Lives Of NYC’s Public Housing [Photo Essay]

Posted on April 29, 2013 by lidiakcmanzo

Yvonne Shields, Sous-Chef NYCHA Resident: Highbridge Gardens (Bronx) Credit: City Limits

By number, it’s a city – a large one. As of this past January, 403,736 people live in 2,596 apartment buildings owned and run by the New York City Housing Authority. That population is bigger than Miami, Oakland and Tulsa.

NYCHA buildings do not comprise a city of course. But their people, history, importance and problems are no less critical and complicated.

See this amazing photo essay published on-line by City Limits:

We the People: The Citizens of NYCHA

Michel de Certeau: Walking The City

Posted on April 28, 2013 by lidiakcmanzo

Reblogged from Notes From Dystopia:

“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of an appropriation. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place — an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City…a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.”

― Michel de Certeau “The Practice of Everyday Life”

Photo by John Fraissinet

Questioning New York City’s Affordability

Posted on April 26, 2013 by lidiakcmanzo

“New Yorkers assume that we live in the most expensive city in the country, and cost-of-living indexes tend to back up that assertion. But those measures are built around the typical American’s shopping habits, which don’t really apply to the typical New Yorker – especially not college-educated New Yorkers with annual household incomes in the top income quintile, or around $100,000. ”

[New York Times, 4/23]