not that inventory is not increasing,” he said, “it’s just that anything that comes out in the market is being scooped up.”
  • “We would put in an offer only to find out someone else offered $40,000 over the asking price,” said Ms. Monforte, a clinical social worker, adding that “every free moment was devoted to looking.”
  • And what do buyers want? “They want green space,” said James Gavin, an agent with Laffey Real Estate in Manhasset, “and a lot are asking for a home office and then a pool.”
leilamulveny

Crowded N.Y.C. Jails Stoke Covid Fears: 'It's a Ticking Time Bomb' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-jail-covid.html

new york times Politics Culture policy

shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New York City’s jails were under such threat from the coronavirus last spring that city officials moved swiftly to let hundreds of people out of the crowded, airless old buildings. The effort shrank the jail population to its lowest point in more than half a century.
  • There are now more than 5,500 people in the city’s jails, slightly more than were detained last March. About three-quarters of the people being held have not been convicted. Many are awaiting trial much longer than usual, as the court system continues to operate at a near standstill during the pandemic.
  • Those behind bars are at high risk for contracting and spreading the virus, and correctional facilities have been home to some of the largest outbreaks nationally. Often, those outbreaks have spread into the community at large, as people shuttle in and out of detention. Few of those being detained in New York have been offered vaccines.
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  • Data kept by Correctional Health Services, which oversees care in jails, shows that infections and exposures in the jails crept up during January and February to their highest levels since last spring. A Department of Correction spokesman, in a statement, noted that the average test positivity rate in the jails was lower than in the city at large, though experts warn that the virus’s prevalence in jails can be hard to track.
  • The Department of Correction said that there were not widespread or systemic shortages of soap or other sanitary materials, and that staff members are subject to discipline for not wearing masks. The department also pointed to the ruling in a lawsuit filed by E.E. Keenan, a lawyer representing current and recent detainees at Rikers, in which a judge declined to order city jails to improve their hygiene regimens.
  • In the earliest months of the pandemic, public defenders and local officials, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, pushed for city prosecutors and state courts to release the most vulnerable populations from behind bars and introduced an early release program for people being held on a jail sentence of one year or less.
  • But none of the measures that the city took to release people were implemented on a continuing basis and the jails population began to grow anew in the summer.
  • Judges have also set bail and remanded people to pretrial detention in violent felony cases — which are not part of the state bail reform law — at higher rates than before the pandemic, according to a forthcoming report from the center. Alternatives to jail are being used less often. Public defenders said attempts to secure the release of people at high risk for contracting the virus have fallen short in recent months.
  • At least 700 people are jailed whose cases would likely have been resolved if not for the pandemic, according to the city. An additional 285 who otherwise would have been discharged to state prison to serve sentences are stuck in city jails, as those transfers are currently suspended, the Department of Correction said
  • “It doesn’t take a mental health professional to say that if somebody is living 24/7 in complete fear of death, that their mental health is not going to be that sound,” said Mr. Keenan, the lawyer who represented Rikers detainees in a lawsuit against the city over jail conditions. A group of guards have also filed a lawsuit saying that jail policies placed them at risk.
  • For Mr. Churaman, who was transferred to Rikers Island in July after a felony murder conviction was overturned and he awaited a new trial, the time inside was especially difficult.
  • Rigodis Appling, a Manhattan public defender, said that because her clients in jails experienced no relief from the pandemic — no time at which they were able to feel fully safe from infection — they were in a state of unrelenting anxiety.
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