Edda Lopez-Lennards wears a brave smile despite the threat of foreclosure on her Bronx home.

The bravest smile in New York belongs to a 59-year-old Bronx woman who had it all before one of the worst runs of bad luck in city history.

Many of Edda Lopez-Lennards’ woes reflect the larger problems weighing heavily on the whole country: a subprime mortgage, sudden unemployment, no health coverage in the face of debilitating illness.

Add to that untimely widowhood. A mother with advanced Alzheimer’s. No heat. A basement that floods with raw sewage. A Con Ed turnoff notice.

But even as her foreclosed home is slated for auction next week, she smiles with the kind of grit and faith that we may need to get through to better times.

“God has never let me down yet,” she said Friday. Read more..

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 A restaurant owner contemplates moving into a smaller space. A bicycle manufacturer lays off five workers. A car salesman postpones retirement. In October, The New York Times began tracking how six small businesses were handling the recession. The holiday season seems to have provided little relief: Layoffs, shorter hours and struggles to pay bills were common refrains in recent interviews conducted by Ken Belson, Brent McDonald, Patrick McGeehan and Erik Olsen.

But there was also some hope that the new year, and perhaps the new president, would bring relief. The Times will continue to follow the six businesses in 2009.

Making Ends Meet

Michael Menna, 46, is the owner of Menna’s Quality Meats and Salumeria, his family’s 50-year-old meat market in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. With business down, he fell behind in his electric payments, and Con Ed demanded about $6,500 as a security deposit. He has cut hours for his four workers, asked his wife to help and started working part time as a D.J. to help pay bills.

There were days where you almost feel like you want to close the doors and walk away and say, “I can’t do it anymore.” But that’s not an option.

Been doing this myself with my family for 37 years, and my father and my uncle for over 50 years. This is what I know, and I have a family to support.

A couple of my suppliers cut me off. I’d been trying to pay cash whenever I can. So that was one of the most difficult things that I’ve been facing right now. They have to pay their bills as well. Read more..

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SOUTH BRONX, November 11 — Mayor Michael Bloomberg, fresh from buying the chance to buy a third term despite the public passage of term limits, now apparently feels free to deploy lawless gangs to evict lower income New Yorker, all in the name of redevelopment.

On November 10, Bloomberg’s housing and buildings Departments converged on a four-story building in Mott Haven in the South Bronx, intent on removing the residents. They never took them to court. Rather, they wrote pretextual vacate orders and called Con Edison to turn off the lights. They stood cackling in the half-light, ridiculing those they were evicting, many of them hard-working immigrants of the type Bloomberg pretends to respect.

From the housing projects across the street, people marveled at the heartlessness of it all. “Wow, they’re throwing all those families out, with their kids and grandmothers,” said one young woman with dangling earrings.

“Yeah, it’s Bloomberg’s New York,” said another. “He thinks only the rich should live here.”

“Dictadura de los ricos,” diagnosed a third, a member of La Prensa del Pueblo / Community on the Move Homesteaders, noting that even when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, this type of eviction did not take place.

Michael Bloomberg speaking high and mightly, lawless evictions not shown Read more..

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Mamadou Diallo with his two-year-old son, Ibrahim, in their Bronx apartment. The family was put in financial peril because of thousands of dollars in erroneous utility bills.

When that first unexpectedly high Consolidated Edison bill — with a balance in the hundreds of dollars instead of the usual $70 — landed in Mamadou Diallo mailbox in the Bronx last year, he simply paid it.

 This week, experts from the Children’s Aid Society and the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York will be answering selected questions about foreclosure and the housing crisis.

The Diallo Family

 Nafissatou Kante with two of her children, Ibrahim, left, and Issagha.

Moussa, and Madany, 10, reading ion their bedroom

Then came the whopping bill from Cablevision, and mysterious demands from phone companies. And the Con Ed balance continued to grow, from $404 one month to $634 the next.

All he could think, he said, was that “something is wrong; someone is trying to steal my electricity.” Read more..

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