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Jamaica Bay, a 40-square mile bird sanctuary in southern Brooklyn and Queens, is a testing ground for some of the soft edge approaches being discussed by politicians, planners and environmentalists as future protections against another Sandy. Dunes line its beaches—or lined them until Sandy came and flattened them and about 180 acres of salt marshes have been restored. For the most part, officials say these features proved their worth in the storm, although others doubt whether they can be replicated in other parts of the city’s shoreline. On a recent tour of the bay, Elizabeth Jordan, a landscape architect at the  New York City Parks Department, pointed to a low ridge of sand along Plumb Beach. It used to be a line of 12-foot-high sand dunes. Now, that sand is scattered across the bike path, about 50 feet further inland. “Where other places that don’t have dunes further down, like Rockaway Parkway,” Jordan said, “the actual bike pathway was undermined and we lost part of it because the water wasn’t stopped by dunes.” The Plumb Beach dunes were constructed by the city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of a $6.5 million project just two weeks before Sandy hit. Marit Larson, the director of the wetlands restoration team for the Parks Department, said they did their job. “If Sandy had happened three weeks before when it did,” she said, “we would have lost the Belt Parkway.” Jamaica Bay is an odd place to talk about “natural barriers.” It is has been extensively engineered. In the past 150 years, it has at once been made smaller and deeper: channels were dredged so that ships could pass through for a port that was never built; the inlets along its shores have been turned into hard-edged marinas; and much of the dredged sediment was used to raise neighborhoods like Canarsie and Howard Beach out of the marshland and onto terra firma. Plumb Beach as we know it today was actually underwater.  “The whole coastline of Brooklyn and Queens was a series of salt-water marshes, inlets, and different types of sea farming,” Jordan said. “We were the biggest oyster producers in the United States in the 1800s.” Now, about 300,000 people call the Jamaica Bay environs home and live within 15 feet above sea level. Many of those who lived in the former swamp—in Canarsie, Howard Beach, Gerritsen Beach—got flooded. Oddly enough, it is engineers who are now in the process of restoring “natural” barriers. Not just the dunes, but the salt marsh too. Video by Jennifer Hsu At the next stop of the tour, Gerritsen Creek, Larson showed off about 20 acres of wetlands that were restored as part of a larger $7.2 million  project, also done with the Army Corps. Unlike the dunes along Plumb Beach, the salt marsh survived Sandy well, she said. In fact, the storm “flushed” the stiff reeds of the trash that had built up there. If protecting the coast were a game of chess, sand dunes would be pawns: cheap, plentiful and easily dispensable. Salt marshes, meanwhile, are more like knights: more resilient, but they also play a specific, limited role. “It has a very stiff stalk for a grass,” Larson said of salt marsh. “It’s resistant so that it really forms an energy dissipation structure. It attenuates waves as they rise up over it.” 'Not a rosy picture' But while salt marshes may slow the force of a storm surge, even their advocates admit they do little to actually stop the water. According to one rule of thumb, it takes a mile of wetlands to absorb a foot of storm surge. For Sandy, which had a 14-foot surge, that means 14 miles—which is about the entire length of Manhattan. One 1963 study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived at an even more ominous figure: it takes 14 kilometers of wetlands to decrease a storm surge by just one meter (or 2.7 miles for every foot). "People think that if you add a fringe of wetlands, you can stop a storm surge," said Phil Orton, a research scientist at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. "And the reality is, it's not a rosy picture." Still, Orton said that restoring Jamaica Bay to something like it once was is worth it: the bay is large enough, at about 7 miles wide, where it could mitigate surges by at least a few feet. He also said that wetlands restoration will have other benefits, such as protecting wildlife. “There’s this opportunity with Jamaica Bay to restore a system that’s not really being used for shipping any more,” he said. Orton has studied the hydodynamics of Jamaica Bay and says the shipping channels may well have intensified Sandy's damage in neighborhoods like Canarsie and Howard Beach. "They dredged out the entrance channel to Jamaica Bay and made it much deeper and the tides come in a lot stronger, and the high tides are higher," he said. A $20 Billion Solution But Jamaica Bay may be just about the only place in New York City where salt marshes could have an impact. Malcolm Bowman, professor of oceanography at Stony Brook University, says most of the city's shoreline drops down too quickly to foster vegetation. "You’ve got 520 miles of coastline, most of it’s bulk-headed seawalls, wharves, docks ventilation shafts, etc., and there’s very little space to grow anything,” said Malcolm Bowman, professor of oceanography at Stony Brook University. Bowman is an advocate of what could be called the rook, or maybe the queen, of the coastal chess board: a steel and concrete hurricane barrier. Already in use in London, Rotterdam and St. Petersburg, Russia, these barriers will stop the surge, but they are also very dear to build and maintain. Bowman has proposed building a barrier that would stretch across the mouth of Lower New York Harbor, between Sandy Hook, N.J., and Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Another barrier would stretch across the very top of the East River in the Bronx to protect the harbor from surges entering from Long Island Sound. The barriers would have gates to let ships and water pass through during normal weather, then close up for heavy storms. Such a barrier system could cost around $20 billion, though Bowman says it could also generate revenue if a toll road or light rail were constructed on top of it. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has criticized the barrier, pointing out it wouldn’t protect the Rockaways, which sustained some of the worst damage. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has also expressed doubts, but has agreed to study it. A spokesman for the U-S Army Corps of Engineers meanwhile, says such a study could take years to complete.

New Yorkers weren’t the only ones monitoring Sandy in the week before Halloween. A Georgia contractor was tracking the storm closely as it made its way north toward Lower Manhattan where his potential clients’ commercial buildings sat doomed to flood. By the time Sandy was ready to hit the area on Oct. 29, Peter Hajjar and several of his employees at Reliable Restoration were parked outside Philadelphia waiting to move. As soon as the storm passed they sped to the Financial District and began pumping out the flooded buildings. In less than two months Hajjar and his Atlanta-based company, which specializes in repairing storm damage, billed commercial building owners for $4 million worth of work. “Typically an area in a region when it’s hit with a storm this size, there are never enough resources or people or brainpower for management to run the jobs and so companies are called in from around the country to help out,” Hajjar said. “We were one of those companies.” His experience highlights a simple economic fact: one person’s disaster is another’s opportunity. During November alone, nearly two dozen out of state companies, including Reliable Restoration, legally set up shop in New York to do post-Sandy work. In addition, a number of new companies formed during that time to likely work on the recovery – companies with names like Hurricane Response Group LLC, Sandy Contracting LLC and HurricaneSandy Inc. Joseph Seneca, an economist at Rutger’s University, said it’s not surprising to see such activity. “There are economic opportunities and what you’re witnessing there with all those new business formations is the responsiveness of a market economy to profit opportunity,” Seneca said. Newly formed companies and out of state firms aren’t the only ones getting post-Sandy work. Many well established -- sometimes politically-connected -- companies are winning major storm-related government contracts, records show. Lucrative government contracts In the city, officials set aside $927 million for emergency spending immediately after the storm. More than half of that -- $500 million – is for the Rapid Repairs Program. Under the program, the city has committed to getting roughly 12,000 storm-damaged buildings back to a livable condition with working heat, electricity and plumbing. The city hired nine large general contractors including Gilbane Building Company out of Rhode Island and Sullivan Land Services from Texas. Gilbane got a $70 million contract from the city, records show. Sullivan’s was for $60 million. The nine general contractors have hired about 140 companies as subcontractors. It’s unclear which firms. The city hasn't released the names of the companies despite repeated requests. The subcontractors are putting thousands of people to work, according to the city. On a recent day, Ernest Cole was stringing new electric wiring through the bare walls of a gutted Breezy Point home. Cole said he’s struggled to find steady work when he got a call from his old boss at Genmar Electric, one of the subcontractors. Cole said he didn’t need to hear anything else once he heard the pay would be around $90 an hour. He was in. “Times are hard, I’m not working. I’m coming. So I’m here,” Cole said. The Building Trades Employers Association says post-storm spending has helped create as many as 20,000 temporary construction jobs in New York City. Nick Masem, who works for Rockaway Beach Boulevard Construction Company, one of the nine general contractors in the program, said the recovery spending has been a boon for his industry. “The electricians went from having five or six employees to now where they have almost 20 or 30. The same with the plumbers, so it’s been a great thing for the economy down here and especially all the local contractors,” Masem said. “I don’t think there’s one of them right now that’s out of work.” The state has also been doling out post-Sandy work. The state comptroller’s office recently posted online a list of Sandy-related contracts and payments the state made in the two months after the storm. The list shows $267 million of what will ultimately be billions of dollars in state spending. Kate Gurnett, a spokeswoman for the state comptroller's office, said many of the contracts were issued under special emergency rules the governor used to speed the process. “He did exempt some of these contracts from advertising, bidding and our approval. But we're still keeping track of them and they're all on our website,” Gurnett said. The biggest contract reported so far went to a joint venture of John P. Picone Incorporated, Bove Industries and Tully Construction. The partnership won a $33 million contract from the state's transportation department to repair a two-mile storm-damaged stretch of Ocean Parkway. Tully Construction, its president and related companies have given more than $125,000 in donations since 2006. Records show more than $24,000 of that went to Cuomo. A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said politics played no part in the selection of the companies. He pointed to Tully’s vast experience working on large construction projects as a main reason the joint venture was chosen for the job. A Gilbane truck in Rockaway Park, Queens, part of NYC Rapid Repairs program. Gilbane is one of nine major contractors (Stephen Nessen/WNYC). Economic impact uncertain There is some disagreement in economic circles about the ultimate impact of the storm on the regional and various local economies. The storm caused widespread damage, major economic losses and cost a number of jobs. But billions in recovery funds from the government, insurance company payouts, and private business and resident spending could act as something of a stimulus. Seneca, the Rutger’s economist, led the most sophisticated modeling to date of Sandy’s impact on the economy. His team looked at New Jersey in particular and determined the storm spending will offset the economic losses from Sandy. He said out of state companies working post-Sandy could have an impact on the recovery’s stimulative effect. But it depends on a number of factors such as if the companies hire local workers and how much of their revenue they spend locally on costs such as hotel rooms and food, he added. Georgia-based Reliable Restoration hired 90 local workers, its co-owner Peter Hajjar said. Pearl Kamer, an economist with the Long Island Association., thinks the losses were too great and came at too shaky a time at least so far as the Nassau and Suffolk county economies are concerned. As a result she thinks the storm will ultimately prove to have a negative economic impact despite the post-Sandy spending. But she said it could take years to figure out. “The truth is we don’t know what the ultimate impact is going to be,” Kamer said. Ken Swan, whose four apartments were damaged by Sandy. He's signed up for NYC Rapid Repairs (Stephen Nessen/WNYC) Homes Repaired One Block at a Time The city and FEMA have teamed up to repair busted homes, “which has been an absolute nightmare,” according to small property owner Ken Swan. He rents four apartments a block from the ocean in Rocakway Park, Queens. They were rendered uninhabitable by Sandy. Swan registered with FEMA, got his homes inspected and made sure he was available nearly everyday for the Rapid Repairs contractors swarming the flood damaged areas. Last Wednesday, he stood in the frigid cold waiting for them. From Swan’s description, they’re worse than the cable guys. “I’ve had to wait, they never showed up and when you call nobody has an answer for it, today, the appointment, the guy came an hour and a half late,” he said. “That’s the mass confusion part. They don’t have it all together yet.” Since the storm, Swan’s apartments have been gutted, and a few tenants are already back. The apartments have squeaky new tile floors and fresh coats of paint. Through Rapid Repairs he’s had two boilers replaced, but with temperatures dropping he couldn’t wait, and replaced a third out of pocket for more than $5,000. That leaves one apartment without heat, so he’s waiting for Rapid Repairs. Swan said part of the problem is that many of the contractors are from out of state and aren’t used to New York City apartments that have multiple addresses on one lot. Finally, three contractors show up. They’re over two hours late to inspect his apartment, for the sixth time to see if the last boiler can be installed. They chat with Swan for a minute and get back in their trucks. And, after sitting in their cars for 15 minutes, both contractors drive off leaving Swan waiting in the bitter winter winds another day. The city says over 7,000 buildings have been completed, and Rapid Repairs has more than 2,000 left to go. When the program started, contractors fixed orders as they came in, first come first served. Recently it switched, fixing one block at a time. Across the street Colleen Dalton, 54, just got electricity and heat restored in her 3-story family home, courtesy of Rapid Repairs. “We considered ourselves lucky. Being an American you think things are supposed to happen over night and that’s not the case in a disaster.”

