Some other recent clips:

-Morning Buzz: A crackdown at the turnstiles
-Morning Buzz: A dancer’s life is saved onstage
-Metro: ‘Apple Green’ a hard sell to livery cab drivers
-Morning Buzz: A fight over $150 million in tips
-Morning Buzz: Bird strike forces emergency landing
-Morning Buzz: The cost of renovating City Hall
-Morning Buzz: Reviewing stop and frisk
-City Room: Brush fires across region are spread by high winds, co-reported with Andy Newman
-Morning Buzz: Trying to save the G train
-Morning Buzz: A juror’s regret
-Morning Buzz: The Knicks’ convenient silence
-Morning Buzz: Lighting the Wonder Wheel
-Metro: Lawsuit seeking information on cyclist’s death gains support
-Morning Buzz: Saying goodbye to pay phones
-Metro: Verizon fined $140000 after electrocution death
-Morning Buzz: A ‘B’ for Mayor’s coffee shop
-Morning Buzz: A lottery lawsuit
-Morning Buzz: Creating robotic fish
-Morning Buzz: Cuomo jabs at predecessors
-Metro: With videotapes, recipients of sanitation summonses prove innocence
-

I worked with a team of investigative journalists to report the articles contained in the March/April issue of City Limits magazine, “The Phantom Landlord,” about a notorious Bronx landlord and the system that allowed him to slip through the cracks.

To be filed under, “Look, mom…”

A slightly different online version of the story.

More of what I’m doing at the New York Times.

I thanked the officer, and sipped the shot.

Later, he told me about his Xanax addiction. And how it was better than the addictions it replaced.

“So, what do you do?”

“Oh, I’m a reporter.”

“Shit. What do you cover?”

“Um. You guys.”

Originally published in the New York Times’ City Room blog, January 23rd, 2012

Three months and a lawsuit after their son’s death, the parents of Mathieu Lefevre, a Canadian bicyclist struck and killed by a truck in Brooklyn in October, were relieved to finally receive records about the crash from the Police Department.

They were less pleased with the details of the investigation itself.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Lefevre’s mother, Erika Lefevre, criticized the police for failing to collect or photograph evidence from the crash scene, release information in a timely manner or press serious charges against the truck driver, who an accident report [below] said turned right without signaling as Mr. Lefevre tried to pass on the right, and dragged him and his bicycle a considerable distance.

Read the full story here.

but they sure did stick around

through the winter months

when I kept no fruit

I just hoped

you’d ask me to dinner.

They’re all dead now, their wings

singed in the bulbs of my bedside lamp

and I remember tilting my head back and laughing

when you first entered my messy apartment.

I’m zipping suitcases

to get myself gone

and laughing until I cry

when I think of you

and those damn flies, alive

without nourishment

in the wrong season, nonetheless.

The 2012 Olympics will be the first time female boxers are allowed to take the ring. But change has been a coming for a long time at Gleason’s Boxing Gym in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Les Boxeuses: Meet the women who dominate Gleason’s Boxing Gym from Hannah Miet on Vimeo.

Produced by Hannah Miet and Alva French, with stills by Edouard De Mareschel

Originally published in the Times-Picayune, November 28th, 2011

Residents of Broadmoor began to get serious about organizing the neighborhood’s post-Hurricane Katrina recovery in January 2006, when a rebuilding commission set up by then-Mayor Ray Nagin suggested razing the entire badly flooded neighborhood and turning the land into green space. It was a green dot on a map of the future New Orleans. The residents of Broadmoor were having none of that — and their determination and ingenuity not only helped kill the green-space idea but made their neighborhood, at least for a few years, the poster child for what New Orleanians could do on their own to revive the city.

Ted Jackson, The Times-PicayuneTED JACKSON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Resident and neighbor of the blighted property, Hannah Hayes celebrates as workers demolish the former community center at 3601 General Taylor St., Friday, November 18, 2011. She calls herself the mayor of the street, since she is the only resident on the block to return after Katrina.

Three days after the release of the commission’s plan, residents, many of them still displaced, rallied in protest, waving signs declaring “Broadmoor Lives.” Some had traveled home from Baton Rouge, Houston and other far-flung cities to join the demonstration.

The Broadmoor Improvement Association, the long-established residents organization that spearheaded the neighborhood’s grass-roots approach to rebuilding after the August 2005 storm and flood, set up shop in a doublewide trailer at the Church of the Annunciation.

Volunteers began reaching out to scattered residents, urging them to return. They surveyed the neighborhood and created their own redevelopment plan for it, raising money through private and public partnerships.

In the three years following Hurricane Katrina, a remarkable 79 percent of Broadmoor’s flooded properties were restored.

“Broadmoor is rich with human capital,” said Tulane University urban geographer Richard Campanella. “The community is educated and engaged.”

The association’s partnerships with universities were also key, he said, citing teams of volunteers who arrived from Harvard, Bard and other colleges. The group’s website reports it has “leveraged more than $48 million in outside investments and brought in more than 13,000 volunteers, who have committed 362,000 hours to Broadmoor.”

But since 2008, many say, progress has slowed and even stalled in Broadmoor, officially defined as the area bounded by South Claiborne Avenue, Nashville Avenue, Fontainebleau Drive, Octavia Street, South Jefferson Davis Parkway, Washington Avenue and Toledano Street.

