A thousand reasons to love Long Island City. Tips: Editor@LICtalk.com
Well we finally get some real local news late in the week. Best of all, I didn’t create it. Jimmy Van Bramer was interviewed in Crain’s on Tuesday and he revealed the following: [Read more…] about JVB SPEAK(ER)S & MIGHT WE SEE TWO HIGH LINES IN LIC?
Next Tuesday, September 22, at 6pm there will be a Participatory Budgeting (PB) neighborhood assembly in the auditorium at PS78Q. ((the one on 5th Street)) PB is where our local councilman lets you decide how to spend $1 million on community improvements to parks, schools, libraries, streets, and more. It’s not quite that simple, there’s a whole process in place to make sure it doesn’t end up in your Uncle Lou the contractor’s pocket, but it’s the starting point for ideas. So here are two suggestions for LIC. [Read more…] about PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING IS COMING: TWO SUGGESTIONS FOR LIC
For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.
But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.
– The New York Times April 4, 2015
Recent travails with the 7-train and school-gate lead me to ask: should everyone be living here? In a reversal of the entropic forces that overcome an abandoned jungle city, have we instead built over every square inch and then gone, and continue to go, too far upwards? Most importantly, does densification diminish the quality of life for all?
Probably not if you’re taking the seaplane to your 20-acre spread in the Hamptons every weekend and living in a 5,000 square foot apartment or townhouse Monday to Friday. As for the rest of us, I will posit that the answer is ‘yes.’ Because as exciting as it is to live in a city that never sleeps, at some point the reality of [Read more…] about GROWTH AT WHAT PRICE?
Since Mayor de Blasio fantasizes to the press about covering Sunnyside Yards and building affordable housing on top of it, I have decided to put forth a more pragmatic housing solution that focuses on the original intent of government. [Read more…] about RAZE QUEENSBRIDGE
A double headline, one surprising, one anything but. The news of Joe Conley’s resignation from Community Board 2 after 23 years, was unexpected and sudden. Under normal circumstances, a reign of that duration usually ends with months of boozy goodbye celebrations at night, replete with cigars and backslapping. Followed by hungover days ferrying around to local public schools and senior citizen centers to pick up newly contrived award plaques. There’s also usually a handpicked and groomed successor. Unless there’s a big scandal, in which case [Read more…] about CONLEY SUDDENLY RESIGNS AND MU RAMEN HAS LONG LINES