“If it were up to me, all of New York City would be included,” said State Sen. Julia Salazar, who is looking to expand the state’s recently passed basement legalization pathway to more neighborhoods.

Adi Talwar

Homes in the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is excluded from the state’s recently passed basement legalization plan, despite serving as the city’s testing grounds for an earlier conversion pilot program.

Although the recently passed state budget included a new basement legalization pilot, less than a quarter of the city’s community districts were selected to participate—but a last-minute bill could extend the program to additional neighborhoods prone to flooding.

Of the city’s 59 community districts, only 15 were chosen for the five-year legalization pilot authorized by the state. These encompass four in the Bronx (districts 9, 10, 11, and 12), four in Brooklyn (districts 4, 10, 11, and 17), and six in Manhattan (districts 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, and 12). However, only one district in Queens was included (district 2), and none from Staten Island.

The carve-outs in Queens, despite the area’s vulnerability to flooding and the basement drowning deaths of 11 people in the borough during Hurricane Ida in 2021, compounded with the omission of Brooklyn Community Board 5 (CB5)—the site of the city’s basement conversion pilot launched in 2019—came as a shock and disappointment to some community leaders.

“It’s our communities in Cypress Hills and East New York that demonstrated the need for the state to act,” said State Sen. Julia Salazar, referring to the original pilot that took place in Senate District 18, which she represents. “So it is totally counterintuitive that Brooklyn CB5 would be excluded.”

Salazar and Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas of Queens introduced a bill earlier this month to expand the pilot to a handful of additional neighborhoods, including Brooklyn CB5 and Queens CB1, 3, and 4. With only a week left in the current session in Albany, they’re hoping to see it move before legislators wrap their work on June 6.

Some city lawmakers have opposed basement legalization, citing concerns about safety and increased residential density. Besides the addition of the four community districts, Salazar’s bill seeks no further changes to the state pilot, which she hopes will allow it to pass more quickly.

“The priority is that we add these community districts to the pilot, and we didn’t want that to be delayed by any other changes that the legislature would have to debate and consider,” said Salazar. “We felt that this should be really easy and really straightforward.” 

Experts estimate that there are tens of thousands of basement or cellar units across the five boroughs, many occupied illegally, leaving tenants—often immigrant and low-income New Yorkers who can’t afford other options—with fewer protections and at particular risk for safety issues.

Their plight has become more urgent in the face of increased rain and flooding caused by climate change, prompting a push for state legislation in recent years that would clear the way for the city to regulate underground units. 

“I am really thankful to the leadership of State Sen. Salazar for quickly taking action and trying to fix this situation,” said Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who represents Brooklyn CB5 and adds that its exclusion “should never have been a problem in the first place.”

The pilot included in the budget effectively allows for exceptions to the state’s Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL) for projects in the selected neighborhoods. The MDL dictates the construction, maintenance, and safety standards of buildings with three or more residential units.

It proved the most significant obstacle in the city’s earlier pilot attempt, which connected property owners of one- to three-family homes in East New York with loans and other assistance to facilitate basement conversions. When a two-family home attempted to legally convert to become a three-family home, it became subject to the MDL, with its stricter requirements that significantly raised the construction costs. 

According to testimony from Department of Buildings officials at an executive budget hearing earlier this month, most of the homeowners who applied to the city’s pilot were “overwhelmingly” earning below 80 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), about $111,840 for a family of three, despite the pilot being open to those earning up to 165 percent of the AMI. 

According to the DOB, the primary reasons applicants said they were interested in making conversions were to house a family member or to improve their financial security. 

“To me, it speaks to the fact that we have a lot of homes where you have multiple generations living together,” Nurse said in response to that testimony. “People do the best they can, and one of the options is basements.”

As the city grapples with high rents and a historic 1.4 percent rental vacancy rate—the lowest in over half a century—Salazar believes legalized basement units can help fill the shortage.

“They can be a valuable part of the affordable housing market in New York City as long as people have proper egress and they have what they need in order for it to be safe and legal,” the lawmaker said. 

For Councilmember Nurse, it’s essential that her community board and others be included, noting that flooding will remain a problem for years to come.

“We were communities that were impacted by Hurricane Ida, and the cloudbursts are going to continue to be part of our future,” said Nurse. “The reality here in New York City, where rain drops so fast and can create flood situations very quickly—we want to make sure people aren’t drowning in their own homes.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Chris@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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More than two-thirds of U.S. physicians have changed their minds about generative artificial intelligence and now view the technology as beneficial to health care. But as AI grows more powerful and prevalent in medicine, apprehensions remain high among medical professionals.

For the last 18 months, I’ve examined the potential uses and misuses of generative AI in medicine — research that culminated in my new book, “ChatGPT, MD.” Over that time, I’ve seen the fears of clinicians evolve — from worries over AI’s reliability and, consequently, patient safety, to a new set of fears: Who will be held liable when something goes wrong?

