Uptown Radio

New York City is home to almost 8.2 million people.  That is according to the 2010 census. And the racial make-up of the city is changing.  Asians have the highest growth rate at 32 percent. The ethnic group with the second highest is the Hispanics. But just up by 8 percent. Commentator Larry Tung says Asian New Yorkers are a very diverse population but many people often lump them together because well, as him explains, they all look the same.

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My friends always tell me that I should be an actor. And that’s not because of my leading man good looks.  It’s because I have a generic Asian look—I am 5-9, a square face, light facial hair and small eyes.  I could be a Chinese deliveryman, a Japanese businessman or a North Korean soldier in one of those James Bond movies.

Growing up in Taiwan, nobody thought I was Taiwanese or Chinese. People always thought I was Japanese. Back in the 80s, anything Japanese was popular in Taiwan so I never minded. I actually took it as a compliment. When I was in college, Korean drama became big hits, and all of sudden people thought I was Korean.

I moved to New York a decade ago. There are several Chinatowns, a couple of Koreatowns, and an unofficial Little Tokyo on St. Mark’s Street.  We are everywhere. Whenever I meet new people, the question of my ethnicity always comes up. But often time, people would just look at me and say “You’re Korean?”

I am not, but I do love Korean food. However, a trip to Koreatown usually involves me pretending to be Korean. At restaurants, the waiters used to give me dirty looks when I ordered in English. They thought I was Korean but tried not to be fobby-”Fresh off the Boat”. So to keep waiters from spitting in my food, I ordered in Korean- calbi for barbecue short ribs, pa-jon for seafood pancake, and chop-che for sweet potato noodles. Yum.

Occasionally, people confuse Taiwan with Thailand. And the conversation would go like this:

“Where are you from?”
“I’m from Taiwan.”
“Oh, I love Thai food!”

I used to get upset about it because Thailand is a poor country. Now I just smile and say “Me, too!”

So obviously many New Yorkers don’t really know much about Asians even though we are the fastest growing racial group in the city. But can we tell the difference amongst ourselves?  A few of us decided to take a challenge. We found a website called Alllooksame.com. Get it? All look same. Even the name of the website makes fun of us.  The site offers an online exam where you have to identify Asian New Yorkers by their ethnicity – Chinese, Japanese or Korean. As we went down the list, we thought we nailed it. Well, the joke was on us because we ended up getting only 8 out of 18. I guess we Asians get confused, too.

All in all, I really don’t mind it when people get confused about my ethnicity. In fact, I enjoy telling people about Taiwan. But, believe it or not, from time to time, I do get asked if I am from New York. And I take that as a compliment.

Larry Tung lives in Brooklyn, New York, and hopes the city will one day make the Asian Lunar New Year an official holiday.

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Use the interactive map below to explore the changes Chinatown is facing and how a Business Improvement District would affect the neighborhood.

View Changing Chinatown in a larger map
View Changing Chinatown in a larger map

When it comes to improving a neighborhood, there are often as many ideas as their are residents. In Chinatown, a proposed Business Improvement District or BID has become a point of contention – some say it’s time to band together to improve the neighborhood…others say the BID is a burden for small business owners and part of the reason the neighborhood is losing its identity. Larry Tung reports.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April and David Ye is walking with a basketball under his arm in Sara Roosevelt Park, on the eastern side of Chinatown.

“When I think about Chinatown, I think about coming here to play basketball, or dim-suming with my parents or buying grocery…you know…all the stuff that makes Chinatown what it is,” said Ye.

Sara Roosevelt Park is a popular neighborhood hangout – seniors do tai-chi in the morning and play chess in the afternoon, kids climb up and down the jungle gym. It’s clean and has the latest everything. The park you see today is the result of an 8-month renovation from two years ago. And developments like this are all over Chinatown. A block away on Hester Street, a Wyndham Hotel is going up. Chic boutiques and hair salons are opening up next to old neighborhood institutions.

“Like just across the street there’s a butcher who’s worked there for longer than I’ve been born,” Ye said.

A few more blocks west, near Broadway, is a new kind of Chinatown restaurant, called Red Egg. Through the sleek, dark wood doors, there is a full bar that serves specialty drinks like the Lychee Sake-tini. Darren Wan opened the restaurant in 2008, and serves traditional dim sum-style small plates. But he says his restaurant is not stereotypical.

“You have your traditional Chinatown restaurants which people always feel very bright fluorescent lights, large tables, not always the cleanest places, fast food, inexpensive food,” said Wan.

