Parks gained popular and political support during the pandemic. That hasn’t translated into increased funding, especially for smaller neighborhood parks.
A lawsuit alleges that the Department of Corrections failed to provide medical treatment to detainees thousands of times between June 2022 and present. The city maintains that the vast majority of missed appointments were due to detainees’ refusal.
New York and other cities are changing their zoning codes to allow clean, small-scale production in their commercial corridors. Opening up retail spaces to “artisanal manufacturing” has many benefits for communities.
Future in Context
As ridership continues to lag amid a stubbornly slow recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, cities experiment with free rides and micromobility to prove public transit’s worth in worsening financial conditions.
The city’s Education Department has directed districts to increase their share of classes in compliance with a reduced size plan by 3 percent. Superintendents can require schools to meet individual targets.
New data from the New York City Economic Development Corporation shows that the city’s Black unemployment rate has dropped to 7.9 percent. Overall unemployment has dropped to 4.9 percent and Hispanic unemployment is at 6.7 percent.
Currently, the state controls the local speed limits but a proposal folded into the state budget would change that. The current speed limit in New York City was set in 2014, the first citywide reduction in a half-century.
Gov. Kathy Hochul says she and lawmakers have a “conceptual agreement” that includes both tax breaks for developers and some new tenant protections. She failed to win approval of an ambitious housing package last year.
Almost 700 children who were evicted from New York City’s migrant shelters on Jan. 9 are no longer enrolled in the city’s school system. Many educators are worried about how this will impact those students’ futures.
Although population losses have slowed in most major cities, they haven't stopped. New York has lost nearly a half-million people since the start of the pandemic.
Land subsidence is making major seafront metropolises from New York to Jakarta more vulnerable to rising waters. Local decisionmakers need to account for it.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed billions toward public transit in New York, but the state is choosing to spend billions more on highways.
In 2022, Cook County, Ill., became the first local government to partner with the nonprofit group RIP Medical Debt to use private donor funds to buy up and forgive patient debt. Since then, seven local governments, including NYC, have joined the program.
Nearly four years after the start of the pandemic, downtowns are still short of office workers and foot traffic. That's contributing to significant budget problems in some cities.
Previous funding that had been slashed from police, fire, sanitation and schools has since been restored. Meanwhile, costs related to migrants have been cut by 20 percent.
New York City schools have received more than $7 billion in federal aid to help students recover academically after the pandemic. But 36 percent of students were still “chronically” absent last year. Those in poverty were gone 45 percent of the year.
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Future in Context
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