“We are shocked by [yesterday's] court decision,” said Richard McBee, President of Lower Manhattan’s Sixteenth Street Synagogue. The NYS Supreme Court has upheld the eviction of the synagogue from their home of more than 65 years by building owner Jack Braha. This decision marks a low point for McBee and the synagogue on the roller coaster ride of a real estate battle that has ensued over the Fifth Avenue property in the last few years.

Braha posted the five-day eviction notice two weeks ago, but the NYS Supreme Court put a Temporary Hold on the mandate, allowing the synagogue’s lawyers to argue their side in court. The Sixteenth Street Synagogue claims partial ownership of the building where they hold daily services and also asserts “moral rights” to the building based on the claim that Braha verbally promised to let the congregation remain rent-free when he purchased the building in 2005. Unfortunately, they have no paperwork to prove it.

Neither Braha nor his lawyer returned phone requests for comment.

As McBee promised, the synagogue will be filing an appeal of the decision in yet another attempt to save the religious community they’ve built over the years. “This action by the court forces our hand to pursue other options in our fight for our synagogue’s life and our own future as a community,” he said.

Via City & State.

Ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner’s just-released campaign finance filing shows that Weiner continues to pay rent for a campaign office. Most recently, on July 7, Weiner paid $5,438.23 to SL Green, for “Office Expenses Rent” – and Weiner also continues to pay a monthly phone bills for the office.  A source confirmed that Weiner continues to keep a campaign office open.

It’s interesting that Weiner continues to have at least a bare-bones campaign operation, since the ex-congressman said recently that he’s not planning to step back into public life. Weiner has been pontificating recently about the Supreme Court’s health care bill decision, but his mayoral ambitions were seemingly vanquished by his tweeting scandal.

A spokeswoman for Weiner did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

To read more from City & State click here.

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that largely amends Arizona’s controversial 2010 anti-immigration law. However, despite ruling out several important elements, the court upheld the “show me your papers” provision, which authorizes police officers to operate random identity checks on “suspicious” persons.

By Laurent Berstecher

The Court ruled out three key provisions of the SB-1070 bill for going against the constitution, leading to the following changes:

1. It is now no longer legal for police officers to arrest immigrants on probable cause charges (e.g. without a warrant)
2. It is no longer a crime for immigrants not to carry identification and registration papers with them
3. It is no longer a crime for illegal immigrants to look for a job or solicit work

However, it maintained what is perhaps the most controversial aspect of SB-1070. The provision, which has cynically been nicknamed the “show me your papers” law by its opponents, basically enables police officers to undertake ‘random’ identification checks, provided that there is “reasonable suspicion.”

Critics have voiced their discontent at this half-decision, claiming that the “show me your papers” provision remains one of the most dangerous aspects of the law and that it will lead to instances of racial profiling.

While a step in the right direction, Monday’s ruling will have left many pundits bitter and disappointed.

City Council speaker Christine Quinn praised the Court’s decision, but deplored that it did not go all the way, adding that upholding the “show me your papers” provision undermined “the ideal that America was founded on […] the welcome and support of every person who comes into this nation in pursuit of the American Dream.”

Meanwhile, President Obama also expressed his concerns in a written statement, pointing out that “No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed the original SB 1070 back in 2010, assured the public that police officers were receiving special training not to profile people based on their skin colors. However, as many critics duly pointed out, random immigration status checks are in essence targeted towards people of color.

We spoke with M. Walter Barrientos, Program Officer at the North Star Fund, an organization supporting immigrant communities in New York. Along with his parents and sister, Barrientos left Guatemala in 1996 in pursuit of a better life. In a turn of fate, Barrientos was offered a special visa after he was attacked by a gang and collaborated with the police on the investigation. However, he told us that his parents only got their visas processed in January, 16 years after they came to the United States.

“I know first-hand how it feels to be taken apart from the group,” says Barrientos, referring to his past experiences with racial profiling. Before he obtained his visa, recent-graduate Barrientos was on a train to Chicago when immigration officers proceeded to a ‘random’ sweep. “They told me to follow them, and took everyone who wasn’t white into questioning.” Walter and the others illegals were detained in a high security prison for three days, after which he was released on a $10,000 bail. “I got lucky, I had connections,” Barrientos says. “Everyone else got deported.”

Walter Barrientos’ views on Monday’s ruling reflect the majority of the public’s opinion. While he sees it as an encouragement for future battles, he cannot bring himself to call the Court’s decision a victory.

“The Court definitely struck down some of the weaker provisions, but the one that could have the most impact was upheld,” says Barrientos. “[Show me your papers] makes it the most difficult because it breaks the trust between the community and the police.”

