Grace under pressure: An FDNY fireboat engineer recalls the spontaneous bravery and humanity that so many showed after the attack on the World Trade Center and reminds us that “each of us has that capacity within.”

What began as a single radio documentary has grown dramatically, and helped change the face, and voice, of American journalism. Now it has a new home.

A new career ladders program is designed to reduce workplace inequality, stabilize a high-turnover workforce, and improve essential services.

Even in a relatively middle-class community, the pandemic’s effects are powerful and likely to be long-lasting.

The Astoria Project survey captures the multi-dimensional impact on a single New York City neighborhood during the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing together economic findings, reflections on health and mental health effects, and new perceptions of risk now enveloping routine daily activities.

Child protective workers exercise powers akin to those of police officers – so they should also provide the same legal protections the police must.

Recycling and composting stalled or went into reverse during the pandemic lockdown. Here’s how to get things moving again.

What the next mayor -- with help from Albany and Washington -- can do to relieve a looming housing crisis.

To succeed, the mayor has to be a manager – and a marketer, too.

Our experience now is one of profound exhaustion – and, perhaps, insight.

A visual report card tracks efforts to move the schools forward under the last two mayors.

Why the next mayor needs to learn from what Bloomberg and de Blasio accomplished – and didn’t – in the schools.

Racial disparity has been the legacy of the child welfare system. It doesn’t have to be its future.

There is a maternal health emergency in New York City. It’s deeply rooted in racism. And it’s one the next mayor can do a lot to stop.

Why budget makers love the way Federal rescue dollars are arriving – and how they might use them.

State and City governments both will get a reprieve from the worst-case scenarios forecast at the height of the pandemic-induced recession.

Stopping unnecessary, punitive child welfare investigations is the right thing to do.

Young people in communities hit hard by Covid-19 want to work while they learn, and help support their families.

Done right, legalization can redress longstanding injustices and strengthen local economies in both rural and urban communities.

Does a story of middle-income renters fighting to hold onto their homes have relevance in a pandemic-era city?

Green energy and green jobs: a restorative justice prescription for a healthier New York City.

Will the city’s next leaders right the environmental wrongs that have worsened the pandemic?

We write from the strange world of coronavirus recovery; we write from this time when Covid-19 in the past tense does not yet apply.

How will pandemic-forced changes alter admission to many of New York City’s most sought-after secondary schools?

Despite being the Big Apple’s biggest buyer of health insurance, City government does a poor job of leveraging its market power for the benefit of workers, and taxpayers.

Here’s what to keep in mind as State officials grapple with the pandemic’s dire effects on New York State’s economy and finances.

This report examines New York City’s app-dispatch driver pay standard and finds that in the first year of the pay standard (pre-pandemic) driver pay increased by about nine percent, passenger fares rose slightly but not much more than in Chicago without a pay standard, passenger wait times declined significantly, and some of the pay increase was absorbed by the app-dispatch companies through lower effective commission rates.

New York’s antiquated law governing unemployment insurance disincentivizes work and threatens to slow the economic recovery. This report from the CNYCA analyzes the proposed Stirpe-Ramos bill’s reform for New York’s partial unemployment insurance benefits and finds that low- and moderate-income workers would benefit and models several scenarios to show that additional costs to the state’s UI trust fund will be small.

Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins was committed to interracial democracy and just policing – values that still resonate today.

Commercial rent regulation? Tax relief? What kind of help do New York City’s small businesses, and their landlords, need?

Nonprofit social services provide essential services for a broad swathe of New Yorkers, yet these organizations face significant workforce retention and recruitment problems. This report from the Center for New York City Affairs outlines concrete steps that can be taken to invest in these essential workers by building robust career ladders, addressing pay disparities among workers, and raising the compensation of nonprofit workers to aid in retention and recruitment. The ongoing public health emergency and economic dislocation make clear the need to invest in social service workers essential not only during emergencies but also day in and day out.

Will small businesses survive the pandemic? And what can and should government do to help them weather the tough months ahead?

Inequality harms us all. Fair and fairly enforced rules promote economic growth that is strong, stable, and broadly shared.

