City paid consulting firm to manipulate the violence statistics at Rikers Island with shady and unethical tech methods

 

Propublica

In April 2017, partners from McKinsey & Company sent a confidential final report to the New York City corrections commissioner. They had spent almost three years leading an unusual project for a white-shoe corporate consulting firm like McKinsey: Attempting to stem the tide of inmate brawls, gang slashings and assaults by guards that threatened to overwhelm the jail complex on Rikers Island.

The report recounted that McKinsey had tested its new anti-violence strategy in what the firm called “Restart” housing units at Rikers. The results were striking. Violence had dropped more than 50% in the Restart facilities, the McKinsey partners wrote.

The number was bogus. Jail officials and McKinsey consultants had jointly rigged the Restart program in its earliest phase to all but guarantee there would be few violent episodes, according to documents and interviews. They stacked the units with inmates they believed to be compliant and unlikely to get into fights or to attack staff.

Publicly, McKinsey and top corrections officials touted the drop in violence in these units as an early sign of their project’s success — without disclosing that they had tilted the scale in favor of that result. After McKinsey handed off the inmate selection process, about a year into the firm’s work at Rikers, jail officials continued to manipulate the population of the Restart units to keep their violence numbers low.

In October of this year, the New York City Council voted to approve Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to close Rikers. The vote occurred during the same month that a federal monitor, appointed by a court to oversee reform at Rikers, revealed that violence by jail guards there continues to worsen. Overall, using the metrics employed by McKinsey, jailhouse violence has risen nearly 50% since the firm began its assignment.

The full story of how New York City came to pay McKinsey $27.5 million only to abandon many of the firm’s recommendations and decide to shut Rikers has never been told. A ProPublica investigation, based on interviews with 36 people, half of whom worked directly on the project, as well as more than 10,000 pages of project documents, internal emails and other records, reveals that problems dogged the project at every stage.

Among the issues that plagued the project: McKinsey, which had never before advised a jail or prison system, made data errors that further undercut the results it reported from Restart units. The firm also persuaded the Department of Correction to spend millions on the sorts of advanced data analytics favored by McKinsey’s corporate clients. The department never ended up using many of the those data products, some of which simply did not work very well.

What happened at Rikers is a cautionary tale of a public-sector consulting boom that has emerged over the past decade. In recent years, government agencies across the United States have entrusted management consultants with more and more facets of public administration, from designing school systems to shaping Medicaid policy. Public-sector consulting in North America is a more than $9 billion industry, with an average yearly growth rate of about half a billion dollars, according to ALM Intelligence, which monitors the consulting business. McKinsey was anxious to expand into a potentially lucrative branch of public-sector work, corrections consulting, according to a former McKinsey consultant who worked on the project.

As I am sure you all are aware, and this is mostly directed to the residents of Kew Gardens, Mott Haven, Boerum Hill and Chinatown, this report was used to justify closing Rikers. 

In the future, who will they contract to study and manipulate the data after the four borough tower jails get built?

Con Edison will gouge New York residents electric and gas bills for the next three years

Gothamist


Con Edison, the privately owned utility company that theoretically powers our city, has reportedly resolved to raise rates beginning January 1: Under the proposal, electric would go up 13 percent over the next three years, while gas would jump an astounding 25 percent. Hm well, at least you know you're getting solid and uniformly reliable service for all those extra dollars you're paying out; at least you know that this added, unavoidable expenditure will be Worth It in the long run!

Here is a breakdown of the average rate hikes, which would vary somewhat depending on customers' electricity and gas consumption. Most of you would be looking at a roughly 4.2% rise in 2020, followed by a 4.7% increase in 2021, and a 4% bump in your electric bills for 2022. As for gas, the average bill would jump 7.5% in 2020, 8.8% in 2021, and 7.2% in 2022.

Many people are displeased with this scheme, which stands to make already burdensome monthly payments significantly more expensive. AARP has already filed its grievances with the state Public Service Commission, pointing out that, as it stands, "tens of thousands" of customers find themselves unable to pay their utility bills and see their services cut every year.

"We think it’s an unfair rate hike,” AARP lobbyist Bill Ferris told the NY Daily News: “We have a problem in New York State with energy affordability.” With everything affordability, some would say!

Hotel owners are profiting off of the homeless crisis

NY Daily News

Owners of dozens of recently-built homeless hotels are saving millions of dollars on city taxes through an obscure rebate program that allowed them to hold on to $12.5 million in the 2018-2019 tax cycle.

