City lost an awful lot of affordable housing

From The Real Deal:

More than 1 million affordable apartments have vanished from New York City since 2005, according to a new report from Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office.

The study found that the city has lost more than 1 million units that rented for $900 or less since 2005, while the number of apartments that rent for $2,700 or more has quadrupled over that same time period. Apartments going for $900 or less made up 20 percent of all rentals in 2017, down from 74 percent in 2005, while apartments going for more than $2,700 increased from 2.7 to 13.9 percent of the total market.

A subway signal malfunctions just about every day

From PIX11:

There were subway delays on all but one day during August 2018 because of signal problems, a Riders Alliance analysis released Sunday showed.

The Alliance said it reviewed MTA delay alerts for the month of August from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. They reported delays due to signal problems for every day except Aug. 23.

"It's just painful," said Joe Hetterly of Bay Ridge, about his commutes.

The Riders Alliance said signal delays caused problems on every subway line except the L, which has already received signal upgrades.

The analysis showed the worst delays were on the D and R lines.

King of the hill, top of the heap!

From Metro:

New Yorkers may feel like this is one of the best cities in America, but a new report has named New York City one of the worst-run cities in the United States.

New York City ranked as the third-worst-run city in the country according to a WalletHub study published on Monday.

This is the second year in a row New York landed near the bottom on WalletHub’s ranking of the best-run cities. Out of 150 cities measured on a variety of “quality of services,” New York came in at number 148, above only Detroit and Washington, D.C. Gulfport, Mississippi and San Fransisco came in above New York, rounding out the top five worst-run cities.

WalletHub's list looks at how effective the local leadership is, but how can that be measured?

"One way is by determining a city’s operating efficiency," per the report. "In other words, we can learn how well city officials manage and spend public funds by comparing the quality of services residents receive against the city’s total budget."

The study’s “quality of services” score looked at different details across several categories: financial stability, education, health, safety, economy and infrastructure and pollution.

New York fared well in the safety area, but its finances and economic issues dragged down its overall score. According to the report, New York has some of the highest long-term outstanding debt.

The report also dinged New York City when it came to education. The high school graduation rate here is 74.3 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in February.

NYPD caught covering up shelter crime

From the Daily News:

A Queens man suffered a one-two punch when a homeless shelter resident struck him in the face — then cops refused to put key details of the assault in their report and closed the investigation in one day, the Daily News has learned.

Edward Karakash, 29, said the man called him a “cracker” and slugged him outside of the Queens Blvd. car repair shop where he works, on Dec. 18.

The auto shop near 54th St. in Sunnyside is adjacent to a Quality Inn which the city has converted into a homeless shelter.

“A laundry van for the hotel was blocking my driveway and I was honking the horn,” he said. “A guy comes out of the hotel with a friend and starts threatening me. He said, ‘I’m gonna knock you out, cracker!’ Then he punched me in the temple.”

The suspect ran into the hotel. Karakash went to the hospital where he was treated for bruises after telling cops what happened.

His mother, Karine Karakash, 50, an eyewitness to the attack, said doctors initially believed he had broken bones in his face.

Unbeknownst to Karakash, cops closed their investigation the same day even though he gave them a photograph of the perpetrator, video of the assault and told police where his attacker lived.

The complaint report claims wrongly that Karakash refused to give his contact information and says there were no witnesses.

“They did not put on the report that he was from the homeless shelter,” Karakash said. “They just put that it was a random person who ran away.”

It was only when community activist Bill Kregler, a former Republican candidate for Queens Borough President, got involved that the cops changed their tune.

Karakash said the neighborhood has had problems with shelter residents before. Back on Oct. 14, someone else from the shelter hit him with his car and the police refused to take a report.

“I got hit while I was taking a picture of the plate,” he said. “The police said they weren't going to take a report.”

Years ago when similar problems were happening near the Pan Am, this blog reported that crime in the area was increasing and that police were not taking reports. They publicly denied this and several of the reporters covering the situation claimed we were lying. It's clear who was telling the truth and who is full of crap, now, isn't it?

In debt up to our eyeballs

From the Observer:

New York State has the second-highest debt total in the United States, and it’s expected to grow in the coming years, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

New York’s state-funded debt is expected to reach $63.7 billion at the end of the current fiscal year and increase over the following four years to $71.8 billion, according to a report released by DiNapoli on Thursday morning. New York’s current total state debt is second only to California’s, which is at $87 billion.

