Creating Urban Agriculture, One Roof At A Time
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published January 18, 2011
Traditionally, farmers take it easy in the winter. But urban farmer Ben Flanner has never been so busy. He is trying to get more New York rooftops ready to grow new shingles of Sun Gold tomatoes, salad greens, and carrots before the next season begins.
“We want to see a lot more roofs across the city covered with farms and growing healthy vegetables,” said Flanner, head farmer at Brooklyn Grange, New York’s biggest rooftop farm located (despite its name) in Long Island City, Queens.
Started last May, in its first season the 40,000 square-foot organic rooftop farm covered with 1.2 million pounds of soil provided New Yorkers with 15,000 pounds of fresh produce that was traditionally shipped into the city from far away, creating pollution and waste.
Almost a year into the project, Flanner has now learned some lessons which he willingly shares.
“In terms of crops, plants in the nightshade family including tomatoes, peppers and eggplants worked very well,” he said. “Salad greens, carrots, and radishes also worked. Big cabbage plants don’t work quite as well ’cause they are deep, heavy feeders.”
Flanner’s project was not without its bugs–the animal, not the electronic kind. Insects are a problem of organic farming everywhere. However, reconstructed natural eco-systems like a roof don’t harbor natural predators, so the pests can turn out to be even more obnoxious than usual.
“We had some harlequin bugs,” Flanner said. “In the next season we’ll focus on introducing natural predators to those bugs as well as staying on top of them and literally killing them with our fingers.”
How to tackle the wind was another lesson learned.
“You want to minimize the stress on the plant to as low level as possible, ’cause then they grow faster and more healthy,” Flanner said. “You have to get creative with bamboo sticks to set up tripods and supports and protect the plants.”
Brooklyn Grange products are sold directly to restaurants including Fatty Cue, Vesta and also Roberta’s, whose owners, Brandon Hoy and Chris Parachini, are Brooklyn Grange partners.
The rooftop farm products can also be found at markets like the one at the first floor of the Queens building where the farm is located (3718 Northern Boulevard) and at the one in front of Roberta’s in Bushwick.
Brooklyn Grange also has a selling system called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) where members pay a lump sum for a weekly supply of fresh vegetables. For $20 a week, CSA members receive a bag of mixed produce each week of the growing season.
The reaction of the community has been overwhelmingly positive, from the volunteers who helped install the farm to the ones who showed up to donate plants and seeds for the roof.
“We were given strawberry plants, raspberries, peppers, bamboo,” Flanner said with a laugh. “It’s great that people get involved, it creates a better sense of partnership with everyone in the community.”
The Brooklyn Grange has many goals: to create and prove that rooftop farms are a sustainable business, to get the community involved in the project, and to encourage people to eat more healthily.
“There is a lot of interest and a lot of enthusiasm towards the Grange, we’ve been speaking with a lot of people,” Flanner said. “We’d really like to see more rooftop farms around.”
Baking Dreams Into Real Businesses
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published January 13, 2011
Filled with prune or cherry, Janine Frank’s round, slightly sweet Kolachi pastries could come straight from an old-school Slovakian bakery. And Sherry Rousso’s 2-inch-square vegan treats decorated with gold dust could come from a hip Williamsburg shop.
But these two delicacies come from the same place, an industrial building on a block in Long Island City, Queens: a street shared with rundown car washes and mechanics’ garages.
Frank, a former real estate investor, and Rousso, a part-time agent for commercial cameramen, are among the 95 food makers who rent a spot at the kitchen of the Entrepreneur Space, an incubator for fledgling food operations and other businesses on 37th Street near Northern Boulevard.
The 5,500-square-foot commercial kitchen is a refuge for unemployed New Yorkers who want to start their own businesses, a laboratory for the ones who have jobs but would love to change gears, and a paradise for “slash careerists” - people who want to combine more than one career.
“Here we nurture small businesses until they become big enough to flap their wings and go out on their own,” said Kathrine Gregory, coordinator and soul of the kitchen since 2005.
Scheduled to close down last summer, when the union-backed nonprofit group that sustained it could no longer afford to lease the space, the kitchen is still humming. The Queens Economic Development Corporation (QEDC) took over the facility last September. It invested $100,000 in the venture and offered its business expertise to bakers like Frank and Rousso.
“We realized that this was a wonderful resource here in Long Island City,” said Seth Bornstein, executive director of QEDC. “This goes back to our mission, creating jobs in Queens.”
New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) provided QEDC with a $170,000 grant to help subsidize the fit-out and development of the space, after which time it is expected to be self-sustaining. It is one of eight incubators that the City has launched across industry sectors to provide affordable space to start-ups and to facilitate networking among tenants. The City has launched more than 60 initiatives to support entrepreneurship and encourage start-up companies to locate and grow in New York City.
“From our industrial studies we find food to be one of the sectors in the manufacturing space that is still growing in New York,” said Ann Li, Director at the Center for Economic Transformation at NYCEDC. “We wanted to ride that momentum and support that sector.”
The kitchen solves many problems. It provides cooks with a space that they don’t have at home, allows them to manufacture in volume; it’s fully equipped and complies with all city health regulations. The operation also fosters partnerships with other entrepreneurs who rent offices in the same building, people who might help food entrepreneurs draft a marketing plan or keep their books.
The commercial kitchen is open 24/7 on a shift basis. The most expensive time slot runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. ($231), the cheapest from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. ($154).
“At first I was intimidated by all the machines and the equipment, but the staff here is wonderful, the facility is wonderful,” Rousso said. “They are very supportive, it really is an incubating kind of establishment, I feel very nurtured here.”
Gregory said that most of her clients have a real knack for cooking. They don’t bake just bread. They make a kaleidoscope of products: hand-ground blue-corn tortillas, chocolate-covered pretzels, mini-falafel, granola, pickles and chutney, croquettes, and everything in between.
What all the people who show up at this kitchen have in common is a great passion for and commitment to what they do: “When you know you have something good and you feel it in your soul, you should go for it,” said Frank, as she cut decadent triple-chocolate biscotti in small, round bits. “I just love making everyone happy, and this is my way of doing it.”