Recovery curve

Campanella said that, in any neighborhood or city coming back from a disaster, stabilization is typical after three years of fast recovery. The same curve applies to every recovery metric in New Orleans, from businesses reopening to people returning home, he said.

In the past three years, fewer than 6 percent of properties have been restored in Broadmoor, according to Santiago Burgos, president of the Broadmoor Development Corp., which was created by the Broadmoor Improvement Association in 2006 to focus on bringing blighted properties back into commerce.

Despite its early success as a model for citizen-led recovery, the neighborhood is now facing many institutional roadblocks. While experts agree that a lag in recovery is typical six years after a disaster, neighborhood activists are reluctant to accept that, in the same way they were reluctant to let their neighborhood turn into a green dot. They are analyzing the reasons behind the slowed recovery and planning how to push forward into the future.

The properties still damaged after several years of recovery are the hardest to rebuild, said Doug Ahlers, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who organized students to help Broadmoor after the storm. Six years in, the low-hanging fruit is gone, Ahlers said, leaving properties with absentee owners, properties stuck in the city’s adjudication process and properties that require complete reconstruction.

Another major roadblock is the difficulty of dealing with bureaucracy. Only 20 percent of the houses that the BIA has declared “truly blighted” are in the city’s code-enforcement process, Ahlers said. Many rebuilding projects are indefinitely stalled due to lack of financing, inadequate Road Home grants and cases of contractor fraud, among other factors.

These properties, which have been abandoned by homeowners but not yet adjudicated by the city, sit in a state of decay.

“When things are unsightly, when they’re not clean, it’s a health problem we need to get rid of so the community can be well,” said LaToya Cantrell, the passionate and tireless president of the BIA. “It touches all ages and demographics. It doesn’t discriminate. And it’s not just what we have to live around, but also what it attracts: loitering, violence and disrespect to the community.”

David Winkler-Schmit, a spokesperson for the BIA, said it can take as long as two years for the city to gain ownership of a property in the adjudication process, followed by the time it takes to demolish, redevelop and sell that property. The redevelopment process is also slower now that fewer volunteers and less private money from other parts of the country are streaming into New Orleans.

Chalking up successes

Despite these roadblocks, Broadmoor’s human capital has rung up many successes, such as the $29 million renovation of the Andrew H. Wilson Charter School, which reopened its doors in 2010, and rebuilding of the Keller Library, which is set to reopen soon with a coffee shop that residents voted to name Green Dot Coffee.

The city this month finally demolished the “Pink Elephant,” a derelict former community center on Gen. Taylor Street that activists had lobbied ever since Katrina to have torn down.

There is also hope that greater government cooperation is on the way. The BIA has begun a “Clean and Green” program that, working with the city, will turn vacant lots into mini-parks.

In 2010, voters by a wide margin approved creation of the Broadmoor Neighborhood Improvement District, which is empowered to levy an annual $100 fee for five years on all neighborhood property. The fee will raise about $120,000 a year for “quality-of-life initiatives and encouraging the beautification and overall benefit” of the area.

Broadmoor still stands as a powerful example of what a neighborhood can do on its own — an especially powerful example, some say, considering how closely the demographics of the neighborhood resemble New Orleans as a whole: Before the storm, more than two-thirds of Broadmoor’s residents were African-American, and most were lower- to middle-income.

“If Broadmoor fails, the whole city fails,” Cantrell said. “We’re still a model for success, but we have a long ways to go. We can’t claim victory yet, by no means.”

Everyone who speaks “in conversation” at the New York Public Library is asked for a seven word bio. “Seven words that define you.”

Joan Didion’s seven words were, “seven words do not yet define me.”

Her most recent book, Blue Nights, is about the death of her daughter. She said it was hard to write, but not because of the content. It was hard to write because it needed a new rhythm, one she had never used before. She said she had to make up the rhythm as she went along.

Sloane Crosley, who interviewed Joan Didion on stage, suggested that the new rhythm was “more like jazz.” Didion agreed.

Writing about her daughter’s death was not cathartic, she said. She wrote about it because it was “a thing that happened.”

Crosley asked Joan Didion how she “mixed” her grief over the events in the book with the frank and brutal process of writing the book. She said she did not “mix” it. The two things could exist at once. She said the work that she did about her life was in some ways separate from her life.

Blue Nights is considered a memoir, which is not a word that Joan Didion likes. She said, “I don’t know what it was, but memoir seemed the most soft to me.”

Crosley asked her about her writing process. She said she wrote the book during the day. At night, she had a drink — bourbon then, though it is now white wine — and then she “marked up the page.” In the morning, she looked at the marks and make more final edits. “The drink helps,” she said.

Crosley asked her about her use of very specific details. She said that without them, the writing “just kind of floated there.” Without the details, she said, you have a memoir.

Crosley asked her if writing details was intuitive, or if she had to learn to write them. She said, “You always have to teach yourself everything.”

An audience member told Joan Didion that his father had recently passed away. He wondered why she would write Blue Nights if the writing was not cathartic.

“In order to understand it, I have to write about it,” she said. “A lot of writers have that failing.”