WNYC News

Beneath a full moon in Jamaica Bay, horseshoe crab love was in the air.

Female crabs skirted along the shore, each with two or three smaller male crabs attached to their backs and sides, fertilizing thousands of eggs in the sand. Hundreds of casual encounters like this were taking place during a visit by WNYC last week to Plumb Beach in Brooklyn.

A bizarre incident on the Gil Hodges Bridge seriously injures two cyclists, and Flatbush Avenue is set for a major overhaul. That and more in this week's On The Way roundup of New York City transit news.

WNYC's Brigid Bergin recaps the first debate of the Democratic primary for mayor. 

This week's Politics Brief previews Wednesday night's Democratic primary debate for mayor, as well as an urgent discussion on Andrew Cuomo's preferred breakfast sandwich. 

The Administration for Children Services is overseen by the State Office of Children and Family services, but the Department of Investigations say that's not enough. The New York State Assembly has introduced a new bill that authorizes the DOI to have access to certain records related to kids in the city's care.

DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber joined WNYC host Michael Hill. She said the department has identified child fatality cases that the ACS has deemed unfounded, but should be reassessed.

Landlords who get public money to house the most vulnerable New Yorkers — including people who were recently homeless and those with mental illness and substance abuse disorder — sought eviction warrants for nearly 300 people this year, a new analysis of the data shows.

The numbers are the first ever comprehensive look at how many marshal’s notices are issued by dozens of supportive housing providers, who receive city, state and federal money to provide housing to people in need. The data was compiled by Legal Services NYC, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income New Yorkers, and shared with Gothamist. The numbers were compiled through a review of daily marshal’s notices collected by the city’s Department of Investigation.

At least 293 tenants in supportive housing, which are subsidized apartments that come with additional social services, have had eviction warrants issued by a judge in the last five months, according to the data. The warrant authorizes a marshal to remove a tenant from a unit. Of those, 51 have so far lost their homes, Legal Services NYC found. Most of the cases were over unpaid rent and involved about 70 providers. The group said the numbers are likely an undercount because many providers sue through subsidiary companies or don’t disclose it’s a supportive housing unit.

Advocates, city officials and nonprofit providers agree supportive housing is a crucial part of the safety net that keeps people from returning to shelter or the streets. But as the industry has grown by 10,000 units in the last decade tenants and their advocates say too many New Yorkers aren’t receiving the help they need to hold on to their hard-fought housing — at a time when the city is desperately trying to reduce record homelessness.

“ There's no earthly reason why the government who is funding these supportive housing providers should not put in their contract that the provider has to do more,” said Pavita Krishnaswamy, supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society.

“You've worked so hard to get these folks off the streets into stable housing and then you don't require the providers to do everything in their power in return for the money that we're giving them to keep them stably housed.”

Briana Hunt was picking up extra work at a hair salon in Washington, D.C., when she got a chilling phone call: Her 1-year-old daughter had nearly drowned in the bathtub in their Bronx apartment while under the care of the toddler’s dad.

Hunt rushed home in an Uber and arrived to find her child in a coma. Outside her daughter’s hospital room, another shock awaited Hunt: a representative from the city’s child welfare agency.

That night, Hunt’s three older children were taken away on allegations of neglect by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS — the agency responsible for investigating child abuse cases — even though Hunt wasn't there during the incident. Once her youngest recovered three months later and was discharged, she was also removed from Hunt’s custody.

Medical staff are required to report suspected cases of neglect or abuse. But Hunt says she was punished for an accident that happened when she was traveling for work and had arranged for other care. Hunt was separated from her children for a whole year until ACS withdrew its charges during trial — a rare move that generally happens when the agency can’t prove its case, attorneys said.

“ You just never think that it will be you one day,” said Hunt, who is now 27. “ Even though you know you've done nothing wrong, they can just come and just take your kids at any moment.”

Hunt’s story is among 21 featured in a new report by the Bronx Defenders, a public defender group. The organization said the stories demonstrate that ACS treats Black and Latino families more punitively than white parents, rushes to judge their parenting decisions and violates its own rules, sometimes separating children from their parents for days and weeks without getting required judicial approval.

ACS's own numbers show the agency is seven times more likely to investigate a Black family than a white one and six times more likely to investigate a Latino family than a white one. Additionally, the Bronx Defenders report says Black children are 13 times more likely to be put in foster care than white children, citing data from the NYC Family Policy Project, a child welfare think tank.

Like Hunt, most of the parents included in the report had their children removed from their custody and then eventually returned. In one case, a child was removed from a home after a parent, who was Black, left her child with a roommate to do laundry. The roommate then left the child alone and a neighbor called the police.

It's election season in New York City with the Democratic mayoral primary just a few weeks away. As part of our coverage, we're visiting laundromats around the city to engage with voters and find out what issues they care about. It's a project we're calling Suds and Civics.

Three mornings a week, a fleet of brand-new, $500,000 trucks descends on Harlem to hoist a thousand massive trash bins into the air.

Sanitation worker Anthony Martin stood outside one of the trucks on a recent misty morning and signaled his colleague in the driver's seat, Marvin Hernandez, who used a joystick to shake loose a few stubborn trash bags. They slid into the compactor, and the truck's arms lowered the container back into its permanent home in front of a city sidewalk.

The two repeated this routine 80 times through the morning — their part in a 16-truck ballet playing out for the first time ever as part of Mayor Eric Adams’ "trash revolution."

The plan calls for getting all of the city’s garbage into secure trash bins rather than strewing it across the sidewalks in stinky piles of garbage bags. The rollout has been fully implemented for the first time in Harlem, making Martin and Hernandez part of New York City’s storied trash history.

Some residents have complained on social media about the bins, which sit in spaces typically occupied by parked cars. The sanitation department says the bins, produced by a Spanish company, have only replaced about 4% of the neighborhood’s spots.

“As a result of our efforts, we now have a fully containerized neighborhood in Harlem — the first in North America — and have seen six straight months of fewer rat sightings with cleaner sidewalks and clearer corners,” Adams said in a statement on Monday.

The new bins hit the street about a month ago automatically for buildings with 31 or more units. Buildings with 10 to 30 units had the option to request them, and sanitation officials said about half of the buildings in the area did.

Sanitation officials also said the new bins and corresponding trucks are cutting down on the food supply for the neighborhood rat population. For decades, trash workers had to heave garbage bags over the hoods of cars from the sidewalk or squeeze between them to reach the back of the truck.

“ It's a different mindset, different muscles being used,” said Martin, a 19-year veteran of the department. “ I mean, there's still some physical elements to it … Sometimes there's bags outside the bin that we still have to pick up and put back in the bin.”

The conventional trash removal dance leads to a lot of workplace injuries. Acting Sanitation Commissioner Javier Lojan started his career heaving bags into trucks, which can also be covered with disease-ridden rat urine.

“I’ve seen too many good people get hurt from throwing bags or sick with leptospirosis, and I’ve seen too many neighborhoods asked to live with garbage juice and rats all over their sidewalks,” Lojan said.

The new "Empire Bins" can only be opened with a special keycard given to building staff.