Wan is 36, and grew up in Riverdale. As a child, he came to Chinatown every Sunday for church. He remembers practically everyone speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and other dialects. He remembers all the cheap toys you could buy. With Red Egg, Wan is joining a new wave of younger Chinese business owners who hope to draw more people willing to pay for higher quality.

“Everything’s made fresh to order. So you probably won’t see ladies walking around and pushing carts. It’s kind of a lot more comfortable feel,” Wan said.
Wan wants his customers to feel comfortable outside his restaurant too. But to do that, he has a constant battle with one of Chinatown’s biggest problems– trash. The area is notorious for its smelly fish markets and garbage, especially in the summer. The city’s Department of Sanitation picks up garbage once a day, and sweep the streets 2 or 3 times a week. But it’s not enough, and businesses are responsible for keeping their part of the sidewalk clean.

Anthony Cummings collects garbage for a private company. He’s in Chinatown six nights a week and says it’s a real workout.

“Stupid heavy. A lot of slabs. A lot of nasty garbage, man,” said Cummings.

The nasty garbage is what’s keeping Chinatown from getting more visitors. That’s according to Margaret Chin. She is the first Chinese American elected to represent Chinatown in city council.

“I heard so many times, from friends, relatives, even my own kids. Mom, Chinatown stinks. They don’t want to come,” Chin said.

Chin has been the driving force behind the controversial Chinatown Business Improvement District, or BID. The proposed BID would collect money, just like a tax, from property owners to pay for street cleaning and garbage collection. But Chin says it goes beyond the sanitation problem. She says a cleaner Chinatown is crucial to boosting the pride of Chinese Americans.

“So how do we get to a point where our kids feel proud to bring their friends to show off their community?” said Chin.

The Chinatown BID is on the cusp after over two decades of efforts to establish local control of the neighborhood’s cleanliness. There’s currently an organization called the Chinatown Partnership. That was founded in 2004 to revitalize the neighborhood economy, which took a big hit after September 11, 2001. So far, it’s been largely funded by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the 9/11 Fund. But the money ran out last year. That’s when a group of business and community leaders formed a BID steering committee. Now, the BID is poised to pass. Once it’s become law, commercial property owners will pay between 200 and 5000 dollars a year. Based on a formula, most will pay under $1,000.

But opponents of the BID says, plain and simple, the BID assessment is just another tax.  David Eng’s family has been making and selling tofu in Chinatown since the 1930s. Inside the factory on Division Street, machines are grinding soy beans, and Eng supervises men in hair nets churning out dozens of tofu bricks every few minutes. There’s steam everywhere, the final product soaks in big blue buckets of water.

“We grind the beans, we cook it in the vat, and we run it through what’s called the extractor, makes the soy milk, the dao jiong. From there, we add the calcium, it congeals, from there we make our tofu,” said Eng.

“How many pieces of tofu do you make?” asked a reporter.

“Oh, I never really counted, I’m thinking about 10000 pieces a day…But this is the way my father did it back in the 60s. I didn’t really change anything. Besides, the lack of space is a problem also,” said Eng.

Eng is against the Chinatown BID. As far as he’s concerned, it’s the property or business owner’s responsibility to clean the sidewalk, and the city’s job to keep them honest.

“If they enforce the law, then you’ll have a cleaner Chinatown. Because I’ve gotten so many tickets, I every day sweep the sidewalk because I don’t want any tickets.  But then at the same time to raise my property tax maybe 500 dollars a year for them to clean the street, it’s hard for me. I got to sell a lot of tofu to get 500 dollars,” said Eng.

Eng’s attitude is in line with an old Chinese saying: Zhi Sao Men Chien Shue, which literally means “sweeping the snow only in front of your door.” It’s said about people who look out only for themselves. People who support the BID say that kind of mentality is holding the BID and Chinatown back and needs to change. David Louie is a Chinese American and has been doing business in Chinatown since 1976. He says 9/11 forced people to change their attitude. Before then, he says, they were much more insulated.

“Leave us alone. We don’t bother you. You don’t bother us. After 911, there was a rude awakening, rude awakening. Chinese Americans say hey wait, we are part of the whole city. We’ve gotta start thinking together,” said Louie.

Louie says a Chinatown BID is a win-win situation. It will stimulate the economy and create jobs.

“You’ll have more waiters, you’ll have more cooks, you’ll have more shopkeepers. We got plenty of doctors, we got very qualified doctors in Chinatown, not just restaurants. In terms of beauty salons, and facials, look, you don’t have to pay uptown prices, you can come down to Chinatown, get the function done, enjoy your dinner and do some shopping,” Louie added.

