The PUSH and Shove of Cooperative Housing
PUSH Buffalo is cruising to completion on its second cooperative house on the West Side, this time at 129 Chenango Street. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new house is happening next Saturday, April 5 at noon. Be sure to check it out.
The roughly $140k it cost to renovate the long abandoned house was money well spent. The house is now environmentally friendly, with high-rated “super” insulation, bamboo (read “renewable source”) floors, on-demand water heaters, radiant floor heating and Energy Star windows. In keeping with PUSH’s mission of community empowerment, the work was done entirely by neighborhood locals. Says PUSH executive director Aaron Bartley, “We like to find people who need work, give them basic skills and move our projects forward with their help.”
PUSH is currently receiving applications for tenancy. Part of living there will mean participating in the federal First Home Club home-buying program. Under this program, co-op tenants pay below-market rent to PUSH, who each month places $75 of it into an escrow account. M&T Bank then matches the money on a 4-to-1 basis for the first 18 months, at which point they’ve put away considerable cash towards buying a house ($6,750 plus interest). Tenants are obliged to buy a house then, and finance it through M&T.
Saturday, April 5 @ noon. New PUSH house (129 Chenango St.) Free.
Last summer, we wrote about the ongoing work at 129 Chenango, and PUSH’s program to empower would-be low income home buyers.
You Auto Know
The 2009 Toyota Corolla
In this week’s You Auto Know, AV columnist Jim Corbran takes a look at the redesigned Toyota Corolla, and talks about the long history of this old standard in America.
Read it here.
Viennese Masters at BPO/Pacifica Quartet
AV classical columnist Jan Jezioro wrote about the BPO’s Viennese Masters series this weekend. He also covered the arrival this weekend of a quickly rising star, the Pacifica Quartet, to UB’s Slee Beethoven Quartet Cycle.
Read it here.
More On Religion and Presidential Politics…
AV columnist Mike Niman had a thing or two to add about John McCain’s pastors—John Hagee and televangelist/supporter Rod Parsley—in this week’s issue. According to Niman, Obama’s fiery Reverend Jeremiah Wright shies in comparison to the two. Hagee has called the Catholic Church “The Great Whore of Revelation 17″ and deemed Hurricane Katrina God’s revenge on New Orleans for “a level of sin that was offensive to God” (some real Old Testament Sodom and Gomorrah stuff there). Parsley, on the other hand, thinks that America’s “divine purpose” is to destroy Islam. He looks forward to America’s inevitable nuclear showdown with Iran that will bring the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. McCain has gladly accepted both men’s endorsements, thus, perhaps, implicitly agreeing with them.
Read Niman’s story in the paper on page 4, or online here.
REVEREND HAGEE’S WAR
AV columnist Bruce Fisher writes from DC:
The McCain campaign is reprising traditional Republican campaign techniques, but it’s also bringing a new face to American political discourse.
Meet the Reverend John Hagee.
Hagee is a large, loud man who regularly tells the people who attend his Texas mega-church that the Catholic faith is a “cult” and the Roman church a “whore,” that the “end times” are near, and that a pre-emptive military strike against Iran would not only be a good foreign policy move for America, but that it’s what America needs to do—because the Bible says so.
It’s pretty breathtaking stuff—and you can watch it for yourself and see a vintage Hagee performance on the perils of Catholicism.
It’s quite surprising that the mainstream media have given Barack Obama hell about Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s angry preachments, but neither Tim Russert, nor Chris Matthews, nor John McLaughlin, nor Pat Buchanan, nor any of other leading Catholic media chat-leaders have made much of Catholic-hating Reverend Hagee.
March 26, 2008
Letters from Paladino
Developer Carl Paladino is a terrific (and prolific) letter writer. This week we have two from him. The first letter is a response to this article in the March 13 AV by George Sax. The article is not about Paladino at all—it’s about Empire Zone benefits being extended to a project by the Kissling Interests in a well-to-do section of Allentown. The article refers, however, to Paladino’s high-end housing project on the waterfront downtown, which also received Empire Zone benefits. Hence the letter.
The second letter is a salvo in Paladino’s ongoing war with developer James Sandoro, Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis and the Brown administration.
