Happy belated 243rd birthday to America

There's no way an 1100 vote lead disappeared without corruption

New York Times

The Democratic primary for district attorney in Queens, a race that drew nationwide attention, was thrown deep into uncertainty on Wednesday after a count of paper ballots flipped the primary-night result.

Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender, saw her almost 1,100-vote lead evaporate, with 

Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, edging out to a 20-vote lead.

The tight margin will automatically trigger a recount, according to Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokeswoman for the New York City Board of Elections. It also spurred accusations from Ms. Cabán’s side that elections officials improperly invalidated more than 2,000 affidavit ballots before the paper ballots were counted.

“We are going to fight to make sure every valid vote is counted and every voter has a voice,” said Bill Lipton, the New York director of the Working Families Party, which supported Ms. Cabán. “And when all the votes are counted, we are confident Tiffany Cabán will be the next Queens district attorney.”

The primary race was cast as a battle between the traditional power bases in Queens and the progressive forces that propelled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to her primary victory in New York last year. Ms. Katz had the backing of unions and local political leaders, while Ms. Cabán received support from prominent members of Congress, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.

Ms. Katz is ahead by 20 votes, 34,898 to 34,878, according to lawyers representing her. Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer representing Ms. Cabán, agreed that Ms. Katz was now ahead by 20 votes.

The new vote total meant that Ms. Katz drew twice as many votes from the paper ballots as Ms. Cabán did.

Mr. Goldfeder said he intended to challenge the decision to invalidate all but 487 of the 2,816 affidavit ballots cast. Election officials said they had determined that the ballots, used when a voter’s name is not listed at the polling place, were invalid or had been cast by ineligible voters.

The Board of Elections would not release any information until the election results were certified but confirmed that there would be a recount. The board has a policy of conducting a manual recount when the victory is by less than 0.5 percent, Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said.

Crappy emailed me this bizarre (although expected) turn of events and wrote in the subject line and I am inclined to agree. Something like this happened in a district in Florida that the notorious Debbie-Wasserman Schultz represents. And of course there was the incident where 200,000 votes in Brooklyn vanished during the 2016 presidential primary. Go figure this would happen on the eve of the day of the birth of this nation. Apparently, the Queens Machine will stop at nothing to keep their crappy patronage jalopy running.

Update: I found a more appropriate picture.

Three-bedroom apartments in this city are like an endangered species

 City Limits

Christina Saldana’s 9-year-old daughter Hailey plays with a brown doll in the crawl space between the family’s sofa and the wall. She has a small pink box of toys crammed in the corner, and another next to the hot pink twin bed that the family of three shares most nights.
 
Saldana and her two daughters are cramped for space in their 650-square-foot studio apartment in the Bronx.

“The only door that I have right now is the bathroom,” Saldana, 27, says. “If I want to have a few minutes to myself, I would have to take a bubble bath.”
 
Saldana pays $1,100 for the studio in Parkchester, where the family has lived for four years. With her salary of $40,000, she wants to buy her girls more space as they get older. But she says there’s nothing she can find on the market that fits her needs.

New Yorkers have long lived in cramped quarters, from multiple generations of immigrants to large Orthodox families. But the rising rents that accompany gentrification in certain neighborhoods has caused even four-person families to squeeze into small spaces.

The price of a two-bedroom apartment in historically poor neighborhoods like Mott Haven in the Bronx has jumped 14 percent in the last year to a median of $1,850. Many working-class families are forced to make do in one bedrooms and studios. The city’s affordable housing program has tried to compensate for this in the last five years, building far more one bedroom and two bedroom affordable apartments than larger units. But some advocates say this in turn leaves larger families without options.

Of the 156,000 units of affordable housing built or preserved since 2014, over 100,000 units had two or fewer bedrooms, according to New York City’s OpenData. Almost 43,000 were two bedrooms. In comparison, only 14,700 three-bedrooms were built or preserved in the same timeframe, as were only 1,500 four bedrooms.

Developers in the city tend to favor studios and one-bedrooms, with over 25,000 units newly built since 2014, compared to just over 2,000 three-bedroom units built and only 88 four-bedrooms. On the other side, the city preserved over 30,000 two-bedroom units, over 27,000 one-bedrooms and only about 12,000 three-bedrooms.