A BID is part of the picture, but people who study BIDs say the kind of success that Louie hopes for is happening in most of the 64 BIDs throughout the city. Rachel Meltzer is a professor of Urban Policy at the New School. She says part of the reason most BIDs work is they are fair and everybody has to pay in.

Meltzer: The idea of having a binding assessment is to overcome something that’s called free riding. The idea that if someone is not paying, they can still benefit from the good, or they benefit more from the good than what they pay into it.
But what makes BID popular, she says, is that you see immediate results.

“If anything, they will see it more than what they get out of their property taxes. With the BID, you pay the assessment and you actually see the return right outside your front door. You know it’s going to your areas,” said Meltzer.

Those immediate results can be both positive and negative. The returns help businesses, but for long-term residents, the fear is whether they can afford to stay in the area. As David Ye walks from the basketball courts to his home on Eldridge Street, he passes Hester Gardens, formerly a rent-controlled building that’s gone upscale condos. He says many units are sitting there empty.

“People who could have lived there–poor, low-income people that used to live there–could be actually living there now,” said Ye.

Ye wants his neighborhood to grow and evolve — and be cleaner. But he says this kind of progress should not come at the expense of the heart of Chinatown–its people.

“When you think about it, Chinatown was built from thousands and now hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans who wanted to move away from their mother country for more opportunities…. If the people… are forced to move or if they just leave…it definitely takes a part out of what Chinatown is,” said Ye.

The BID is waiting for a final vote by City Council. It is expected to pass later this year.

Jacob Anderson contributed to the story.
View Changing Chinatown in a larger map

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In Pat O’Mara’s basic algebra class at Borough of Manhattan Community College in Tribeca, students are trying to learn how to calculate the slope between two points.

O’Mara: So this is the X and Y coordinance of the first so it’s the x’s of 1 and y’s of 1, and the coordinance for the second one would be x’s of 2 and y’s of 2.

It’s a concept that the students should have learned in middle school. But they are learning it again because they failed the school’s entrance placement test.

Tasha Colorado from Fresh Meadow, Queens, is one of the students in O’Mara’s class. She is taking three remedial classes this semester, including math, reading and writing. That means she will not get any college credit even if she passes all her classes. She said she thought she was good at math.

“I thought I was… But I used a calculator. In college, you can’t use a calculator. So it kind of screwed me over,” said Colorado.

Colorado is part of the majority at BMCC. About 60 percent of all math classes offered there are remedial, and three-quarters of the all freshman at CUNY community colleges need at least one remedial class in math, reading or writing.

Last year CUNY spent 33 million dollars on remedial instruction in its 6 community colleges. That amount nearly doubled over the past 10 years.

Faulty say there are a few reasons for the increase. First more students are going back to college, after years in the workforce-which means they have not been in school for a while. O’Mara says she sees that in her class.

“They’ve probably been away for a couple of years. If you don’t keep up with any subject, you are kind of full. Then you are asked on one test to put all the right answers down, you’ve forgotten a few things only because you haven’t done it for a while,” said O’Mara.

Others students and faculty blame the increase on public high schools. Another student in O’Mara’s class, Frank Sanchez, was not surprised that he failed the placement test. He said he had bad math teachers in high school.

“I’ve always had trouble with math. And when I came into the school, I have a more of an understanding since I’ve had math ever, Sanchez said.

Sanchez graduated from New York City public high schools, like two-thirds of his classmates. Kathleen Offenholley coordinates adjunct math instructors at BMCC. She says the faculty spends a lot of time making up for the high schools’ shortcomings.

“New York has an enormous disparity of income. A lot of people live in very poor neighborhoods with not much resources for their schools. And I think a lot of my students come from that kind of backgrounds,” said Offenholley.

Another reason for the increase in remedial classes is the changing culture. Gay Brookes is the chairperson of the developmental skills department at BMCC.

“Many students don’t read very much. So they don’t have the fluency in their reading ability. So they look at a textbook and it’s got 250 pages of rather dense print, and they just don’t know how to approach it,” said Brookes.

Students don’t get college credits for remedial classes, or developmental courses as they are formally known. But the classes cost the same as credit-bearing courses. Low-income students’ tuition can be covered entirely by Pell grants. However, Republicans in the US House of Representatives are proposing to cut the grant funding by up to 15 percent. Dolores Perin from Columbia University’s Teachers College studies remediation at community colleges. She says that supporting remedial students benefits everyone.

“We as taxpayers have to think about tomorrow and not just today,” said Perin. “Think about the implications of supporting students with low skills because those are the workforce tomorrow. The workforce is aging out. We need to replace them.”

The long-term solution to reduce remediation is for high schools to prepare their students better. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and a former governor of West Virginia, says high schools and colleges need to get on the same page when it comes to standards.

