TechCrunch Mobility: Blue-green is the color of autonomy
States force hospitals to offer more financial aid—and it’s working in Oregon
By Melanie Evans for KFF Health News Four years ago, Oregon hospitals were under fire from state authorities and patient advocates. Hospitals, critics said, had made it too hard for patients to apply for and receive help paying their bills. Within months, the state enacted a sweeping law that required hospitals to proactively screen patients and give financial aid to those who qualify…
The hottest AI wearables and gadgets you should know about
They put a spell on us: Black musicians and spooky tunes for Halloween
This story originally ran Oct. 31, 2021. Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. As folks across the nation and their kids celebrate Halloween with…
When a fancy ballroom just isn’t enough …
A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Trump’s gilded ballroom loses its pretext for existing…
Geopolitical Tension and Funding Cuts Are Crushing Arctic Wildlife Research
This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Decades ago, one of the world’s largest subpopulations of nesting eider ducks spent its summers on tiny Mitivik Island, near the mouth of Hudson Bay. But as concern grew, in the 1990s, over their steep decline globally, the Canadian government set up a rudimentary research station near the island in the hopes of forestalling a collapse.
The modest investment paid enormous dividends over the next 30 years as Inuit partners from nearby Southampton Island, who hunt common and king eiders for food and feathers, worked with scientists from all over the world to solve the mystery of where the birds spent their winters and the causes of, and remedy for, their initial decline. In the field for months at a time, researchers also gained critical insights into how climate change, disease, diminishing sea ice, and polar bears were affecting bird populations.
As remarkably successful as the pioneering research station was, though, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change department quietly shut it down in 2024. By then, the number of nesting eiders had crashed again, from a high of 8,000 pairs to just a few hundred.
“We need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life.”
Today, federal research continues in only three of the 14 migratory bird sanctuaries in the Arctic. Hundreds of other wildlife research endeavors in the circumpolar world, including in Greenland and the US, have also been shuttered in recent years.
Like many other agencies and programs operated by Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Service has suffered from the high cost of conducting research in the Arctic, the increasing likelihood of polar bear encounters as sea ice recedes, and a series of crushing funding cuts. In the most recent blow, the Canadian government in 2025 committed to reducing the Environment and Climate Change workforce by 10 percent.
In the past, funding to monitor wildlife in the Arctic often had to be justified by its relevance to oil and gas development and how roads, pipelines, and oil wells would affect animals such as migrating caribou, according to Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. But as the search for Arctic oil and gas began to ramp down in the late 2000s, due to low natural gas prices and breakthroughs in fracking for oil and gas that spurred new production in the south, climate change became a priority.
The current circumpolar decline in funding, Hinzman said, is not just about rising costs. It stems from governments shifting priorities once again, this time from climate change to national security issues and the search for rare minerals. According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, geopolitical tensions are also undermining the work of the Arctic Council, an international forum comprising the eight Arctic countries that plays a key role in monitoring environmental changes in the region.
While support for research in the Arctic wanes, Canada is investing $405 million to advance the construction of a new highway to the Arctic coast to facilitate resource development and connect remote communities, part of a $40 billion plan to assert sovereignty over its Arctic territory.
Research in Alaska has been particularly hard hit by the suspension of hundreds of climate-based collaborations with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, and by the closure last year of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States after the National Science Foundation eliminated its operating grants. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of US research publications on climate change in Greenland fell by 32 percent. And in July, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the territory’s leading environmental research center, temporarily halted any new collaboration with US partners when President Donald Trump threatened to take over the island.
“There have always been ebbs and flows in the support for environmental monitoring in the Arctic,” said Hinzman. “But what we are seeing now is unprecedented. It’s heartbreaking because we need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life.”
The decline in Arctic research comes at a time when at least 96 Arctic and sub-Arctic mammal and bird species may be responding to warmer winters, earlier spring snowmelt, and profound landscape changes by migrating earlier in the year and traveling farther afield, sometimes in new directions.
