"Uproar in NYC over ‘poor door’ plan" by Mireya Navarro | New York Times August 27, 2014
NEW YORK — A 33-story glass tower rising on Manhattan’s waterfront will offer all the extras that a condo buyer paying up to $25 million would expect — hotel-style concierge services, entertainment rooms, and unobstructed views of the Hudson River and miles beyond.
Taking advantage of affordable-housing incentives, the project will also cater to renters who make no more than about $50,000, and who will not share the same perks.
They also will not share the same entrance. And that image, and the catchy phrase it led to, has proven to be too much for some of the city’s leaders to bear.
The uproar over the so-called poor door, with numerous officials now demanding a ban on the strategy, largely reflects the liberal mood under a new mayor who is focused on income inequality.
Is he?
But the question of how to best incorporate affordable units into projects built for the rich has become more relevant than ever as Mayor Bill de Blasio seeks the construction of 80,000 affordable units over the next 10 years.
The answer is not a simple one. As public housing becomes a crumbling relic of another era, US cities have become more reliant on the private sector to build housing for the poor and working class. And private developers say they can maximize their revenues and thus build more affordable units if they can separate them from their luxury counterparts.
The issue has even divided affordable-housing advocates, some of whom argue that developers who segregate apartments should not benefit from government incentives, while others say the focus should be on building more homes, rather than where to enter them.
“There are trade-offs,” said Lisa Sturtevant, vice president for research at the National Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy group in Washington. “It’s really important that there’s no discrimination, but there’s a balance between what we can do and should do.” I'm to the point of why pretend we are something we are not.
Let's let the cla$$ differences out in the open, elect Romney as president, and just be what we are: a society under the yoke of corporate governance. Enough with the ma$ks of diver$ity.
Administration officials attribute the two-door setup to changes to the zoning code in 2009 that de Blasio voted for as a member of the City Council. He has said that the revisions, which allowed builders to put the affordable apartments in an attached segment of the building, were meant to increase housing units and that “it was not evident at the time the nuances of where the doors would be.”
City officials say they are working to change the rules so separate entrances in the same building are not allowed, although they said they had not decided whether also to push for more apartment integration, like banning developers from concentrating cheaper units in one part of the building, a strategy some affordable-housing programs already prohibit.
It's like a Titanic mobile home.
Separate front doors, though, said Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for housing and economic development, are not in keeping with the administration’s principles of equality.
“Walking into a building should not be any different based on income status,” Glen said in an interview.
From the street, the luxury condominium tower in the middle of the debate, at 40 Riverside Blvd., and its six-floor affordable segment seem to blend seamlessly and appear as one structure.
But the low-income renters, who will pay $850 a month for one-bedroom apartments and $1,100 for two bedrooms, will go through a door facing 62d Street while the condo owners will come in through a door facing the Hudson.
They are considered "low-income?"
--more--"
Related: $hiny Apple
More like a smelly Apple.
"In jab at de Blasio, sergeants’ union warns against a convention in Brooklyn" by Matt Flegenheimer and J. David Goodman | New York Times August 27, 2014
NEW YORK — A union of New York City police sergeants on Tuesday warned the Democratic National Committee against holding its convention in Brooklyn in 2016, issuing an open letter that doubled as a broadside against a mayoral administration that some officers have grown increasingly frustrated with.
After the mayor begged 'em.
In the letter, addressed to the committee that Mayor Bill de Blasio wooed during its visit to New York two weeks ago, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Edward D. Mullins, said the city was “lurching backward to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces, and families that walk our streets worried for their safety.”
He presented a bleak vision of a city overrun with “squeegee people” and other panhandlers, with shootings on the rise and morale among police officers flagging.
That's what Bloomberg left him?
“The DNC should choose another venue,” the letter said, adding that “Mayor de Blasio has not earned the right to play host to such an important event.”
Even after he did, in fact, endorse the death squads.
In fact, while shootings are up slightly, according to the administration, the homicide rate has fallen 12.3 percent this year after a 20 percent decline in 2013, when there were 335 murders, punctuating a steep drop under the former mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. The administration also noted that overall crime had fallen 3.6 percent this year.
It was up again on Wall Street.
In an interview, the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, called the letter, which appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times and other outlets, “unfortunate.”
“My feelings toward the mayor is that I think, over time, the officers are going to appreciate that a lot is being done for them,” he said. “My appointment should be a strong signal of that.”
But Bratton added that “there’s no denying” that morale in the department has slipped. He attributed this, in part, to union contract negotiations and a spate of “negative stories in the media.”
Blaming the lapdog?
Union officials and many officers were already skeptical of de Blasio for his opposition to the police department’s stop-and-frisk tactics under Bloomberg, and for his support of increased police oversight.
But he relented and stop-and-frisk has gone forward.
Those fissures seem to have widened since last month, when an unarmed man, Eric Garner, died after an encounter with the police on Staten Island.
He was black, the cop was white, but no big deal.
Meanwhile, Al Sharpton is in Missouri.
Garner’s death focused renewed attention on the “broken windows” enforcement strategy, championed by Bratton, that calls for aggressive policing of minor offenses. Garner was approached by officers after being accused of selling untaxed cigarettes.
It's AmeriKan Ju$tice in so many ways.
