By The Times-Ledger
The city Department of Transportation has set aside $3 million to improve conditions for those who dare to cross this street. The money will pay for additional pedestrian Walk-Don't-Walk signs, the widening of the center medians and installing mid-block barriers. The DOT plan is ambitious, but will it work?
We are skeptical. As far as we can see, the changes do not address the central problem that on this section of Queens Boulevard there are too many cars and too many pedestrians competing for too little space. The volume is only going to get worse as development continues.
A more dramatic plan may be necessary. One possible – albeit costly – solution is to build overhead walkways across the boulevard and make it illegal to cross the roadway itself. Unlike the other proposals this would not slow down the flow of traffic on the boulevard.
The DOT and Borough President Claire Shulman are sincerely concerned about stopping the bloodshed on this street. The plans they have announced will help. But we fear they will not be sufficient to stop the killing of pedestrians. We hope they will explore additional remedies.
While HUD slept
It seems like only yesterday that Andrew Cuomo, a son of Queens and the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was chastising New York City. Cuomo said the city couldn't be trusted to oversee the millions of dollars set aside to help middle- and low-income New Yorkers afford housing.
At the time we questioned whether Cuomo was trying to embarrass Mayor Giuliani in order to advance the senate campaign of his good friend Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now we learn that while Cuomo was taking the city to the woodshed, con artists were taking HUD to the cleaners in the New York metropolitan area – right under Andrew's nose.
According to published reports, fraudulent real estate speculators have been using illegally obtained loans to purchase properties and sell them at inflated prices. The practice is called “flipping” and it has made some people very rich.
In a news conference last week, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said nine people have been charged in a scheme that has resulted in mortgage defaults on hundreds of properties costing HUD more than $70 million. This is money that will no longer be available to help people realize the dream of buying a first home.
Don't imagine that this is a victimless crime. These unscrupulous speculators talked people into buying properties they couldn't afford at inflated prices. As they “flipped” properties, these entrepreneurs made as much as $60,000 on a single transaction. The new homeowner was left with an overpriced property badly in need of repair. They had no choice but to default and HUD picked up the tab.
Susan Gaffney, inspector general for HUD, blamed the fiasco on staffing reductions in the New York area that left the department unable to spot patterns of fraud in the program created to help families buy singe-family homes. Let's see if we have this right. Cuomo says New York City can't be trusted to monitor HUD funds and then he lets a handful of con artists rob the program blind while destroying the dreams of hundreds of families.
Nice work, Andrew.