But dozens of studies have shown that these journeys don’t always lead to more food. And they often expose birds to additional parasites and pathogens and put them at greater risk of predation. The new migrations also happen at a time when critical stopover sites—like the Salton Sea, in California—are being badly degraded by drought and development.
Polar bears and eiders are among the many animals that appear to be struggling with rapidly warming northern marine environments, from the Baltic to the Canadian Arctic Ocean to the eastern seaboard, stretching from Newfoundland to Maine. But without researchers in the field, it’s difficult to predict how or whether these species may adapt.
Studies from a now shuttered Hudson Bay research station led to tighter regulations on hunting that fueled an eider resurgence.
The situation was far different when eiders began their mysterious worldwide decline in the 1990s. Then, researchers working in Mitivik, in the East Bay Migratory Bird Sanctuary, which would later be named the Qaqsauqtuuq Migratory Bird Sanctuary, implanted satellite transmitters into the abdomens of eiders and learned where they were overwintering. The findings led to tighter regulations on eider hunting in Canada and Greenland that dramatically boosted eider numbers.
That is, until they crashed again due to disease and polar bear predation. In 2005, Grant Gilchrist, the founder of the research station, and his colleagues identified an outbreak of avian cholera—which is rare in the Arctic and likely linked to global warming—that would kill as many as 3,000 nesting females in 2006 and about half the population over the eight seasons it spread through the nesting colony.
Gilchrist was also on hand to witness how receding sea ice, brought on by climate change, forced polar bears onto land just when the eiders were sitting on their eggs. “The bears were like grazing cows leisurely moving through a pasture, stopping to feed [on eggs] whenever they were hungry,” he said. And herring gulls, which can’t force an eider off its nest, learned to eat the eggs that the bears had missed while the eiders were away.
Canadian Wildlife Service scientist Jennifer Provencher and her colleagues discovered that even though the eiders nesting in Mitivik hosted larger-than-expected communities of gastrointestinal worms and flukes, which benefit from warming temperatures, the parasites reduced the ducks’ exposure to contaminants such as mercury and lead. The parasites appear to absorb and clear contaminants from eider tissues. This is significant because mercury and lead, which are leaching from melting permafrost in many parts of the Arctic, can result in reproductive failure in ducks, and they can be harmful to humans who rely on ducks for food. The Inuit have higher levels of mercury than the general Canadian population.
Other researchers found that eiders, like some other animals exposed to deadly disease, eventually developed an immunity to avian cholera. “Had we not been there, we would never have been able to document any of this,” said Gilchrist, who says he has little doubt that most of what Mitivik researchers discovered is happening in other parts of the Arctic.
In the past, Indigenous hunters have reported dramatic changes in the Canadian Arctic, such as sharp declines in ivory gull numbers; orcas moving into the region and killing narwhal and bowhead whales; and grizzly bears migrating north, mating with polar bears, and producing hybrids. But it is almost impossible to say what is going on in the vast areas that are too far afield for Inuit hunters without putting scientists in the field. In Arctic Canada, there are approximately 150,000 people living in an area that is about half the size of the lower 48 states. Only a fraction of these people lives above the Arctic Circle.
Environment and Climate Change Canada did not respond to questions about funding cuts and the cessation of research in Mitivik. In a statement, the department said it is “committed to the long-term conservation of biological biodiversity and abundance,” noting that experts are working on new research programs with territorial governments and Indigenous organizations, and with new technologies to help track and understand birds and other animals, including polar bears.
Determining how polar bears are faring in Canada is becoming difficult, if not impossible, because of a lack of funding.
Still, Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta scientist who has conducted research over the past 40 years on polar bears in Norway, Canada, and Alaska, notes that support for polar bear research in Canada is at an all-time low. Determining how polar bears are faring in Canada—which is home to 13 of the world’s 19 polar bear populations—is becoming increasingly difficult, he says, if not impossible, because of a lack of government funding.