Technology experts have grown increasingly optimistic that next generations of AI technology will prove reliable and safe for patients, especially under expert human oversight. As evidence, recall that Google’s first medical AI model, Med-PaLM, achieved a mere “passing score” (60 percent) on the U.S. medical licensing exam in late 2022. Five months later, its successor, Med-PaLM 2, scored at an “expert” doctor level (85 percent).

Since then, numerous studies have shown that generative AI increasingly outperforms medical professionals in various tasks. These include diagnosis, treatment decisions, data analysis and even empathy.

Despite these advancements, errors in medicine can and will occur, regardless of whether the expertise comes from human clinicians or advanced AI technologies.

Legal experts anticipate that as AI tools become more integrated into health care, determining liability will come down to whether errors result from AI decisions, human oversight or a combination of both.

For instance, if doctors use a generative AI tool in their offices for diagnosing or treating a patient and something goes wrong, the physician would likely be held liable, especially if it’s deemed that clinical judgment should have overridden the AI’s recommendations.

But the scenarios get more complex when generative AI is used without direct physician oversight. As an example, who is liable when patients rely on generative AI’s medical advice without consulting a doctor? Or what if a clinician encourages a patient to use an at-home AI tool for help with interpreting wearable device data, and the AI’s advice leads to a serious health issue?

In a working paper, legal scholars from the University of Michigan, Penn State and Harvard explored these challenges, noting: “Demonstrating the cause of an injury is already often hard in the medical context, where outcomes are frequently probabilistic rather than deterministic. Adding in AI models that are often non intuitive and sometimes inscrutable will likely make causation even more challenging to demonstrate.”

To get a better handle on the risks posed to clinicians when using AI, I spoke with Michelle Mello, professor of law and health policy at Stanford University and lead author of ” Understanding Liability Risk from Using Health Care Artificial Intelligence Tools.”

Her analysis, based on hundreds of tort cases, suggests that current legal precedents around software liability could be adapted to include AI. However, she points out that direct case law on any type of AI model remains “very sparse.” And when it comes to liability implications of using generative AI, specifically, there’s no public record of such cases being litigated.

So, for medical professionals worried about the risks of implementing AI, Mello offers reassurances mixed with warnings.

“At the end of the day, it has almost always been the case that the physician is on the hook when things go wrong in patient care,” she noted, but added: “As long as physicians are using this to inform a decision with other information and not acting like a robot, deciding purely based on the output, I suspect they’ll have a fairly strong defense against most of the claims that might relate to their use of GPTs.”

To minimize the risk, Mello said AI should be implemented as a supportive tool to enhance (not replace) clinical decisions. She also urges health care professionals to negotiate terms of service with major AI developers like Nvidia, OpenAI and Google, whose current disclaimers deny any liability for medical harm.

While concerns about the use of generative AI in health care are understandable, it’s critical to weigh these fears against the existing flaws in medical practice.

Each year, misdiagnoses lead to 371,000 American deaths while another 424,000 patients suffer permanent disabilities. Meanwhile, more than 250,000 deaths occur due to avoidable medical errors in the United States. Half a million people die annually from poorly managed chronic diseases, leading to preventable heart attacks, strokes, cancers, kidney failures and amputations.

Our nation’s health care professionals don’t have the time available in their daily practice to address the totality of patient needs. The demand for medical care is higher than ever at a time when health insurers — with their restrictive policies and bureaucratic requirements — make it harder than ever to provide excellent care.

It is imperative for policymakers, legal experts and health care professionals to collaborate on a framework that promotes the safe and effective use of AI. As part of their work, they’ll need to address concerns over liability. But they must recognize that the risks of not using generative AI to improve care will far outweigh the dangers posed by the technology itself. Only then can our nation reduce the enormous human toll resulting from our current medical failures.

Pearl, the author of “ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group. He wrote this column for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.

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Capping its inaugural season, Minnesota’s professional women’s hockey team skated past Boston to take home the first-ever Walter Cup — the league equivalent of the Stanley Cup, which has proved elusive for the Wild for the past quarter-century. How best to mark the championship glory?

The women’s team — which came together so hurriedly the league has yet to christen a name — announced a victory celebration to be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at Rice Park, by the statue of Olympic coach Herb Brooks at 317 Washington St.

But could there also be a secondary event in the offing?

“Championship = Parade,” wrote St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter on Wednesday night on the platform currently known as X and previously known as Twitter, using his personal account. “Them’s the rules.”

The mayor, who did not disclose further details, was no less proud on his professional X account: “We are the State of Hockey; it’s only right that the inaugural Walter Cup resides here. Congratulations @PWHL_Minnesota on a championship finish of an extraordinary season! #WeWonTheCup.”

While mounting security costs have derailed some street festivities over the years, St. Paul hasn’t been shy about throwing together an impromptu parade when a special sporting occasion merits. When renowned St. Paul gymnast Sunisa Lee took home a gold medal in the women’s all-around event at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the city greeted her with a parade down White Bear Avenue that drew some 20,000 to 25,000 well-wishers, many of them Hmong fans who had come from at least as far away as Arkansas to celebrate.