Defense attorneys raised concerns about whether an external body was monitoring the Military Commission proceedings held at the Expeditionary Legal Compound in Guantanamo Bay Monday in the trial of five men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks. Court had just reconvened after a fifteen-minute recess, where Judge James Pohl had given defense attorneys time to decide whether to agree to the rules surrounding the prosecution’s disclosure of classified information, which could include discussion of black site detention centers. Just as defense attorney David Nevin, lead counsel for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was telling the court that they would agree to have the motion considered in a closed, so-called ‘505 hearing’, the sound cut-off. Static fed through the courtroom monitors and a red light spun from the judge’s bench. Victims’ family members, human rights observers and journalists sitting in the back of the courtroom behind a plexi-glass wall could watch what’s happening in front of them, but could not hear anything from the closed circuit monitors and audio feeds that are on a 40 second delay. When the feed was restored, a frustrated Judge Pohl told the court he did not initiate the audio dump, suggesting there was someone else monitoring the military courtroom. “If some external body is turning the commission off,” the judge said, appearing to direct his comments towards the government, “we’re going to have a little meeting.” “I can address that in the 505,” said Joanna Baltes, an attorney for the Justice Department. But defense attorneys raised serious concerns. David Nevin, Cheryl Bormann and Navy Cmdr. Walter Ruiz each approached the podium to ask the court who operates the courtroom’s security system and said they wanted to know whether other things, like attorney client communication at the courtroom tables, was also being recorded. A Defense Department spokesman would not comment on the incident or to what extent the prosecution knew who controlled the courtroom feeds. “We don't discuss the security apparatus that surrounds the commissions, the JTF, or the detainees themselves,” said Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale. The episode lasted just about ten minutes. But it wasn’t the only dramatic moment of the first day of a four-day hearing on pre-trial motions.  Judge Pohl also asked each of the defendants if they understood their right to be present at the pre-trial hearings and what it meant to voluntarily waive that right.  Pohl addressed each defendant directly and said they would need to respond if they were going to choose not to attend the rest of the hearings this week. He started with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who sat at the table in the front of the courtroom closest to the judge. Wearing a camouflage jacket, glasses and what looked like traditional clothes, including a keffiyeh tied around his head, Mohammed replied to the judge.  A translator told the court that, yes he understood his rights, and no he didn’t have any questions. Walid Bin Attash, seated with his counsel at a table a row behind Mohammed, said he also understood his rights but before saying whether he had any questions he spoke at length complaining, according to the English translation, “We don’t have any motivating factors that would make us come to court.” Bin Attash said he did not want to make it a “personal issue” with the judge but, “I want you to understand this issue we’re in,” explaining that after even after a year, he had not developed a relationship with his attorneys. He asked earlier in the day that one member of his military attorneys be removed from his defense team. The judge only repeated his questions and eventually Bin Attash said he understood and had no questions. The other defendants, Ramzi bin al Shibh, Ammar al Baluchi, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, also each acknowledged their rights and said they had no questions. The judge said he would not make the defendants appear in court to hear him read these rights again in February, if they opted not to appear.  But he said he would expect to bring them back for the April hearing.

A new set of pre-trial motions for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other men accused of plotting the September 11 terror attacks starts Monday. The five are being tried before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay. In January 2009, Retired Deputy New York City Fire Chief Jim Riches attended the proceedings. He was one of about a dozen family members picked from a lottery to see the trial of alleged mastermind of the attacks that killed his son and almost 3,000 others. "We were in the courtroom behind the plexi-glass and we could look in and see the whole trial," he said. But while he was there the trial was stopped. President Barack Obama signed an executive order suspending the military trials at Guantanamo Bay. What followed was legal and political haggling, including a heated debate over whether to bring the accused terrorists to New York City to face federal trial in civilian court. Eventually, President Obama reversed his decision and the military trials resumed. Riches met with the president after his trip to Guantanamo. He says he was promised "swift and certain justice." Four years later, Riches sat in a corner booth at the Fort Hamilton diner just across the street from the last stop of the Brooklyn R train. He held up a picture of his 29-year-old son, Jimmy, wearing his dress uniform.  Jimmy Riches was a fireman, like his father. He worked for Engine 4 in Lower Manhattan, and was in the North Tower when it came down. "It's very difficult," explains Riches who describes finding his son's body crushed in a stairway along with other men from his company. Riches’ family has grown since then, with marriages and births, but he said life will never be the same. "You always miss him. What would Jimmy do if he was here, he lit up the room everybody is like, 'whoa, Jimmy's here.' He was a character," Riches recalled. Jimmy was the oldest of four brothers. An all-City basketball player who continued to play ball at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, where his number 20 was retired just this past weekend. "It tears your heart out and you just, you miss him everyday no matter what." As lawyers present pre-trial motions this week, Riches believes something is wrong. "You know, I'm not saying take the guy out and string up and hang 'em. You know, let's hear the process, let's get it going," he said. "But 10 years later, we're still at square one." It's not exactly square one, though, says Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School. She understands Riches' frustration "from the point of view of somebody who just cannot believe that we haven't tried these individuals in such a long amount of time." But says there are a myriad of reasons the legal process is moving at such pace, including the fact that officials are creating the legal process at the same time that they're using it. "If you understand how complicated a trial is and then you make a trial about something of such magnitude," she explained, "You see how creating the process and living inside at the same time is very hard." For this week's round of pre-trial motions being heard by the military commission, Phyllis Rodriguez was one of the family members picked to go to Guantanamo. Her 31-year-old son, Gregory, worked in the IT department of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  When she remembers that September morning, she thinks of all the messages on her answering machine from friends asking whether her son was alright.  And then there was the one from Greg. "He said, 'Um, I'm at the Trade Center. There's been a disaster. I'm ok'," she said. He never came home. (Photo: Phyllis Rodriguez and her son, Greg./ Courtesy of Phyllis Rodriguez) Rodriguez says going to Guantanamo is important to her for several reasons. "First and foremost, I'm going there because the trials are there or the hearings are there," she said. She, along with the other families going, also plans to meet with the judge the chief prosecutor. "But we're also going to meet with members of the five defense teams, and I'm particularly interested in that." She's is a member of a group called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. In the years since her son's death, she's tried to channel her energy towards an organization that works for nonviolent causes around the world. As lawyers on both sides have been working hard for justice, she says she believes the process has been flawed. And for her, justice doesn't equate to closure. "We're not going to get closure because [that] implies you can say, 'ok, I'm over my grief.' It doesn't work that way. We're going to live with it the rest of our lives. Putting someone on trial, putting him to death, giving them a life in prison or indefinite detention, that doesn't make me feel any better," she explained. It's a delicate balance, Rodriguez says, living with the loss and the grief.  That will be with her as she sits through the military commission. She expects there will be times during the hearings where she won't want to talk anyone but other families traveling down to the hearings. She also expects the days to be long with few breaks. This round of hearings will run through the end of the week, and another pre-trial hearing is already scheduled for February.  A new lottery will pick which victim's families can attend. And it's a cycle that will continue until the lawyers finish presenting all their motions.  According to experts, the actual trial for the five men accused of plotting the attacks may not start until sometime next year. WNYC's Brigid Bergin will be reporting from Guantanamo Bay all week. Follow her on twitter at @brigidbergin.

