The new poverty measure unveiled by city officials at the recent NAACP convention presents New York City with a yardstick not just to count the city’s poor, but also to gauge the effect of anti-poverty measures and gain new perspective on New York’s residents – including the realization that poverty among the elderly and the employed is significantly worse than previously recognized.

The question now, say both city officials and poverty experts, is how the new statistic will be incorporated into city policies… [read more]

The scene on Fort Greene’s Myrtle Avenue on Thursday was certainly bursting with cheap irony: John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket czar and likely 2009 mayoral candidate, being protested by local residents for taking away their only neighborhood supermarket. Catsimatidis, you see, is also a developer, and had torn down a strip of stores including an Associated (no relation to Catsimatidis’ Gristede’s chain) to make way for condo towers. Two years later, the site is still an empty lot; to add insult to injury, the demonstrators charged, the builder is now backing away from promises that the new buildings would include affordable housing.

If you live in one of the city’s supermarket-enriched zones, this might seem amusing — crying over Penn Station or Yankee Stadium is one thing, but an Associated?… [read more]

It’s undoubtedly not how John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Gristede’s owner and rumored 2009 mayoral candidate, would have liked his bespectacled, slightly pudgy face get public recognition: aloft on a pole held by a Brooklyn pre-teen, beneath the words “SHAME ON YOU!!”

The occasion was a protest by Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), the Brooklyn-based low-income group, over a much-delayed development project that Catsimatidis has in the works on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene… [read more]

I was riding the B train across the Manhattan Bridge recently when an especially civic-minded conductor thought to point out Olafur Eliasson’s “Waterfalls” art installations visible out either window. One passenger near me got up to take a peek, then sat back down, shaking her head: “It looks like the Brooklyn Bridge sprung a leak.”

That seems the popular verdict on the $15 million project (mostly funded by private donations, though the joint city-state-run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation kicked in $2 million): This is a waterfall?… [read more]

Don’t be so sure, says John Crompton, author of a 2006 paper detailing what he calls “mischievous procedures” in economic impact studies that reflect their genesis as more PR documents than scientific treatises. “The All-Star Game, there’s no question people will come to town for that,” he says. Nonetheless, he questions how many of the “new” visitors will merely displace existing tourists who’ll avoid New York because the hotels are full during All-Star week: “If there was no All-Star Game, would those hotels still be at 80% [capacity]? If the answer is yes, then you haven’t added to the economic impact, you have merely displaced some other folks who would have come if there was no game.”

Last week’s Port Authority report on progress (or lack thereof) at ground zero was a great moment for fans of political schadenfreude, with news of how virtually every aspect of the rebuilding is a shambles, with the new PATH station and 9/11 memorial massively behind schedule, and the whole project more than a billion dollars over budget. Meanwhile, the Cortlandt Street IRT station turns out to be inconveniently located mere inches from where two new skyscrapers are set to be built — who knew?[read more]

When the Massachusetts passed its much-delayed state budget last week, it included an obscure tax-law change that could be crucial for small-business owners concerned about unfair competition. By becoming the 22nd state to adopt “combined reporting” legislation, Massachusetts lawmakers are hoping to put a stop to a longstanding practice that, they say, gives large corporate chains an unfair advantage over their smaller competitors at tax time… [read more]

As promised, state assemblymember Richard Brodsky held a hearing this morning into the Yankees’ latest request for $350 million (or so - see below) in city-backed tax-exempt bonds to help pay for extra doodads for their new stadium. The surprise: On the hot seat for the entire three-hour hearing was a single witness, Economic Development Corporation president Seth Pinsky, who at times struggled to come up with detailed responses to the questions posed by an increasingly impatient Brodsky…

As if New Yorkers hadn’t been beset by enough bad news of late — foreclosures going through the roof, “The Real World” filming its next season in Brooklyn — last week the MTA chimed in with word that its latest round of budget woes would force it to “defer” planned service upgrades, possibly forever. With $500 million in red ink projected for next year, MTA chief Lee Sander declared, the authority needed to put off everything from renovating crumbling subway stations to buying new double-length buses - and still may consider another fare hike next year.

To blame is the MTA’s financing system, which draws roughly equally from fares and from a series of dedicated taxes… [read more]

Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade isn’t usually a place for broad political messages, except when reclaiming pasties as a symbol of women’s empowerment can be considered political. These aren’t normal times, however. Last year, as the battle over Thor Equities’ plan for beachfront condo towers heated up, the “Save Coney Island” section was a small contigent of the festivities; at this year’s parade, stepping off tomorrow at 2 pm, expect it to be the major theme.

First off, it will undoubtedly be the first time that the hundreds of thousands of gawkers there to take in the sights will be handed flyers for a city scoping meeting…