Walter Barrientos also expressed his concerns that police officers will increasingly double as “immigration agents.” And this is not limited to Arizona either. Not only will the Supreme Court’s ruling set a precedent for similar immigration laws to be passed in other states, but the City of New York has recently begun implementing an aggressive immigration program known as Secure Communities, which aims to reinforce cooperation between local police, the FBI and the ICE.

While the Supreme Court’s crackdown on parts of Arizona’s controversial immigration law certainly holds hope for the future, prospects largely remain gloomy and uncertain for many immigrant communities in America.

By Sean Creamer and Anam Baig

James Harmon’s brownstone (center) at 32 W. 76th St.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court weighed a decision that could have meant the destruction of rent regulation in New York. The court decided on Monday morning, after several delays and requests for more information, not to hear a case brought by Upper West Side resident James Harmon against the state’s rent regulation laws. While supporters of Harmon’s fight grumble and regroup and advocates of rent regulation breathe a collective sigh of relief, many people have said that they were surprised that the challenge went this far in the first place, and that the fight to keep rent regulations in place is not likely to end any time soon.

City and state agencies charged with defending rent regulation reiterated the long-standing viability of the law, even as it is has faced legal challenges in the past.

“We are pleased that the Supreme Court will allow the existing court rulings dismissing this case to stand. Rent regulation in New York City has a long history, and the court properly left it to elected state and city officials to decide its future,” said Alan Krams, senior counsel of the Appeals Division, in a statement issued by the New York City Law Department.

While rent control is designed to enable people who cannot afford market-rate rents to stay at a comfortable level in the city, one disgruntled property owner decided that his tenants were taking advantage of this system. Harmon sued to overturn the regulations that he said amounted to the taking of his property, since he was not able to rent the units out at market rates.

The court declined to hear the case because of the fact that Harmon and his wife Jeanne were aware that the building was rent controlled when they inherited the property.

Harmon, an Upper West Side resident, inherited the five-story brownstone building on West 76th Street. At that time, he became the landlord of several tenants who were living in rent-controlled apartments. According to previous statements made by Harmon, he felt that these tenants were affluent citizens and did not belong in rent-controlled apartments.

“It’s pivotal that the Supreme Court even thought about taking it, said Sue Susman, the president of the Central Park Gardens Tenants’ Association. “For decades, the U.S. Supreme Court was in support of the regulation.”

Harmon had several avenues he could have taken to alleviate the situation, but he chose to go to court, Susman said. He could have filed a hardship increase application, where he could have showed the State Housing Agency his account books and had his tenants pay a higher percentage of regulated rent.

Harmon, an attorney, argued that under his Fifth Amendment rights, the fact that rent control even exists is an unconstitutional seizure of his personal property by the government. The court ruled that there was no “taking of property” and dismissed the case, but Harmon appealed, touting his 14th Amendment right to due process which he claims was denied him. The case was denied in both the Federal District Court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

He pleaded to the courts that rent stabilization laws were denying him the ability to earn as much as he could from his apartments. He has to offer the rent-stabilized apartments at 59 percent below the regular market price to his tenants, is not able to choose his tenants and has no say over who inherits the apartments when their tenants die. Even when a beneficiary of the deceased takes over the property, they too are graced with below-market-rate rents.

Harmon’s lawsuit was against several parties who are in charge of rent control policies, including Jonathan Kimmel, the chair of the Rent Guidelines Board, and Darryl Towns, the commissioner of the New York State Homes and Community Renewal.

After the denial of both federal courts, the Harmons petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, which would allow the Harmons to appeal to the Supreme Court for a final decision in their case. The state and city each filed a brief defending the Rent Stabilization Law as constitutional, urging the Supreme Court not to grant the petition. With the decision on Monday, the case has finally reached its last stop.

“The Harmon family is disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision,” Harmon said in an email. “We still believe that the Constitution does not allow the government to force us to take strangers into our home at our expense for life. Even our grandchildren have been barred from living with us. That is not our America.”

While Harmon was looking to free himself of his rent-stabilized tenants, his efforts snowballed into a movement with the aim of dismantling rent control policies in New York City. Real estate interest groups stood together to oppose a sanction that they believe impedes their rights, but most local politicians support rent regulation and fight to renew it every time it is set to expire.

“I am gratified that the United States Supreme Court has denied review of the Harmon case, which could have spelled the end of rent regulation in New York City,” Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal said in a statement. “This is a victory for millions of rent-regulated tenants throughout New York City who would not be able to afford to live in this city were it not for rent regulation.”

