They Act Like Animal Hoarding Is A Bad Thing!

“Cat Lady” — myth or reality? The Queens Tribune investigates:

Pomonok Houses certainly isn’t the first housing complex in Queens, let alone New York City, to have the noxious scent of cat urine seep into its walls and it won’t be the last, according to the New York City ASPCA.

ASPCA Senior Outreach Manager Allison Cardona said the agency sees at least 50 to 100 cases similar to Pomonok throughout the city each year.

“It wasn’t until recently that the data is being recognized as a social problem, a mental health problem,” explained Cardona. “In the past, everyone heard of a cat lady or a little old lady who rescues too many cats, but instances like these are considered animal hoarding.”

Hoarding is when an individual has more than the typical number of companion animals; is in denial of the inability to provide this minimum care; and is in denial of the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling, according to the he Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, a non profit academic research group.

“A lot of times the situation is approached from social service stances, where it’s recognized that you can’t just remove all the animals and everything will be fine,” she said, “because no it’s won’t be fine, and yes, something needs to happen for the human or else they will begin hoarding all over again.”

. . .

Melanie Neer, an Elmhurst woman who had caught national attention for housing close to 120 cats in her studio apartment in 2000 is an example of an animal hoarder who agreed to give up her companions and once again found her apartment crawling with 45 felines in 2006.

Neer was facing eviction and since March 2006 has seen Animal Care and Control cage 27 of her cats, emphasizing that she knows of eight for which they could not find adopters, and which have been euthanized.

Neer never saw her number of pets as being a problem. She simply saw it as living with her “closest friends.”

It is important to recognize that hoarding knows no age, gender, or socioeconomic boundaries, according to HARC. It has been observed in men and women, young and old, married as well as never married or widowed, and in people with professional or white collar jobs.

Backstory on the Pomonok Stench: A Cautionary Tail.

Graduation And Retention Rates Or . . . Affirmative Action For Italian-American Staffers?

More than 60 years after Little Flower left office, Italian-Americans are still shockingly underrepresented in the CUNY system:

As Columbus Day approaches, a number of prominent Italian-Americans are expressing concern that the City University of New York has a vendetta against them.

Nearly 30 years after that ethnic group was included in CUNY’s affirmative action program, Italian-Americans still face discrimination there, according to a university-commissioned report.

A three-member panel appointed by CUNY officials and the Calandra Italian American Institute determined there has been no significant progress in boosting the proportion of Italian-Americans in CUNY’s faculty and staff since 1977. The figure that year was slightly more than 6%. The panel’s report found that number largely unchanged today.

“One would have to say it’s disappointing, considering that Italian-Americans have been identified as an affirmative action group,” said panel member Richard Alba, a sociology teacher at SUNY-Albany.

The panel report was mandated by a 1999 settlement of a landmark class-action civil rights suit filed by Bronx native Joseph Scelsa, former head of the Calandra Institute, which was named after the late Bronx state Senator John Calandra.

Local leaders in the Italian-American community are blasting CUNY over the report.

“It has been 30 years of affirmative ‘inaction’ against Italian-Americans,” said Bronx Columbus Day Parade Committee member Jay Savino.

Is part of the reason CUNY supposedly sucks so bad that they’re dithering over affirmative action for Italian-Americans?

Real Estate Brokers Agree — Follow The Lesbians

Sure, blame it on the strollers:

As the Park Slope mommies, daddies and Bugaboos multiply, a fringe group that once dominated a piece of the neighborhood has taken itself back to the fringe.

. . .

The southward shift of the lesbian community is far from surprising.

One obvious reason is the skyrocketing cost of living in Park Slope. On average, men earn 21 percent more than women, an income discrepancy that becomes wider for women-only households. But finances are only part of the neighborhood’s waning desirability among lesbians.

In the end, the real turnoff may be simply too many people who look like one another.

“I went to the Tea Lounge the other day and it totally freaked me out,” said Gabrielle Belfiglio, a lesbian who once lived in Park Slope, but has since moved to Windsor Terrace. “Everyone looked like they were part of the same photo shoot, posing with a laptop or a baby.

“There used to be a sense of diversity that isn’t there anymore,” she added. “You can walk around Windsor Terrace and Kensington and see a Hassid next to a woman in hijab next to a Jamaican kid. You can be who you are in that mix of people.”

