Bronx News Roundup, Aug. 11

Weather: Another beautiful one in the Bronx today, with temperatures a bit cooler than yesterday (think high 70s/low 80s), blue skies and lots of sun. Take your lunch break outside!

On to the news. Lots of headlines this morning about the Soundview Healthcare Network run by former Bronx Sen. Pedro Espada Jr., which just got kicked out of the state's Medicaid program and is likely facing closure. You can read more on this in our previous post, here. According to the A.P., Espada says he'll fight the state's decision with a court order.

Bronx schools scored the worst of the five boroughs on the state's English exams last year, with only 31 percent of students passing (that's compared to 44 percent citywide).

Hansel Aguero, 17, of Soundview, is off to Amsterdam this week to compete in a Yu-Gi-Oh! world championship tournament (Yu-Gi-Oh!, in case you didn't know, is a Japanese trading card game the kids are apparently into these days. I think the equivalent of my generation's Pogs). We liked Hansel's oh-so-confident, hometown-pride attitude: "I feel pretty confident," he told the Daily News. "I'm from the Bronx. I'm not scared of nothing."

Deadly Belmont Fire Points to Illegal Housing Dangers; City Launches Crackdown

Editor's Note: A version of this article first appeared in the May edition of the Tremont Tribune.

A fire at 2321 Prospect Ave. killed
three people in April (Photo by David Greene)

Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council announced yesterday that the city will be taking a new, more aggressive approach in identifying and inspecting apartment buildings suspected of being divided illegally.

At the end of April, a fire tore through an apartment building in Belmont and killed three family members who had been living there--Christina Garcia, 43, Juan Lopez, 36, and their 12-year-old son Christian Garcia.

The early morning blaze broke out on the top floor of a multi-family building at 2321 Prospect Ave., a space that had been subdivided into several rooms using partitions, according to FDNY spokesman Frank Dwyer.

The tragedy has shined a spotlight on the proliferation of dangerous housing conditions in the Bronx, and across the city. Experts and elected officials say practices like illegal divisions, erected by both tenants and landlords alike, are frighteningly common and growing in number.

Sally Dunford, of the West Bronx Housing and Neighborhood Resource Center, called the problem “endemic.”

She described some of what she’s seen in the community in recent years: already small apartments portioned off into even smaller ones, blocking access to the fire escape or stationed dangerously close to the building’s heating source; five people living in a basement with no bathroom or kitchen; an elderly couple living in a closet; tenants moving back into a property immediately after the city ordered them to vacate.

“It’s just scary,” Dunford said.

Bronx News Roundup, April 27

Weather: Warm temperatures again today--though not as balmy as yesterday--with highs around 70. Skies will be mostly cloudy.

Story of the Day: Crackdown After Deadly Belmont Blaze
Mayor Bloomberg and chorus of other elected officials are calling for stricter regulation and punishments for building owners who oversee illegal apartments, after a fire early Monday killed a Bronx family of three in Belmont. The apartment where the victims lived was illegally subdivided, faultily wired and a haven for squatters, neighbors said.

It's unclear who should be held accountable for conditions at the Prospect Avenue building, which has no clear owner--according to the Post, the original landlord lost the property to foreclosure years ago, and that the building has since been part of a Texas private-equity firm's multibillion-dollar portfolio of subprime mortgages. The Times reports that some tenants were paying rent to another squatter who was living there illegally. The Bronx District Attorney's office also announced it will be conducting an investigation into the fire.

Quick Hits: 

A former NYPD officer pleaded guilty in Bronx Supreme Court yesterday for beating a man on a Davidson Avenue sidewalk last January. The incident was caught on tape by witnesses, and then-officer John Cicero resigned from his post a month later.

The fate of Kingsbridge Innovative Design Charter School is now in the hands of the Board of Regents, which put the school on probation for fiscal mismanagement. Officials at the school have until Friday to prove it is financially solvent enough to stay open.

Gotham Gazette takes a look at the growing artist community in the South Bronx and across the borough. 

A third prosecutor has been transferred to the NYPD department advocate's office to handle disciplinary cases in the ongoing ticket-fixing probe. It's unclear just how many officers are being probed in the scandal, which is largely concentrated on Bronx precincts, but some reports are putting the number in the hundreds.

An animal rescue group that filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health, for ignoring a law that requires animal shelters be established in all five boroughs, lost its case yesterday. The Bronx and Queens are both without full-service shelters.

Justin Long-Moton, a 17-year-old from Co-Op City, is the city's Youth Poet Laureate.