“We’ve pretty much stopped any research beyond the long-term monitoring in Western Hudson Bay and a project in James Bay” funded by a private foundation, he says. “There is almost no other research on polar bears in Canada now.”
Ornithologist Mark Mallory spent 12 years conducting research at migratory bird nesting sites across the Canadian Arctic while working for the Canadian Wildlife Service, but he left that job for a research chair at Acadia University in part because of the high cost of conducting research in the polar regions and the endless struggle to secure consistent funding. Mallory is still very much interested in what is happening in the Arctic, but his years in the field and as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Arctic Science have given him a broader perspective on the challenges scientists face when trying to figure out how a warming climate is affecting wildlife.
“No credible scientist would deny that not enough is being invested in long-term monitoring,” he says. “But the bigger problem is not enough is being done to act on what we know is happening…Do we really think 10 or 20 more years of data showing ranges shrinking north, or clutch sizes reducing, or skinnier species is going to change anything in the minds of politicians or the public?”
Gilchrist appreciates Mallory’s frustrations with governments that refuse to act on climate change, but he—like many Arctic researchers—still believes that long-term monitoring with Inuit partners is essential. “Somebody should still be out in nature monitoring wildlife and the natural environment, and quantifying changes that are occurring or not occurring,” he said.
He doesn’t know whether the eiders of Mitivik Island will eventually return or whether they have found safer areas to nest. Because of the high costs of operating at Qaqsauqtuuq and the increased odds of running into polar bears, Gilchrist is now focusing his research at a site on Baffin Island, where it is cheaper to work and where there are fewer bears.
Spooky Girl 831’s guide to weird, wild and haunted Halloween events in Santa Cruz
Want to build a UK datacenter? Please hold while Whitehall transfers you
Building a UK datacenter spans three government departments: one handles datacenter policy, another telecoms, and a third energy.
MPs this week explored what Prime Minister Andy Burnham's summer reshuffle means for businesses navigating Whitehall.
Liz Lloyd, parliamentary under-secretary of state, sits across two departments with a portfolio of responsibilities as long as a weekly shopping list. She explained to MPs this week that, following the decision to get rid of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), liaison with the tech industry on datacenter construction fell to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST).
Lloyd, who works across BIST and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), went on to explain that digital infrastructure sits within DCMS.
Speaking to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Lloyd acknowledged that some departmental responsibilities overlapped.
"In terms of sector responsibilities, that is clear that technology, sorry, that telecom sits with DCMS and datacenters with BIST. When you're actually in an industry or you're trying to run a business, that that that is clear," the junior minister said.
Any business trying to build a datacenter might also want to know how to get power to it. As far as The Register can figure out, that would be the Department for Energy and Net Zero. Planning permission rests with local government, although the overall policy lies with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. It may be clear, but it is hardly simple.
The problem is real, though. Earlier this month, Microsoft pulled out of plans for Britain's largest AI supercomputer because of difficulties securing power for the facility.
Elsewhere in the hearing, Lloyd was asked about the government's early 2025 claim that modernizing aging technology and digitizing processes could deliver £45 billion in productivity savings.
Asked if the government stood by the figure, the junior minister said: "The £45 billion figure was an estimate of long-term productivity gains. It wasn't a kind of one-off figure for savings… it was never a figure that was a target or a cashable savings figure."
When the figure was publicized under the Starmer government in January 2025, the press release was headed "Archaic tech sees public sector miss £45 billion annual savings." It continued: "Taxpayer funded services from the NHS to local councils are missing out on £45 billion in productivity savings because they are too often dependent on old and outdated technology."
It claimed the government would "tackle these issues" using "digital tools, AI and common sense to overhaul public sector technology." ®
Their Buildings Are Set to Be Demolished. They Won’t Move Out.