Of the owners benefiting from the tax break — known as the Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program — the biggest winners include Sam Chang, Harshad Patel and Riverbrook Equities, according to a New York Hotel Trades Council analysis obtained and vetted by the Daily News.

Chang, for example, has built 49 hotels since 2006.

Of those, 14 have housed the homeless. Five have received ICAP rebates and saved approximately $2.3 million on their 2018-2019 tax bills, city records show.

Chang, who still retains ownership in one of the hotels, the Holiday Inn JFK, saved $791,323 in taxes for that property during the last tax cycle.

In all, 44 homeless hotels appear to have received both the ICAP rebate and homeless subsidies within the past four years, city records show. There are a total of 151 hotels that get ICAP rebates. From 2015 to 2019, homeless hotels that got the rebates saved more than $30 million.

All the while, owners like Chang and other operators who get the tax rebates are getting paid by the city to house the homeless. That money is routed to the hotels through homeless service “management companies,” which get the money directly from the city.

A spokeswoman for Chang’s McSam Hotel Group said the company has done nothing wrong.

“McSam Hotel Group complies with New York City laws, rules and regulations in building hotels. We never build hotels with the intent of housing homeless persons," spokeswoman Lisa Linden said. 

"McSam Hotel Group makes no decisions regarding whether homeless persons are housed in hotels. The management companies make those decisions.”

Harshad Patel said the rebate fulfills its mission of creating jobs and that critics are ignoring the big picture.

“It’s the only reason we are building,” he said. "We have a lot of expenses.”

The city projects it will spend $2.1 billion overall on tackling the homelessness crisis in 2020. In 2018, $384 million went from city coffers to housing homeless people in hotels. Less clear is how much of the city’s homeless budget is going specifically to hotels that already receive the ICAP rebate.

Whatever the cost, affordable housing advocates believe it’s a waste of taxpayer money.

“What the city needs to do is build housing to house the homeless,” said Cea Weaver, Housing Justice for All’s campaign coordinator. “It’s a better use of our resources. It’s better than paying hotel owners twice.”

Multi-family homes will be destroyed for mega tower.

LIC Post

Three more century-old homes in Long Island City are slated for demolition.

The multi-family homes are all located on the same block – one at 23-10 45th Ave. and two at 45-03 and 45-07 23rd Street.

The demolitions will clear the way for the construction of a 45-story building near the southeast corner of 23rd Street and 45th Avenue in the heart of Court Square.

Development Site

Permits for the demolitions were filed Nov. 8. A total of seven multi-family homes on the block are in the process of being torn down to make way for the new high-rise.
The addresses of the buildings to be bulldozed extend from 23-10 to 23-16 45th Ave., and 45-03 to 45-09 23rd St.

The new project, however, will not cover the corner two-story building currently at 45-01 23rd St. The developer noted in city filings that attempts to purchase the property and its development rights from the owner were unsuccessful

Homeless shelter landlord plans to build school next to Pan American Hotel

Jackson Heights Post

The owner of the homeless shelter at the former Pan American hotel has filed plans to build a school on an adjacent site, according to building records.

David Levitan, one of the largest homeless shelter landlords in the city, has filed plans with the Department of Buildings to construct a 4-story school at 79-20 Queens Blvd in Elmhurst, on the lot directly next to the 79-00 Queens Blvd. shelter that he also owns.

Levitan, who is listed as the property owner on record, filed the plans on Nov. 22 to build the 39,764-square-foot school.

The school will house at least 18 classrooms, as well as multiple science labs, a music room, a fine arts room, a media lab, a teachers lounge, a cafeteria and kitchen, a rooftop play area and several offices, according to the plans.

The building will reach 53 feet in height, according to building plans. The plan makes no mention of whether the school will be public or privately run.

The school will sit next to the shelter, as Levitan bought a number of properties along the strip.
Levitan bought three sites — 79-20 Queens Blvd., 79-14 Queens Blvd. and 79-13 51st Ave. — next to the former hotel for $3,750,000 in April 2014, months after he brought the hotel site for $23,100,000 in January 2014, according to city records. He bought each lot from Panamendel Corp.

Wow. Apparently, with over tens of thousands of homeless children attending school, something like this was inevitable. The tale of two cities continues...