[Editor's note, 3/27: There's a little more on this in this week's print paper (p. 5) and here.]
Echo Chamber: News You Could Have Read Anywhere
- The Earth continues to warm up, as evidenced by the collapse yesterday of a chunk of Antarctic ice seven times the size of Manhattan. The 160-square-mile piece of ice has been disintegrating for the past month. The rest of the Wilkins ice shelf in western Antarctica is holding on by what scientists describe as a “narrow beam” of ice. They’re worried that it, too, will soon collapse.
- The Republican party is courting local news anchorman Don Postles to run for Tom Reynolds’ soon-to-be vacant Congressional seat. Postles, one of the few news anchors to complete the Buffalo news station trifecta, has been with Channel 4 since 1993. Besides having great hair and a wonderful on-air personality, Postles also has name recognition, a trait that makes him very electable in the minds of GOP party officials. The apolitical Postles has been called upon to run for Congress by both parties in the past, but never has. Other possibly Republican candidates include Buffalo Board of Education member Chris Jacobs, Erie County Republican Committe Vice Chairman Michael Powers, President Bush’s Northeast political director Nick Sinatra and Anthony Nanula, former Buffalo comptroller and state senator.
- Hunt Real Estate agent Matt Quagliano is a very busy man, says his lawyer. Too busy, it would seem, to pay his various income taxes in many of the past eleven years. Quagliano, who was indicted in Albany last week on tax fraud charges for not paying the state in 2003 and 2006 ($20,750), has a history of paying his taxes late…really late. In 2006, for instance, he repaid the federal government $365,946 in ten years of back taxes. Until a tax agency files warrants or liens against him, Quagliano can’t be bothered with taxes. Unfortunately for him, laws are laws, and this time he got in trouble. If the felony charges aren’t dropped by New York State, it could jeopardize Quagliano’s state real estate license. (more…)
March 25, 2008
Doin’ Time turns 2…tonight
Comedian/burlesque dancer/stagehand Kristen Becker has been hosting Buffalo’s only weekly comedy show—Doin’ Time Stand Up Comedy Showcase—for two years as of tonight. Doin’ Time, which puts ten performers in front of sometimes unforgiving audiences (they’re cheap seats…what can you expect?), has become somewhat of a litmus test for local comedians looking to test their material—and their mettle—on the masses. And none of it would’ve been possible without the tireless efforts of Becker, herself an accomplished comedian (she won the Queen City Comedy Competition in 2006). Head over to Nietzsche’s tonight as Doin’ Time celebrates its 2nd anniversary. After all, the admission price—$3—is ridiculously cheap admission for an hour or two of good fun. And don’t forget to tell Kristen congrats…
Tonight @ 8pm. Nietzsche’s (248 Allen St., Buffalo) $3
630 High Street
Last week AV’s Pete Koch and I joined Fix Buffalo’s Dave Torke and Just Buffalo’s Mike Kelleher to walk through 630 High Street, an abandoned building located where High ends at Herman Street, near Genesee.
The building is 40,000 square feet, with beautiful wood floors, a central, open staircase running through all four floors and tremendous banks of south-facing windows. It’s located in a part of the city that attracts little development capital and promises no return on the money, public or private, that is invested here.
But it could be great—artist studios, a la Artspace, for example. If there’s a buyer with the money to fix the building and the tenacity to get it pulled from the city’s demolition list.
Mainstream Thinking
In the latest edition of Extra!, the magazine produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Michael Dolny reports that the 25 biggest think tanks in the US were cited 17 percent less often in 2007 than they were in 2006.
I don’t know what that means exactly—whether journalists are lazier or less trusting of think tanks; whether the think tanks are doing crap work or not promoting it properly; if there is a generally ant-intellectual trend in our public discourse that causes consumers of information to cast a cold eye on what Brookings has to say about, for example, the costs/benefits of cleaning up the fouled Great Lakes. Dolny’s report provides fodder for conversation but no real answer. However, I think one can draw some conclusions from looking at which of those think tanks do get cited most often in the press: The dominant media isn’t liberal at all. It’s middle of the road with a cant toward the right-hand gutter.
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