Sometime in the late 1980s, Doris Ruffin’s decrepit market-rate apartment in Harlem collapsed. With nowhere else to go, she took her young nephew, Prince, to a city shelter. For months they lived there, occupying a kind of limbo, protected from the elements but never really settled. Ruffin is not one for big emotional displays, but when a social worker helped her find a place at the Elliott-Chelsea Houses, a public housing complex on the West Side of Manhattan, she was overcome with relief. “I felt like the heavens had opened up,” she said. The apartment was nothing fancy, but it was a home. And at 30 percent of her income—the policy for public housing—the price was right. “Now I had a stable, affordable place to live.”
Ruffin has been at Elliott-Chelsea for more than 30 years. The apartment’s two bedrooms allowed her to raise Prince, who liked keeping small pets and fixing electronics, until he was a teenager. She often worked two security jobs at a time to make ends meet. Eventually, she earned a master’s degree in speech therapy. By the late 2010s, Ruffin was making a decent salary and paying a little over $1,500 a month, still a manageable sum in a neighborhood that she had watched transform as artists and luxury retailers crept in, followed by the lush tourist trap of the High Line park, the gleaming towers of Hudson Yards, and the soaring rents that came along with them.
Public housing continued to support Ruffin in 2019, when a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood plasma, forced her to retire. The treatment damaged her kidneys and she went on dialysis, withdrawing her pension to cover her mounting medical expenses. By then, her apartment had mold problems, and the New York City Housing Authority, racked by decades of federal disinvestment, was slow to remediate. Her property manager helped place her in a seniors-only building where the units were clean and large enough to fit her new rolling walker. Friends from the community visited to check on her. Together, they would take walks at the park nearby or watch Knicks games on TV. From her window, she could look out over a rippling canopy of green and the Empire State Building rising above it.
One day in 2024, Doris Ruffin returned to her apartment after a long hospital stay to find a notice from NYCHA taped to her door: She would be relocated. The housing authority—working with Related Companies, the mega-developer of Hudson Yards, and its spin-off firm Essence Development—intended to demolish and rebuild her home, along with the whole of Elliott-Chelsea and the nearby Fulton Houses. Ruffin’s building would be among the first leveled. Staff “relocation specialists” would help the 67-year-old move into a different unit in the complex. In a few years’ time, she would be placed into a brand-new building packed with modern amenities like fitness centers and central AC. Ruffin was unmoved by this pledge. “I was in disbelief,” she said. Sure, the elevators needed an overhaul, and the plumbing clearly deserved repairs. But why did these problems require a teardown?
“I was in disbelief,” she said. Sure, the elevators needed an overhaul, and the plumbing clearly deserved repairs. But why did these problems require a teardown?
The plan to transform Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea falls under a federal scheme that allows local agencies to convert developments out of the public housing system and bring on private real estate companies that can finance their rehab or reconstruction. Often, these partners are big corporate landlords that are more than happy to take over managing the homes—and collecting the government-guaranteed rent that they provide. As Congress has withdrawn funding from public housing, many cities have used the program to turn their entire portfolios over to private managers. This might be fine if the companies consistently delivered big upgrades. But the program does not exactly have a stellar track record. A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office found that large percentages of tenants in converted developments nationwide reported poor renovation quality and nonresponsive management, and a 2022 assessment from Human Rights Watch warned that, in New York City, it has “negatively impacted the right to housing of low-income residents by leading to a reduction in oversight.” That neglect has caused a range of serious problems for tenants, from increased evictions to poor living conditions.
NYCHA, however, has bulldozed ahead. So far, the agency has converted around a quarter of its public housing stock, and its plan for Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea is especially aggressive. Under a $1.9 billion proposal, Related and Essence would conduct the first demolition under the program, razing all 18 buildings of the complexes and replacing them with six high-rise towers for public housing residents. The developers would erect thousands of new mixed-income apartments on the remainder of the land, some of the most valuable on the planet. Tenants have described a planning process riddled with deceptions and disregard for their input. But with the housing authority staring down roughly $78 billion in backlogged maintenance over the next 20 years, officials have said that the cash flow from this conversion is one of the few ways to give the aging apartments the repairs they need. The agency views the project as a model for other developments, according to NYCHA’s chief executive, Lisa Bova-Hiatt.
