This tweet from yesterday still nagging at me. Don't remember a president talking publicly about hating anyone since Nixon warned about such thoughts in his farewell speech https://goodreads.com/quotes/69125-always-remember-others-may-hate-you-but-those-who-hate

—  Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein

In @realDonaldTrump’s case, there’s a term for this “hate”—narcissistic rage.  He hates an entire city and state, and wishes their people harm, merely because he’s being called to account for his conduct, something a pathological narcissist can’t tolerate.  #IMPOTUS

— George Conway@gtconway3d

As the Trumps Dodged Taxes, Their Tenants Paid a Price

A phony business the Trumps created to siphon wealth from their empire drove up the rent for thousands living in their buildings.

www.nytimes.com

They were collateral damage as Donald J. Trump and his siblings dodged inheritance taxes and gained control of their father’s fortune: thousands of renters in an empire of unassuming red-brick buildings scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

When their regulated rents started rising more quickly in the 1990s, many tenants had no idea why. Some heard that the Trump family had spent millions on building improvements, but they remained suspicious. 

As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.

Padding the invoices had a secondary benefit for the Trumps, allowing them to inflate rent increases on their father’s rent-regulated apartments.

As a way to appreciate the scope of the impact, a onetime $10 increase in 1995 on all the 8,000 apartments involved would put the total overpaid by tenants at more than $33 million to date, an analysis of approved rent increases shows.

In reality, the creation of All County did not change how Fred Trump’s business functioned. He and his executives continued to negotiate prices for everything from roofs to window cleaner, but vendors began receiving checks from an All County bank account. Fred Trump’s apartment buildings then reimbursed All County, with an extra 20 to 50 percent tacked on.

All County was owned by Donald Trump, his three siblings and a cousin. In some years, the amounts distributed to each Trump sibling ballooned to nearly $1 million, records obtained by The Times show.

Because All County performed no real work, the transfer of money through the corporation was essentially a gift that evaded the 55 percent tax in place at the time, tax experts told The Times.

Civil penalties in cases of fraud remain a possibility, and tax authorities in New York City and New York State have said they are examining issues raised by The Times’s investigation.

NYC sets $17 an hour minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers

It's the first U.S. city to set pay minimums for ride-hail drivers, months after temporarily halting new Uber licenses

www.cbsnews.com

The city's Taxi and Limousine Commission voted Tuesday to establish a per-minute and per-mile payment formula for Uber, Lyft, Via, Juno and Gett that is supposed to result in drivers earning $17.22 an hour. Regulators say it will raise drivers' annual earnings by $10,000 a year.

The city's minimum wage is set to increase to $15 an hour at the end of this year. The equivalent wage for drivers, who are considered independent contractors and have to cover their own expenses, is $17.22.

The rules are based on a proposal developed by economist James Parrott, fiscal policy director of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, that adjusts how much drivers are paid based on how much work they're getting each hour. A report Parrott co-authored this summer found that most ride-hail drivers earn less than $17.22 an hour.

Traditional taxi drivers in New York, who operate under a different set of city rules, already make or exceed $17.22 on average, according to Joshi's commission.

96-Year-Old Secretary Quietly Amasses Fortune, Then Donates $8.2 Million

A frugal woman from Brooklyn, who rode the subway to work at one law firm for 67 years, left millions for students at Henry Street Settlement and Hunter College.

www.nytimes.com

• “She attended public schools, including Hunter College, where she completed her degree at night while working days to make ends meet.”
• She retired at age 96. Working for the same company for 67 years.
• She married her husband, Raymond Margolies and kept her maiden name
• She and her husband lived in rent-controlled apartment
• She moved to a senior residence after retiring
• She used NYC transit her entire life until her death in 2016
• She never told anyone about her fortune. May not even her husband!

Even by the dizzying standards of New York City philanthropy, a recent $6.24 million donation to the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side was a whopper — the largest single gift from an individual to the social service group in its 125-year history.

