City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.

A Rent Guidelines Board heading in 2023. The board will hold a public hearing in Manhattan Friday, and will vote on rent increases for stabilized tenants next Monday, June 30. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

Welcome to City Limits’ NYC Housing Calendar, a weekly feature where we round up the latest housing and land use-related events and hearings, as well as upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.

Know of an event we should include in next week’s calendar? Email us.

Upcoming Housing and Land Use-Related Events:

Tuesday, June 24, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.: It’s Primary Day! Look up your poll site here. Check your voter registration status here.

Tuesday, June 24 at 9:30 a.m.: The Landmarks Preservation Commission will meet. More here.

Wednesday, June 25 at 10 a.m.: NYCHA will hold its monthly board meeting. More here.

Thursday, June 26 at 10 a.m.: The NYC Council’s Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Sitings and Dispositions will meet. More here.

Thursday, June 26 at 11 a.m.: The NYC Council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises will meet. More here.

Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 a.m.: The NYC Council’s Committee on Land Use will meet. More here.

Saturday, June 28, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.: NYC Housing Partnership will host its Third Annual Affordable Housing Expo, featuring expert talks and resources around affordable rentals and homeownership. Attendance is free, but space is limited/advanced registration requested. More here.

Friday, June 27, at 10 a.m.: The Rent Guidelines Board, which is considering rent increases for tenants in stabilized apartments, will hold a public hearing in Lower Manhattan. More here.

Monday, June 30, at 1 p.m.: The City Planning Commission will hold a review session. More here.

Monday, June 30, at 1:30 p.m.: The NYC Council is expected to vote on the city’s fiscal year 2026 budget. More here.

Monday, June 30, at 7 p.m.: The Rent Guidelines Board will vote on rent increases for New York City tenants in rent stabilized units. More here.

NYC Affordable Housing Lotteries Ending Soon: The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is closing lotteries on the following subsidized buildings over the next week.

111 Willoughby Street Apartments, Brooklyn, for households earning between $101,143 – $227,500 (last day to apply is 6/25)

The Hart, Brooklyn, for households earning between $57,498 – $131,220 (last day to apply is 6/27)

Crotona Park West (Waiting List), Bronx, for households earning between $28,698 – $180,810 (last day to apply is 6/30)

Edgemere Commons B1, Queens, for households earning between $22,458 – $160,720 (last day to apply is 6/30)

Prisma House, Brooklyn, for households earning between $35,589 – $160,380 (last day to apply is 6/30)

The post NYC Housing Calendar, June 23-30 appeared first on City Limits.

“We need a mayor who knows that in a city committed to seeing all of us thrive, there is no place for Rikers Island.”

A rally calling for the closure of Rikers Island in 2023. (Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit)

It’s clear that New Yorkers want safety, and it will be important in this year’s mayoral election. But how can we tell which candidates are serious about safety, and which ones care more about stoking our fears than investing in what works?

To start with, any candidate who is not committed to closing Rikers is not serious about safety. Rikers Island is a violence incubator that detains legally innocent people largely on the basis of wealth. If that sounds exaggerated, consider that Anthony Martin Jr., a correction officer, is at liberty while he faces charges of raping a woman in Queens (he is also named in civil lawsuits by two incarcerated women), but 31-year-old Joshua Valles died after suffering a cracked skull at Rikers while facing non-violent felony charges. Joshua Valles couldn’t pay $10,000 for his freedom, but Anthony Martin paid his bail immediately. 

Rikers also wastes tremendous resources—over $2.8 billion dollars a year—that we desperately need for housing, healthcare, education, and other resources that strengthen our communities. 

Maybe worst of all, Rikers is a place to hide our city’s problems rather than solving them, with the terrible effect of making these problems worse. When people with mental health needs are sent to Rikers (as thousands are each year), they are disconnected from any community-based care they’re receiving, and subjected to practices like “deadlocking.”

The thousands of people admitted to Rikers each year who are homeless can lose their spot on the waitlist for supportive housing. People who have stable housing can lose that too, along with their jobs, during even a short jail stay. 

It’s not surprising then that being detained at Rikers actually increases the likelihood that a person will be re-arrested. On average, 33 percent of people released from Rikers return within one year, compared to alternative-to-incarceration programs like Bronx Connect, which sees 97 percent of graduates with no new felony convictions after three years, or Justice Involved Supportive Housing, which has substantially reduced jail and shelter stays for the lucky few who’ve been able to get one of these units. 

Anyone who is serious about safety should be telling voters that they will fund more Intensive Mobile Treatment teams for the hundreds of people who have qualified for them but are waiting for a placement; that they will ensure that everyone who needs supportive housing can get it; and that they will fund and encourage judges to make better use of New York’s highly-effective network of alternative to incarceration programs—all of which operate at less than one-tenth the per-person cost of Rikers.

Voters should be skeptical of any candidate who won’t fully commit to these proven solutions, but will rail against “recidivism” and pledge to arrest more people who have spiraled into crisis while waiting to access services.

While Rikers should have closed long ago, avoidable delays have put the borough-based jails to replace it far behind schedule. Still, there are actions the next mayor can, and must, take to shorten this timeline. The Independent Rikers Commission identified ways to speed up jail construction by at least a year, and candidates should commit to doing so.  

Infrastructure, however, is just one part of the close Rikers plan—shrinking the jail population is the other. Mayoral candidates should be telling us that they will bring down the jail population in alignment with the Close Rikers plan by August 31, 2027, regardless of whether the borough jails are finished. Doing that would enable the closure of several Rikers jails, even if some remain open while the borough jails are completed. Having fewer people in Rikers is also the surest and fastest way to prevent it from claiming more of our neighbors’ lives.