Story Pirates: Kids’ Imagination Rules on Stage
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published December 27, 2010
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of improvisational comedians performed a collection of brand new stories for children at the Drama Book Shop in Midtown. The tales that the Story Pirates brought to life featured kings, ghosts, and elaborate plots. But the Story Pirates didn’t write them; the authors were kids.
Greisbert Nunez, a 4th grader from PS 73 in the Bronx who loves writing and football, wrote “Kung Fu Fighting Ninja Squirrels.” Joshua Perez, 8, authored “Shadow’s Lamp.” Second grader Brandon Santana, also from PS 73, penned “The Silly King.” And Braden Donoian, a second grader from PS 234 into soccer and baseball put together “Baseball Game Gone Wrong.”
“We celebrate words and ideas of kids. We tell them that what they have to say is important,”said Benjamin Salka, the executive director of Story Pirates. “We try to give them the tools and the confidence to make their stories heard.”
Since 2003, this arts and creative writing organization, with a rotating roster of more than 100 actors, has gone to New York schools, asking kids to come up with original stories. Then they act them out, and the results are often surprising.
“Adults write what they think kids want to hear, or are supposed to hear,” Salka said. “Kids have no filters; they use their own imagination, logic, and language.”
The Pirates make a point of honoring kids’ own creativity and logic. They act out stories the way they are written rather than tweaking them or correcting their language. “Once a kid wrote a story called Cakeface, and one line read ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about how much that cake tasted,’” said Lee Overtree, the Story Pirates’ artistic director, with a laugh. “It was an awesome way to express that concept.”
Story Pirates performs in more than 100 schools during the school year and has a regular Saturday gig at 2pm at the Drama Book Shop on 40th Street in Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. They also organize birthday parties for about $1,000, including food.
“It was funny and entertaining,” commented John Perez, the father of Joshua, one of the young authors. “Kids have an amazing imagination. It’s great that these Pirates help them to bring it on stage.”
But it is the troupe’s work in schools that constitutes the core of what Story Pirates does. The performers teach kids to create dramatic stories. The children have fun, and in the process, they gain confidence in their writing abilities. Usually two weeks after the workshops, the actors go back to the classroom and perform a selection of the students’ original stories. All the writers receive feedback and positive comments about their work.
“Once the students see the Story Pirates’ performance, and they realize that their ideas are being used, and they hear their words on stage–it definitely inspires them and motivates them to write more,” said Ann Ledo, an educator at the Bronx Charter School for the Arts, one of the schools involved in the Story Pirates’ program.
In late 2008 Jean Carlos, a shy PS 154 elementary school student, wrote a three-sentence story during a Story Pirates workshop. His was one of the tales picked for performance two weeks later to his delight and surprise. When the Story Pirates came back to his class the next year, Jean Carlos stood up and handed one of the Pirates a piece of paper.
“This new story was much more complex and well-structured. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the best part was that the teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jean Carlos had worked on it during his own free time,” said Overtree. “It was a pretty neat moment to see his new passion for writing, which lead to an improvement in his writing skills.”
From Brooklyn to Butare, Rwanda; A Sweet Dream Comes True
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published November 19, 2010
When Jennie Dundas and Alexis Miesen opened Blue Marble Ice Cream in 2007, they wanted it to be bigger than a humble, eco-conscious, all organic ice cream shop in Brooklyn. But they never imagined that their business would lead them halfway around the world to Rwanda, still recovering from the brutal civil war that claimed nearly one million lives.
The project “Sweet Dreams” came about in July 2008 when Dundas, an actress by trade, met a Rwandan woman, Odile Gakire Katese, at a theater workshop in Utah. Katese heard that Dundas owned an ice cream shop and asked her to start one in Butare, Rwanda’s second largest city.
Katese, artistic director at the University of Butare’s Center for Arts and Drama, thought an ice cream shop could give jobs to women widowed by war and boost the economy. But more importantly, she wanted to share the simple pleasure of ice cream to reawaken happiness that had been dulled by the 1994 genocide.
“Rwandan women want to reshape life in its simple and sweetest form,” Katese said. “We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death. We want to create a place where poverty, disease and illiteracy are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings.”
Dundas and Miesen started a non-profit organization, Blue Marble Dreams, and embraced the project enthusiastically, applying for an American Express grant to extend their business across the ocean. They got community support, a key requirement of the grant, but did not win in the end. Undeterred, they organized a fundraiser and got a few angel donors interested in the project.
This January, the two owners went on an exploratory trip to meet Katese and a number of Rwandan women eager to get involved in the business, which they would eventually take over. The women were really excited, but wondered whether Rwandans would like a cold product not part of their diet, and they worried about the cost of the treat.
“I was very, very important to us that we not create a product that is only accessible to non-Rwandans,” Dundas said. “The whole point was that common people would enjoy this.”
Once a reasonable price was set, Dundas and Miesen approached the manufacturer Taylor Products, and the company donated an ice cream machine, shipping it all the way from South Africa to Rwanda. Despite a few initial glitches, the grand opening was ultimately a great success.
“Watching people eating ice cream for the first time was one of the most hilarious and gratifying experiences,” Miesen said with a laugh. “The older customers were so shocked by the coldness of it and many asked, ‘Does it has to be this cold? It’s quite cold.’”
Dundas and Miesen are thrilled that this “sweet dream” has finally come to life, the shop is open and people are enjoying sweet cream, passion fruit, pineapple and coffee ice cream — with toppings ranging from granola to fresh fruit. But the business, they point out, it is still very much in its infancy.
“Like any small business it needs a little bit of influx of cash to augment the operations,” Miesen said. “So we are still raising funds, we are still seeking our angel investors who want to support this shop and really make sure it has the resources it needs to succeed.”
Headstone Shop Owner Sells Bread to Improve the Relationship with His Daughter
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published November 11, 2010
As we walked down Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg, we would often pass by a headstone shop that had stacks of bread in the window — certainly an odd combination. Who was behind the idea to sell bread with cemetery headstones.
Jerry Ragusa, the owner of the funerary business told us that this is “the best bread above ground”, or, if we preferred, “the bread to die for”. So we decided to enquire further.