The Henry Street Settlement, on Montgomery Street, now serves more than 60,000 people and provides an array of services in addition to its education support, including health care programs and transitional housing.

Ms. Lockshin said an additional $2 million from Ms. Bloom’s bequest would be split between Hunter College and another scholarship fund to be announced.

It was not donated by some billionaire benefactor, but by a frugal legal secretary from Brooklyn who toiled for the same law firm for 67 years until she retired at age 96 and died not long afterward in 2016.

Her name was Sylvia Bloom and even her closest friends and relatives had no idea she had amassed a fortune over the decades. She did this by shrewdly observing the investments made by the lawyers she served.

“So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.”

In 1947 she joined a fledgling Wall Street law firm as one of its first employees. Over her 67 years with the firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, it grew to its current size, with more than 1,200 lawyers, as well as hundreds of staff members, of which Ms. Bloom was the longest tenured, said Paul Hyams, a human resources executive for the firm who became good friends with Ms. Bloom over his 35 years working there.

“She never talked money and she didn’t live the high life. She wasn’t showy and didn’t want to call attention to herself.”,  Paul Hyams

Ms. Bloom was known for always taking the subway to work, even on the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center, not far from the firm’s offices.

That day, Ms. Bloom, at 84, fled north and took refuge in a building before walking over the Brooklyn Bridge and taking a city bus — not a cab — home.

• NO sprinklers for residents  #WellBuiltBuilding  #NoSprinklers
• None of residents were told by Trump security or management to evacuate. Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident found out while watching TV.
• Did the fire alarm system work within the building?

“Michael Cohen, who is Trump’s lawyer was texting me and said ‘are you in the building? I said 'yes.’ He said 'you better get out ASAP!’”,  Dennis Shields a New York banker. Watch the video evidence - skip to the 58 sec. mark.

• President Trump's centerpiece Manhattan skyscraper built that opened in 1984, but which does not have sprinklers on its residential floors.
• According to The New York Times, Mr. Trump was one of the developers in the late 1990s who lobbied against sprinklers in buildings.
• He then recanted once the legislation passed with grandfathering provisions that meant existing buildings did not need to install them. 
• Then New York city mayor and now staunch Trump ally Rudy Giuliani signed the bill requiring sprinklers into force on March 24, 1999 

NYC Subway Travel Time Map

On this map, each stop‘s distance from your chosen stop is based on the time it‘ll take to travel there.

subway.nateparrott.com

Travel time predictions are based on the MTA‘s published schedule, assuming an 8 AM weekday departure. They may be a little optimistic these days.

All the data that went into the map comes from the MTA's GTFS feed, which provides information about routes, stops and schedules.

New York City is Using Oysters to Protect the City From Future Hurricanes

After the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, the city found a natural solution to protect itself from future storms.

impact.vice.com

Hurricane Sandy laid bare the city's inherent vulnerabilities in the face of natural disaster. At the local level, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg created the Strategic Initiative for Rebuilding and Resilience. Also, President Obama appointed a Hurricane Sandy Task Force headed by Shaun Donovan, Director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bottom line then and still is this: how do we make New York safer to withstand a big storm? President Obama's own task force launched a design competition in support called Rebuild by Design, which awarded money to government officials to implement six innovative plans from architects and engineers selected from detailed proposals.

Among those proposals was Living Breakwaters: the placement of oyster beds and reefs off Staten Island's shore to subdue the brunt force of oncoming waves. Tottenville, Staten Island was one of the hardest hit areas during Hurricane Sandy, and, the $60 million dollar project being implemented by the New York State Governor's Office of Storm Recovery set to conclude in 2019 aims to prevent further erosion and lost acreage.