WNYC is telling the story of public housing in New York City through the lens of one family that has lived there for four decades. The Alstons arrived in the Queensbridge Houses in 1954 and have lived there ever since. This is part three of a four-part series. If Chick Alston is the unofficial mayor of Queensbridge, his son, Fredo, could be considered his deputy to the streets. The wide-eyed and already graying Fredo, 35, is part of the third generation of the Alston family raised in the public housing complex in Long Island City — a fact he says marked him as early as elementary school. “One time a teacher told me, ‘You gonna be in jail. You gonna be in jail,’ and I just couldn’t understand,” Fredo said, recalling an episode from fourth grade. “I knew people go to jail—I knew my father went to jail—but I didn’t know I was doing anything that would lead to jail. And it was such a rude awakening when I went to jail that she was right.” Fredo spent his teens in North Carolina with his aunt who says he was always showing other kids how “bad” New Yorkers were. He managed to finish high school. Fredo said the allure of street life — the money, fast cars and status — and coming from a family that he said condoned hustling if it meant making ends meet culminated in his first arrest. Three months after he returned to Queensbridge from North Carolina, he was arrested for selling crack. He said he served two years in Mohawk Prison. Three years later, he says he was shot in the shoulder and then arrested on gun charges. He served two more years. Members of the Alston family describe how tight-knit their crews were. Members include family and friends and loyalties run deep. Sometimes too deep. Defending honor has landed members in jail. When Fredo’s son was born, the pressure to provide increased. Now he sees much of his father in himself. “I always said that I would never be like him. I always had this thing, I’m never going to be like my father,” he said. “But you start to have children and then you understand how a man could maybe not raise his family or be there for his family or be there for his son.” Fredo was working a construction job until 2008. Now, he’s out of work and hustling. His life is punctuated by the constant ring of his cell phone. He’s currently crashing with a few friends at Queensbridge. He spends part of each day with his father and uncles in a half-renovated café across from Queensbridge playing cards and craps on tables — waiting for the phone or a friend to swing by. And while Fredo wishes he’d made better choices, he’s also grateful to have the love and support of his family, especially his grandmother, Virgie. “If there’s one thing that truly makes us Alstons—if there’s one thing that truly makes us who we are it’s her,” he said, fighting back tears. “If your mother throws you out, your father throws you out, she’s there for you. When you see that kind of love, it’s hard to turn it down—‘Oh yeah, I’m just another person.’ " Fredo Alston Stephen Nessen/WNYC The Next Generation of Alstons Compared to his cousins, Jason says he was kind of a nerd. In fourth or fifth grade he wanted to be a pediatrician or a lawyer. Jason has tight cropped hair and likes to wear a gray Hillman College sweatshirt from the fictional black university in “The Cosby Show.” He attended a very real historic black liberal arts college, Dillard University in New Orleans where he received his Bachelor’s degree. He just earned a Master’s degree in political science from Howard University. But sitting on a picnic table in the leafy park across from Queensbridge, the 26-year old remembers one time when he tried to fit in. He loosened the belt on his jeans, like his friends and cousins, and let his pants droop a little. His mother, Karen, freaked out. “I came in the house one time with my pants sagging and I was like, ‘That’s the style’ and she went ham, she went ballistic. ‘Pull your pants up! You will not walk the streets like that,’ ” he remembers her saying. And his mother’s strictness extended beyond fashion. When other kids could go around the corner on their bikes, he could only ride in front of the building. His mother’s discipline came hard-earned. The 52-year old is intimately familiar with the social problems people generally associate with the projects — drugs, rape, violence. But she's also taken advantages of its community: she learned to swim at a nearby pool, ride a bike in the park and attended drug rehab classes at Queensbridge. “I’ve had some good times and bad times at Queensbridge," she said. "At the same time, I wouldn’t have liked to have done it anyplace else." She was addicted to crack at 26 — when Jason was born — and struggled to quit. After watching her brothers fall victim to drug addiction she forced herself through meetings and finally quit for good. “I had to break cycles,” she said. Jason Alston Stephen Nessen/WNYC As a single mother she eventually got a job at Queens College. As Jason grew up, she knew she wanted more for him then a life in Queensbridge, which had led to jail for so many Alstons. “When my son was growing up, my brothers and all them was in the hustling game. So, I said, 'Jason, you don’t see anyone working, but you see how everybody’s getting all these things? Think about how they getting them,’ " she said. “’You have an option and jail doesn’t have to be that option for you.’” Jason is working four days a week as a youth counselor and just took the LSATs. He plans to apply to law school in the Fall. Right now, he’s back at Queensbridge. He’s giving back to the community, which he admits is where he’s most comfortable. He is living with his mother above the apartment the New York City Housing Authority once converted into a double apartment for the Alstons. The doors are turquoise. Jason rolls his eyes saying it’s always been one awful shade of blue or another. “I’ve been fortunate to have a family and a community that really are engaged with each other,” he said. “I remember my aunts and uncles telling me that when they were young besides the fact that there were so many of them, there was never a time when somebody else’s kid wasn’t in my grandmother’s house sleeping or eating.” But Jason said he hasn’t been immune to the stigma of living in public housing. He remembers when he first brought a girl home in high school and she cringed at the smell of urine in the elevator. He’s been stopped and frisked by police too. He said he remembers when the officer saw his university ID and told him to, “Keep his nose clean,” and that, "He could be somebody.” “I could be somebody?” he said to himself. “I am somebody.”  

WNYC is telling the story of public housing in New York City through the lens of one family that has lived there for four decades. The Alstons arrived in the Queensbridge Houses in 1954 and have lived there ever since. This is part two of a four-part series. Karen Alston lives two floors above her childhood home in the country’s largest housing project, the Queensbridge Houses. Like many members of her sprawling family the 52-year old has had every reason to leave over the years. At 15, she was raped in a laundromat near her home. In her 20s, she was addicted to crack. She has witnessed one after another of her brothers sent to jail. Karen is a twin, and one of 12 children born to Virgie and Walter Alston. Like many in her family Karen got caught up in the kind of drugs that became commonplace in New York during the 1970s and 1980s. “I used to smoke crack when (my son) was a baby,” she said recently. “I grew up in the heroin era—where everybody in my generation we had a brother or sister addicted to dope. Everybody.” Dozens of members of the four-generation Alston family still live in Queensbridge, including four of Virgie’s children who were raised there, many of their children and even some of their children. For more than 60 years, the Alstons have witnessed the landscape shifting as diversity dissipated in public housing and drugs flooded the streets. Still, leaving her childhood home, her family, was never an option. Even when she was sent to the country through the Fresh Air Fund she pined for familiar sites like the smoke stacks of the nearby power plant and the familiar faces of Queensbridge. Public housing started as a solution to urban crowding and an alternative to the unsanitary tenements. But decades later it too became a stigmatized problem in search of solutions. One of Karen’s brothers, Keith, now 48, said he used to be a junkie who would hustle to keep up with his habit. Now, clean after a seven-year jail stint, the married father of two said a life on the streets was all he knew growing up. "When you have an example of a life of hustle that’s set before you, you have no choice but to hustle,” he said at a family gathering in New Jersey this past spring. “That’s all I seen — how to get a fast buck. How to gamble. How to sell drugs.” Keith now lives in Far Rockaway. Leaving Queesnbridge was the best thing for him – it distanced him from temptations, he said. “I think back where I came from and where I could of been today and I’m grateful. I could of still been out there in Queensbridge. Because I know a lot of my friends that are still out there,” he said. “And I’m not better than them. God just made an escape for me. I’m living now—I’m not just existing, I’m living.” Karen Alston outside of her home Stephen Nessen/WNYC Couldn’t Evict Jack the Ripper As an agency, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has a complicated funding structure that since its inception has used federal, state and local funding. Early on, the housing authority covered most of its operating expenses from rents, and did its best to attract and keep paying tenants. They even put a cap, 30 percent, on the number of tenants on welfare. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia hoped public housing would supplant the slum landlords he saw plaguing the city. But landlords and real estate interests claimed the city was taking away their middle-income paying tenants. “Look at the scale of the plans of the early years,” said professor Nick Bloom, with the New York Institute of Technology, referring to large complexes like the Queensbridge Houses, with 3,142 apartments and the Red Hook Houses with 2,545 apartments. "They’re really not just about building transitional housing. They really had the goal, much like happened in England, of pushing out landlords from the working class rental market." At the same time, the balance of black and white residents was steadily sliding. Every year since such records began in 1946, the number of white residents decreased at Queensbridge as the number of blacks increased. Experts say this was in part because there was more available housing for whites, many of whom moved out of urban centers and into suburbia in the 1950s. And although the 1944 G.I. Bill bolstered home ownership with low-cost mortgages in the suburbs, blacks were routinely discriminated against living in certain neighborhoods. “Change in the racial complexion, quite literally, of public housing residents coincided with the boom in American suburbs,” said Owen Gutfreund, director of the Urban Affairs program at Hunter College. At the same time, advocates argued that subsidized housing should go to the neediest residents, said Bloom. “Emergency cases or the homeless, moved up the (NYCHA) waiting list very quickly and moved into public housing very rapidly.” By the 1960s, NYCHA had made it harder for higher income tenants to stay and easier for the poor and homeless to enter public housing. In 1961, rent was capped at 25 percent of a tenant’s income. But nothing did more to change life in New York public housing than a 1971 lawsuit brought by a couple evicted for keeping a dog illegally. The resulting consent decree, known as Escalera, tied NYCHA’s hands by making it difficult to evict tenants who broke NYCHA rules. One housing official told Fritz Umbach, a specialist in criminal history of New York and professor at John Jay College, that with this ruling “they couldn’t even evict Jack the Ripper.” In the '70s and '80s, as the drug epidemic gripped the projects, crime in NYCHA exploded, and the stereotype of the projects as dangerous was cemented in the public’s imagination. But some experts were quick to point out that welfare tenants weren't necessarily more likely to commit crimes than paying tenants — it had just become harder for the community to police itself. The culture at NYCHA was also changing. Growing up, members of the Alston family remember fearing fines from the housing police for minor infractions like playing ball on the grounds, walking on the grass or stepping on the benches. NYCHA police could also fine tenants for hanging their laundry out to dry or poor housekeeping. But by the 1980s crime in NYCHA spiked “ferociously,” Umbach said. “And the police force and the residents begin to go their separate ways.”   Patricia Alston, center, with her family in Virgie Alston's living room. Stephen Nessen/WNYC Crime Plagues the Alstons “This whole neighborhood just turned into hell,” said Patricia Alston, 55, one of Virgie’s daughters. “We all playing and all of a sudden we can’t go to certain areas, we couldn’t go to the avenue anymore. Literally, we saw people overdose on the bench outside.” Many Alstons succumbed to drug addiction too. Virgie and her husband said they didn’t know much about drugs—but they knew when one of their children began acting strangely. “That drug business that was the worst time in my life tell the truth. It was the worst,” Virgie said recently. “You can tell when there’s a change in your kids. All you do is say a prayer and keep talking to them, is all I can do.” And one by one—the Alston boys all got arrested. Chick, the oldest brother was the first. In the mid 1970s, he was charged with manslaughter after a scuffle that ended in violence at the Astoria Houses, several family members said. The police did not confirm specifics about Chick’s arrest record. Eventually, six out of the seven Alston boys served time for various crimes — many involving drugs. “How did it go from just how nice it was to everyday fighting in the house because my brother would be nodding on the floor." Patricia said. “And my father would be like, ‘Get out of here with that in front of these kids.’ ” Crime soared in public housing from 1985 to 1991, the peak of the crack epidemic. And this spike was, some experts say, a result of major changes to NYCHA’s ecosystem. In the 1960s and 1970s there was an informal economy for things like lunch services, baked goods and auto repair. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s this became less profitable. “Suddenly there are fewer opportunities for this gray market activity, and there’s all this money to be made from dealing drugs,” said Umbach. Umbach doesn’t believe it was the architecture that contributed to the proliferation of drugs, but rather the social dynamics of having fewer residents with full-time employment. And according to members of the Alston family, a quick buck, the latest sneakers and fast cars were also part of the allure. NYCHA doesn’t keep crime statistics anymore, and the police don’t keep statistics for specific housing projects, but this year a child was shot in the hand while doing her homework at Queensbridge. And when gun shots rang out in Queensbridge this summer 83-year-old Virgie dropped to the ground outside the Jacob Riis Community Center. As for Karen, who battled drug addiction and is now clean, she’s retired from her job at Queens College and has a son who is a recent graduate with a Master’s degree. She says she sees no reason to leave. “I been here all my life—and I have no desire to leave Queensbridge either,” she said defiantly.