“Up until recently, our high schools and our community colleges and four-year institutions haven’t been communicating well enough about what it is that students need to be able to succeed in college or career,” said Wise.

The National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practice last year developed an initiative to help improve K to 12 education. So far more than 40 states have adopted it. In New York, CUNY is working with New York City Department of Education to align academic standards. In the meantime, the city’s high schools will be graded for their graduates’ college readiness.

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By Larry Tung

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in his weekly radio address that the city will help direct donations to the victims of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami. He described the deadly earthquake as sad news.

Bloomberg: If anybody wants to donate money and help, and I don’t know if they need money yet, but if they do, the mayor’s fund will arrange for public money to be sent over.  We did that with the earthquake in Haiti and Chile.

The mayor urged those who would like to make a donation to call the city’s information hot line 311.

Days of heavy rains up and down the eastern seaboard have caused flooding in the region.  More than a dozen school districts in the Hudson River Valley were closed or delayed because of the flooding.  In New York City, no major flooding was reported but several major roads going into Westchester County were closed.  In northern New Jersey, senator Frank Lautenburg is calling for federal aid to clean up the areas affected by major flooding. The National Weather Service says no major rains are expected this weekend but the water is not going to recede in some areas for at least a few days.

The New York City Comptroller John Liu has rejected a 20-million-dollar contract to recruit public school teachers.  The New Teacher Project would recruit teachers from non-traditional backgrounds to serve hard-to-fill positions, such as special education and English as a second language teachers. Liu says 20 million dollars seems excessive at a time when the city is looking to lay off thousands of teachers. The Department of Education plans to resubmit the contract within 30 days.

A New York City program to help homeless people get out of shelters may suffer from the state budget cut. The Advantage program offers rental subsidies to people in homeless shelters who find stable jobs. But now the city’s department of homeless services says it will not be able to accept new applications after next Monday. The city will have to build 70 new shelters if the program is eliminated.

The police are still searching for a man who allegedly killed his ex-wife in a Midtown hair salon yesterday afternoon. Police say the 42-year-old Michael Kenny, stabbed his ex-wife, Denise, at her workplace before fleeing with her wallet and the money from the cash register.

Larry Tung, Columbia Radio News

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Teacher layouts may affect P.S. 65 in East New York. Larry Tung/Columbia Radio News

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new budget proposal has some hard news for public school teachers.  He says he needs to cut more than 6000 of them from the city’s payroll.  That’s about 8 percent of the city’s public school educators.  If the cut actually happens, it would be the biggest teacher layoff since the 1970s.

It’s 3pm – And school’s out for kindergarteners at P.S. 65 in East New York, Brooklyn.

One of their teachers, Luz Paternostro is waiting outside with them until they’re picked up.

A product of New York City public schools, the 22-year-old says she knew she wanted to teach when she was a student at Queens College.

“It’s fascinating to see children learn and to be the person who teaches them because it’s something that they will carry on with their life forever,” said Paternostro. “It makes you feel like you are making a real difference.  You are teaching the future.”

But it is Paternostro’s future that’s uncertain right now.

If the budget passes, about 4600 teachers will be laid off.  And the 1500 that will retire or resign next year….will not be replaced.

New York State law mandates that as the last teacher hired at P.S. 65, Paternostro would be the first one out.

She doesn’t think that’s fair.

“There are other factors that should be considered,” said Paternostro. “There are excellent teacher who have been in the system a long time that definitely should have their jobs.  Just as there are also new teachers who deserve that opportunity to gain that experience that have the same qualities who just perform as well.”

Mayor Bloomberg shares her view.

He first threatened to cut 21 thousand teachers … after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a massive cut in state funding earlier this month.

Many critics say that was the mayor’s push to abolish this “Last in, first out” law. Bloomberg says it should be changed immediately.

“We have great teachers,” said Bloomberg. “And I want to keep the very best if we have to lay off teachers.”

But determining the best teachers is tricky.

Wendy Glash is the union rep at P.S. 65 and a teacher with 25 years of experience.  She says ratings are very subjective.

“It depends on who your supervisor is,” said Glash.”That will guide your rating. I don’t think that, if you want to lay off people based on those ratings, that that’s a fair and equitable way.”

P.S. 65 is one of the top-rated schools in the district and attracts many students.

But almost half of its teachers have less than 5 years of experience.  So they are in danger to be laid off.

PTA President Karina Cevallos says there are barely enough teachers.

“Imagine more kids in the class,” said Cevallos. ”I don’t know how they are going to deal with it.”