Corporate Lay-Off Creates a Boot-Strap Entrepreneur
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published 3 November, 2010
Dana Ostomel was a casualty of the first round of layoffs at Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages in November 2007. She took a few months off, got married as planned, and thought about starting a business. Then, in February 2008 she took the plunge.
In her bright Midtown Manhattan apartment, Ostomel started Deposit a Gift, an online cash gift registry service that lets friends and family contribute cash toward honeymoons, home down payments, cribs, college funds, and anything in between.
“The idea had been percolating for a while,” said 33-year-old Ostomel, who has a background in advertising. “But my own experience getting married informed my decision.”
As with most start-ups, the beginning was exciting but rough. For the first time Ostomel didn’t have anyone giving her feedback or complimenting her when she did something good. She also no longer had a title, something with which she identified
herself for so long. Sometimes, while sitting at her living room desk, building her own website from scratch with no previous programming knowledge, she wondered whether she would actually pull it off.
“One of my biggest concerns was, ‘Am I going to finish? Is this a reality? Can I actually take this idea in my mind and make it into a website that actually works?’” she wondered. “You have to get up in the morning and make your own to-do list, and you have to make yourself do those things thinking that it’s actually going to result in something.”
Besides these general worries, she had to learn how to do her finances and legal work and to decide when to hire people to take on specific tasks and when to do things herself.
“Every single day you’re making a decision that feels crucial to you but in the scheme of the world is just not really that important, because you don’t really exist [as a company yet],” she said.
But less than a year after the official launch, Ostomel is pleased about how the business is doing, although it is not making money yet. The self-funded site has had close to 1,500 users; it grows by 15% every month; gifts are being given every day. It’s becoming a well-oiled machine, Ostomel said.
Ostomel hopes that the site will become profitable at some point next year. The site charges a 7.5% service fee on gifts, which includes the credit card fee. For now she is fortunate enough to have a husband who is very supportive of the business, both financially and emotionally. The entrepreneur appreciates that, after her husband has had a long day of work, he is still willing to take the time to hash out an idea with her and give her constructive feedback.
“It’s extremely hard to live with an entrepreneur,” Ostomel said with a laugh. “You are doing a business but you feel like your life is on the line, and it makes you a little crazy, sometimes.”
Despite all the frustrating trouble-shooting that an online start-up entails, Ostomel would never go back to a corporate job. She is quite happy that she turned a lay-off into a great opportunity for herself and her family.
Mother Of 4, Laid Off From MTA
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published September 16, 2010
Losing your job is hard enough. It’s even harder if you are a single parent. But what about if you are a single parent, trying to raise four children in one of the most expensive cities in the world?
Sabrina Greenwood is one of nearly 200 subway station booth agents who handed in their badges and uniforms last month, the latest victims of Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) financial woes, which have resulted in fare increases and reductions in service.
“I’m sad, I’m hurt, I’m depressed,” said the 38-year-old Bronx woman said last month. “I’m trying to figure out how I’m gonna pay September rent [$900], how I’m gonna send my daughter to college as well as buying school clothes.”
Greenwood was earning $50,000 as a booth agent. Now she will have to rely on $354 a week in unemployment benefits. She doesn’t have to worry about the health insurance for six months — her union is covering that. But she will have to cut back on spending dramatically, especially when it comes to clothing and school supplies for her kids.
And with four kids, it seems as if Greenwood never has enough to cover things like backpacks, binders and the like.
Her daughter Johnesha, 19, was planning on attending an out-of-state university but will now have to stay local. Greenwood also has a son, Jonathan, 16, and two daughters, JonDanea’, 12, and five-year-old Jaylynn. Their lives are a constant stream of fieldtrips, science projects, and extra curricular activities that need to be funded.
The Bronx mother is not only upset about her new, unstable financial situation. She is also disappointed because she loved her job and believed she was contributing to keeping the city safe.
“Instead of paying us, they have cameras that don’t work, and even when the cameras do work, they record, they are not a preventive measure,” she said, adding that MTA workers are a deterrent against crime. “When I am there I can press the button and call the police, call for help.”
Greenwood also strongly disagrees with those who think that booth agents used to be overpaid for selling MTA cards, giving information to disoriented tourists, and helping senior citizens.
“When people say, ‘you guys are lazy’ and ‘you make too much,’ that’s really untrue,” she said. “Everywhere else you work you have a clean bathroom, you don’t have to worry about the rodents who share the bathroom with you.”
The Bronx woman points out that working underground can cause health problems such as asthma, bronchitis, and skin cancer - not to mention the challenges of dealing with frustrated customers.
“We get blamed for everything: the station being dirty, the trains being late, overcrowded trains, sometimes we are just a dumping ground for people who are venting,” she said. “We get it all.”
Yet Greenwood misses the feeling of being useful, the kind of feeling marching off to work each morning gives.
Sitting at a kitchen table of her Bronx apartment off the last stop of the 5 train on Dyre Avenue, she hardly has any time to drift into the past. She needs to work out a budget and decide what her next move will be.
She is contemplating continuing her education.
“I’m gonna take some time, go back to school,” she said. “I’m gonna be a college student with my daughter.”
She wants to study business management and get a job in labor relations.
On a recent morning, Greenwood was walking to a movie in Co-op City with her three daughters. Johnesha and JonDanea’ had long faces. But the small Jaylynn, her dreadlocks neatly made, was jumping and smiling. She loves having her mom home all week.
Laid-Off City Employee, Struggles To Get Health Care For Teenage Daughter
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published July 22, 2010
“A couple of weeks ago I got discouraged,” said Special Terry, a nine-year veteran of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “My daughter said ‘I hope what happened to you doesn’t make you forget about your dreams and aspirations.’”
What happened to Terry was a worst case scenario. She knew that the Department had to lay some people off due to budget cuts, but she hoped she wasn’t one of them.
After all, Terry was one of the most experienced social workers in her office. She had been working for the Department for years as a public health educator and correctional counselor, transitioning people from jail back into their communities. She had skills. She was about to get a Master’s in Education from Long Island University.
In early May, however, together with three other colleagues, she received a letter. Her last day of work for the City was May 14. On that day she lost her health insurance as well.