A day after the final courts-martial, the family of Pvt. Danny Chen said they were disappointed by the outcome of the trials of eight soldiers from their son’s platoon who were charged with hazing and abuse that culminated in his suicide two years ago. Speaking through an interpreter on Tuesday, Chen’s father, Yao Ten Chen, said he’d hoped attending the five of the eight trials in Fort Bragg, N.C., would help him and his wife close this chapter in their lives. “Hopefully time will heal. Looking forward to a closure,” said Chen, who still wears his son’s army cap everywhere he goes. In October 2011, Chen was found dead in his guard tower, in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. The cause, authorities said, was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The last courts-martial for the members of Pvt. Chen’s platoon was Monday. Chen grew up on the Lower East Side. His parents are immigrants from Southern China. Speaking through an interpreter, Chen’s mother, Su Zhen Chen, said she wanted to make sure this didn’t happen to another family. “She still finds the strength to go to those hearings because she doesn’t want this to happen to another Danny Chen—that’s why she wants to make sure justice is done—so not another mom has to suffer like she that,” her translator said. Chen’s family and his best friend Raymond Dong urged him not to join the Army.   “I told him it’s not a good idea to join whatsoever, because there’s risk in it. And he’s the only son, I’m the only son, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do it,” Dong said. “He said he wants to do something new in his life. And I respect that.” But in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan, authorities say Chen faced racial hazing and physical abuse. The eight members of his platoon were charged with bullying, hazing and using racist language. From New York to North Carolina, Liz OuYang, president of the Organization of Chinese Americans and a civil rights lawyer for 26 years attended every courts-martial. At every press conference and rally she attends, she carries a white banner that reads “We Are Danny.”  Hundreds of people have left messages for and about Private Danny Chen in a rainbow of Sharpie colors. The last officer to face court-martial was Lieutenant Daniel Schwartz. He will be removed from the Army.  All the soldiers were found or plead guilty. Two will face short prison sentences and two were discharged. Others were demoted in rank and docked pay. OuYang says these sentences are just a slap on the wrist. “And it just sank in then that the military court system cannot, cannot deliver justice to someone that is a victim of hazing by their superiors,” OuYang said. For OuYang though—the last trial isn’t ending her advocacy that was catalyzed by Chen’s death. She’s been promoting national anti-hazing bills, which would strengthen the anti-hazing laws and create a database of incidents in the military. "We are Danny" banner, to commemorate death of Pvt. Danny Chen. Stephen Nessen/WNYC

