Teach A Man To Fish And He’ll Earn $30 In A Conditional Cash Transfer

The plan to pay off poverty is moving forward:

Poor kids and their parents will pocket cash rewards — from $25 for good school attendance to $200 for visiting the doctor to $3,000 for passing five Regents exams — under an innovative anti-poverty program unveiled by city officials yesterday.

The “conditional cash transfer” program, modeled on plans in places like Mexico and Brazil, is privately funded but administered by the city.

. . .

About 14,000 participants will take part in the two-year $53 million pilot program beginning this fall.

As many as 5,100 families of three living below the poverty line in six low-earning neighborhoods, with at least one kid in fourth, seventh or ninth grade in a public school, would participate in the educational part of the program.

Half of the families (the rest will serve as a control group to measure results) will get paid as much as $5,000 a year for meeting various clean-living goals.

Among those families, teenagers will get paid directly $50 for taking the PSAT (a warm-up for the SAT, the most widely used college entrance exam), $300 for getting 11 high school credits a year and $50 for getting a library card — and a whopping $600 for every Regents exam passed, up to a maximum of five.

That means some teens could be directly paid as much as $3,000 by the city. Five Regents are needed to graduate high school.

. . .

Recipients, being selected this summer before the program begins in the fall, can have the money deposited directly into their bank accounts.

Also, 4,100 adults who get Section 8 federal housing vouchers — with half serving as the control group — will get $150 monthly for working 30 hours a week, and $600 for every block of 140 hours in job training.

And about 18,000 fourth- and seventh-graders from 80 pre-selected schools will get paid between $5 and $10 a test for 10 exams overall throughout the year that they finish. There are incentive bonuses thrown in for perfect scores.

The Pen Might Not Be Mightier Than The Sword, But It Can Still Smart

In a media-obsessed city, this sort of fetish seems almost natural*:

A UPS manager was arrested for delivering cash to a teenage girl who fulfilled his sick sexual fetish by letting him prod her with a ballpoint pen, authorities said yesterday.

Prosecutors said Frank Ranieri, 25, of Ashton Drive on Staten Island, sometimes posed as a cop to win the trust of high-school girls in front of whom he would masturbate after “puncturing their buttocks” with a pin or a pen, according to a criminal complaint.

Although Ranieri was arrested for sexually assaulting only one of the girls, a 17-year-old, prosecutors said the deranged delivery man carried on with at least four other high school students, including one who was 15.

“Several thousand dollars have been laid out for these acts,” said Wanda DeOliveira, a prosecutor for the Staten Island district attorney.

DeOliveira said that starting in 2003, Ranieri used money and a promise of paper routes to target girls at Tottenville HS.

Cops said his latest victim was assaulted numerous times over two weeks in April, during which he paid her at least $500.

The victim suffered bleeding, bruising and substantial pain, according to officials.

Ranieri was busted after one of the girls came forward to cops.

Or is this an “I have a gub” moment? The Daily News seems to have heard it differently:

A former NYPD recruit told investigators he got pleasure out of paying underage girls on Staten Island to pierce their flesh with pins, law enforcement sources said yesterday.

Frank Ranieri, 25, was arraigned in Staten Island Criminal Court on charges of second-degree assault as a sexually motivated crime, authorities said.

“He said he liked to see the pins go through muscle and flesh,” a police source said. “A sexual deviant. He didn’t see much wrong with it.”

*In fact, I’m surprised this wasn’t included in Peter B.’s all-you-can-eat buffet.

The Toilet Paper-Toting Flaneur

You could lazily view the city from the comfort of your computer or you could actually get out there and do it yourself. Wish them good luck and god speed:

Remember Matt Green and Don Badaczewski, those two guys who last August broke the record for circumnavigating the city by subway?

Well, Green is back — with a new teammate, college buddy Rob Moncure — for another urban adventure: a five-day, 150-mile walk across the city. That’s 30 miles of pavement, or roughly 10 hours of trekking, a day, starting Monday on Staten Island.