Until that point, Terry, a 45-year-old single parent of two daughters, had done well for herself and her family. She was earning $1,352 every two weeks, enough to pay the $679 rent for low-income housing in the North Bronx and support her daughters. Her older daughter, Chrisshawmba, 22, graduated from college last year with a degree in Criminal Justice. Her younger one, Erica, 13, is in middle school.
But suddenly the only money she gets is $380 weekly from unemployment. Like many other New Yorkers battling the economic downturn, she entered a different, uncertain world. It’s a world where if your daughter gets sick, you don’t know how to pay for the hospital. It’s a world where you scramble to cover rent while desperately looking for jobs. And you have to do everything at the same time, quickly.
Terry has always made a point of was having good medical care for her children, but now, with health insurance gone, she just prays that her kids don’t get ill. In early July, however, an insect bit her daughter, sending her to the emergency room. When Terry told the doctors she had no insurance, they panicked, she said, and told her to apply for Medicaid. But because she collects unemployment she is ineligible for Medicaid. Her daughter feels better, but Terry is worried about the medical bill waiting around the corner.
Terry is also concerned about her younger brother’s son, Dejon, the sick, two-year-old boy she is raising. Dejon’s mother passed away last August, and nobody else can care for him. Born prematurely, Dejon’s lungs never developed completely. In the last 11 months he has had three hospitalizations for pneumonia.
For Terry, who had never experienced unemployment before, the most humiliating aspect of her new life was applying for food stamps. She felt other people would see her as someone who exploits the system, rather than as someone who needs a little help to get back on her feet.
“When people lose their jobs and go to agencies where people receive on-going assistance, they kind of view you like you are a loser,” said Terry, who feels she is not begging, only getting her due. She eventually successfully applied online for food stamps through LIFT, a non-profit organization whose stated mission is to combat poverty and expand opportunity.
In between tending to the baby, counting her pennies at the grocery store, and showing up in court to get her rent adjusted to match her new, lowered income, Terry frantically scours the internet for jobs.
In two months she has scored three interviews, including one with Odyssey House, a drug treatment center based in New York City. But she has still received no callbacks. The memory of the lost job she loved motivates Terry to keep looking for positions and keeps depression at bay.
Terry will get her Master’s in Education in September. She is confident she will land some job by the end of August. She also still hasn’t given up on her dream, founding an organization to help integrate formerly incarcerated people back into her neighborhood, the Edenwald Projects in the North Bronx.
That brings her back to her daughter’s words about her aspirations, which make her feel better.
“I’m gonna get back out there again,” she said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Boomerangers: Meet College Grads Who Have Moved Back Home
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published June 22, 2010
In the film Tiny Furniture a 22-year-old girl called Aura returns home to her artist mother in a TriBeCa loft with a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, and her tail between her legs.
Throwing away her clogs, she dives into a new life very similar to the one she had before college. She steals $20 bills out of her mother’s Prada purse, parties on East Village fire escapes, and drinks her mom’s wine.
Roughly put, that’s the story of Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and played the leading role in this movie, which received the narrative film prize at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. It’s also the story of an increasing number of young New Yorkers who live with their parents to save money while trying to launch their careers.
“The advantages of living at home are myriad,” Dunham said. “The tangible are food, laundry, magazine subscriptions, someone to nurse you when you are sick; the intangible are warmth, support, humor, and the feeling of being truly home.”
In 1980, 11 percent of 25-34 year-olds in New York lived in multi-generational households. By 2008 that number had jumped to 20 percent, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
In Manhattan the number of people in this age group living in their parents’ homes increased by 40 percent from 2000 to 2008, all the more evidence that it has become more socially acceptable to return home to mom and dad.
This phenomenon has been accentuated by almost two years of a weak economy. Some of the laid-off young adults went back to living at home to save cash, as did recent graduates looking for jobs that are not there or going through diabolic cycles of unpaid internships.
Raised in New York, Sara Allen graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in writing last March. Then she had two fancy internships in New York, one at a public relations firm, the other at a high-end event planning firm. But nothing came out of them, and she is now living with her parents in Sugar Hill, a small town tucked in the mountains of New Hampshire, where they recently started a bed-and-breakfast.
“It’s a little bit like living in a fish tank here,” she said over Skype, during a break from looking for jobs on LinkedIn and Twitter. “But right now I can’t afford living on my own in New York. It’s expensive.”
These sons and daughters of baby boomers who have come back home after college for economic reasons have been labeled by some sociologists as “boomerangers,” signaling a new type of relationship between parents and their offspring.
“Parents should treat them like adults, and they should come back home expecting that they will have to behave like adults,” said Susan Morris Shaffer, an educator for more than 35 years and co-author of the parenting guide, Mom, Can I Move Back In With You? “They should treat their parents the way they would roommates, not expecting them to do their laundry or have dinner on the table.”
One of the hot issues for boomerang parents is whether or not to charge rent. Some parents charge their children no rent. Some ask for a market rate rent, others for a percentage of their children’s income, and a few have devised an escalating rent scheme to put a bit of pressure on them.
Experts like Linda Perlman, a psychotherapist who co-authored Mom, Can I Move Back In With You? and the mother of a successful boomeranger, thinks that making children pay rent is only one way to teach them financial responsibility.
“The whole point of staying at home is to save money so that they can get out,” she said. “Rather than financially, they can give back in kind; they could cook dinner, clean a little bit after dinner, give a ride to a sister to the gym.”
That’s more or less what happens at the Dunhams’, where Lena doesn’t pay rent but tries to contribute to household chores.
“I take out the trash, wash the dishes, pick up milk from the store, keep my music down,” she said. “It’s a real team effort.”
Living with your parents after college and asking them for spending money after your teen years have long been regarded as something only losers do and something kids and parents should be ashamed of. But the recession has taken away much of that stigma.
“We would have rather been homeless than been back with our parents,” said Shaffer. “Now it’s not a failure if your child has to move back.”
For young adults like Allen and Dunham, it certainly wasn’t shameful.
“It would have been more shameful struggling in Bushwick obscurity just to prove a point,” Dunham said. “I really like my parents, and they have excellent taste in food, décor and media. So they presented a better roommate option than most.”