Finally, any candidate who says they will stand up to the Trump administration cannot share its disregard for constitutional rights. More than 80 percent of people at Rikers have not been convicted. Describing them as dangerous or guilty of anything before they’ve had their day in court is a page out of Trump’s playbook.

When NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch refers to people as “offenders,” “prisoners,” or “perps” based solely on an arrest, as she did in her State of the NYPD address, she displays either her lack of understanding of the legal system, or her contempt for the presumption of innocence that is at its foundation. Either one should be a red flag to all New Yorkers, and to any candidate considering keeping her on as commissioner. 

The truth is that the dehumanization of people held at Rikers starts far before they cross the “Bridge of Pain.” It starts in our communities, where we are denied the resources we deserve and then punished in our struggle to survive, and it continues in a court system that comfortably treats us as guilty because it presumes that our lives are of no importance anyways.

We need a mayor who knows that in a city committed to seeing all of us thrive, there is no place for Rikers Island.

Darren Mack is co-director of Freedom Agenda, and a survivor of Rikers. Melissa Mark-Viverito is the former Speaker of the New York City Council.

The post Opinion: NYC Needs a Mayor Who is Serious About Safety appeared first on City Limits.

By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear the appeal of a former Louisiana prison inmate whose dreadlocks were cut off by prison guards in violation of his religious beliefs.

Related Articles

Early-season heat dome brings highest temperatures in years to parts of Eastern US

Weekend tornadoes kill 6 in North Dakota and New York, toss trees and train cars

Search continues for 1 person still missing after 7 killed when boat capsized on Lake Tahoe

A look at Al Udeid Air Base, the US military site that Iran attacked

Jury orders man to pay $500K for assaulting police officer who killed himself after Capitol riot

The justices will review an appellate ruling that held that the former inmate, Damon Landor, could not sue prison officials for money damages under a federal law aimed at protecting prisoners’ religious rights.

Landor, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, even carried a copy of a ruling by the appeals court in another inmate’s case holding that cutting religious prisoners’ dreadlocks violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Landor hadn’t cut his hair in nearly two decades when he entered Louisiana’s prison system in 2020 on a five-month sentence. At his first two stops, officials respected his beliefs. But things changed when he got to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, about 80 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, for the final three weeks of his term.

A prison guard took the copy of the ruling Landor carried and tossed it in the trash, according to court records. Then the warden ordered guards to cut his dreadlocks. While two guards restrained him, a third shaved his head to the scalp, the records show.

Landor sued after his release, but lower courts dismissed the case. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lamented Landor’s treatment but said the law doesn’t allow him to hold prison officials liable for damages.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the fall.

Landor’s lawyers argue that the court should be guided by its decision in 2021 allowing Muslim men to sue over their inclusion on the FBI’s no-fly list under a sister statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

President Donald Trump’s Republican administration filed a brief supporting Landor’s right to sue and urged the court to hear the case.

Louisiana asked the justices to reject the appeal, even as it acknowledged Landor’s mistreatment.

Lawyers for the state wrote that “the state has amended its prison grooming policy to ensure that nothing like petitioner’s alleged experience can occur.”

The Rastafari faith is rooted in 1930s Jamaica, growing as a response by Black people to white colonial oppression. Its beliefs are a melding of Old Testament teachings and a desire to return to Africa. Its message was spread across the world in the 1970s by Jamaican music icons Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, two of the faith’s most famous exponents.

The case is Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, 23-1197.

A Burnsville man with a laundry list of previous felony charges was sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding a California electronics company, said acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson on Monday.

Thomas Thanh Phẩm, 53, also was ordered to pay more than $2.9 million in restitution.

“Fraudsters have flocked to Minnesota for far too long,” Thompson said in a statement. ““Pham is no exception. He is a serial fraudster who has demonstrated that he will not stop until he is stopped. Thanks to the hard work of law enforcement, for the next 84 months, Pham will be where he belongs — in prison.”

According to a press release, between 2019 and 2020, Pham defrauded a California based electronics manufacturing company out of more than $1.2 million by claiming he could broker multi-million dollar contracts for the business.

Pham asked the company to pay a “deposit bond” of $1,278,000. The company did so, believing it would receive millions of dollars for its repair services. As part of his ploy, Pham sent an initial delivery of 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly needed repairs. The victim company did not know that the devices were stolen property.

When the victim company asked questions about the deal that was made, Pham did not deliver as promised and offered excuses. Although he had promised to keep the deposit in a refundable escrow account, Pham instead used the money.

Pham’s first criminal conviction was more than 32 years ago, Thompson said.

He has been convicted of the following:

• Felony Theft of Property, in which Pham unlawfully used a false identity in order to fraudulently purchase a $49,000 car.

• Felony False Statements for Property, in which Pham knowingly made false statements to fraudulently purchase a vehicle valued at more than $20,000.

• Felony Unlawful Possession of Fraudulent Identification, in which Pham knowingly possessed identification documents of a victim without permission for purposes of defrauding the victim.

• Felony Securing Execution of Document by Deception, in which Pham attempted to pass a forged check.

• Multiple felony check forgeries.

• Conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a federal fraud conviction in Texas in which Pham used the identities of victim companies to defraud victims out of $1.9 million by deceiving them into shipping high-dollar electronics and computers.

After the sentencing, the judge immediately remanded Pham into custody saying it “was too dangerous and too risky” to the public for Pham “to remain at liberty.”

This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI.

Related Articles

St. Paul man’s crime spree included a carjacking, crash, shots fired, charges say

Man shot and killed in Bloomington driveway early Sunday morning

Woman drowned at White Bear Lake Sunday afternoon after jumping into water

Three shot and injured on St. Paul rooftop pool area Saturday night

How client advocates are quietly reshaping criminal defense