Talk Bronx New York

Operation Protect Your Home To Save NYC Home Owners Facing Foreclosure 

Like so many others, 69-year-old George Mascia fears he is on the brink of losing his home because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

“Let these bankers see these people, what they have done to them,” says Mascia. “Angry ain’t the word for it, you don’t know how angry I am.”

The Air Force vet, who still holds down a job, says in 2005 he was in desperate need of money to pay off medical bills so he took a second mortgage on his home in Throggs Neck. He says he was quick to sign, without reading the fine print about interest rates that go up over time.

“I went from a $2,400 mortgage up to $3,500 mortgage. One thousand dollars in a jump!” says Mascia. “And it’s going to raise every six months one percent, up to 13 and a half percent.”

State Senator Jeff Klein says his office has received numerous complaints about adjustable rate mortgages from homeowners who are in danger of foreclosure. The mortgages start out with low interest rates, but can balloon to levels that a lot people just can’t afford.

“I’ve met so many people who really lost their part of the American dream – home ownership – and that is wrong,” says Klein.

So how serious is the problem in New York City?

According to a report from Klein’s office, in just a year from July of 2006 to July of 2007 there were 14,561 foreclosure filings in the city. Most of them were in Queens and Brooklyn, but the Bronx had 1,684, with the neighborhoods of Wakefield and Baychester hit the hardest.

“I’ve been pressuring these banks for quite some time, but they are finally stepping up to the plate and they are willing help people modify their mortgages,” says Klein.

This Saturday, Klein and others officials are sponsoring a forum called “Operation Protect Your Home.”

It will be held at Cardinal Spellman High school from noon until 8 p.m. Dozens of banks, lending institutions, and housing counselors are scheduled to attend to help owners who are in jeopardy.

Although this huge gathering is set up to help people protect their homes, bottom line, there are no guarantees.

“They took advantage of innocent people is what they did – people like myself,” says Mascia.

For more information on this Saturday’s forum, call Klein’s office at 1-800-718-2039 or log onto his website at nyssenate34.com.

SOURCE: NY1

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Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Caregivers Begin Strike

Caregivers at a Bronx nursing home hit the picket line yesterday.

Key among the issues raised by the health care workers - no health care.

Workers at Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Center at 3400 Cannon Place in the west Bronx have been working without a contract for several years, according to their union, the Service Employees International Union 1199.But what pushed the 220 workers to walk out at 6 a.m. was their recent loss of health benefits.

Late last year, just before the holidays, the Kingsbridge nursing home unilaterally ended employee health benefits, suddenly stripping the workers and their children of their health insurance.

The nursing home is $2.5 million in arrears to the workers’ health benefit fund, and as a result, workers and their families lost their health care coverage completely last November.

The union says the facility’s owner, Helen Sieger, has refused to negotiate in good faith to resolve the dispute, thus forcing the strike.

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Students from the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation hear a talk by zoo employee Linda Corcoran.

Hands on: Students Aber Hajdarmataj (l.), and Yuliana Hernandez take measurements from a miniature ecosystem they created in class.

Wildlife on Top List of Studies For One Bronx School 

At the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, the zoo is more than a field trip

When Elijah Maderon attended a class at the Bronx Zoo in January, he and his fellow sixth-graders gave presentations on how they might protect peregrine falcons from the pesticide DDT if they were conservationists on a tight budget.

Inspired by the activity, Elijah quickly prepared a proposal afterward. With the silver tongue of an experienced entrepreneur, he described a video game to an intrigued teacher. Called Zoo Tycoon, the game allows players to work within a budget to build and maintain a zoo with the goals of ensuring its animals’ health and happiness while still turning a profit. The game, Elijah maintained, would fit right in with his school’s curriculum.

That kind of thinking is encouraged at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation (UASWC) in the Bronx, where Elijah and 148 other students represent the inaugural class. This is one of 19 themed-curricula public schools throughout New York City funded partly by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Jacob Rivera, 15, near his apartment in the Bronx, who was convicted of assault, receives intensive therapy as part of his new sentence.

Jacob and his family are seen regularly by Eddy Lee a counselor for the Juvenile Justice Initiative.

Juvenile Justice Program Sends Medium Risk Teens Home

When Jacob Rivera, 15, was resentenced in May on an assault conviction, he felt he had received a “blessing.”

Only months earlier he had been sentenced to a year in state custody, and he had already spent weeks bouncing between a juvenile detention center in the Bronx and a residential treatment campus upstate. Two of his older siblings had spent time in those facilities and, he said, had “come out a mess.” He could see his future.

But the court gave him a second chance because his case had not been properly reviewed for inclusion in a new alternative sentencing program, which the city started in February 2007. The program, called the Juvenile Justice Initiative, sends medium-risk offenders back to their families and provides intensive therapy.

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The ‘City Harvest/FreshDirect Buying Club’ Launches in the South Bronx

FreshDirect, one of the nation’s leading online gourmet food purveyors and delivery services, and City Harvest, the world’s first and New York’s only food rescue organization, signed a groundbreaking new agreement today to give the residents of the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx greater access to affordable, quality, fresh food.

The new initiative, “The City Harvest/FreshDirect Buying Club,” will aim to reach low-income residents of the South Bronx who struggle to find fresh and healthy food in their neighborhood.

The new arrangement will partner FreshDirect with City Harvest as an intermediary to sell discounted produce and groceries to individual residents and local institutions serving the community, such as day care and senior centers. FreshDirect will offer City Harvest a 20% discount off of regular prices allowing low-income residents to shop from a selection of items at a discount and conveniently pick up their purchases at a local drop-off point. FreshDirect will also waive all delivery fees for orders placed by City Harvest for the Buying Club. Read more..

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