In some ways, the economic downturn has brought America closer to Europe in terms of parents supporting kids in their twenties, although the United States is still far from challenging countries like Italy, the long-established land of mammoni, mama’s
boys who don’t think twice about having their mothers wash their clothes or cook their food well into their thirties.
“If my kid asks me something like that, I’m gonna whack him on the side of his head,” Shaffer said. “But parents should stop whining about their kids being at home, make it a win-win situation, and turn it into an opportunity to coach them a little bit more.”
Dot.com alla newyorkese
IL SOLE-24ORE, pubblicato il 19 maggio 2010
Dennis Crowley, amministratore delegato del social network più corteggiato del momento, ricorda perfettamente quando ha avuto l’idea da 125 milioni di dollari. Dopo il jogging lungo il fiume Hudson con un dispositivo che registra tragitto e velocità della corsa, ha scaricato i dati sul computer e confrontato la performance con quella dei suoi amici. «In quel momento ho pensato che se c’è competizione anche il jogging diventa più divertente» spiega Crowley. «E ho cercato di trasformare la realtà in un grande videogioco alla Super Mario Bros».
Quattordici mesi dopo, il suo Foursquare, un sito internet e applicazione iPhone a metà tra gioco a premi virtuale, guida cittadina e navigatore per trovare amici, è stato valutato da Yahoo! ben 125 milioni di dollari.
Operativa in oltre cento città al mondo, Foursquare è la stella della Silicon Alley, la galassia delle start-up newyorkesi. I capitali, copiosi nella Silicon Valley e a Boston, sede del Massachusetts Institute of Technology, negli ultimi mesi stanno arrivando sempre più a New York, attratti da giovani businessman di talento che non possono più aspirare a lavori super pagati in banche come Morgan Stanley; manager di Wall Street licenziati a caccia di nuove sfide; e grazie a una città dal carattere innovativo, capace di offrire una serie di agevolazioni alle start-up: uffici a prezzi contenuti, aiuti per acquistare computer e un fondo da nove milioni di dollari.
Il venture capital per le start-up di New York è schizzato a 566 milioni di dollari nel primo trimestre 2010, un incremento del 18,9% rispetto al quarto trimestre del 2009, e 75 imprese hanno ricevuto capitale nel primo trimestre di quest’anno, un 11,9% in più dell’ultimo trimestre 2009, secondo gli ultimi dati di PricewaterhouseCoopers e della National Venture Capital Association. «Benché la Silicon Alley di New York non stia soppiantando la Silicon Valley» spiega AnnaLee Saxenian, ordinaria di imprenditoria tecnologica ed economia regionale all’Università di Barkeley in California, «certamente New York in questo periodo sta brillando, e ha grandi potenzialità».
Crowley, newyorkese, 33 anni e modi da guascone, è il volto della nuova, scintillante Silicon Alley. Ex istruttore di snowboard appassionato di hip hop, dopo il master in Interactive telecommunications alla New York University, ha fondato nel 2004 il servizio Dodgeball, per segnalare agli amici dove ci si trova in città in un dato momento inviando un Sms. Un anno più tardi, Crowley ha venduto Dodgeball a Google, che però ha lasciato sfumare il progetto ritenendolo in fin dei conti troppo macchinoso per poter decollare. Crowley, però, nel marzo 2009 insieme al compagno di master Naveen Selvadurai ha riproposto la formula di Dodgeball in salsa iPhone, incorporando un nuovo ingrediente rivelatosi il tocco vincente: il meccanismo del gioco a premi. Gli iscritti a Foursquare contendono medaglie virtuali ad amici e sconosciuti. C’è un trofeo per chi va in palestra dieci volte alla settimana, un altro per chi mangia fuori in almeno 30 pizzerie diverse in un mese, un altro ancora per chi riesce a trascinare in discoteca 50 persone. E poi c’è’ il bottino più ambito: il più assiduo frequentatore di un locale viene incoronato sindaco virtuale.
«Questo gioco crea assuefazione» sospira Mike Caprio, un consulente informatico di Brooklyn che tra le varie medaglie può vantare pure quella di sindaco della rinomata pasticceria The Blue Stove nel quartiere Williamsburg. «A volte entro a comprare una fetta di torta di rabarbaro solo per raccogliere punti e difendere la leadership».
Musica per le orecchie degli investitori, pezzi grossi come Albert Wenger, partner di Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway, sostenitore della prima ora di Google, Kevin Rose, fondatore del sito di social news Digg, e Jack Dorsey, cofondatore di Twitter. Tutti stravedono per queste medaglie perché non solo influenzano, ma cambiano il comportamento dei consumatori.
«Gli iscritti adorano vantarsi di essere stati in un locale più di ogni altro» racconta il ventottenne cofondatore di Foursquare, Selvadurai. «È il gusto di poter dire che lì sei di casa, sei qualcuno, mentre altri sono semplici clienti». Gli investitori ora attendono da Crowley e Selvadurai buone notizie sul fronte del modello di business. E pare ci siano. Crowley si sta orientando a far pagare i commercianti per collocare pubblicità con offerte promozionali per gli iscritti a Foursquare.
«È troppo presto per sapere se il sistema funzionerà» dice Crowley, che tra l’altro potrebbe presto dover affrontare la concorrenza di un prodotto simile al suo targato Twitter. «Credo però che i modi per fare profitto cambieranno prima che riusciamo a metterli a punto». Intanto, però, alcuni business stanno aderendo con passione a Foursquare. Una compagnia di taxi di New York ha offerto corse gratuite al sindaco virtuale dell’aeroporto John F. Kennedy di New York. Perfino un cimitero del Maine ha voluto essere della partita: mette in palio una visita guidata del Camposanto ai foursquaristi che dimostrino di esserci stati almeno cento volte.
Silicon Alley
Coniato alla fine degli anni ‘90, il termine (letteralmente Vicolo del silicio) indicava un gruppo di aziende informatiche con sede vicino a Union Square, TriBeCa e SoHo, in un corridoio che costeggia da nord a sud la Broadway, nella sezione meridionale dell’isola di Manhattan. Ma con il tempo gli uffici di queste imprese si sono sparpagliati in diverse zone, e il termine ha cominciato a connotare le aziende dot.com di New York in generale.
