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For public housing residents after Sandy, ‘a slow-motion Katrina’
November 10, 2012
Ask anyone living in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens or Park Slope earlier this week, and they would tell you that they have power, hot water and wi-fi. In fact, most of the $1 million-plus townhouses and local businesses in Brooklyn’s wealthier neighborhoods never lost any basic necessities, even during the worst of the storm. But the Gowanus Houses, a low-income public housing complex owned and operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which falls almost at the intersection of those three neighborhoods, is an exception.
Malik Rhasaan: Expanding occupation to the hood
December 23, 2011
When Malik Rhasaan first visited the Occupy Wall Street park at Liberty Square, he noticed that there was a lack of people of color. “Something needed to be done and I started the hash tag #occupythehood and from there it kind of swelled,” said Rhasaan, getting support from everyone from “professors down to cats who just got out of prison.”
Locked up and left behind: New York’s prisoners and Hurricane Irene
August 27, 2011
“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference Friday afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas.