The Post Is Saying What The Times Is Thinking

Foreign-born New Yorkers make up 37 percent of the city’s population, according to the latest census data:

Immigrants have continued to surge into metropolitan New York since 2000, according to census figures released today, and that increase, combined with high birth rates, has elevated the foreign-born and their children in New York City itself to fully 60 percent of the population. The rate of change was even more pronounced in the 24 suburban counties around the city, where a record 20 percent of the residents are now born abroad.

The figures, while showing that the city’s gains from immigration were not nearly as marked as they were in the 1990’s, are nonetheless striking in their detail and magnitude.

In the city, the number of people who identified themselves as Mexicans, here legally or not, soared 36 percent in five years, and not merely as a consequence of improved counting. More than half the residents of Queens and the Bronx do not speak English at home. Nearly one in three black residents in New York City was born abroad.

The trends are reported in the American Community Survey, a new annual version of the federal Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire designed to capture the nation’s demographic profile in a more timely moving picture, rather than a once-a-decade snapshot.

Meanwhile, the Times buries the Post’s lede (note the descriptive word the paper uses in the URL for this story):

Among children younger than 15, white residents who are not Hispanic have become a minority in the metropolitan area, an indication that within just a few years the New York region will become the first large metropolitan area outside the South or West where non-Hispanic whites are a minority.

The Post, on the other hand, doesn’t bury the Post’s lede:

The number of whites in New York City has been shrinking the last five years, while the Asian and Hispanic populations have been climbing, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Then again, the Post’s headline is “Whites Decline In City” . . .

Other interesting or notable data:

New York ranks first in the proportion of men and women — 35.2 percent and 30.2 percent, respectively — who have never married. The median age for first marriages by women is highest in Connecticut, at 27.5, and for men in New York, at 29.3. New York State also has the lowest proportion of households composed of married couples, 45 percent. Barely half the children in the city, 53 percent, are being raised by a married couple.

As ever, within the borders of the city there were great differences. In Manhattan, where the number of black and Hispanic residents declined, married couples with children living at home made up about 10 percent of households, but the rate is 27 percent on Staten Island. In the Bronx, more than half the families with children are headed by women.

The census counted more American Indians, about 33,000, than in any other city. Chinese is spoken by more than 350,000 New Yorkers, Italian by 103,000, Yiddish by 77,000.

While the number of Puerto Ricans in the city declined slightly, they remain the largest group among Hispanics, with 787,000. Dominicans, who number 532,000 — the largest number among foreign-born — are catching up with Puerto Ricans. More city residents still identify their ancestry as Italian than any other group, but West Indians are closing.

Somebody Resized My New York Times!

The New York Times is being downsized to USA Today proportions:

The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.

The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs.

Several other American broadsheets reduced their size a few years ago, and many are planning further shrinkage to cut costs as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.

The Times, which made the announcement last night on the eve of its quarterly earnings report, said it would sublet its plant in Edison and consolidate its regional printing facilities at its newer plant in College Point, in Queens.

That consolidation will mean the loss of about a third of the total production work force of 800.

The Edison plant, which opened in 1992, is to keep printing papers until the spring of 2008, by which time one new press will have been added at College Point. That plant opened in 1997.

The company said the changes would save about $42 million a year — $30 million by consolidating printing at College Point and $12 million by reducing the size of the paper. Leaving the Edison plant means the company can avoid about $50 million in capital improvements there, although it will spend about $150 million to combine the facilities in College Point and buy a new press.

The reduction in the size of The Times will mean a loss of 5 percent of the space the paper devotes to news. If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.

“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,” Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.

Several broadsheets — including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post — have already reduced their size and others, like The Wall Street Journal, are planning to.

See also: New York Times Cut to 5 Percent Of Size; Keller Says Paper Better Without It (New York Observer’s Media Mob)

The Point Of Which Should Hit You Like A Ton Of Bricks . . .

While it’s obviously an important issue, it’s perhaps a stretch to assume that 34 East 62nd Street would have been avoided if only New York state had no-fault divorce. But don’t let the details get in the way of a smart op-ed on the topic:

Behind the powerful gas explosion that nearly leveled a historic Manhattan town house on Monday is a nightmarish New York saga of divorce and vengeance worthy of a Lifetime channel movie. Authorities believe that the Upper East Side doctor suspected of causing the blast wanted to destroy the house so his ex-wife wouldn’t get it as the result of a nasty divorce fight that dragged on for over five years, even after the divorce was finalized.

We’re tempted to blame the State Legislature.

Obviously, even New York’s dysfunctional government is not bad enough to drive people to blow up their houses. But the story does give us an opportunity to point out once again that, thanks to Albany, the state has notoriously cumbersome divorce laws that regularly produce both hideous domestic squabbles and inflated lawyer’s fees.

And there’s your ghoulish rhetoric for the day . . .

You Don’t Think I Can Wedge A Reference To “Wooly Bully” In A Story About Rent Control? Just Watch Me!

A rent control story for the ages:

For three decades, Lisa Dittmer has been on a collision course with her landlords — one involving the peculiarities of real estate and rent control in New York City — that culminated yesterday in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

For those unaccustomed to the range of comedy and heartbreak those factors can produce, it is worthwhile to begin with this: By law, Ms. Dittmer says, her monthly rent is $94.18, roughly the price of a pair of sneakers that will get you laughed off any basketball court in the city.

Ms. Dittmer moved into her apartment on the top floor of a three-story building in Bay Ridge in 1965, about a month before Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs released “Wooly Bully.”

“To date,” her lawyer wrote with lawyerly reserve, “plaintiff continues to occupy said apartment.”

The best reason, and perhaps the only reason, to occupy the same apartment for 41 years is rent control, a program established to address a housing crisis in postwar time, post-World War II time in particular. Under those rules, Ms. Dittmer’s rent for the apartment at 319 82nd Street was set at $80.72 a month in June 1970 and raised to $94.18 in March 1983, according to the lawsuit.

But since 1976, the lawsuit says, she has often been charged more than that. A lawyer for Ms. Dittmer, Colleen Buckley, said the amount she paid ranged from the maximum legal rent to as much as $570 monthly.

The suit contends that the landlords willfully ignored the fact that the apartment was rent controlled. The plaintiff is asking for $350,000:

Since 1976, the lawsuit says, Ms. Dittmer has been overcharged, in total, $84,465.80, which works out to $237.93 a month.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Dittmer, who did not return calls seeking comment, is seeking $253,397.40, or three times the total overpayment, plus lawyers’ fees and interest, for a round total of $350,000.

Hoodely-Doo, I’m The Times, I’m So Above It All, Hoodely-Doo!

Despite the Times’ hoodely-doo above-it-all tone, the paper certainly has been “flooding the zone” with its extensive coverage of the Jared Paul Stern/sex-for-arms scandal. Today they print their twelfth article on the subject. But I suppose Campbell Roberts needs something to do now that there’s a death watch for Boldface Names.