Boom di iniziative
Dal 2003 la Silicon Alley annovera sempre più start-up e contende a Boston e San Francisco la palma di centro tecnologico principe degli Stati Uniti. Dal 2007 la seconda sede per dimensioni di Google è a New York, e oggi conta 700 impiegati. Yahoo! non si è fatta attendere e ha aperto un ufficio con vista su Bryant Park. Dal 2009, poi, la Silicon Alley è diventata leader nel campo della pubblicità e dei new media. Senza contare la sfilza di start-up Web 2.0 che hanno messo su bottega.
A caccia di uno stage. Anche gratis
Il SOLE-24ORE, pubblicato il 21 aprile 2010
Un documentarista freelance di Brooklyn è tornato dall’India a febbraio con venti ore di interviste filmate. Disperato, ha confidato a un amico che servono mesi per trascriverle. “E che problema c’e’?” gli ha detto lui. “Assumi degli stagisti che lavorano una decina di ore alla settimana”.
Il trentanovenne signor Jonathan Krabbe all’ora di pranzo ha messo un annuncio sul popolare sito di inserzioni Craigslist.com ed e’ uscito a fare quattro passi.
“Incredibile,” racconta Krabbe, “quando sono tornato ero sommerso dalle e-mail”.
Venti messaggi nelle prime 24 ore, e dopo due giorni erano saliti a 52. Così, il signor Krabbe, dopo una serie di colloqui, ha assoldato non un paio, ma una task-force di stagisti, chiedendo un impegno non retribuito e per corrispondenza di circa dieci ore a settimana.
Adesso una casalinga quarantenne di Seattle è al lavoro per trovare sponsor. Un dottorando in neurologia di fede mormona sta cercando evoluzionisti e filosofi da intervistare. Una studentessa del college artistico Pratt a Brooklyn è a caccia di qualcuno che prepari un’animazione per il trailer. Una trentenne con esperienza in documentari a carattere naturalistico sta masterizzando DVD da distribuire ad altri tirocinanti incaricati delle chilometriche trascrizioni. E c’e’ pure il capo-stagista, il cui compito è coordinare tutti gli altri.
“Questi stagisti sono fantastici,” spiega Krabbe. “Stanno contribuendo al progetto con entusiasmo benché possa promettere loro solo esperienza e un eventuale compenso in caso si venda il documentario”.
Il numero degli stagisti non pagati in America è cresciuto in modo sensibile negli ultimi mesi, secondo il più grande database di tirocini, Internships.com, che segnala un aumento del 28% nel 2009 rispetto al 2008. La stessa tendenza si delinea considerando i dati degli uffici stage di università di primo piano come Stanford, dove quest’anno sono arrivate ben 634 offerte di tirocini da aziende della Silicon Valley, più del triplo di due anni fa. E il fenomeno è fotografato anche in un ampio studio uscito il 5 aprile scorso a cura dell’Economic Policy Institute, un Think tank liberale con sede a Washington.
Le aziende hanno bisogno di manodopera gratuita, specie in un momento in cui hanno dovuto licenziare o comunque non si possono permettere di assumere. Inoltre un numero crescente di neo liberi professionisti o titolari di start-up, che hanno perso il lavoro per la crisi economica, ricorrono agli stagisti senza compenso per massimizzare la produzione senza incidere sui costi, secondo Mason Gates, fondatore di Internships.com, bacheca online in cui sono pubblicate 17mila offerte di stage da parte di 7mila imprese in 70 diversi ambiti.
Ma per rendersi conto del proliferare di questi stage spesso sospetti in start-up talvolta oscure, basta concedersi una passeggiata virtuale su Craigslist.com, edizione New York. Qui, ogni giorno vengono pubblicate dalle quaranta alle settanta offerte di stage. Di cui solo una su dieci segnala tirocini a pagamento, e anche tra questi la chiara indicazione del compenso è frequente come un’eclissi solare.
Le opportunità di lavoro gratis per “stagisti super star”, come vengono battezzati in alcuni annunci, sono variegate: sviluppare una strategia di marketing per una start-up di cioccolato biologico InTheRawChocholate; aumentare il volume di traffico di un sito centrato sulla bellezza femminile chiamato Realbeautyis.com tramite una titolazione più congeniale ai motori di ricerca; scrivere articoli per un blog sulla vita notturna newyorkese come Joonbug.com o promuovere compagnie telefoniche su Twitter per conto di start-up come Socialcord.com.
Gli studenti, sia pure con master e perfino dottorati, si accontentano di uno stage non pagato perché è sempre meglio di essere disoccupati, e in America il tirocinio è ormai il passaggio obbligato per qualsiasi tipo di professione. E poco importa se lo stage non rispetta le norme indicate dal Ministero del Lavoro nel documento Fair Labor Standard Act, secondo cui lo stagista non deve sostituire un lavoratore stipendiato, e soprattutto non deve svolge un compito che produce un “vantaggio immediato” alla compagnia, ovvero aiutare l’impresa a fare profitto.
“Generalmente non è legale chiedere a uno stagista di sbrigare lavori altrimenti assegnati a impiegati assunti,” spiega Jay Zweig, un avvocato dello studio Bryan Cave di Phoenix in Arizona con esperienza ventennale in diritto del lavoro. Benché Zweig precisi esistano alcune eccezioni per studenti impegnati in tirocini che valgono crediti universitari.
Il Ministero del Lavoro dello Stato di New York sta adottando misure per sanzionare aziende che offrono stage illegali, ma si urta con una diffusa reticenza degli stagisti nel riportare casi di abuso: sono preoccupati di cucirsi addosso una fama da piantagrane.
“Masterizzare DVD non è elettrizzante,” spiega Nicole McDonald, 27 anni, una delle stagiste del documentarista Krabbe che sta lavorando gratis per acquisire esperienza nel campo in cui intende specializzarsi. “Eppure Krabbe ci permette di contribuire con le nostre idee alla realizzazione di un documentario, il che è affascinante e fa curriculum”.