The inaugural Walter Cup championship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League skated to a finish Wednesday when Minnesota blanked out Boston with a 3-0 win at Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass. By 9 p.m. Wednesday, the team was marketing pre-orders for championship t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, hockey pucks and neck chains.

So when and where will the celebratory parade be held?

Wrote the mayor on social media Wednesday night: “Stay tuned.”

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Israel stands accused of genocide as it fights to destroy Hamas in response to Hamas’ savage terrorist attack last October. Is the world’s only Jewish state being held to a different standard? Many Israelis believe this to be true, and they are, undeniably, right. It doesn’t, however, make all criticism of the war in Gaza either unfair or antisemitic.

It’s surely true, to name one example, that the appalling death toll in Gaza — now estimated by the Hamas-led health authority at about 36,000 — cannot alone explain the scale and depth of the international outcry it has caused. Where were the campus protesters and genocide claims when at least 10 times that number of ethnic Tigrayans were killed or deliberately starved to death by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments in a war that ended only last year?

Equally indisputable is that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have set a precedent by recommending arrest warrants on war crimes charges for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. If the court approves that request, it will be the first time since the ICC’s inception in 2002 that it has targeted the sitting leaders of a democracy, even though other democracies have, of course, done some very bad things. Invading Iraq on a lie, at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead, would be one candidate.

The ICC warrants sought against Hamas are equally unprecedented; never before has the court indicted terrorists for war crimes. Many Israelis are furious at the idea that their elected leaders should be equated with terrorists in this way, no matter how much they may dislike Netanyahu. All of the above is accurate, but it also entirely misses the point. And that’s in no small part, I think, because those same Israelis are seeing a different war unfold on their TV screens and news pages than the daily horror show of broken Palestinian children that’s seen outside the country.

On Monday, news organizations around the world (as well as Israel’s own leftist Haaretz) led their news pages with an IDF strike on Rafah that set refugee tents on fire, killing 45 people, according to initial reports from the Hamas-controlled Gaza health authority. Yet neither Israel Today nor Yedioth Ahronoth (Latest News), which together account for about half of all Israeli news readership, had that story on their home pages for much of the day — even after the prime minister acknowledged the IDF had made a “tragic mistake.” Instead, they headlined on the long-term threat posed by Hamas, on newly released footage of the Oct. 7 massacres, a further twist in Netanyahu’s trials on corruption charges, or on rockets fired from Lebanon (an evacuated home was hit).

This sanitized account of the IDF’s continuing effort to eliminate Hamas is either missing or glossing over undeniable facts. The first is that Gaza is being leveled. You can argue as to why and who is to blame, but it has happened. The 2,000- and 1,000-pound bombs that the U.S. only recently stopped sending Israel cause fatalities within a radius of about 360 meters (1,181 feet), making high rates of collateral damage inevitable in a densely populated urban area such as Gaza. Israel has used these bombs liberally, which is a choice.

Equally undeniable is that the unfolding IDF assault in Rafah has blocked the main aid crossing to Gaza, undoing recent improvements in the quantities of food and other aid that had been making it into the territory. People will go hungry as a result. Israeli officials say they’re doing their best and point to aid theft by Hamas. Yet the decision to resist opening more crossing points, and to not crack down on Jewish extremists who blocked or destroyed aid on its way into Gaza, suggest the government is, at a minimum, recklessly negligent in ensuring the provision of basic necessities to Gaza’s civilian population.

None of this proves the legal charge of genocide, a crime that requires not a certain number of casualties or weapon types, but the intent to wipe a group of people out in the place where they live. When 8,000 unarmed men and boys were executed by Serb forces in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995, it was ruled a genocide because the intent to exterminate a whole class of people in that particular location was so clear.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have provided South Africa with fodder for its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice — which hears state-on-state complaints — by calling to remove Palestinians from Gaza, at the same time IDF actions are making it uninhabitable. It isn’t enough to say these men aren’t in the war cabinet; Netanyahu depends on them to stay in power, and Israelis should be concerned they are being led by extremists toward a crime they would not condone.

Of course, Israel is a special case. It will always be singled out, often unfairly and for malign reasons. No other conflict, after all, takes place on the Holy Land, a patch of desert claimed as a spiritual home by three major religions and fought over for centuries. No other nation was formed as a refuge from pogroms. Few others have such a controversial modern history, in which Arabs and Jews have fought multiple wars aimed at removing one or the other people from the land, a contest that remains unresolved after 70 years. Fewer still have resulted in a permanent, unstable refugee status, accompanied by de facto military occupation and aggressive settlement.

But the arrest warrants, campus protests and genocide accusations were not inevitable. These were the direct results of the Netanyahu government’s policies, pushed into hyperdrive since he scraped back into power with the help of ultra-right parties in December 2022.

Double standards should not be Israel’s big concern here. The question for Israelis should be how they want to be led, how they retrieve the remaining hostages in Gaza alive, and how they win the war. That victory won’t come the day Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar is killed in a Rafah tunnel, but when Israelis can live in security, which will depend on addressing the Palestinian despair Hamas feeds on. This is the goal by which Israelis should judge their own leaders, as well as the claims of outsiders.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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