Photographer Matias Campa records New Yorkers' historic early voting march to the polls.

In a pandemic-induced emergency, is it a good idea to give City government limited leeway to borrow to cover operating expenses?

The pandemic has put tenants, landlords, and local governments in a financial vise. Are there ways to ease the squeeze?

In the current unprecedented climate, nonprofits led by people of color have become the vanguard of crisis response in their communities. Yet even as they perform urgent new work, many face profound challenges to their long-term financial stability.

As economic activity continues to increase, it’s time to enact essential, enforceable State workplace safety laws specifically related to Covid-19.

There can no longer be any doubt that the City’s plan for reopening schools is falling apart. But there’s a way of saving this school year so that children who need the most get it.

Community violence prevention organizations have produced real results in reducing gun violence. They deserve more resources, support, and respect from policymakers looking for community-based approaches to public safety.

In New York City, skin color helps determine where a patient receives hospital care. It’s a form of systemic discrimination that undermines the health of Black New Yorkers.

When New York City released its "Bridge to School" plan in late August, officials called on teachers to make students' mental health needs their top priority. "Many of our young people are in pain,” City officials wrote. But as students finally resume classes – remotely this week and in classrooms next – they will find that many social workers and other mental health care providers have disappeared from school budgets.

A paycheck guarantee program would help an economy that has been hemorrhaging jobs and also address the profoundly racialized impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

This report updates the Center's ongoing examination of the Covid-19 economic impact, finding that as of early August, unemployment remains distressingly high, and the July expiration of the temporary $600 Federal supplemental weekly unemployment insurance benefit will impose deep new hardships on hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and on the entire city economy.

As a result of the coronavirus, New York City faces a $9 billion loss in tax revenue and hard choices to make for the city’s future. Public employee layoffs and drastic service cuts are options under discussion to balance the City budget if significant federal relief doesn’t come through.

The experience of emergency child care centers serving the children of essential workers at the height of the pandemic offers insights about re-opening New York’s early education programs.

Our colleagues tell us what they’ve been reading during the powerful, disturbing days we’ve all just been through.

The Center for New York City Affairs and the Center for Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California Institute for Research on Labor and Employment are releasing a new report recommending the establishment of a minimum compensation standard for Seattle Uber and Lyft drivers. The study examined pay for thousands of Seattle drivers, and found that drivers net about $9.73 per hour, much less than Seattle’s $16.39 minimum wage for employees of large businesses. A third of all drivers work 32 hours per week or more and provide 55 percent of all trips. Nearly three-fourths rely on driving as their sole source of income.

If they aren’t careful, the City might sacrifice their commitment to educational equity in the name of emergency modes of on-line learning. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Since February, New York City has lost 1.25 million jobs, by far the sharpest job decline since the 1930s. To a greater extent than in previous downturns, the Covid-19-related job losses are heavily concentrated among low-wage workers, hitting persons of color, immigrants, young workers, and less educated workers the hardest. It is likely that the city could end 2020 with 500,000 to 600,000 fewer jobs than at the beginning of the year. Substantial additional federal economic assistance is needed to reduce hardships and spark more and better employment opportunities.

The problem isn’t isolated decisions by “bad apples.” It’s decisions made at much higher levels

A new report by the InsideSchools project of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, “Learning Equitably, Digitally, and Well,” examines how teachers, students, and parents have fared since schools switched exclusively to online learning in March. The report draws on in-depth interviews with some 37 students, teachers, parents, researchers, and others, and includes recommendations to City education policymakers for improving online or blended (combination classroom and remote) instruction in the coming school year.

“Zero waste” policies will also create good green jobs, reduce food insecurity, and address climate change.

The crisis, as ever, is white supremacy. But this is not a rerun; this is something new.

To end the effects of structural racism, we will need national standards in public health and public safety.

Doctors across New York State see a growing number of young people coming to hospitals with dangerous psychiatric emergencies. It is a first sign, they say, of a looming mental health crisis among children and adolescents. And they warn that—unless the State makes radical changes—many young people will not be able to get the mental health care they need.

This moment holds much more than rage at police brutality: the path of the coronavirus has revealed the dense fabric of inequality in a manner we have never seen before.