None of this smelled right to Ruffin. “These developers are just being greedy,” she said, her eyes growing big. “They don’t care about the people and how it’s affecting them.” When she viewed the temporary apartment that NYCHA had reserved for her, she found small, narrow rooms that were impossible to navigate with her walker. Ruffin decided that she was staying put. In her 14-floor building, she is one of 24 holdouts, as of late September. Six other families have refused to move out of a mid-rise in Fulton, the first marked for demolition in that complex. Together with tenants across their community, they are fighting in street rallies and in court against a plan that they view as a land grab. “This is what we’re used to, this is our environment,” Ruffin said. “If you take that away, you’re taking everything away from us.”
In picking this fight, Ruffin and her neighbors are battling a political behemoth. Not only do the housing authority and its real estate partners favor the plan. New York City’s new democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on holding corporate landlords accountable, seems eager to turn public housing over to private companies if it means a quick fix for troubled infrastructure. And in Washington, bipartisan members of Congress recently authorized a vast expansion of such conversions nationwide, a continuation of a decades-long retreat from direct control of public goods.
As the country unwinds the social gains of the twentieth century, what remains for public housing tenants?
Public housing began as a grand social democratic experiment. Born from the economic depths of the Great Depression, the Housing Act of 1937 charged government with creating affordable rentals for working Americans, a stout brick bulwark against the slums of the for-profit housing market. The idea was not without opposition. Politicians on both sides of the aisle smeared it as socialist, and real estate groups decried it as a threat to their livelihood. In the end, the program, known formally as Section 9 of the law, was a compromise, ensuring that public housing would be built to minimum standards and reserved for the poorest citizens, so as not to compete with the private market. Still, into the postwar era, its segregated garden apartments and squat brick townhouses enjoyed a foothold in urban life. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his 1944 State of the Union address, nodded to the program when he declared “the right of every family to a decent home.”
Over the decades, however, that sunny New Deal vision has clouded. In the midcentury, cities struggled as white residents fled for the suburbs, lured by incentives denied to families of color. Public housing became the high-rise terrain of a Black urban underclass. Politicians and the media blamed the projects for rising crime and poverty, despite the vibrant communities millions still found there. Beginning in the 1970s, notorious superblocks, like St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe and Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, served as justification for Congress to drastically defund the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Local agencies spiraled into dysfunction; much public housing was allowed to deteriorate. In 1995, President Bill Clinton promised to “end public housing as we know it,” a bid for bipartisan agreement. “Most public housing worked pretty well,” said Edward Goetz, a professor of urban planning at the University of Minnesota and the author of New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy. “Yet we embarked on this large-scale effort to eliminate it.”
Plumes of debris rose from Chicago to Atlanta to New Orleans, where agencies took federal grants to sell off or detonate their public housing, as white, affluent families streamed back to urban centers. On the grounds, developers built mixed-income rentals, but most public housing was never replaced. Even at this stage, politicized tenants understood these “transformations” as a land grab. Some were given government-issued vouchers to rent from landlords in the private market; many were pushed out of the system altogether when they were rescreened for eligibility. Thousands of families were scattered into other poor and segregated pockets of the urban landscape. Nationally, the number of public housing units has fallen from 1.4 million at the program’s postwar peak to 860,000 today, even as the waiting lists in big cities reach the hundreds of thousands.