Per McDonald, in un mercato occupazionale così asfittico perfino lavorare gratis diventa un’impresa. La competizione è feroce. Negli ultimi due, tre anni a combattere la battaglia degli stage non sono solamente gli studenti, ma anche professionisti disoccupati e sottoccupati con la voglia di cambiare impiego o aggiornarsi.
“Senza uno stage oggi non fai nulla,” fa spallucce Lois DeSocio, 55 anni, una vita da freelance per Newsweek e riviste di moda come Zink e adesso curatrice di un blog del New York Times dopo il tirocinio in redazione. “Mi sono iscritta a una scuola di giornalismo proprio per ottenere un buon stage”.
E in questa lotta per accaparrarsi i tirocini migliori c’e’ anche chi gioca sporco, e si rivolge ad agenzie come la texana Fast-Track Internships: alla modica cifra di $799 aiuta un potenziale stagista a lavorare gratis a tempo pieno.
Rare Bookstore, Skyline Books, Closes Doors After 20 Years
DAILY NEWS, published 3 February, 2010
Say goodbye to yet another dusty, musty piece of vanishing Manhattan.
All that’s now left of Skyline Books is a sign in the window reading “End of an Era. Thanks for 20 Great Years.”
That’s how long Robert Warren’s used book store at 13 W. 18th St. lasted - a kind of hole-in- the-wall home to a universe of rare books, from first editions of Beat Generation classics like “The Dharma Bums,” to pornographic Italian comics to an autographed copy of Charles Bukowski’s “Post Office.”
But last Saturday, Warren, 55, bid the neighborhood farewell. He says he can’t afford to renew the lease, which increased by more than 50%.
“The evils are three,” he said, combing through a copy of an $8,000 first edition of “Les Americans” by Robert Frank. “The big book chains, Amazon.com and online auctions like eBay.”
For years, the Bronx native collected books, scouting for them at fairs and estate sales.
Warren says Skyline Books was his life, its employees his family, among them his “fiancée,” Linda, a 12-year-old, 15-pound gray tabby cat fond of jumping the shelves.
“Linda is the manager in command,” said human store manager Christopher Cosgrove. “She is cold with dogs but super-friendly with customers.”
“You know why I come here?” asked Joseph Jesselli, a reporter for thesmokinggun.com, a couple of days before the closing. “For the creaking floor, the dust, the feeling of a book in your hands.”
Others would show up just to meet other bibliophiles.
“This place was a communion between people who love books and history,” said Jennifer Parkhurst, a former English teacher who was flipping through “First Selected Poems” by William Packard, whom she called a friend.
Last week, Warren was walking around his racks, reshuffling travel guides and philosophy pamphlets, making sure they were not trashed by customers.
“For them, they are just books,” he said, picking up a children’s tale, “Horseshoe Tree” by Lucy Daniels and stroking it. “But I know them one by one.”
Warren plans to donate most of his collection - about 10,000 books valued at $75,000 - to New Alternatives, a nonprofit that works with homeless kids. Warren says he wants to share his treasure trove with younger generations.
For himself, Warren will only keep a bright red poster, a Republican banner from the Spanish Civil War, which he plans to put in his living room. Many customers had inquired about buying the poster, but were rebuffed by the steep asking price - $10,000. That’s a joke, because it’s actually not for sale.
“Sometimes there are things that have no price,” Warren said. “Like this shop; it was my baby.”
Karina Ioffee contributed reporting and editing
Remittances a pittance: Ecuador feels pain of U.S. economic ills
DAILY NEWS, published 23 June, 2009
Rosa Martinez used to stroll to the local money transfer office in Corona every week to send $200 to her family in Cuenca,Ecuador.
She still goes to the Delgado Travel office, but not to send money. Instead, it is she who collects a little cash from those family members in Cuenca.
“My husband used to earn $140 a day working three, four days a week as a construction worker,” said Martinez, 48. “Now he gets $80 a day and works two, maximum three days a week.”
The economic downturn has battered the nation in recent months, but it also has deeply affected countries like Ecuador, where a recently improved standard of living has devolved with less money flowing from immigrants working in the U.S.
“I hope that God fixes this mess,” Martinez said. “If not, we’ll have to go back to Cuenca.”
Hector Delgado, president of Delgado Travel, which has 70 offices in Ecuador and 29 in New York, began seeing a decrease in money transfers last fall.
“At the beginning, it was a slight reduction of 5% in October,” he said. “But then we went up to 9%, 15%, up to 22% in February.”
Data released recently by the Central Bank of Ecuador confirms the trend: Remittances decreased by 8.6% in 2008. They amounted to $3.1 million in 2007, dwindled to about $2.8 million last year and are continuing to fall.
In Queens, the struggle of Ecuadoran immigrants can be seen at “la parada,” or “the stop,” a stretch on 69th St. and 37th Ave. between a small grassy park dotted with yellow tulips and a basketball court.
Day laborers like Enrique Cunas arrive at 6 a.m. and wait for pickup trucks to pull over. Men swarm the truck when the driver yells, “I got jobs!”
The workers rely on a patchwork of jobs to feed families 3,000 miles away and fuel their dreams of building Swiss chalet-style houses to enjoy when they go back to Ecuador. But these days, most hardly make enough money to keep their beds in cramped apartments.
“I have six kids in Ecuador,” said Cunas, a builder from Naranjito, a village of 13,000 in Guayas. “When I speak to my wife and my kids, I ask them to understand that the situation is kind of difficult here. It really is.”
By 4 p.m., workers who haven’t found a job for the day start kicking a soccer ball around in the basketball court.
“At least we can have some fun playing ball,” said José Morales, 22, a construction worker.
Meanwhile, the workers’ dream homes in Ecuador sit only half-built, a sign of tough times on two continents.
“Farmers who have family in the [U.S.] were quickly building big houses in the outskirts of the town,”Nadia Balden, owner of Mayo restaurant in Cuenca, said in a phone interview. “Now, you see their lambs and cows lazily walking around the building sites.”
