City Council Member Alexa Avilés leads the NYCHA budget hearing (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)

The New York City Housing Authority is facing a fiscal crisis as rent revenue has plummeted in the wake of the pandemic, affecting its operational budget, constraining its ability to hire personnel, and forcing it to suspend dozens of infrastructure improvement projects. Amid the city's larger affordable housing and homelessness crisis, the public housing authority is also struggling with a worsening ability to get vacant units repaired and filled with new tenants, a problem apparently

A NYCHA building in Queens (photo: Governor's Office)

In July 2020, the New York City Housing Authority published “A Blueprint for Change” to address decades of organizational mismanagement, financial instability, and repeated crises that were affecting the health and wellbeing of the city’s roughly 500,000 public housing residents. Last year, NYCHA achieved one of the crucial steps from that plan as the state

A portion of the Unity Map proposal for new City Council districts

Last month, the New York City Districting Commission released a preliminary map of new City Council district lines, redrawing boundaries across the city based on population changes enumerated in the 2020 Census. Uproar quickly ensued over several of the major changes in the draft maps for the 51 City Council districts across the five boroughs.

In Brooklyn, the commission proposed a new Asian American majority district that could award political power to a growing constituency — what the commission itself deemed an “Asian opportunity district”

City Council members at City Hall (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)

Unlike the fight over new state legislative and congressional district maps, which focused on partisan lines earlier this year, the effort to redraw New York City's 51 City Council districts has become a battle defined by incumbency and ethnicity.

Last Friday, the New York City Districting Commission released a

Thursday's rally (photo: @NYCComptroller)

With climate crises bearing down on New York City, including hurricanes and tropical storms that flooded landlocked neighborhoods and killed more than a dozen New Yorkers last year, elected officials and activists are pressing Mayor Eric Adams to act with urgency in implementing a law to tackle carbon emissions in the city.

At a rally in midtown Manhattan on Thursday morning, climate activists gathered with officials including Public

Alexa Avilés (photo: Alexa Avilés campaign)

Alexa Avilés, a Democratic candidate for City Council, recently prevailed in the primary in District 38 in Brooklyn. She joined the Latino Vote '21 podcast to discuss her candidacy and the Latino vote in her district and beyond. The Latino Vote '21 podcast is a pop-up podcast produced by Gotham Gazette and hosted by contributing columnist Eli Valentin (who writes a column of the same name) exploring Latino candidates, voters, and other related themes in the city's 2021 elections. Episodes can

Kids back to school (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)

On Thursday morning, February 25, thousands of New York's middle school students scrambled for misplaced backpacks and student MetroCards, trundled out the door, and made their way to long-abandoned classrooms, ready at last to resume in-person instruction after months of remote learning. Thousands of teachers were there to greet them—many no doubt wearing nervous but enthusiastic grins behind their doubled-up facemasks.

Sadly, my daughter Karina—a seventh-grader at Brooklyn's MS 88—wasn’t