WNYC is telling the story of public housing in New York City through the lens of one family that has lived there for four decades. The Alstons arrived in the Queensbridge Houses in 1954, and many members continue to live there. This is part one of a four-part series. Chick Alston is sometimes called the mayor of the Queensbridge Houses. He has lived in the sprawling Long Island City public housing development, the country’s largest, since he was three-years old. He’s 62 now. The lanky patriarch said that even if he won the lottery he wouldn’t leave Queensbridge. Four generations of Alstons live there, including Chick’s 83-year old mother, Virgie, the first Alston to step foot in Queensbridge. “It’s hard, but inside there’s life,” said Chick, in his raspy voice, looking up at the security bars hanging off a red brick building. “Inside the building there’s real life. Real families. Real love.” Public housing was built for families like the Alstons: the working poor who could reliably pay rent. It was also meant to be an antidote to the city’s filthy and dangerously over-crowded tenements.  But the Alstons are an anomaly to public housing experts; most families that moved into public housing during the mid-1950s are long gone. More than 400,000 New Yorkers now live in public housing. Of those, 6,732 call Queensbridge home. Queensbridge is mostly black and Hispanic with an average gross income for residents between $21,000 to 24,000. Most residents stay an average of 17 to 18 years. The average rent is between $405 and $445.  Chick Alston spends his mornings at the Jacob Riis Community Center in Queensbridge. In the lobby, there is a fading 300-foot WPA mural by Philip Guston called “Work and Play,” which depicts basketball players, musicians, a doctor and child and a group of children playing near a slum building being demolished. “Other than gun play every now and then people can have a good time,” Chick said, “It’s a beautiful place. The grass. The greenery. The trees. When it’s summer time everything lights up.” After lunch, Chick winds down the sidewalk of his youth to meet his kids and grandkids, stops by his brother’s cafe to catch up and finally, ends up at his apartment, which he shares with his live-in girlfriend. “It’s not all bad and it’s definitely not all good all the time, but it’s a balance.” Chick is the oldest of 12 siblings, all of whom were raised in Queensbridge. Four still live there and many of their children are growing up in the complex. “It’s not really about these bricks,” said Chick’s 26-year-old nephew, Jason, a college graduate who’s back in Queensbridge  “It’s about a deeper kind of personal experience that develops your character and what you value in life. A lot of things people associate with the projects — it’s not always true.” Chick Alston, sitting outside the Jacob Riis Community Center at the Queensbridge Houses Stephen Nessen/WNYC “Tear Down the Old!”: The Birth of Public Housing The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established in 1934 before there was a federal housing program. It pledged to create housing for the so-called “submerged middle class,” or as some say, “the working poor” who were stuck in decaying tenements. It was also seen as a job creator, providing 3,000-4,000 jobs at four housing projects, each in a different borough, according to reports at the time. The first public housing was built in the Lower East Side in 1935, an experiment with 123 apartments called First Houses. Before the old tenement there had even been demolished, the New York Times reported 3,000 people had applied for apartments. Early public housing was modeled after Europe’s post-war housing programs with their use of eminent domain, low-cost uniform buildings and the notion that housing was a tool for rebuilding cities. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a child of Italian immigrants, saw public housing as a public service, like water or mass transit: a city’s obligation to its citizens. And in the early years, it was self-supporting, mostly paying for itself and only using government subsidies for purchasing land and construction costs, but not for operating or maintenance. LaGuardia took to the airwaves in October 1938 to press his agenda for clearing out what he said were the slums of Manhattan and to drum up support for more housing projects. “Tear down the old, build up the new!” he barked on WNYC. “Down with rotten antiquated rat holes! Down with hovels! Down with disease! Down with firetraps! Let in the sun! Let in the sky! A new day is dawning. A new life. A new America.” A year earlier, Congress had passed the National Housing Act in an effort to create jobs through the construction of homes and to build safe housing for urban and rural communities. Congress wrote the decaying housing stock was “injurious to the health, safety, and morals of the citizens of the Nation.” Construction at Queensbridge began in September 1938 on 61 industrial acres surrounded by old factories. There was not much of a neighborhood in Long Island City at the time so there were few residents to complain about demolition — just vast cheap land for architects to build on. Queensbridge was completed a year later—just in time for the 1939 World’s Fair, where visions for the future of cities were presented. NYCHA hoped visitors would be inspired by the 26 Y-shaped buildings as they crossed the (Ed Koch) Queensboro Bridge on their way to Flushing, Queens. Queensbridge was meant to be a model for the future of public housing. What they saw then is pretty much what can be seen now: from overhead, Queensbridge looks like a honeycomb with patches of green between the buildings. There is a warren of six-story brick apartment buildings, flanked by the East River to the west and bookended by the bridge looming to the south and a power plant with red and white smoke stacks to the north. When it opened, rents ranged from $4.55 a week for 2-1/2 rooms to $5.90 a week for 6-1/2 rooms and included gas, electricity, heat and hot water. Queensbridge was completed under budget by cutting back on amenities like closet doors and by using asbestos tiles instead of wooden floors, according to Nicholas Boom, a professor from the New York Institute of Technology, and author of Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century. “The buildings are identical across the entire project, also reducing cost,” Bloom said. “And thus allowed for there to be more units on site, while still preserving what the housing reformers wanted, which was abundant open space, modern conveniences for apartments, such as central heating, which was lacking in tenements that came before.” There were also elevators in the buildings—things most working class residents never had before in New York.  In the early 1950s, when the Alstons arrived in Queensbridge, Virgie’s oldest son, Chick, said he’d never seen such diversity before. “I’ve seen people of other color, you know, whites and Chinese, on TV, but never personalized, living in the same building,” he said recently. “We lived on the same block, same building, same floor sometimes.”  Establishing Roots Chick’s mother Virgie, 83, was part of the Second Great Migration. That brought 1.5 million rural blacks from the south to the northern cities, according to a report by the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. In 1946, she left the tobacco and cotton fields of Henderson, N.C., for a crowded fifth-floor walk-up in Harlem where her grandmother and other relatives lived. She was 16-years old. “When I first came to New York I hated it,” she said with spit-fire quickness and a drawl that revealed her southern roots. “I said, ‘How can anybody live here—everybody on top of one another?’ I really hated it when I first came here.” Virgie met her future husband, Walter, a distant cousin, during her junior year of high school. “I guess it might’ve been love at first sight for him,” she said. “I had no intention of marrying this boy from North Carolina in the country.” But a year later, at the start of her senior year, she dropped out to marry him. He was charming and they had fun together. By 25, Virgie had three kids and needed to get out of the four-bedroom apartment she and Walter shared with her grandmother. So, they applied for public housing. Virgie Alston, the matriarch of the Alston family Stephen Nessen/WNYC In 1953, NYCHA had started filtering potential tenants based on “desirability.” These were 21 items that could be used to reject applicants for such things as having out-of-wedlock children, being single parents, poor housekeeping, lack of furniture or for having an “irregular work history.” Virgie only remembers having to prove she was married. These 21 requirements were abandoned in 1968. Virgie’s application was accepted. She’d had never been to Queens before, but she was ready to leave Harlem. The Alstons paid $37 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. Walter worked two jobs, cleaning buildings and cooking at a fish-and-chip shop in Manhattan. Virgie continued to care for her expanding family. But under pressure from advocates who believed state-subsidized housing should only be for the very poor, NYCHA began evicting tenants whose annual income exceeded $3,000 in 1947. This meant more space for lower income residents in public housing. Meanwhile, with the availability of suburban housing for whites, which often discriminated against black homeowners, many fled the neighborhood in what became a trend of migration of whites from urban centers, known as white flight. Soon, as more working class white residents left, poverty in public housing became concentrated and Virgie’s family would be shook by the changes. By the late 1950s, public housing was also becoming stigmatized. What had gone from a solution to the housing crisis of the time, was quickly becoming its own problem in need of a solution. Many of the social problems that come with disrupting stable communities with a

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie met with President Barack Obama this morning to press for money to help fund the state's recovery from Hurricane Sandy. WNYC's Anna Sale caught up with the Governor in Washington, D.C., this morning. She tells us: Governor Chris Christie just entered the U.S. Capitol here in Washington after a meeting with President Obama regarding Sandy recovery funds. I was the only reporter in the corridor as he entered the Capitol, asked him to talk about the president’s meeting, how he would characterize it and he just told me, ‘Nope.’ He’s expected to meet with New Jersey senators and with House Speaker Boehner today. Christie met with members of the Senate Appropriations Committee — including Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) along with Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ). Christie says the storm caused nearly $37 billion in damage to New Jersey alone. Democrats on Capitol Hill say Obama plans to ask Congress for about $50 billion dollars in additional emergency aid for states hit by the storm. That's less than the $82 billion that New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are asking for. [View the story " " on Storify]

President Barack Obama’s pointman on regional Sandy rebuilding efforts said tackling immediate needs such as minimizing the number of displaced is a top priority – but long-term issues such as buyouts and climate change loom large. Speaking to WNYC on Friday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said reaching the more than 10,000 families in the region living in homes affected by the storm is issue No. 1. “That’s going to make a big difference in ensuring we don’t have more families that have to find housing,” he said. Donovan also said it’s crucial for Congress to act quickly to get funds to the region so that residents can begin to plan rebuilding efforts. But he said how to rebuild and where remain lingering questions. “One of the things the president has made clear to me is we have to rebuild not exactly what was there before,” he told WNYC. “We have to rebuild smarter and stronger to make sure that we minimize the enormous damage to people’s live and their families and their communities that we saw in this storm.” Donovan said that buyouts are possible but that decision would fall to communities. His role is to support those decisions, he said. “There are already town meetings going on in Staten Island and other places where communities are coming together to decide, ‘Should we just do buyouts?’ and everybody in a neighborhood really decide to move somewhere else,” he told WNYC. He added, “Some of those will not be easy decisions."

An American flag still flies in the front yard of firefighter Mike Bellantoni’s two-family bungalow on New Dorp Lane. Three pumpkins painted in New York Giants blue sit near the end of a walkway leading up to the front porch. A light-catcher hangs on the front door with the words “proud to be an American” over another small flag made of translucent red, white and blue plastic. His house sits just across from Miller Field where white FEMA tents are clustered and the sound of distant cheers Thursday afternoon meant President Barack Obama had just arrived. Standing on his porch, littered with bottles and debris, Bellantoni said he didn't vote for Obama, “but I'm a true patriot,” he said, "so my theory is, he's my president. I want him to prove me wrong.” That sentiment was echoed by other residents in this historically conservative borough who had mixed feelings about Obama’s visit to the region as the clean up crawls forward. Obama won Staten Island, but the margin was 50 to 49 percent — the narrowest margin of any of the five boroughs. It's also home to Republican Congressman Michael Grimm, who was also successfully re-elected and whose office is right up the street on New Dorp Lane. Lisa Mazza, 42, waited to see the president along Miller Field with her video camera, even though she said she didn't vote for him either. The mother of three said Obama should have visited Staten Island sooner. She also wanted to know what else the president could do to help the neighborhood, over and above the work of non-government groups like the Red Cross. “As far as government: what are you going to do to help us? We need to get this taken care of,” said Mazza who lost the entire first floor of her home. She applied for help from FEMA but was confused by questions on the application. “You know some of them are a little tricky,” said Mazza. “Like one of them was, 'Did you have electric in the last five days?' I called on day two (of the power outage), so I said, 'Yes.'” For now, FEMA has denied her claim even though she went for 17 days without heat, hot water or electricity. Dario Veggian, 69, is having his own FEMA issues. His two story house has mold. There's a crack from the storm in its foundation. He needs a new boiler and completely new wiring. FEMA gave him a check for $17,000. But he estimates there’s more than $100,000 worth of damage. “We got some help from friends, volunteers, it's tough,” said Veggian. “We don't even know if the house is going to be livable.” Veggian was standing at his front gate wearing work gloves and binoculars also hoping to see the president. He considers himself an Obama supporter and if he had a chance to tell him something, he’d say this: “Mr. President thank you for coming. You see what’s happening here. And whatever help you can give us, please, hurry up.”