“We’re most worried about how our feet and knees are going to hold up, rather than being concerned about our cardio-vascular health,” said Green, 27, a transportation engineer living in Bay Ridge. “We’re going to wear sneakers. We were considering hiking boots because they’re waterproof, but we just want to wear what’s most lightweight.”

They will have plenty of moleskin for blisters and extra pairs of socks. They’ll also stock up on underwear and an emergency roll of toilet paper, Green explained.

They won’t be carrying much in the way of food, because walking is not all the duo expects to do. They have a quirky checklist, too, that includes eating “as much ethnic cuisine as we can,” Green said.

Other items on the checklist: ride a camel (Bronx Zoo), “go to a hipster bar without looking or acting hip,” perform music on a subway platform, go fishing (Central Park rents rods, Green said) and go swimming on top of a sewage treatment plant (Riverbank State Park on 145th Street). On Staten Island, they plan to scale Todt Hill (elevation 410 feet), the highest natural point in the city.

She Got A TV Eye On Me

If you were perhaps concerned by all the Volkswagen Beetles you’ve noticed videotaping your apartment, rest assured that it’s just Google’s ambitious new bodega-mapping project:

Heralded by observers as a step that could change the way people travel, live, and work in the city, Microsoft and Google have launched features that allow computer users to fly over realistic 3-D renderings of the city’s skyscrapers or take street-level tours such as following Broadway between Battery Park and Yonkers.

The developments were announced yesterday at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Google users may view 180-degree photographs of almost every street and intersection in Manhattan, as well as sections of the other boroughs. For the past 18 months a company, Immersive Media, has sent Volkswagen Beetles outfitted with about $250,000 worth of video equipment to drive almost every mile of Manhattan and other parts of the city, the company’s president and CEO, Miles McGovern, said.

On top of the car is a dodecahedron camera with 11 lenses, each taking in streaming video at 30 frames a second. Google licensed the images and integrated them with its maps.

Mr. McGovern estimated that the 40,000 miles of America his company has documented — 2,000 of them in New York City — are captured in about 120 million spherical images.

. . .

A product manager for Google Maps, Stephen Chow, said he used the technology to scope out neighborhoods where he was looking for apartments in San Francisco.

“I would go to that location and see whether the listing was right for nearby restaurants and public transportation,” he said. He said he could also zoom in on parking signs to find out when he had to move his car to avoid getting a ticket.

(Nice URL, by the way.)

The Distinctive Facade, The Expert Mortar Work And The Mitchell-Lama Period Touches Combine To Make This Building An Excellent Candidate For Preservation

Is it creeping Gioiaism or is landmarking a building really the only way to preserve affording housing in some neighborhoods? Things are pretty bad when you have to resort to having the Landmarks Commission step in:

Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx, not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

O.K., Mr. Campbell is not just anybody — he is the alpha D.J. of hip-hop. As D.J. Kool Herc, he presided over the turntables at parties in that community room in 1973 that spilled into nearby parks before turning into a global assault. Playing snippets of the choicest beats from James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Babe Ruth and anything else that piqued his considerable musical curiosity, he provided the soundtrack savored by loose-limbed b-boys (a term he takes credit for creating, too).

Mr. Campbell thinks the building should be declared a landmark in recognition of its role in American popular culture. Its residents agree, but for more practical reasons. They want to have the building placed on the National Register of Historic Places so that it might be protected from any change that would affect its character — in this case, a building for poor and working-class families.

Throughout the city, housing advocates said, buildings like 1520 Sedgwick are becoming harder to find as owners opt out of subsidy programs so they can eventually charge higher rents on the open market.

The Sedgwick building is part of the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, in which private landlords who receive tax breaks and subsidized mortgages agree to limit their return on equity and rent to people who meet modest income limits.

Of course this is in the paper, so maybe it works!