The local paper for the Upper er East Side OUR NEW REAL ESTATE LISTINGS < P.17
WEEK OF SEPTEMBER
24-30 2015
COUNTING BIKES ON THE EAST SIDE NEWS A survey by a neighborhood group tallied bikers and whether they abided by the law BY KYLE POPE
Just how out of control are dangerous bicycles on the Upper East Side? Not as much as you might think. In one of the first attempts to quantify the bike safety problem in the neighborhood -- a topic that has gained extra urgency with the recent roll-out of CitiBike -- the E. 79th Street Neighborhood Association this summer launched its own survey of bike traffic on First Avenue and 79th Street.
Volunteers from the group, led by Betty Cooper Wallerstein, tracked bicyclists for nearly 12 hours on June 30, tallying how many bikes passed by the intersection, whether they were using the bike lane, and whether they obeyed traffic lights and went with the flow of traffic. The results: 1,218 bicylists were counted by the volunteers over those 12 hours. Of those, 821 -- or about twothirds of the riders -- traveled in the bike lane. The group counted 277 riders who didn’t ride in the lane, 120 who were going the wrong way, and 178 who went through a red light.
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Photo: John St John, via Flickr
WHEN A PLAYGROUND DISAPPEARS NYCHA plan to sell off play space hits a backlash BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
The New York City Housing Authority shocked public housing residents and lawmakers when it announced a proposal to build affordable housing on playground space at Holmes Towers on the Upper East Side. In a bid to raise revenue and increase the affordable housing stock in Manhattan, the administration is proposing to sell or enter into longterm leases with developers to build 350-400 apartments on playground space at Holmes, 175-200 of which would be affordable. The remainder of the apartments will be offered at
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market rate. The agency released a statement last week that said since May, NYCHA has been rolling out key pieces of “NextGen NYCHA,” billed as a 10-year strategic plan to address the agency’s “chronic operating deficit” and $17 billion in unmet capital needs. Holmes Towers’ residents and local elected officials said they were not briefed on the proposal before it was announced last Thursday, and there are already several problems with the plan from their point of view. For instance, in order to qualify for the affordable apartments, a potential resident would need to make a minimum of 60 percent of the area median income, which is equivalent to a fam-
ily of three making $46,600. “I think it’s really unfair,” said Milagros Velasquez, a resident and tenant leader at Holmes Towers. “I’m lowincome, I’m a single working mother, and I still won’t be able to afford that low-income apartment.” A NYCHA spokesperson said a
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