With a robust “Hello, Brooklyn!” Islanders owner Charles Wang announced that the New York Islanders are moving to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Wang, joined by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bruce Ratner, developer of the Barclays Center, and several other officials, said the Long Island-based team signed a 25-year agreement and will take to the ice in Brooklyn starting in 2015. “When the Islanders came into existence in 1972, they shared the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum with the New York Nets,” Wang recalled, “and this announcement today reunites these two franchises.” The newly opened 18,000-seat arena already hosts the Brooklyn Nets team, currently playing pre-season games. It will host the season opener between the Knicks and the Nets next week. Like the Knicks, the Islanders’ hockey rival, the New York Rangers play at Madison Square Garden. Bloomberg noted the move means the rivalry between the Islanders and NY Rangers just got bigger. And he’s hopeful that Brooklyn will help bring the “mojo back” for the four-time Stanley Cup champions. “The whole world knows that Brooklyn is big time and now we’ve got the big league sports to prove it,” he said. He added the move would help add more jobs at the arena, as well as the surrounding area, which “will mean millions of dollars in new tax revenue, the city will be able to pay for schools and police officers, and everything else we need to keep our city growing.” But the city’s gain is Nassau County’s loss. Wang said a major goal was to keep the team local and they tried to keep the team in Nassau County, but “unfortunately we were unable to achieve that dream.” He told Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano of his decision Wednesday morning. Last year, voters in Nassau County defeated a plan that would have allowed the county to use $400 million to redevelop the 40-year-old crumbling stadium. Mangano took to twitter to say his administration worked hard to retain the Islanders. "I have supported various proposals to redevelop the HUB, including a public referendum in which voters chose not to construct a new sports arena." He added he will select an economic development team to help redevelop the Hub into "a vibrant destination and job creation center." Supporters of the redevelopment said the county stood to lose $243 million a year and more than 2,000 jobs if the Islanders leave and the Nassau Coliseum closes. Like any good new neighbor, though, Bloomberg brought a housewarming gift for Wang and the team’s general manager: MTA cards. He said he hopes they use it to travel to the Canyon of Heroes for the Islanders Stanley Cup championship parade. But only after 2015. Andrea Bernstein contributed reporting Watch a video of the announcement below:

The Seren family gathered around the TV in the living room of their home in Huntington Station on Long Island on a recent Saturday night. Nestor, 32, was watching soccer with his wife, Mildred, 34. Their 6-year-old daughter, Daniela, a first grader whose favorite subject is math, was running around the house.  It was a typical relaxed evening, a change from only a few months ago when they didn't know whether Nestor would be deported. Now he stands a chance of getting a green card.   "Obama changed our lives," Mildred said.   The Seren family significantly benefited from the changes in the immigration policy the Obama administration has put in place. In June, President Barack Obama announced another policy change — deferred action — allowing unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children to apply for a two-year deportation deferral and work permits. But Obama has said he remains committed to passing a comprehensive immigration reform — legislation that would combine stricter enforcement, changes to the visa system and legalization of unauthorized immigrants. GOP challenger Mitt Romney has criticized Obama for implementing temporary measures. He said he plans to fix the country's broken immigration system by putting in place permanent solutions. Romney proposed fixes to the visa system and opposes any policy that would allow unauthorized immigrants currently in the country to “cut in line.” The two candidates propose different solutions for the problems of the country's immigration system. But recent developments suggest what might be possible when the new Congress and president begin their terms next year.A Family's Life ChangedThe Serens are a mixed-status family. Daniela was born here, Mildred is a naturalized citizen and Nestor is undocumented. He was on his way to being deported, but he got to stay because a change in immigration policy under the Obama administration earlier this year allowed unauthorized immigrants who haven’t committed crimes and who have strong ties to the country to remain in the U.S.   "I’m lucky ‘cause some people, they don’t the luck that I have," Nestor said."Now I’m feeling better." But he is still in legal limbo, without a work permit. If Seren returned to his native Honduras now to apply for a green card as a spouse of a U.S. citizen, a 10-year return ban would be triggered, because he’s spent more than a year in the U.S. illegally. He could soon, however, benefit from another Obama policy change — a provisional waiver. It is expected to come into effect before the end of the year.   If Nestor and Mildred show his absence would cause her extreme hardship, he can get this new waiver in the U.S. His attorney, David Sperling, says that means the 10-year ban will be waived and that Nestor and will almost certainly be approved for a visa when he goes to Honduras.  "This is an answer to the plight of hundreds of thousands undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens," Sperling said. In Washington, A Different View of ObamaImmigration advocates in Washington support the changes in the policy the Serens have benefited from, and particularly the president’s decision to allow young unauthorized immigrants to get work permits. But Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, is quick to criticize Obama.“We’re not happy at all with what’s been done,” Wilkes said. “The president, unfortunately, he chose not to pursue immigration reform.”Wilkes also pointed out more than 1.5 million people have been deported during the last four years. The president said his administration has focused on deporting criminals, but advocates argue that people with no criminal records have also been deported.Republicans have also been vocal in their criticism of the president. They say Obama’s policy changes that have helped unauthorized immigrants are his attempts to win over Hispanic voters while circumventing Congress. Lamar Smith, a Congressman from Texas and chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, in an op-ed on deferred action for U.S. News and World Report in July wrote: “This move by President Obama is clearly a political ploy announced a few months before an election."Republican Plan for Immigration But some Republicans think the party’s position on immigration could alienate the Hispanics, the country’s fastest growing minority, and say there’s a need to offer their solutions for the problems of the immigration system."I think there's a sense in Congress among Republicans that they can't say no to this issue forever, that there are advantages to being upfront on it and having some momentum and owning some pieces of it," said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organization that advocates for immigration reform on behalf of employers.    Jacoby said Republicans are interested in incremental changes to the legal system, but not the big comprehensive reform Obama said he favors. "We’ve seen a lot of Republicans introducing measures that were small, rifle shot, targeted measures to fix this or that aspect of the legal immigration system," said Jacoby.  One of those recently introduced measures was a bill that would give green cards to those who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in the science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields. It didn’t pass, but experts say the two parties are not too far apart on the issue and that they might come to an agreement. Romney’s immigration strategy also includes green cards for graduates in the STEM fields, and changes in the visa system for temporary agricultural and other seasonal workers, raising caps on visas for highly skilled workers and speeding up processing times for immediate family members of citizens and legal permanent residents. “It’s time to put the politics aside, and I will actually reform the immigration system to make it work for the people of America,” Romney told Univision in September. What precisely will happen next year depends whether two parties will be able to reach a compromise. It also depends on will control the House and the Senate and who will be in the White House.  Back on Long Island, Mildred Seren plans to cast a ballot for Obama when she gets to vote for the first time in November.   "I support Obama for president,” she said. “He helped us a lot.”

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday on whether the University of Texas at Austin wrongly discriminated against a white woman who sought admission in 2008. The decision could have broad implications, and a wide range of interested parties in New York City are watching the case closely. At the heart of the case is the way the University of Texas diversifies its student body. First, it accepts the top 10 percent of students in all high schools across the state. It fills roughly 85 percent of its freshman class this way. The remaining applicants then compete for a small share of open spaces based on personal achievements, academics and race and ethnicity. Fordham and New York University submitted amicus briefs in support of the University of Texas. In a Catholic Blog Post, Fordham President Joseph McShane wrote “We try to develop in our students an understanding of, and reverence for, cultures and ways of life other than their own. We believe that such an understanding and reverence cannot be achieved absent a truly multiracial, multicultural student body.” Many universities and colleges argue education is enriched by students being exposed to a variety of cultures, ideas and backgrounds. But Heather McDonald from the Manhattan Institute maintains the importance of race is overplayed.  “I think that the university’s obsession with race and ethnicity as the central access of human experience is very narrow and trivializing,” she said, adding that at many colleges self-segregation occurs. [View the story "Affirmative Action Debate Revisited" on Storify] McDonald believes affirmative action policies result in minority students being admitted into colleges they are ill prepared for academically. She points to California’s state system and says graduation rates improved among blacks once affirmative action was banned in the state. But researchers say while graduation rates among minorities did improve, there could be several reasons why, including an effort to better "match" students to campuses. The View from the Classroom At the City University of New York, 55 percent of the undergraduate student body last fall was either black or Hispanic. At NYU, by contrast, 15 percent of the incoming freshman last fall fell into those categories. Gabby Cohen, a sophomore at NYU, says she does benefit from having a mix of students in her class. But she does think affirmative action can sometime be abused. “I also know a kid who got into Wharton at UPenn and put on his application that he was African American because his great-great-grandfather was African American,” she said. The last time the Supreme Court ruled on an affirmative action case was 2003, when a white student named Barbara Grutter alleged the University of Michigan’s Law School weighed race too heavily when determining admissions giving blacks and Latinos an unfair advantage over her. The Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s admissions policy and ruled that diversifying a student body was a legitimate goal as long as race alone did not determine an applicant’s admission.  Lee Bollinger, the current president of Columbia University was the president of University of Michigan at the time and the named defendant in the case, said diversity has been crucial to the success of higher education. “If the majority of the justices were to take a look again at the Grutter case and to overturn Grutter and have a new approach interpreting the 14th Amendment as prohibiting considerations of race and ethnicity,” Bollinger said, “that would have profound effects on higher education.” Bollinger predicts dramatic declines in blacks, Latinos and Native American enrollment at major universities if affirmative action policies are banned or weakened.