The increased burning of household trash, a likely side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, could well make an already desperate health situation in many Black and Latinx communities even worse.

Covid-19 relief for tenants and landlords won’t last long. But a swift and dramatic expansion of the existing Housing Choice Voucher program would stabilize their lives.

The author of Last Subway talks about shoring up finances, calming riders' fears, and planning for the future at the nation's largest mass transit system.

For the next school year, here are six key things officials must be focusing on right now.

With the help of nonprofits, New York City has begun providing hotel rooms to people leaving jail with nowhere else to go. Advocates say it's a great step, but thousands of New Yorkers remain in danger in the City's crowded jails and homeless shelters.

The Covid-19 pandemic is hitting the underfinanced hospitals serving thousands of poor and working-class New Yorkers the hardest. Now it’s up to State and City policymakers to straighten things out and make New York City’s hospital system work better for everyone.

The sectors of the city's economy hardest hit by the Covid-19 contraction rely heavily on immigrant workers Nearly 200,000 undocumented workers have lost jobs, and they've been left out of many unemployment relief measures.

When the coronavirus put New York on pause, the City’s Family Courts shut down most of their operations. Last week, the Court began to open up for matters that might move cases forward. But progress is slow and limited, and many families remain without access to the judges who can send their children home from foster care.

New York City’s economy is in a more precarious state than at any time since the 1970s fiscal and economic crisis. The current public health and economic crisis far surpasses the personal, psychological, and economic devastation wrought by 9/11, the 2008-09 Great Recession, or Superstorm Sandy. The social distancing public health imperative at present has incapacitated a substantial portion of the city’s economy. Job losses and new unemployment claims that have mounted since the beginning of the pandemic are unprecedented. An estimated 1.2 million New Yorkers (or 27 percent of all private sector workers) will be jobless by the end of April in an environment where businesses have been ordered to close and non-essential personnel told to stay at home. This report identifies the workers and industries that are expected to experience the most profound displacement and economic losses as business closures and social distancing measures demanded by the health crisis continue. The daunting economic challenges New York City faces in the months and years ahead are discussed.

The recently released admission results for next fall’s classes at New York City’s elite specialized high schools fit a racially and ethnically imbalanced pattern that has been the status quo in recent memory.

Covid-19 has torn through the City's juvenile detention centers. Frantic parents say their kids should be sent home.

I’ve learned a lot about what it means to learn and teach with technology. Let me share some advice for parents and teachers. Forget the products. Focus on principles.

The CARES Act will help overcome glaring gaps. But workers and small businesses may not receive aid in a timely fashion. And assistance to immigrants, those without health insurance, and many low-income families will be severely limited.

Amid the chaos caused by Covid-19, New York City parents with kids in the child welfare system have lost access to the Family Court

James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies for the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, partnered with The Century Foundation and its Senior Fellow Andrew Stettner on a new report projecting up to 15 million U.S. lost jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic. The report also estimates the value of a key provision in the new Senate stimulus bill regarding unemployment insurance benefits.

The Covid-19 outbreak and the massive economic dislocations it has induced have brought renewed attention to the lack of benefits, including employment-based health insurance coverage, typically experienced by workers classified as independent contractors.

Elected officials have asked businesses and workers to shut down and cease what they do out of justifiable public health concerns. The first order of business for economic stimulus is to make whole those whose jobs ended because public safety demanded that.

odega culture still rests on the quick transactions that turn into familial encounters; these brick and mortar strongholds exist at the intersection of community center, public forum, and corner store. But what was once a hyperlocal cultural experience is now reproduced globally via marketing and social media. Each customer that steps inside the bodega is participating in networks that – whether analog, digital, or social – spread the bodega’s influence farther than the corner where it stands.

Tom Liam Lynch – high school English teacher, online learning architect for the New City Department of Education, academic researcher and scholar, and public school parent – is the new director of education policy at the Center for New York City Affairs and editor-in-chief of the Center’s InsideSchools project. He’s putting finishing touches on a “1,000-day” action plan for that work, and this week previews it for Urban Matters.

