In June 2021, the NYS Legislature passed a bill with a $100 million price tag that would permit hotel owners to convert their closed hotels to low income housing for the homeless. It is almost a year later and not one conversion has taken place. Housing advocates celebrated when the state legislature passed the bill. But the state legislature was only half done. The legislators needed to get rid of the needless regulations so that the closed hotels could become residences. Nothing has happened. There are two classes of hotels - those in commercial zoning and not in residential zoning so that it is not possible to convert these hotels without a zoning change. A simple fix is to suspend zoning for any hotel in a commercial zone. Such a fix has not happened. Another class of hotels are those already in residential zoning but need to come up to code. A simple fix is to suspend the code. There are almost 50,000 homeless people in the city of New York. Does it really matter if the doorways
Main Street is hurting. Inflation has arrived; the kids are still not back in school on a regular basis; Covid is worse than ever. Wall Street is still booming although it is increasingly edgy. President Biden enters the room and tells us all the good things he has done. He even called on Tom Hanks to put out a video sharing the good things that have happened. But that is not the way Americans are feeling. And yes, job growth is terrific and unemployment is low. But what Biden doesn't get is that the kids are still not back in school, and that we are paying more for groceries, and the cost of a new car is out of sight. Biden needs to take a page from FDR. Yes, the Democrat who changed the course of American history. FDR did not deny that times were bad. He said so and then he told the American people everything he had done to improve their lot. And then he asked them to do something - in FDR's case, the people had to go to the banks and put their money back into the banks. FDR