Kate Orff, the founder of the project's landscape architecture firm SCAPE, and one of Bloomberg's original task force advisors presented a Ted Talk a year before Hurricane Sandy where she lauded the unsung heroism of oysters. If you didn't already know, oysters played a starring role as a native keystone species in the waterways of New York before industry wiped them out. In a 2011 TED Talk, Orff explains just how important oyster reefs in the New York Harbor were for filtering water. What makes them such an attractive component of the breakwater - which just means any offshore structure meant to protect a harbor from weather extremes - is that they significantly curb water pollution, plus strengthen biodiversity.

To this end, Living Breakwaters partnered with The Billion Dollar Oyster Project (BOP), a nonprofit established in 2014 as an ecological restoration and education program. The BOP endeavors to return the abundance of oysters to the waters that surround the city and claims to have added more than 11.5 million oysters throughout New York's harbors which collectively filter trillions of gallons of water. The future may resemble the past as it relearns to coexist with wildlife.

"There won't be any single engineering masterstroke that is going to change the course of climate change and warming," Orff said. "Rather than sit around, geoengineer our way out of it -- that's a fantasy -- what we need is to change behavior on multiple scales." To sit back and have faith in a catch all tech-save or a form of "geoengineering," is increasingly regarded by scientists as delusion, denial, or both.

Tenants Sue Kushner Companies Claiming Rent Rule Violations

A group of tenants sued the company, claiming rent overcharges.

www.nytimes.com|Jesse Drucker

A group of New York City tenants has sued the Kushner Companies, the family real estate firm of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, accusing the company of systematically violating the state’s rent regulations.

Claims could grow to more than $1 million in rent overcharges in a single apartment building if the company is found liable.

The lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday, was on behalf of nine tenants, but it concludes that more than 100 former and current tenants could have similar claims. The complaint is seeking class-action status.

The nonprofit group that researched the building, Housing Rights Initiative, said it had found similar irregularities in more than 50 other Kushner Companies apartment buildings across New York City and is studying potential future litigation related to those properties.

Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown

Metro Money’s Anne Kadet finds out how green grocers in Manhattan’s Chinatown can sell their produce at such rock-bottom prices

www.wsj.com|Anne Kadet

I never gave Chinatown’s crowded produce markets a chance; I figured the prices were cheap because the selection is all C-grade bok choy and yesterday’s bananas.

Wrong again! I toured the markets with Valerie Imbruce, an economic botanist who spent more than a decade researching the community’s produce supply chain. She even wrote a book on the topic, “From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace.”

Her discovery: Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.

Most of the city’s fruits and vegetables come from wholesalers at the Hunts Point Produce Market, the South Bronx distribution hub boasting all the color and accessibility of La Guardia Airport. Chinatown’s green grocers, in contrast, buy their stock from a handful of small wholesalers operating from tiny warehouses right in the neighborhood.

Because the wholesalers are in Chinatown, they can deliver fresh produce several times a day, eliminating the need for retailers to maintain storage space or refrigeration, said Ms. Imbruce.

Indeed, Chinatown’s green grocers make Costco look like Dean & DeLuca. Some are mere sidewalk stands renting space in front of a nail salon or a drugstore.

I made a little chart to compare prices with my neighborhood Key Food. In almost every case, Chinatown’s prices were less than half what I would pay at the supermarket. Among the bargains: broccoli for 85 cents a pound, $1 each for pomegranates, oranges for a quarter.

After 5 p.m., impromptu vendors haul cartons of cauliflower and cherries from graffiti-covered vans out to the sidewalk, hoping to sell excess inventory before day’s end. I saw just-ripe bananas selling for 50 cents a pound.

Some of the best bargains can be found on day-old produce, at the sidewalk stands on Forsyth Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Here, $8 buys a 20-pound box of mangos.

Mapping the U.S. by Property Value Instead of Land Area

Max Galka, founder of Metrocosm, has posted a series of cartograms over the past few weeks to illustrate just how messed up the city is. As Galka notes, New York City’s 305 square miles make up 8/1000ths of 1 percent of the land area of the United States. Yet New York City accounts for 5 percent of the nation’s housing value—more than every single state but four (one of which is, of course, New York state).