FAQ NYC

A conversation from early Wednesday afternoon, before Frank James' arrest, about the train shooting and also Brian Benjamin' resignation.

Josefa Velasquez joins from Albany to break down the stop-and-start, hurry-up-and-wait path toward New York's forthcoming and already late $216 billion or so budget (and everything else) deal.

Jeff Mays of the New York Times breaks down Kathy Hochul's troubles with Black voters, and Craig McCarthy of the New York Post looks at what is, and ain't, new with the NYPD's neighborhood policing initiative, its anti-gun unit, and its quality of life enforcement push.

Chinese American Planning Council President and CEO Wayne Ho joins the pod to talk about what Albany can do to make the economics of this work for New York's aging population, and much more.

Elizabeth Glazer, the founder and co-editor of the new publication Vital City, joins the pod to talk about rising crime and the rising criminal justice reform tide in New York City, and what reformers can do to move past squishy root-causes rhetoric.

Prof. Christina Greer explains what makes Eric Adams like "a really good point guard" — and the Nets could use one for home games, by the way — and Amir Khafagy breaks down his reporting for Documented on how the city has let down the Twin Parks fire survivors now that they're no longer front-page news.

Super-reporter Greg B. Smith breaks down why Eric Adams' promise to remove the homeless from the trains "right away" has been going nowhere fast.

Alex Brook Lynn asks Katie Honan to walk us through a few of the top news items regarding our mayor in this past week in this shorter-than-usual FAQ episode. Katie gives our listeners some context for the Mayor's reaction to criticism over some of his controversial appointments and his interaction with the press, and we talk about the first few days of NYPD interaction and intervention with homeless people in the subway.

We have a real estate roundup with three of NYC's favorite reporters covering the subject: Rebecca Baird-Remba from Commercial Observer, Stefanos Chen from The New York Times, and Rachel Holliday Smith from The City. For the past two years we have seen so much fluctuation: rents dip and then rise sharply, blocks of store fronts abandoned, hotels turned shelter turned back to hotel, and corner deli turned dark store. Our three guests unpack the prominent real estate issues facing New Yorkers in 2022.

Rommel H. Ojeda talks with Harry Siegel about the sorry state of the Undocumented Workers Fund. The fund has been riddled with scams targeting workers and their debit benefit cards. The company responsible for the fund's distribution debit cards, Blackhawk, has abdicated all responsibility, leaving some workers without relief while their bills pile up.