The New York Sun reported today that Governor Paterson pays $1,250 to live in a rent-stabilized apartment in Central Harlem. This reality, given that the governor has a second home as well as a third (the Governor’s Mansion in Albany), has reawakened the monster question surrounding New York City rents: What if we just got rid of stabilization? Wouldn’t the fresh supply of market-rate apartments drive rents down? And wouldn’t the rich forever be forbidden from freeloading off the stabilization laws?

Luckily, we have Cambridge, Mass., to answer these questions.  read more »

Livable-city activists celebrated the latest, coolest additions to the city’s urban landscape on Thursday inside the stark white interior of Frank Gehry’s first building in New York City, the IAC headquarters on 11th Avenue.

The occasion was the Municipal Art Society’s 2008 MASterwork Awards, which, according to the program, “honor the year’s top projects for their excellence in architecture and urban design, and their contribution to New York’s built environment.”

A motley assortment of New York bold-faced names showed up for the event, including Diane Von Furstenberg, there to receive a Best Historic Preservation award for the DVF Studio Headquarters at 440 West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District.

So did developer extraordinaire Jerry Speyer, who served on the awards committee and who presented the Best Building awards; and Ann Buttenwieser, who accepted a Best Neighborhood Catalyst award for her Floating Pool Lady, that pool-in-a-barge parked last summer at the foot of Brooklyn Heights.  read more »

Long-embattled East Village nightspot Le Souk will remain open at least another week.

Proprietors of the North African-themed eatery and hookah bar at 47 Avenue B are appealing their case against the State Liquor Authority (S.L.A.), which recently yanked the venue's liquor license.  read more »

According to Reuters, Richard Parsons, Time Warner's chairman, is planning to step down in 2009. "This is my last shot at this," Parsons is quoted as saying during a shareholders meeting. "I will be the outgoing chairman after this year, probably."

Get ready for journalists to start another round of the "Richard Parsons, future New York City mayoral candidate" meme.

Flashback: AOL-Time Warner's New Chief, Richard Parsons, Makes His Social Debut, December 23, 2001.

Although it seems like the pressure on Christine Quinn over the problems with City Council's finances has eased, at least one council member is only partially satisfied.

John Liu, who has been one of Quinn's most vocal critics since news of the speaker's slush fund became public, gave an interview to WNBC's News Forum in which he said of her new reforms, "I'm not sure how much good it actually does, but at least they don't do any harm."

He also continued to be critical of her original handling of the problem.

Here's the transcript, which was sent over by the network:  read more »

Last week, in an analysis of the popular vote in the Democratic race, I quoted Manuel Alvarez-Rivera, a Puerto Rican election expert who scoffed at the widely accepted estimate here on the mainland of a turnout of 1,000,000 voters in Puerto Rico's June 1 primary.

It’s a little remarkable in the first place that the matter of turnout by the late-voting Puerto Rico Democrats should be a topic of discussion at all. But with the expectation that Hillary Clinton will post a resounding win there, possibly erasing Barack Obama's overall popular-vote lead under certain circumstances (i.e., counting Florida and/or Michigan), Puerto Rico has been a crucial component of any argument that the Democratic contest is still undecided.

But the one million figure is based on the astronomical turnout that marks some Puerto Rican elections that deal with the fraught issue of that island's status, and as Alvarez-Rivera told me, that sort of intensity probably won't spill over to a presidential primary. He suggested the real number would be around 600,000.  read more »

Next Thursday, May 22, three Manhattan Democratic clubs will vote on making an endorsement in the race for Manhattan Surrogate’s Court judge, while three additional clubs will vote the following week.

In an election like this, turnout really matters, so the endorsement of the clubs are particularly critical.

According to an interested reader, here's the schedule:  read more »

Recently, Media Mob had a bad dream in which we found ourselves back in our high-school Latin class, facing a pop quiz on—let's call it Cicero—and realized with growing dread that we hadn't picked up a Latin book in ages, and were on the verge of wildly failing said test.

Speaking of failing to prepare, knowing nothing about the subject at hand, and being humiliated as a result ... have you seen the above clip from yesterday's Hardball on MSNBC?  read more »

It seems like just yesterday—well, late October, anyway—Brijit.com, the website that read and summarized magazines, was launched. At the time, The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens profiled Brijit's founder, Jeremy Brosowsky, and wrote, "[T]he Internet is littered with good ideas that turn out to be bad businesses, and online publishing can be especially tricky: Do you go mass-market or niche? Subscription-based, or free and ad-supported? Original content or aggregation of other content?"

Yesterday, the site ceased publishing new content. In a farewell post on his own site, Brosowsky wrote, "Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don’t."  read more »