In a neighborhood like the South Bronx, once known for its row houses that hosted generations of families, there are now predominantly apartments with two or fewer bedrooms. Data from the American Community Survey shows that the neighborhood lost about 400 units from with three or more bedrooms 2010 to 2017. It gained 4,311 with two or fewer bedrooms. And over a thousand of those were studios.

Overall, the city lost over 23,000 apartments with four bedrooms or more.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan, Housing New York, largely mirrors the trends in the market when it comes to apartment size. The plan, which was released in 2014, focuses on housing needed by a growing demographic of one to two person households.  The report cites 1.9 million one- and two-person households residing in the city in 2012 (more than 60 percent of all the city’s households), but only 1.25 million studios and one-bedroom apartments.

Mayor Big Slow de Blasio, who wants to run this nation, can't set the timer on his alarm clock

NY Post


Hail to the sleep!

Mayor de Blasio showed up 41 minutes late for a live TV interview Tuesday morning — and blamed the delay on having slept in because his alarm clock wasn’t set properly.

“Says he set his alarm for the wrong time,” PIX11 Morning News co-host Dan Mannarino tweeted following de Blasio’s appearance.

The Big Apple’s habitually tardy mayor forced Mannarino to repeatedly make excuses when he failed to appear as scheduled for a 7:30 a.m. sit-down at the station’s East 42nd Street studio, just three miles from Gracie Mansion.

Mannarino began covering for Hizzoner at 7:33, telling viewers: “I know we teased Mayor de Blasio at 7:30. He is running late. We will have the interview coming up shortly.”
In a 7:45 update, Mannarino said that “we’re being told by the mayor’s detail that he is still coming to our studios” and noted de Blasio’s side-hustle campaign for the White House.

“He was in Chicago last night, so this was an early wake-up,” Mannarino said. “Cutting him some slack this morning.”

At the top of the hour, Mannarino said de Blasio had “just left Gracie Mansion,” and later marked his 8:11 arrival. 

 After de Blasio finally got seated during a commercial break, Mannarino welcomed back his audience by saying: “Better late than never. 8:14, here we go.”
Mannarino even graciously blamed himself when the interview wrapped up, telling de Blasio, “We dragged you out of bed early, I appreciate it.”

“Thank you, man,” de Blasio replied.

The mayor never explained on-air why he kept everyone waiting so long, but mayoral spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein confirmed the excuse he privately gave Mannarino.

 Either hizzzzzzoner has just run out of excuses to use for his notorious tardiness or he's just comfortable telling cliched ones like this because he's been getting away with so much shit for the past 5 years. What a dick.

Woodside Ave Summer Camp for Rats

My dearest Crappy,
 
Behold, Mount Craphurst! It gets bigger by the minute. Wanna see it in person? Come to Woodside Avenue and 73rd Street.
 
This pile has been here for at least a month! The city gives zero fucks. Seriously, Sanitation collects from this same block twice a week and the DSNY inspectors drive around constantly.
 
Last week, a city employee lady was actually walking up and down Woodside Avenue (this very block), inspecting properties for adequate garbage containment measures to prevent RATS?!?!? 

Some neighbors who met this lady actually escorted her to the pile, and she declared that yes indeed, rats might be drawn to such a mess. But why bother dealing with it?
 
Guess what? I myself have spotted 3 rats running down Woodside Ave near the pile since it started forming. Isn’t that surprising? No??
 
Originally it started as a bag or two, on the railroad overpass. Then, it migrated a few feet over to the current location, a construction site. And it grew and grew and grew....
 
 Notice the green bags (with rat holes) that encapsulate some of the litter. These bags are a new (~a week) development. I guess someone bagged up the trash, hoping to make it easier for collection.
 
What did we Queens residents do to deserve this treatment?
 
Again, a pile of lose garbage untouched for a month..... growing and growing and providing a playground for rats and a steamy olfactory playground for humans.
 
Welcome to Queens, the borough of nobody-gives-a-fuck.
 
Anonymous Crazy Lady