The average amount of debt for every man, woman and child in the state is $3,116, three times the median for all states, the report found. And the annual debt service payments — the amount of money needed to reimburse debts over a period of time — are projected to surpass $8.2 billion by the end of state fiscal year 2021-2022.

BDB knew about the NYCHA mess for quite some time

From the Wall Street Journal:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has known the city’s housing authority wasn’t complying with lead-inspection regulations since last year, his office said Sunday.

In a report issued last week, the city’s Department of Investigation said the New York City Housing Authority submitted false claims to the federal government showing it had conducted lead-paint inspections when the required work hadn’t been done for years.

The mayor was first informed of “the possibility of non-compliance” in March 2016, his office said.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who was re-elected to a second term on Nov. 7, has said “operations executives” were responsible for the lapses.

The housing authority notified City Hall that the agency wasn’t in compliance with local laws in April 2016 and with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rules in July, according to de Blasio spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie.

“As part of the agency’s response, NYCHA inspected every apartment with kids under 6 where there may have been lead paint in 2016 and will do so again by the end of 2017,” Ms. Lapeyrolerie said.

Meanwhile, all this is costing us taxpayers a ton of cash.

NYCHA lied about inspecting for lead paint

From PIX11:

The New York City Housing Authority failed to conduct lead paint safety inspections for four years beginning in 2013, according to a new report by the city’s Department of Investigation. The DOI further alleges NYCHA then lied about the inspections to Federal housing authorities.

Comptroller notices that 7 train runs poorly

From Jackson Heights Post:

The 7 train is one of four trains deemed the “worst offenders” for subway delays, with delays on this line costing the city between $13.7 million and $29 million annually, according to a recent report from the NYC Comptroller.

The Oct. 1 report breaks down subway lines based on weekday ridership, train schedules, and wait assessments, coming up with a cost analysis based on “best-case”, “mid-range”, and “worst-case” delay scenarios.

The annual economic cost of the 7 train in terms of “best-case” major delays is $13,685,550, based on the more than 117,000 weekday 7 line riders. “Mid-range” major delays on this line result in an annual cost of $18,793,342. The “worst-case” delays on the 7 line cost the city’s economy $29,009,935.

Sandy victims died waiting for Build It Back

From the Queens Chronicle:

More than 900 Howard Beach residents, and close to 6,000 others in Queens, have dropped out of or were booted from the city’s Build it Back program since 2014, according to an analysis by Comptroller Scott Stringer.

The comptroller’s study, detailed in a Sept. 25 letter to the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations, states Queens had the largest drop in applicants to the trouble-riddled Sandy recovery initiative — from 9,284 who first sought help to 3,584 today.

Many of those dropoffs occurred in Rockaway, and mostly on the western end of the peninsula. In Howard Beach, there are now 936 fewer homeowners in the Build it Back pipeline. Broad Channel saw 530 applicants get out of the program.

Citywide, 20,275 people sought help from the initiative, first established by Mayor Bloomberg in 2013, but now only 8,310 have or are set to be assisted by the program.

Stringer — along with Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn), chairman of the Council’s Recovery & Resiliency Committee — said “the reasons why individual applicants have left the program” are not clear, but are “likely attributable to many causes,” including dissatisfaction with projected timelines, people turning to other sources of aid, getting lost in “the tangle of bureaucracy,” and some being removed for not meeting “stringent entry requirements.”

And in some cases, according to the comptroller, some applicants died while waiting for assistance.

Queensboro Bridge to have some work done

From DNA Info:

The Queensboro Bridge is getting the lion's share of capital funding for major repairs planned for the city's East River bridges over the next three years.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's 2017 Capital Commitment Plan through 2020 parcels out $110 million for the bridge, bringing the total planned funding for the project to $392 million — the most of what's been allotted for the East River Bridges, according to the city's Independent Budget Office.

The Department of Transportation is planning a $353 million replacement of the upper level of the Queensboro Bridge. Remaining funds will go toward adding hazard mitigation to protect the bridge against natural disasters or other threats, like structural hardening, fire-suppression systems and security cameras, according to officials.

That's a lot of crap!