NYU Furman Center's s Vicki Been

In advance of the Supreme Court’s announcement on whether it will hear the case of Harmon v. Kimmel, which challenges rent regulation laws in New York City. NYU’s Furman Center’s fact brief details the number of rent stabilized units in NYC, and provides both demographic and socioeconomic data comparing the tenants inhabiting these units with tenants in market rate units.

“In Harmon v. Kimmel, petitioner James D. Harmon argues that rent stabilization is a violation of several provisions of the United States Constitution,” said Vicki Been, director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “The case would have broad implications forNew York City’s rental market, approximately 47% percent of which is subject to rent control or rent stabilization laws.”

The case of Harmon v. Kimmel challenges rent control and rent stabilization laws that have existed in NYC since the 1940’s, which allows “more than 1 million city residents to pay artificially low rents,” according to WNYC. The Supreme Court can choose at any time between now and June to take the case, or to not hear it at all (which would mean the law would stay in place).

Illustration courtesy of Wiki Commons.

By Josh Rogers
John Edwards’ name resurfaced in the news last week with a report that he was a client of the Upper East Side’s “Millionaire Madam” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Regardless of the truth in the allegation, there was a better reason to bring him up again.
It’s hard to remember, but before the first caucus four years ago, Edwards appeared to have a plausible chance to win the Democratic nomination over the two better-financed candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
All three had roughly similar plans to provide health insurance to more Americans, but Edwards talked about a strategic maneuver he planned to pull in the face of certain Congressional roadblocks. His idea was to introduce a bill to end health coverage for Congress, thus challenging opponents to vote for their health care while denying it to others.
With the two-year anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s health care law coinciding with the Supreme Court debating its legality, congressional opponents have had a chance to revive their “rationing medicine” criticism. It’s as if they believe we live in a country where doctors, not insurance companies, decide on the best treatment for patients.
It may work that way under Congress’s gold-plated health plan, but it is not typical in the United States, where medications, tests and doctor referrals are often held up for approval by insurance companies.
When Republican opponents debated “Obamacare” two years ago, they clung to fantasies about what health care is like for many people with insurance. It was so easy for them to say that Obama’s plan would “lead to rationing” that it sounded like a misstatement borne out of genuine ignorance.
Rationing has been going on for a long time. Bureaucrats do make medical decisions. Those decrees are just not the ones we usually hear about because they are made in the private sector.
It still has not sunk in that Obama’s plan was an outgrowth of what used to be conservative mainstream thinking. The Clintons probably could have gotten a similar plan passed almost 20 years ago, but they rejected Republican counter-proposals. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were not only for Obamacare before they were against it, they were for it before Obama was.
In more recent years, Republican health care plans have become less reality-based.  When Rudy Giuliani ran for president four years ago, he repeatedly said that he would let individuals shop for the best health insurance at the lowest price. While it’s possible to imagine companies getting into bidding wars to insure young people who have no health problems, the free market is not so kind to people with red flags in their medical records.

Health insurance has become so expensive it can often be an overriding factor in families’ job decisions. I left my full-time job a few years ago to take care of my infant son.  It’s something I wanted to do, but it was also something my wife would have wanted to do. The difference was that I worked for a small company with a health plan that would have cost me many thousands of dollars more to add my wife and son. She works for a large corporation which can bargain for better rates—it costs her an extra $10 a week to cover me.

Ours is by no means a hard-luck story. We were fortunate to have options and were able to pick one we liked. For too many others, health costs forces people to make choices they hate and live in fear

That’s the real-world health system Obamacare is trying to change.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him at @JoshRogersNYC.

The recent decision by the Supreme Court to revisit the issue clearly puts it in peril. Even if the court ends up retaining the legality of affirmative action for now, using race as a factor in school admissions was never seen as a permanent solution; there are fairer ways to add diversity.

Current affirmative action plans typically benefit the most advantaged in a group, including those who are also members of a minority most of us would like to be in—the 1 percent.

Large racial disparities, of course, persist everywhere. In New York City, even though over 75 percent of the students at the top-ranked public high schools are minorities, there are still deeply troubling numbers. Less than four percent of the students are black or Hispanic at Stuyvesant High School, where the black population is a hair over 1 percent. At my alma mater, Bronx Science, 10 percent of the students are black or Hispanic. Compare this to the 72 percent of the city’s public school students who are Hispanic or black, roughly the same percentage of Asians at the two specialized schools.

The city Department of Education has made only half-hearted attempts to diversify Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and the numbers have moved in the wrong direction. The Specialized School Institute does recruit “disadvantaged” middle school students of all races to help them pass the admission test, but the city has also expanded the number of specialized schools.