Santiago Muldonado, 49, has no health insurance, and sometimes it worries him more than other times. He went to the Zufall Health Center in Dover, N.J, recently to get treatment for a rash after over the counter creams failed to do the job. He’s hopeful the treatment will be straightforward and economical. Muldonado can handle a $35 out-of-pocket charge, despite being unemployed and keeping his family of five afloat on his wife’s $40,000 a year salary. His health doesn’t keep him up at night. What does is his wife’s knees. “They’re getting more swollen every day, and she has to walk around a lot for her work,” Maldonado said. “This clinic doesn’t have an orthopedist, and if we go to a hospital, we know it’s going to cost a lot of money that we don’t have. So we keep waiting and hoping.” While the family is poor enough to qualify his three children for the government health insurance, his wife’s earnings as a parochial school administrator are too high to qualify the couple for Medicaid, so they’re among New Jersey’s 1.2 million uninsured. As a way to reduce the number of uninsured, states are being encouraged to set more generous income limits for Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. If states comply, they can get 100 percent federal funding in the first three years, declining to 90 percent funding over time. Typically, states and the federal government share the burden 50-50. The new funding might seem like an offer states can’t refuse, but several are, including Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and Arizona. And Governor Chris Christie has hinted he wants to follow the lead of those states and their Republican governors, who believe it will end up costing states more in the long run. “Medicaid is pretty well expanded in our state already because of the legacy of previous Democratic governors,” Christie told “Fox and Friends” in July. “So, I don’t think there’s a lot for us to do in New Jersey in that regard.” A spokesman for the governor said Christie supports GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s position of “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act, including the Medicaid expansion. Christie will likely wait for the outcome of the presidential election before making a decision. Avik Roy, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said Christie and other governors are right to think Medicaid expansion will be more expensive for cash-strapped state capitals than immediately meets the eye. Roy and some policy analysts believe expanding Medicaid would bring hundreds of thousands of people “out of the woodwork.”  “If New Jersey were to participate in the expansion, they would have these hidden costs from potentially enrolling a large chunk of people who are eligible for the existing Medicaid program, where the federal government isn’t backing that up with 100 percent funding,” he said. But Joel Cantor, director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University, said those are people who should be using Medicaid anyway, and getting them into the system ultimately lowers their cost to the state while improving their healthcare. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a healthcare think tank in Washington, estimates accepting the Medicaid expansion would grow the program by 38 percent between 2014, when it kicks in, and 2019, while increasing state spending by only 1.2 percent. Christie’s re-election calculus may ultimately determine whether or not the governor will expand Medicaid under ACA, unless Republicans win both the White House and the Senate. Although Christie prides himself on taking politically unpopular positions, Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Peter Wooley said Christie might think twice before turning down billions of dollars of federal aid. “I think in this state, in this economic climate, it would be extremely difficult,” Wooley said. “It would open him up to sustained criticism from the other side.” But Christie may be looking beyond the Garden State, as well. Professor Brigid Harrison, from Montclair State University, said Christie’s political balancing act will be more challenging in 2013 than it was in 2010, when he cancelled the $11 billion ARC Tunnel, most of whose funding came from Washington. “On the one hand, he needs to placate a constituency within the State of New Jersey that tends to be a bit more moderate than he has been so far in his administration,” Harrison said. “But he needs to balance this with his rather unabashed desire to make a name for himself nationally, particularly as a potential nominee for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2016.”

After almost a decade of fits and starts, which included opposition from residents and delays resulting from the financial crisis, the first part of the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project opens Friday with a concert from borough native Jay-Z. The 675,000 square foot Barclays Center is part of the first phase of the project, which also includes five other buildings, most of which will be residential buildings in the Brooklyn neighborhood.  The second phase of the project includes 11 other buildings. Developer Forest City Ratner has promised to break ground on the first residential tower before the end of this year. “With Barclays Center, the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues has become one of the greatest crossroads in New York,” said Forest City Ratner CEO Bruce Ratner in a press release issued by Barclays Center. But the hoopla surrounding the opening still can’t quell the controversy that has surrounded the project. The construction has been the subject of dozens of challenges from community groups.  Community Agreement Doesn’t Mean the Community Agrees In 2005, Forest City Ratner signed a deal that was supposed to ease neighborhood concerns, called a Community Benefits Agreement. It laid out in detail all sorts of concessions Forest City Ratner would make to neighborhood groups in exchange for support of the Atlantic Yards project. The document was signed by eight community groups, including Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance (DBNA) and the now defunct Association for Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN). But some neighbors and groups opposed to Atlantic Yards alleged that the CBA failed to include all of the people who would be affected by the 22-acre Atlantic Yards development. “It’s not enforceable, it’s not worth the paper it is written on,” said Candace Carponter, one of the attorneys for the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, which opposes the Atlantic Yards project. Groups still opposed complain that the signatories to the Community Benefits Agreement lack the power to enforce the document, and have no reason challenge it, because they assert many of the groups were created — and are still in existence — because of funding from Forest City Ratner, creating a conflict of interest. “It’s up to the parties to enforce the [Community Benefits Agreement], but that won’t happen since a number of the parties are funded by the developer,” said Gib Veconi, a member of the opposition group BrooklynSpeaks.  (Photo: The then unfinished Barclays Center looking East at the junction of Atlantic and Flatbush in Brooklyn on August 8, 2012. Amy Pearl/WNYC) As of 2005, Forest City Ratner provided more than $100,000 to BUILD to begin to develop community outreach. The developer also committed at least $50,000 in funding to DBNA.   One group that signed the CBA defended its role in securing amenities for the surrounding area. ACORN secured a promise from the developer that 50 percent of the residential units created in the Atlantic Yards project would be dedicated to affordable housing units. “People want to say the Community Benefits Agreement doesn’t represent the entire community because they’re speaking for themselves,” said ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis. The group is in bankruptcy proceedings, but Lewis insists that ACORN is still alive. She said the whole process of signing the agreement was very open, and that the signatories to the CBA represented thousands of people throughout the borough. “When we signed the CBA, ACORN had 30,000 members,” added Lewis. Aside from affordable housing, the Community Benefits Agreement also called for a minimum of 35 percent of the jobs created by the project to be given to minority workers, and another 10 percent to women workers. It also said that public housing residents and low and moderate income individuals in surrounding neighborhoods would get priority in available jobs. The document even called for a meditation room to be built inside the arena. “I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but there is a meditation room [in the arena], that will be open during events, a non-denominational quiet space for people to get away from the arena,” said Ashley Cotton, executive vice president of External Affairs for Forest City Ratner Companies. Watch a time lapse video of construction of Barclays Center created by TheBronxBroolyn: Legal Fights, Delays Put Project on Rocky Footing Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, along with other groups, filed a lawsuit against the Empire State Development Corporation regarding Atlantic Yards, which has resulted in the developer re-evaluating the second phase of the Atlantic Yards project, and creating a new environmental impact statement. “We will start a new environmental impact statement process, and there are not any more details on that now,” said Cotton of the outcome of the lawsuit. There’s at least one other major suit still moving forward against the project related to unpaid wages and broken promises. The CBA included a channel — outside the legal system — for the developer to address neighborhood concerns. The agreement called for the developer to hire an independent compliance monitor to guarantee that the company kept its promises. But so far, that monitor has yet to be hired. In a document released by Forest City Ratner on October 19, 2005, the company’s then Executive Vice President Jim Stuckey said plans for the compliance monitor were being finalized. “The CBA Executive Committee is finalizing a Request for Proposals to retain an independent monitor to ensure that the CBA goals are met,” Stuckey said at the time. “Forest City Ratner is one-hundred percent committed to meeting the targets in the CBA and that means we will have to partially fund many of these programs,” said Stuckey, referring to the community groups the developer helped fund. Still, at the Wyckoff Gardens New York City Housing Authority Developments in Brooklyn, less than a mile from the Barclays Center, many residents just want the arena to open already. “I can’t wait,” said 14-year-old Nassir Ali. “I think it’s going to be great, because we finally got a stadium next to us, and we can just go there and watch basketball,” he said. The arena will offer more than 200 events in its first year, including concerts from a diverse group of artists, from Neil Young and Crazy Horse to Barbara Streisand to  Justin Bieber.  Barclays Center will also be home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, of which Jay-Z is a part owner.  The team is scheduled to play its first home game of the regular season against the New York Knicks on November 1.

Fifty-four years ago this month, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Harlem signing copies of his book, when a mentally disturbed woman plunged a steel letter opener into his chest. The wound punctured his sternum, mere inches away from his aorta. King was taken to Harlem Hospital where his life and the course of history hung in the balance. He recovered, of course, but was later assassinated in 1968. And now the last surviving member of the surgical team that saved his life is being honored by Harlem Hospital Thursday night as it unveils its historic WPA murals. At 93, Dr. John Cordice has a slight build, close-cropped white hair and a friendly smile. He and his wife, Marguerite, celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary on Monday and their home in Hollis, Queens, is filled with the flowers and greetings cards they exchanged. He grew up in Durham, N.C., and moved to New York City in 1936. He earned his medical degree at New York University in 1943 and went on to serve as an Attending Surgeon and Chief of Thoracic Surgery at both Harlem Hospital and the Queens Hospital Center, according to the hospital. He says on September 20, 1958, he was with his daughter in Brooklyn picking up mail at his office when he got a call from Harlem Hospital telling him an important person was suffering from a life-threatening injury. “We raced on in to Harlem Hospital and when I went into the emergency room, of course, the crowd was beginning to gather and then I was informed that Dr. King had been injured,” Cordice said. He reviewed King’s X-rays with fellow surgeon Dr. Emil Naclerio and consulted with their chief of surgery Dr. Aubrey Maynard. For many years, it would be Maynard who received most of the credit for saving King’s life, even though Cordice and Naclerio performed the surgery. (Photo: This photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the operating room following his stabbing on September 20, 1958 hangs in Cordice's home. Courtesy Dr. John Cordice) “He decided it would be better if he assumed a principal role here, in spite of the fact that he did not do the surgery,” Cordice said. “We were not going to challenge him because actually he was the boss.” Harlem Hospital had its own impact on the civil rights movement. Dr. Louis T. Wright was the first African-American on the hospital’s surgical staff and also served as chairman of the national board of directors for the NAACP. And as Hugh Pearson wrote in his book, When Harlem Nearly Killed King, the hospital was the most integrated of any in the country. “Wright had died before this event occurred, but his record and his history and his relationship to the NAACP were still very much alive, and so we felt a certain personal identity and a personal responsibility to carry through a level of performance professionally which would make him proud,” Cordice said. In his last speech on April 3, 1968, Dr. King reflected on just how close he’d come to dying that fateful night. Doctors had told him that if he had sneezed, he would’ve died. “I want to say tonight, I’m too am happy I didn’t sneeze, because if I had sneezed I wouldn’t have been around in 1960 when students all over the south started sitting in at lunch counters,” he said.   King continued: “If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1961 when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation in interstate travel...If I had sneezed … I wouldn’t have been able to tell America about a dream that I had had.” (Photo: Cordice sits in his home with a photo of the operating room the night Dr. King was stabbed. Tracie Hunte/WNYC)