From Crains:

A review of data reported under New York's 2012 Sewage Pollution Right to Know Act shows that nearly 2,700 sewage overflows were reported between May 2013 and June 2015.

The nonprofit Environmental Advocates of New York released a report on the sewage overflows on Thursday. The group reports 2,696 overflows during that span but says the true number is likely higher because of inconsistent data collection.

The group says funding for the state Department of Environmental Conservation must be increased to enforce the law and finalize regulations to provide standard reporting requirements.

AirBnB dumped illegal rental data

From Curbed:

Back in November, in an attempt to prove that it's okay with transparency (and that its users are all above board, despite evidence/criticism to the contrary), Airbnb released a year's worth of data that it had accrued on listings in New York City. The data revealed many things about NYC hosts—including that many of them are operating illegal listings—but a team of independent researchers is now alleging that those facts weren't entirely accurate. The website Inside Airbnb (founded by Murray Cox) released a report alleging that Airbnb tampered with the data that was made publicly available, deleting as many as 1,000 listings in an attempt to "paint a misleading picture" of its NYC operations.

The report, compiled by Cox and tech writer Tom Slee, is compiled from two different sats of data using Airbnb listings going as far back as 2013. By doing so, they were able to compare the information that Airbnb made available to journalists in November to the site's data on a typical day/week/month, and the results were fairly damning. According to the report, "Airbnb ensured a favorable picture by carrying out a one-time targeted purge of over 1,000 listings," and used the days immediately following that purge as representative of its operations. The listings that were deleted were for "entire home" rentals, which have been targeted by critics as being the biggest source of illegal activity on the site.

Cox and Slee also poked holes in other data that Airbnb made available, including the statistic that "95% of our entire home hosts share only one listing"; according to their findings, that was true for "less than two weeks of the year." They allege that this was all done in order to make the company's dealings look better to journalists, who were presented with a very specific data set to analyze.

Shelters are styes

From the Daily News:

City homeless shelters had a whopping 21,401 open code violations at the end of 2015, according to a new scorecard issued by Mayor de Blasio's office Monday.

The Shelter Repair Scorecard documents conditions at each of the hundreds of shelters around the city — showing buildings plagued by problems like vermin, leaks, and peeling paint.

Most of the open code violations — 14,418, or 70% of the total — were found at 265 cluster shelters, where homeless people are housed in apartment building units rented out by the city.

Another 6,984 violations were found at non-cluster shelters.

A better plan for Queens Blvd?

From the Times Ledger:

...one 25-year resident of Woodside has a different name in mind. Community advocate and safety consultant Bill Kregler believes that if changes are not made to the boulevard’s redesign plan, it will become known as the “Road to Ruin.”

During a walking tour with DOT officials and community leaders last week, Kregler handed Trottenberg a 35-page detailed report, complete with 116 photographs, that he authored. The report documents the deterioration of the service road driving lanes that have been neglected as construction of the bike lanes became the DOT’s priority.

“In their rush to create a commuter lane for cyclists, and removing travel lanes along one of the busiest roadways in the city for the first time, they’ve created a mess with potholes, cracking asphalt and sinking and collapsing of the service utility cover, because all that traffic is being forced into one overused lane,” Kregler said. “Since its implementation, vehicles have slowed to a crawl during the morning and evening rush hours, creating bottlenecks, and motorists peel off dangerously down our side streets, creating a safety hazard for our children and seniors. Woodside is getting the shaft here and it is becoming a dangerous situation.”

Kregler said Trottenberg did not seem to be pleased to receive his report, although a DOT spokesman confirmed it was being reviewed. Kregler is a former housing cop turned firefighter who went on to become a fire marshal and current president of the Fire Marshal’s Benevolent Association. He also spent 10 years on the Community Educational Council as a representative of the borough president.

Kregler emphasized that he believes in the bike lanes, but that their location was poorly conceived and this is affecting the quality of life along the boulevard in Woodside.

Construction fatalities on the rise

From Huffington Post:

2015 has been deadly in the construction sector with 11 construction site fatalities in New York City's past fiscal year, according to data compiled by the City of New York. This does not include the three devastating fatalities in the last two months that all occurred on construction worksites not up to code or lacking safety equipment, according to numerous complaints filed to the City.