Nick Loomis contributed reporting
Haitian Remittances Decreasing With Economic Struggle
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published 20 May, 2009
Gertha Brice shielded herself from the rain beneath a narrow awning in East Flatbush. Sunday services had just ended at Zelateurs Union Baptist Church and Brice, in a cheerful pink suit, chatted with fellow Haitian-American parishioners about the less cheerful economy. Next door, an empty Western Union money transfer office stood as a testament to their complaints that a bad economy in New York makes for a dire situation in Haiti.
“Now the money’s gone,” Brice said, prompting nods of agreement. “But of course,” she said, “we send home what we can.”
Remittances, the money Haitians living abroad manage to send to Haiti, make up a crucial part of the small country’s economy. At least 20 percent of their Gross Domestic Product comes from remittances, mostly from Haitians living in the United States, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund. Remittances to Haiti had been increasing steeply for the past decade but took a dramatic dip this January falling to $69 million from $104 million the previous month.
Despite a slight bump in remittances in February and March, which industry experts attribute to tax-refund season, the World Bank, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank and money transfer offices are all predicting a thinning flow of remittance money into Haiti, resulting from the global economic downturn.
This comes at a bad time for Haiti, still struggling with a multimillion dollar clean-up from last summer’s hurricane season, which destroyed over 100,000 homes, spiked inflation and stunted economic growth.
The circumstances following the storms were so dire, they prompted President René Préval to request that former President George W. Bush grant undocumented Haitians in the United States, Temporary Protected Status. This would protect them from immediate deportation back to a country that can’t afford the burden of more mouths to feed. Bush rejected the request, though the Obama administration is giving it consideration.
Back in Brooklyn, where just under 15 percent of the estimated 800,000 Haitians in the U.S. live, people are doing what they can to help their families back home, though a struggling economy is making it difficult.
Jean Lazarre, a 54-year-old Brooklyn resident who is the principle breadwinner for his wife and three children here and extended family in Haiti kept his job but still feels the affects of the recession, which he calls “the disease.”
“Before the disease, I used to send $150 to $200 home each month. But now we cannot do that. We do not make enough to help them out. But we do as much as we can. Instead of doing nothing, we send $50, $75, $100, because they really need help.”
Lazarre has been sending money back to his mother, brother and extended family since leaving Haiti in 1982, but is finding it more difficult after having his hours slashed to four days a week at Steinway and Sons Piano Company, where he has worked as a machine operator for twenty-two years. He says he feels bad about sending less.
“They really depend on us over here,” he said. “I know that every time I reduce the money over here, they suffer over there.”
Bernard Angel, another Haitian living in Brooklyn finds himself in a similar situation. A 12-hour shift driving his taxicab around Manhattan used to yield $200. Now, he’s comes home with just $150 and has slashed remittances to family.
“The other day I sent $60 for three of them. That’s $20 each. That’s like for one day. After twenty-four hours they’ll need more money, because there’s no jobs.”
According to the World Food Program, more than three-quarters of Haitians live on less than 2 dollars a day, and though food prices have come down since last year when gas prices drove food prices up internationally, hunger remains an alarming problem.
Unitransfer, a popular remittance service used by Haitians, has seen more and more clients in Lazarre and Angel’s position and fewer dollars going through their wires.
“The average used to be $160 per transaction,” said Jean-Mar Piguion, VP of sales and marketing at Unitransfer, on the phone from Florida headquarters. “Now it’s $140 and we expect that number to continue to go down.”
Despite the dismal economic forecast and the dismal, gray skies of East Flatbush, Jean Lazarre remained upbeat. “The economy will be strong again,” he said with a grin. “And then we can help them the way we used to.”
Published with Emily Feldman
Sharing Business Space to Boost Income
DAILY NEWS, published 22 December, 2008
It’s a Saturday afternoon at the Great American Laundromat in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, where Hawa Sidibe has spent the better part of her day.
But she’s not impatiently awaiting the rinse cycle — she’s busy braiding a woman’s hair into neat rows in a makeshift salon the size of a walk-in closet.
Brushes and a hair dryer fill modest shelf space, as do items for sale: socks, gold-colored belts, knockoff designer bags and DVDs of African movies.
“An outside store is expensive for me, that’s why I have it inside a Laundromat,” said Sidibe, a 26-year-old immigrant from Mali.
At a time when the profit margins of countless small businesses are shrinking, shops-within-a-shop like Sidibe’s are multiplying throughout the city.
“It’s a great way for young companies to get started,” said Cliff Schorer, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. “Going forward, we are going to see a lot of this.”
To offset his expenses, Laundromat owner Peter Sternhas been subletting part of his space, on Southern Blvd. near the Bronx Zoo, for five years, first bringing in a woman selling beauty products, then a tax preparer.
“Usually people spend more than two hours in a Laundromat, so the more services the customers get in that time, the better competitive advantage the shop has,” Stern said. “Hawa helps me by paying rent, but the main thing is I want to keep my customers happy.”
Jessica Rivera was one customer who loved the idea of multi-tasking. “Hawa braids my hair, my kids do their homework, my clothes get dry,” she said.
Splitting space can make for close quarters, but also can help entrepreneurs get started.
Ricardo Torres, an immigrant from Colombia, saw a For Rent sign several months ago on the window of a shop on Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights,Queens. The location was prime, right near the subway.
Two businesses were already inside: a cell phone vendor and a photo developer. Torres opened a money-wiring business.
“The rent is cheaper here than if we’d have our own space, and we’d rather be smaller than waste money,” said Eduardo Maña, the manager of Torres’ business, Transmilenio Cargo. “It’s all about maximizing resources and minimizing costs.”
Whether such arrangements are legal depends on lease terms and the types of businesses. Whether they’ll be successful is another matter, since many are not natural partners.
Last year, Mamadou Diallo asked Zach Toolsee, owner of Toolsee Laundrymat onWestchesterAve. in the Bronx Riversection of the borough, if he could rent a portion of his space. Diallo, a recent immigrant from Guinea who also drives a taxi at night, wanted to set up a shop selling items like Chinese slippers, Yankee caps and bandanas.
Toolsee, facing $4,000 monthly rent and a $2,000 monthly water bill, among other charges, agreed for $1,000. A year later, both complain that business is slow.
“My dream is to start a business outside of a Laundromat,” Diallo said.