Author: Jacquelyn Simone

The office of the New York City comptroller plans to send letters on Tuesday to City Hall and various agencies demanding that they take steps to ensure that people in need of housing are not sent to illegal boarding homes, known as “three-quarter” houses, ..Read More

Every Tuesday night, Joan Cheever hits the streets of San Antonio to feed the homeless. In a decade, she’s rarely missed a night. But on a recent, windy Tuesday, something new happens. The police show up. “He says we have to have a permit,” C ..Read More

Whenever I write about people who are struggling, I hear from readers who say something like: Folks need to stop whining and get a job. It’s all about personal responsibility. In a 2014 poll, Republicans were twice as likely to say that people are poor becau ..Read More

A quarter century after Paris Is Burning swept the independent film world with its verité depiction of life in the New York ballroom scene, the docks down by Christopher Street, off Manhattan’s West Side Highway, are still home to New York’s largest popul ..Read More

New York City is facing an unprecedented crisis of affordability. Skyrocketing costs of living citywide threaten to price working families out of their longtime homes and communities. At the same time, thousands of affordable housing units, created as a safegu ..Read More

Rosa Mendosa is afraid of losing her home. A grandmother and has lived in New York since 1981, she said through an interpreter, “I came to this country from Nicaragua because at the time there was a lot of war and violence in my country.” Mendosa, her son, ..Read More

The rent is too damn high. Rent has gone through the roof in some neighborhoods, rising a crazy 50% to 90% in some spots, according to an analysis by the Community Service Society, a nonpartisan anti-poverty group. Rents rose 32% citywide since 2002, but in si ..Read More

Belgica explains in Spanish why she is getting kicked out of the small two-bedroom apartment she shares with her two children in the Bronx, in New York City. Her husband was sent to Rikers Island jail in February, the same month that she lost her job at a loca ..Read More

When Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation a year ago that increased the number of older New Yorkers eligible to have their rents frozen, he called it a “godsend” and an “extraordinary lifeline” for people whose incomes could not keep pace with the c ..Read More