That deadly sum exceeds New York City construction fatalities in all recent years and is up 83 percent over FY2014 and 120 percent since FY2013 (the city's fiscal calendar runs July 1 - June 30), representing the highest total since the current construction expansion began in 2008. While construction is a huge economic engine for New York City, it accounts for less than 4 percent of all New York State employment, yet an astounding 20 percent of all of the state's on-the-job deaths.

What's more, the Mayor's Management Report has identified that with hundreds of serious construction related accidents, injuries increased 34 percent in FY 2015, up 51 percent from both FY2013 and FY2012. So what is the cause of this and how can it be rectified?

Two trends are leading the increase. One is the obvious surge of new construction New York City has encountered, as the Department of Buildings issued 52,618 residential building permits in FY2015, up 156 percent from FY2014 and up a staggering 749 percent from FY2010.

The second is that data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) shows that nonunion worksites also accounted for 75 percent of construction fatalities in 2014 and 72 percent between 2012-2013.

$1B spent on NYC homeless

From the Daily News:

Spending on the city homeless shelters rose a whopping 62% in the past eight years, with the total expected to reach close to $1 billion this year, according to a new report.

The staggering number includes all money spent on the city’s 271 shelters from city, state and federal funds, according to the Independent Budget Office report released Thursday.

In 2007, the three government entities spent a total of $604 million on Big Apple shelters.

That will rise to an estimated $976 million this year.

More people living in overcrowded conditions

From the Daily News:

The last few years have seen a huge surge in the number of apartments and homes deemed to be “overcrowded,” a new report by Controller Scott Stringer has found.

There were 272,000 overcrowded units in New York City housing nearly 1.5 million residents as of 2013, census data show. That’s a spike of nearly 20% from 2005.

Not surprisingly, nearly 70% of these overcrowded homes and apartments — those with more than one occupant per room — are occupied by an immigrant head of household.

Stringer said the growing trend toward cramped living makes for unhealthy conditions by exacerbating asthma, creates dangerous illegal apartments, and sometimes forces families into homeless shelters.

Removing garbage cans doesn't reduce garbage in subway

From Crains:

A state comptroller's audit is critical of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority pilot program that removed trash cans from 39 subway stations to reduce garbage and rats.

The report is critical of how the MTA measured the program's success and says there's no clear sign the four-year experiment is working.

The MTA says it disagrees. It says the trash can removal produced less trash, thus leading to a reduction in the rat population at those stations.

It says it will continue the program but has no plans to expand it.

Queens has crappiest subway stations

From LIC Post:

The majority of New York City’s worst-condition subway stations are in Queens, a new report from the Citizens Budget Commission has found.

The CBC, a New York finance-oriented nonprofit, released a report Wednesday that examines both the quality of subway stations citywide and the MTA’s system for repairing them. Leveraging MTA data on station conditions, the CBC identified the system’s 33 poorest-condition stations, about half of which are in Queens.

A station is in bad condition when a significant portion of its “structural components” – its platform edges, stairs and other pieces related to its functionality – are found to be in disrepair.

The City’s worst station is 52nd Street-Roosevelt Avenue on the 7 line in Sunnyside/Woodside, where 23 of 29 structural components, or 79 percent, need repair.

Other stations with substantial disrepair include 30th Avenue on the N/Q in Astoria (72 percent of structural components), 103 Street-Corona Plaza on the 7 (68 percent) and 36 Avenue on the N/Q in Astoria (67 percent).

The CBC’s report throws cold water on a repair plan that the MTA devised in 2010. The agency switched from its previous method of repairing entire stations at a time to addressing individual station components on a priority basis.

Fewer Queens foreclosures

From the Queens Courier:

According to the comptroller’s report, areas immediately outside of New York City – such as Long Island and the mid-Hudson region – have seen the greatest number of pending foreclosures with cases rising 63 percent from 25,097 at the beginning of 2013 to 40,985 this year.

However, although pending foreclosure cases across upstate grew by 47 percent, New York City experienced nearly a drop of 10 percent over the two-year period.

For Queens, the situation looks to be “improving,” according to the report, with a high foreclosure rate of around 1.25 percent but decreasing caseload. At the beginning of 2013 Queens had 12,497 pending foreclosure cases and in the beginning of this year it saw 10,667, a decrease of 14.1 percent.