Child welfare investigators, often the first responders to domestic violence cases, aim to help both children and adult victims. However, critics argue that child welfare interventions can go wrong, turning victims into suspects and causing chaos for vulnerable families.

Critics have argued that the City's rezonings have the perverse effect of exacerbating housing affordability problems. On balance, however, the evidence just isn’t there.

The analysis examines the unintended consequence of free, public preschool programs on the supply of child care for babies and toddlers in New York City. It suggests concerns that affordable infant and toddler care for low-income parents may be at risk despite similar enrollment numbers in subsidized child care programs.

Many aspects of New York’s workers’ comp benefit structure combine to deliver inadequate lost-worktime compensation to injured workers. Since 2007 workers' comp “reforms,” payments to or on behalf of workers have fallen relative to workers’ comp premiums while insurance company profits have soared. This report unravels the details and argues that the Empire State needs to take a fresh look at its workers’ comp system in order to restore the priority of fairly compensating victims of workplace injuries and ensure that businesses responsibly invest in enhancing workplace safety. This report updates several data series included in an earlier version released in April 2019.

New York State’s Medicaid-induced $6.1 billion budget gap for the coming year stems from reliance on rigid spending caps and fiscal smoke-and-mirror maneuvers intended to project an appearance of smart and disciplined spending control. Now a day of reckoning is at hand.

The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) recently announced new contract awards to nonprofit agencies to provide preventive services to support families who have experienced challenges in caring for their children. The contracts were awarded through a rigorous request for proposals (RFP) process mandated by the City Charter and applicable laws. And therein lies a major problem.

New York City’s unprecedented and ongoing efforts in the realm of affordable housing show what cities can – and can’t – do strictly on their own to solve a deep and persistent affordability crisis.

An exhaustive study of holistic defense of criminal cases in the Bronx found that it reduces the likelihood of a custodial sentence by 16 percent and expected sentence length by 24 percent. The researchers found that it "offers considerable potential to reduce incarceration without harming public safety

A radically new production of West Side Story will open on Broadway next month. And a new West Side Story movie is to come to the screen later this year. We asked Julia Foulkes, a professor of history at The New School and author of the acclaimed A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York, about the new life and enduring meaning of this musical theater classic.

This report examines the progress achieved with New York City’s July 2019 commitment to early childhood education (ECE) starting pay salary parity that will raise pay for certified teachers in community-based organizations (CBOs) by 30-40 percent by October 1, 2021.

Our six years of key indicators spotlight trends in New York City’s foster care and preventive services systems.

Across New York State, children and adolescents wait weeks—or even months—to get treatment for serious mental health problems. In the coming year, mental health providers and advocates warn that the situation may get worse. Despite an increase in teen suicide attempts, State officials plan to cut payments for several mental health programs that serve young people in their homes and communities.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to end use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) would make the city’s most elite public high schools more racially and ethnically diverse. The mayor’s plan would instead offer seats at the specialized high schools to the top performers in each of the city’s public middle schools. We tested this proposal and found that, if enacted, it would give some 2,000 academically qualified Black and Latinx students each year access to higher-performing schools and a more ethnically diverse cohort of fellow students than they typically have through the current school choice process.

This is the first assessment of restaurant employment and earnings over the entire period of New York City’s historic minimum wage increases, 2013-18. Contrary to fears of massive job losses, $20 Big Macs, and shuttered restaurants, we found a thriving industry.

Scrapping the test would make the city's elite schools more ethnically and racially diverse. But it wouldn't be a panacea for ending entrenched patterns of demographic sorting.

The Boogie Down Brigade: Celebrating Bronx Fashion Superheroes The Common Thread Project, the creation of fashion anthropologist Mikaila Brown, has published a comic book-style celebration of what she calls The Boogie Down Brigade. In panel after panel, she spotlights the latest generation of fashionista superheroes shaped by, and shaping, the look and vibe of the borough that brought the world hip-hop: The Bronx.

A Q&A with environmental policy expert Dr. Ana I. Baptista.

Human services aid from New York State helps localities pay for direct services, including public assistance and services provided through nonprofits. In this report we examine New York State, New York City and county budget data to understand how State funding trends affect localities across the state and New York City in particular.