Mike Fleming, a 29-year-old Ohio native who has been living on the streets since 2003, had his 15 minutes of fame a few months ago when he discovered the building schematics for the Freedom Tower while sifting through a trashcan on Houston Street.

A couple months later, Mr. Fleming again finds himself facing the same grim realities he did before his brush with notoriety.

“I was on the front page of the New York Post the week the pope came to town,” Mr. Fleming said, pulling a poster board of the story clip from his bright orange messenger bag as evidence.  read more »

Activists plan to rally at noon on Saturday outside controversial hotelier Hank Freid's Broadway Studios on the Upper West Side to "denounce the continued operation of illegal hotels" by "scamlords" citywide.

"We are targeting Hank Freid as an egregious illegal hotelier ... with a particularly insidious past," organizer Yarrow Willman-Cole told The Observer.

Mr. Freid earned the dubious distinction as one of New York City's "Worst Landlords" after contracting with the government to provide housing for homeless persons living with HIV/AIDS at his hotels amid hard economic times, then evicting those tenants to make way for upcale renovations once the economy rebounded.  read more »

The Bloomberg administration announced today that street homelessness in New York City dropped 12 percent since 2007 and 25 percent since 2005. The city has an estimated ratio of 1 unsheltered homeless person to every 2,485 people in the general population.