The Buzz

AFFORDABLE HOUSING ON THE HORIZON: It appears that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) have chosen developers for affordable housing projects to be erected on parking lots at the Elliot-Chelsea and Fulton Houses complexes. NYCHA and HPD issued a request for proposals (RFPs) in December and garnered responses by late February, though the agencies seem to be holding their cards close to their chests at the moment, preferring not to divulge the winners until September. Joe Restuccia, chairperson of C.B. 4’s Housing, Health and Human Services committee, who is usually kept abreast of such details, said he “hasn’t been able to ferret out more” info from either agency yet. Representatives from HPD and NYCHA both refused to talk when we called. Film at 11.

WELCOME TO MY WORLD: As we researched our story on education this week, we noticed that Chelsea’s only zoned middle school, Simon Baruch, was in the news, and just for the reasons we mentioned. Responding to parents in Brooklyn Heights who are demanding their own middle school, Battery Park resident Thomas Goodkind wailed to the New York Times recently: “A trip to our zoned middle school, M.S. 104, on East 21st Street, takes a timed 60 minutes via public transportation, as my 10-year-old who will be entering this school next year can vouch.” Our own Miguel Acevedo, of Fulton Youth for the Future, might have added to the conversation, as he mentioned to us in May: “If you leave your kid alone in the apartment, you can be charged with abandonment, but you’re going to put him on a bus?” If the folks from Community Boards 4 and 5 join Goodkind, Acevedo and others clamoring for more zoned middle schools, it smells like a movement. Perhaps the Brooklyn Heights, Battery Park and Chelsea parents can figure out how to make schools as sexy as...congestion pricing?

CANINE CALAMITY: Just as things start to look good for dog owners at the Chelsea Waterside Park dog run, a slight problem has arisen. On Aug. 4, August Costa, de facto leader of the Chelsea Dog Park Coalition, a newly formed group pressing for improvements at the dog run, sent a gracious thank you email to Noreen Doyle, executive vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust: “Just a note to say that we are very grateful and excited about the improvements we are seeing in the dog park. It overall is already seeming like a better managed, healthier environment for the dogs. This reflects greatly on the HRPT.” Only 10 days later, however, he was forced to sound the alarm by issuing an advisory to coalition members, warning of a doggie drug party taking place at the dog run: “Please be very aware that nine dogs over the summer have ingested speed in the Chelsea dog park—all hospitalized, three dead. We’re not sure if they were fed it or they ate it off the ground. Please do not let anyone feed or give treats to your dogs.... Although the park is being cleaned twice a day, we are lobbying to have it cleaned earlier and better.” So much for good, clean living at the dog run.

CORRECTION: The obituary in the Aug. 10 Chelsea Now of Moe Fishman, a leader of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who died Aug. 6 at the age of 92, misstated when he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The diagnosis was last month, not last year. Chelsea Now regrets the error.