Adding five schools was undoubtedly done with the best of intentions and has had mostly positive effects—but it also allows officials to downplay the problem at specialized schools, since the new schools have broader diversity. Higher scores are needed to enroll at the top two schools, but the DOE tries to maintain the fiction it has not set up a two-tier system by not publicizing the scores. This was made clear in the emails the agency sent this paper last year when our reporter Megan Bungeroth [then Finnegan] looked into
the problem.

One fair way to add more diversity at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science would be to give the best students at every middle school an added chance to attend, similar to a state college admission plan in Texas.

Coincidentally, the Supreme Court is now reviewing a different part of the Texas system. The undisputed part of the law grants college admission to the top 10 percent of high school graduates in Texas, thus opening doors to the best students in schools with large numbers of minorities. Affirmative action supporters acknowledge that the non-racial component of the plan is working, but they argue it is not as effective as using race. The same argument is also made when income is used. But if diversity were the only goal, strict quotas would work even better than affirmative action.

Fairness can’t be ignored, which is why you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who favors legalizing racial quotas. Although affirmative action is going to end sooner or later, academia, for the most part, is not ready to give up. The energy used on these battles would be better spent on figuring out what causes racial disparity so it can be ended.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, wrote on the Huffington Post,
“It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.” He won’t have to. There are other paths to diversity.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker.
Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

President Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, would be the fourth female justice, serving alongside two other women from New York City. But Kagan would be the only sitting justice from Manhattan—the Upper West Side, to be exact.

While the Brooklyn-bred Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at Columbia Law School and Antonin Scalia was raised in Queens, Kagan is the quintessential Upper West Sider. She was raised in a Jewish household at 320 West End Ave. and West 75th Street. Her mother taught at Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted students that Elena attended, and her father was a tenants’ rights lawyer who twice chaired Community Board 7.

All three of the Kagan children followed in their parents’ footsteps. Irving teaches at Hunter College High School and Marc is on the faculty of Bronx High School of Science. Their sister pursued both academia and law.

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Kagan attended Princeton as an undergraduate and got her law degree from Harvard. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, taught at the University of Chicago, served in the Clinton Administration working on domestic policy and landed back at Harvard Law School as a faculty member. She was named dean in 2003, becoming the first woman to serve in that role.

In 2009, Obama selected her as the first female solicitor general. In that capacity, she argued cases for the U.S. government in front of the Supreme Court. After the longest-serving justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement in April, Obama announced May 10 that Kagan would be his nominee.

At the White House press conference, the president praised her legal scholarship and hinted at the role he’d like to see her play on the court.

“Elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement, but also for her temperament—her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, ‘of understanding before disagreeing’; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder,” Obama said in published remarks.

Kagan, in her remarks, reflected on the influence of her parents, both of whom were immigrants and the first in their families to attend college.

“If this day has just a touch of sadness in it for me, it is because my parents aren’t here to share it,” Kagan said. “My father was the kind of lawyer who used his skills and training to represent everyday people and to improve a community.  My mother was a proud public schoolteacher, as are my two brothers—the kind of teachers whom students remember for the rest of their lives. My parents’ lives and their memory remind me every day of the impact public service can have, and I pray every day that I live up to the example they set.”

Though she spent years in academia, Kagan also had an eye on politics. At 20, she worked on Democrat Liz Holtzman’s 1980 Senate campaign. According to a recent article in the Daily Princetonian, a young Kagan drank vodka tonics that election night and wept when she learned that Holtzman had lost to Alfonse D’Amato. A writer for the student newspaper then, Kagan reflected on growing up in Manhattan during a time when those who won office were “real Democrats—not closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government,” the New York Times reported. The piece represents one of the few clues to Kagan’s political views.

During the Holtzman race, she crossed paths with now-Borough President Scott Stringer, then just starting out in Upper West Side politics.

“She comes from a great West Side family,” Stringer said. “This is a neighborhood that plays such a critical role in community-based planning. Growing up here gives her such a depth of passion and knowledge beyond her incredible education experience.”

Her father, Robert Kagan, chaired Board 7 from 1969 to 1971 and again from 1974 to 1975. He was a vocal critic of the Westway project, which would have moved the West Side Highway underground and added an expressway in Lower Manhattan.

As a housing lawyer, her father also helped ensure that the 20-block West Side Urban Renewal Area included low-income housing alongside market rate residences.

“He shared a commitment of many, many people [on the Upper West Side] that the community stay a diverse and mixed community,” said Ruth Messinger, a former City Council member who knew Robert Kagan from the community board. “That was evident in his work. That was obviously part of his professional, as well as his personal, life.”

Sally Goodgold, a community board colleague of Robert Kagan’s who is now a board member at several local organizations, described a closely-knit family that emphasized community service.

“They were a team, this family,” Goodgold said. “They did their own decisions based on the law and what was good for the city. I think she will carry that legacy with her.”