It’s great to feel comfortable in a “mix of people” . . . do the Hassids and women in hijab feel the same?

And although I like the idea of tying the decline of lesbian community in Park Slope to the male-female economic gap — interesting theory! — this story isn’t exactly new, is it? Even the Times was writing about the exodus from “Dyke Slope” back in January 2005:

When Emily Haddad moved to New York shortly after finishing college in 2001, she didn’t know much about the city, but being gay, she knew she wanted to live in a gay-friendly community.

Her neighborhood of choice? Park Slope.

“It seemed like lesbian central in New York,” said Ms. Haddad, 24, whose unaccented speech belies her North Carolina roots.

Park Slope was the neighborhood where she marched in the Brooklyn Pride Parade during her first summer in New York. She spent another afternoon at the Rising Cafe, a lesbian coffee shop on Fifth Avenue, and ended up in a spirited discussion with some women from Dyke TV, a weekly television show. It was also the neighborhood where she volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, on 14th Street near Prospect Park. The Archives, and by extension Park Slope, became her adopted home.

But she never did make Park Slope her actual home, nor did any of her lesbian friends. “Dyke Slope,” as it is affectionately called by many lesbians, was too expensive for them, as it has become for many other New Yorkers. Instead, Ms. Haddad found a cheap, newly renovated two-bedroom apartment in a rowhouse on 51st Street, deep amid the residential sleepiness of Sunset Park. She splits the $1,500 monthly rent with a female roommate, who is straight.

(In fact, it’s such old news that the Brooklyn Paper story even features a picture of someone who was interviewed in the Times piece. She’s still not living in Park Slope.)

Who Would Have Thought That Manhattan Prefers To Watch Documentaries About Itself?

The Post analyzes top Netflix choices by borough and finds it says much about who we are:

Manhattan’s top choice is a documentary about itself, followed by “Barbarians at the Gate,” a film about money and excess, the foreign flick “Divorce, Italian Style,” and the patriotic musical “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Brooklyn’s top picks are about Hasidic Jews and graffiti, and local hero Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn.”

Queens’ list reveals its mixed personality — with Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” taking the top spot, followed by the counter-terror hit “24,” and the kvetching of “Seinfeld” creator Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Rounding it out is a film about suicide bombers in Israel and “The Chorus,” a French film about a singing troupe.

In The Bronx, the hip-hop crime drama “Killa Season” is No. 1, followed by documentaries about Puerto Ricans in America and the Latin Kings, and the Paul Newman police flick, “Fort Apache, the Bronx.”

And Staten Island is all over the map, starting with the original version of the horror film “The Omen,” followed by the gang-war classic “The Warriors,” a show about plastic surgery, the straight-to-video action film “Covert One: The Hades Factor,” and “Dumbo.”

The Boop-Boop-Boop . . . Wheeee! Of A Dream Deferred

The New York Press attempts to learn just what the fuck it is dudes with metal detectors are doing:

James is mad as hell about something or other involving money — I don’t ask — and we’re tromping through the streets of Brooklyn in giant strides. He’s got a farmhand’s build, autumn-wheat hair and a scar that extends to the right side of his frown. In his hand is a metal detector as big as a bazooka.

Every morning James wakes up believing he might strike it rich on that very date. “One attic, one backyard or behind one door,” he trails off as we head out to dig up whatever fortune is buried in Prospect Park.

“You take a ring and throw it as hard as you want at the grass, and you ain’t gonna hear it make a sound,” he explains. “The dog walkers, that’s another thing. Tissues they use to clean up with, they put in the same pocket as their change. They pull out the tissues and where do you think the change goes?”

. . .

Dark clouds had followed us to the park and now thunder is rumbling in the distance. The headphones on James’ ears buzz a mosquito-like sound, which grows louder and fainter as he pans his detector side to side. The wind picks up and scatters leaves, and I see James on his knees carving a circular wound in the ground with a painter’s spatula. He flips over a hangnail of sod and reaches into the earth. A nightcrawler squirms across his knuckles. He plucks out a dime that looks like it was found on the Titanic.

Within an hour we have 65 cents in a baggy and are nearly swimming in the downpour.