Results tagged “crisis”

East Village residents packed a community forum Wednesday night to vent about a surge in the local rat population. City Councilmember Rosie Mendez, who co-hosted the meeting, declared that rats were "the largest growing population in the East Village." And Community Board 3 manager Susan Stetzer deemed the rat boom a "crisis...This year we didn’t even have the little Halloween parade in Tompkins Square Park for the kids because of all the rats." According to the Villager, Rick Simeone, director of pest-control services for the Health Department, says they stopped putting poison in the park due to concerns that hawks, squirrels or dogs would eat it. Instead, the city is promising to crack down on bars and restaurants who don't manage their trash properly. Meanwhile, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods are crawling with rats, too!

NYC comptroller William Thompson is proposing that the city plug the MTA's budget gap by raising automobile registration fees in the 12 counties served by the MTA’s trains and buses. If passed by the State Legislature, his plan would require drivers in the city and surrounding counties to pay $100 a year to register their vehicles. (The city currently charges $30 every two years.) According to the Times, drivers with vehicles weighing more than 2,300 pounds would have to pay an additional 9 cents per pound. By that measure, owners of Lincoln Navigators, which weigh in at 6,000 lbs., would owe the city $450 per year. Thompson says the revenue could add up to about $1 billion per year and serve as an alternative to the MTA's "devastating" budget proposal announced last week.

After years of massive expansion, real estate brokers are bracing themselves for a reversal of bank oversaturation. There are as many retail bank branches in Manhattan as there are Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts combined. Now Washington Mutual has postponed opening new branches (understandably), and other banks are consolidating their branches. One broker predicts that "we might have empty corners without a lot of takers out there chasing the space." But Mitchell Moss, NYU professor of urban planning, tells the Sun, "You will see a new kind of retail venture taking over the space, but it is difficult to predict what that will be — but it won't be clothing. It will have to be something that addresses a necessity." Gazing into the crystal ball, one can just about see the pawn shop where Chase Bank once pushed out the Second Avenue Deli.

Don’t get too comfortable homeowners – the city’s foreclosure rate is skyrocketing, up a startling 66% in the first quarter of 2008 compared to last year, according to Crain’s and the housing research site Property Shark. Queens saw more foreclosures than the four other boroughs combined, with 508 in the first quarter, up 59% from the same period in 2007.