Kaiim Vieira was born in a Brooklyn hospital 18 years ago today. He grew into a six-foot-two teen who had a knack for getting folks to laugh even when they didn’t want to. He used to call his mother by the nickname “Muffin.” A week and a half ago, Kaiim was shot 10 times and killed after an altercation on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. It was less than three miles from where his own father was gunned down 14 years ago. "My son became another statistic, and that was something I said he would never be,” said Kaiim’s grief-stricken mother, Iasia Tyre, through tears. Since Kaiim’s death on September 14, his large extended family has banded together at his aunt’s apartment in the Gowanus Houses to make arrangements, stay on top of the police investigation and, more than anything, comfort each other. A big part of that has been sharing stories about Kaiim. Tyre, 37, said her son, who was known for his goofy dancing and joke telling, got his sense of humor from his father. “We went out to eat one time and [father and son] were sticking candy in their nose,” she recalled. “The two of them -- doing the same thing.” In March 1998, their joyous days abruptly ended when Kaiim's father, Trevor, was shot and killed by an acquaintance in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Kaiim was 3-years old and didn’t understand that his father was dead. "He would ask me every day, ‘Did daddy wake up yet? Did daddy wake up yet?’" Tyre said, admitting that she was filled with guilt that Kaiim had to grow up without his father. Tyre went back to school to get her Master's degree to better her family’s life and get them out of public housing in Queens. She began working for the Administration for Children’s Services, the city agency that aims to protect the city’s kids from abuse and neglect. (Photo: In this family photograph, Iasia Tyre, a proud mother, looks dreamily at her baby boy Kaiim. Courtesy of Iasia Tyre) But she said trying to teach her own son about surviving painful episodes like getting beat up was the most challenging job. Tyre said the cruelty of the streets caught up with her son and he started to get in trouble. He had a knife pulled on him and had a tooth chipped in fight by the time he was in high school, she said. Tyre drove Kaiim to and from school, met with teachers, counselors — and eventually judges — but everything she tried ultimately failed to protect him. “I'm supposed to save people's children but I couldn't save my own,” said Tyre, her voice cracking. “And that hurt. And I tried. I tried.” Tyre vows to move to Maryland to give Kaiim's younger brother a chance to grow up far from life-interrupting violence. “I give myself two months and I'm leaving,” she said. “I refuse to raise another child in NYCHA. I refuse to raise another child in New York City." Tyre is planning to visit her son’s gravesite at Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, N.J. today. She’ll be releasing 18 balloons in honor of Kaiim’s birthday.   WNYC is profiling the life of every child in the city killed by gunfire in our series In Harm’s Way.

When John Wallace, 43, of Babylon, N.Y., returned three years ago from his combat tour as an infantryman in Afghanistan, he felt content to be home. But soon the divorced father of three began having nightmares. He was anxious and paranoid. He said he thought he had “intrusive thoughts” and felt like he was “legitimately crazy.”  “Something was wrong,” he said, “No one knew how to help. Nobody knew – ‘Should we even bring it up?’ It was awkward there for awhile.” Wallace left the military in 2011 and was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Wallace received counseling at a veterans’ center on Long Island, and underwent an intensive 90-day treatment program. Earlier this year, through a non-profit group called The Guardians of Rescue, he adopted a rambunctious dog named Tommy. The Long Island-based animal rescue group is one of a handful that help bring back animals saved by soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq as the military draws down its presence. But unlike others, this group has been focusing on pairing veterans or their families with the stray animals. Tommy was rescued in Afghanistan and kept by an Explosive Ordinance Device Unit. Wallace read about the program and decided right away to adopt. “He’s always here,” Wallace said of the white-haired, tan-eared pooch that is just two years old. “[As] opposed to me sitting here in my apartment by myself caught up in my thoughts. Having Tommy here — we go out, we go walking, we go to the field and play. It just became a really big part of my life as well as the rest of my family.” (Photo: Tommy plays with his new owner, John, a veteran who deployed to Afghanistan and was diagnosed with PTSD. Caitlyn Kim/WNYC) Wallace, who is using the GI Bill to go to college as a full-time student, wants Tommy to be officially trained as a therapy dog, so that he can help other veterans suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder He said that while deployed his unit had three puppies that were then cared for by the unit that replaced his even though General Order No. 1, among other things, prohibits the adoption, caring for or feeding of any type of domestic or wild animal. The enforcement of the animal provision has varied from unit to unit. The benefit that a dog — or any pet — provides to a person suffering PTSD is unknown. The Department of Veterans Affairs began studying 17 pairs of dogs and soldiers to examine the potential therapeutic benefit of pets on those who suffered post-war trauma, but the study hit a snag when concerns were raised about the health of the dogs at the vendor’s facility and other contract violations.  “The health and well-being of veterans, their families, and service dogs involved in the research study remain VA’s highest priority,” a spokeswoman said. “The VA Office of Research and Development is developing a new plan to carry out this important research.” But bringing these so-called “battle buddy” dogs to the United States from Afghanistan has been something Meredith Festa, program director for The Guardians of Rescue, has been working on for about a year. Last year, Festa said she received a call from a relative of a soldier who was meeting a lot of resistance in trying to bring his rescued Afghan dog, Savannah, to the U.S. Savannah was later killed in Afghanistan, but the family requested that the funds raised for Savannah be used to help bring another soldier’s dog, Trigger, to the U.S. They did, and since then the group has been flooded with request from soldiers — and sometimes even Embassy workers — in Afghanistan, and “Operation No Buddy Left Behind” began. “It’s about giving that solider the peace of mind of knowing his dog is safe and is not going to be used as a weapon or be killed, and it’s going to have a loving family with a solider who understand how important the dog is,” Festa said. She works with the Nowzad Shelter in Afghanistan, which was founded by former Royal British Marine Pen Farthing, to bring rescued dogs to the U.S. Though the dogs can be adopted by anyone, she has made an effort to pair the Afghan dogs with soldiers or soldiers’ families if the service member who rescued the animal is unable to care for the pet stateside. “That dog went through what [the soldier] went through,” she said. “It’s a different kind of relationship and it’s a bond that only someone who served in battle could really understand, which is why we try to place their dogs with military families and veterans of war.” Festa and the group that has helped rescue 14 dogs and two cats from Afghanistan is in the midst of trying to bring another six dogs to New York. Toby, rescued by a contractor from a burn pile in Afghanistan, is scheduled to leave Afghanistan on October 6. A service woman currently in Afghanistan who asked her name not be used said in an email that Toby is “a bright spot and joy in a place far from anything familiar.” She plans on adopting Toby once she returns from Afghanistan. UPDATE: Toby has arrived in Long Island, where he'll await his soldier's return in January.

During the Great Depression, 99 towns — a series of public works projects — were created across the country as part of then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act, or NIRA. One of those towns was called Jersey Homesteads, now known as Roosevelt, N.J., which is located about fifty miles south and slightly west of New York City. The agro-industrial, Jewish colony in Monmouth County was a project formed to stem unemployment and to address the searing lack of demand for goods and services that was underway during the Great Depression.  The idea was for people to collectively own a farm and factory where they would work, and live in homes nearby. “I came here with my parents in 1936,” recalled Helen Barth, an original resident of the town. Her family moved into the town when she was 3 years old. Now 79, she said at the time her family was looking for fresh air, sunshine, and the chance to garden. “My father saw an advertisement in the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, and it painted an idealistic lifestyle,” she said. Families paid the government about $12 in rent each month for their new suburban homes on half-acre lots. (Photos: A Jersey Homesteads house then and now. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-005688-D/Janet Babin/WNYC) The government sank about $1 million into the project at the time, and the families had to cough up $500, a “move-in” fee, according to Michael Ticktin, the town’s municipal historian.  The homes — flat-roofed, cinder block ranch homes with floor to ceiling windows in the back — were co-designed by architect Louis Kahn, then a young assistant just starting his career. “The style of housing used was similar to housing built in Germany in the 1920s and followed the Bauhaus movement, very functional and rectilinear,” Ticktin explained. The backyards also abutted a common green belt space, in the style of the 19th century British Garden City movement. Combined with the half-acre lots, the design added a privacy component not seen in most developments of the time. Ticktin said the project benefited from a convergence of trends: the Jewish back to the land movement, the Bauhaus architectural advances and the Garden City movement.  But other trends were aligning against this utopian project. After three years, Jersey Homesteads factory and farm failed. People got paid less to work in the fields than they did in the factory during the off-season, so many didn’t till the land. Instead outside workers were brought it. (Photo: A worker in the cooperative garment factory at Jersey Homesteads in what is now Roosevelt, N.J./Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33- 011018-M3) The government divested itself of the investment and homesteaders had to pay about $4,000 to $5,000 to buy out their homes, while the factory was bought out and started to produce hats. Helen Barth’s parents decided to buy their Homesteads house. “They were very happy.  There was a rich community life, and meetings every night that were very emotional and passionate, people would yell and scream at each other,” Barth  said. But, she noted, they would make up the very moment the meeting was over. Barth and other residents say the Jewish intellectual population at the time was keen to debate and argue issues of the day.  It was almost as if they carried with them their New York City roots. The community’s housing is still largely intact, and attracts artists, writers and musicians  much like it did from the project’s inception, according to residents. “People will come from all over this weekend,” said Peggy Malkin, a town councilwoman and one of the organizers of this weekend’s town reunion. There will be events like a panel discussion about the New Deal with local lawmakers and academics. But most importantly, she's hoping former residents will return. “This is a town where everyone knows your name, your children’s name, your dog’s name. When you live here you have an instant family,” she added. Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to Peggy Malkin as a former town councilwoman. She is a current town councilwoman.