That’s left for P.S. 65’s principal, Daysi Garcia, to deal with. She says the mayor and the teachers’ union have been able to works this out in other years.  

“Whatever tools they use to come to the table to try to make those agreements,” said Garcia. “They do it nicely so far year after year. We haven’t had to cut our teachers.”

The mayor doesn’t want to cut teachers, either.

He will negotiate with the city council and most likely come up with another proposal in May.

The council is supposed to vote on the budget by the end of June, right around the end of the school year.

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Metro North introduced a new service: train schedules via text message. Larry Tung/Columbia Radio News

New York’s commuter train Metro North launched a new service today: train schedules via text message.

Richard Romano has been taking Metro North from his home in Poughkeepsie into Manhattan five days a week for the last 20 years.

So train schedules are pretty important to him. Until now, he’s been getting them online.

“I can only do that when I’m near my computer, which is typically the night before I leave for the day or the night before,” said Romano.

Now, he will be able to get that information anytime on his cell phone from a Long Island company named Coo Coo. It piloted the service on the Long Island Rail Road last April.

MTA Chairman and CEO Jay Walder says you start by texting to Coo Coo itself.

“That’s 266-266. You type in where you are and where you want to go. From Rye to Grand Central, ” said Walder. “And within an instant, you get a text message back that tells you what the next five trains are that are coming on the schedule.”

If you are not great with spelling or simply made a typo, not a problem.

Ryan Thompson, a co-founder of Coo Coo, says the system is usually smart enough to correct it.

“We accept abbreviations, we understand that texting inherently uses abbreviation, there’s typos, and the system learns what these idiosyncrasy are of the users and get smart, and we deliver the best information possible,” said Thompson.

That information is free of charge. Right now it doesn’t cost Metro North anything, either.

But Coo Coo is planning to introduce advertising in a few months.

There will be a small footer at the bottom of the text message.

Romano, the customer from Poughkeepsie, says he won’t mind.

“It’s totally reasonable to want to generate revenue from something that people find useful,” said Romano.

There’s no plan to make the service available for the New York subway system yet. MTA chief Walder says that’s because subway riders generally don’t rely on train schedules in the same way Metro North customers do.

But city bus commuters might be in luck. MTA has just launched a pilot program in Brooklyn: tracking bus locations on the B63 line.

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The undergraduate admission office at NYU is housed in an unmarked building on Broadway.  But it is where important decisions are made – well, important to the 42,000 applicants for the class of 2015.  And that’s an increase of 11 percent from last year.  Shawn Abbott is the assistant vice president of NYU’s undergraduate admission.

“We are pretty much at the capacity of what our admission officers can read,” Abbot said. “We have just about 26 admission officers that are responsible for the review of these 42,000 applications.  When the dust settles, we would have hired 3 or 4 additional part-time readers.”

Columbia is facing an even more dramatic increase.  It received more than 34,000 applications this year, a surge by almost a third from the previous year.  The admission office is so swamped that they don’t even have time for an interview.  Bari Norman is a former admission officer at Barnard College and now an independent counselor.

“Even though the economy has slowed, and we would think the interest might go down as a result because these places have pretty hefty price tags on average,” Norman said, “I think almost the sense that a degree from this place is important, or increasingly important in light of the economy, becomes more significant. Hence more applicants come their way.”

But it also got easier technically to apply for Columbia this year because it finally adopted the Common Application: a generic undergraduate application system accepted online by more than 400 colleges in the United States. And Columbia was the last holdout among Ivy League universities.

“The common application is always going to give some sort of a boost,” Norman said.  “You see it in the initial year, and some schools see an even bigger boost in the second year.”

On top of that, financial aid also plays an important factor. Janaye Pohl, a junior from California, chose Columbia over Berkeley for exactly that reason.

“The UC system doesn’t give out a lot of financial aid,” Pohl said. “I would have to end up paying more even though the tuition rate is lower.”

In 2008, Columbia introduced a “no loans” policy.  That means Columbia will make up the difference between the tuition and family contribution with university grants.

“It’s around a thousand or 15 hundred a semester for me, which is like fantastic,” she said.

A fantastic deal indeed.  But for Bari Norman, the independent counselor, her experience tells her ultimately it is the school’s reputation that really matters.

“Columbia will always be a place, so long as the reputation stays as it is,” Norman said.  “It’s an Ivy League school.  The admit rate is very low.  Many people just want what they can’t have. And that would always create the cycle that we have at Columbia and that we have elsewhere. ”

For the 34,000 who applied to Columbia, the chance of getting what they want is getting smaller. Based on previous admission numbers, only about one out of 14 applicants will get in.