Into this smoky air of decline, HUD launched a new plan for public housing transformation. Adopted in 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, is a classic Obama-era public-private partnership—much like the deals that cities strike with companies to manage everything from utilities to hospitals. Under the program, local agencies can convert public housing into what’s called project-based Section 8 housing, a different form of low-income rental that provides roughly double the funding stream. The public still owns the land, while the private partner leases it for 99 years and takes a 50 percent stake in the venture. The idea is that these companies can borrow private capital and access tax credits to finance repairs in ways that housing agencies can’t. Unlike the diabolical demolition schemes of the 1990s and 2000s, the program stipulates one-for-one replacement of public housing units and guarantees tenants the right to return, with the same rent and without rescreening. For struggling housing authorities, the advent of the program was something of a stunner, said Paul Williams, a housing policy analyst who serves as executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise. He described it as a “life hack” for the agencies.
Historically, New York City has preserved its public housing. NYCHA is the largest housing authority in the country. It’s responsible for some 400,000 tenants across 335 developments, the equivalent of a midsize city. And while the agency has had its share of dysfunction, it was long the well-run exception to the bad big-city systems—“public housing that worked,” as its most prominent historian once described it. But decades of austerity have caught up to NYCHA. As with virtually all housing authorities, its apartments literally cost more to run than it receives in rent and subsidies combined. In 2018, NYCHA was forced into a federal consent decree requiring agencywide reforms and repairs to dangerous conditions like lead, mold, and broken elevators. It’s easy to see the bind that housing authorities like NYCHA face, and why many cities are racing to partner with deep-pocketed landlords. “We are limited in the tools that we have to try to reverse the decades and decades of federal disinvestment,” Bova-Hiatt said.
From the outset, however, RAD had problems. Certainly, the program attracted billions in investment, and there were complexes where it resulted in serviceable rehabs. But introducing corporate landlords with a profit motive meant completely changing the incentive structure of running these homes. Plenty imported their habitual cost-cutting practices. “When you bring in these new companies, some of them have very checkered histories,” said Iziah Thompson, a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York. “Some of them are companies that the tenant movement has been fighting as ‘slumlords’ in the low-income housing space for years.”
For these reasons, many advocates have come to see the program not as a “life hack” but as another spasm in the death throes of public housing.
In January, Doris Ruffin held onto her walker as she spoke into a cluster of local news mics at the entrance of the Hudson Guild, Elliott-Chelsea’s community center. Dressed in layers against the cold, she admonished NYCHA for harassing her. Flanking Ruffin were residents of the complexes, supporters from the Chelsea neighborhood, the Democratic district leader, a former state senator, and members of local left-wing organizations. After the seniors refused to leave, NYCHA began putting heat on them, they allege. Agency staff knocked on their doors day and night. Notices arrived threatening lease termination for unspecified rule violations. Many of the seniors are ill, disabled, or speak limited English. NYCHA, for its part, has said that all these measures were taken in the spirit of providing tenants with accurate information about the plan and the terms of their lease. In 2025, the housing authority sued 16 residents, including Ruffin, in hopes that a judge would have them removed; the judge declined, and the agency withdrew its request. But some tenants were intimidated by these tactics. “It is not right,” Ruffin said to the crowd. “It is not ethical.”
Standing at Ruffin’s side was Renee Keitt, looking on protectively from behind thick-rimmed black eyeglasses. An urban farmer and community organizer, Keitt grew up in Elliott-Chelsea. Her mother lives in the complex. Her grandmother died there. In early 2025, Keitt became the resident association president by running an insurgent campaign against NYCHA’s redevelopment scheme, unseating a longtime incumbent who supported the plan. Since then, she has served as the de facto leader of the opposition. “Nobody has asked us,” Keitt said during her turn at the mics. “We demand that you start listening.”
How the process of repairing Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea became a crucible for the fate of public housing in New York is a long and complicated story. But as Keitt indicates, it begins and ends with tenants feeling that their wishes are being ignored, a familiar experience for people of color across the United States whose government-run homes a city has decided to tear down in order to make room for the more affluent. Back in 2019, officials gave up on an initial plan to demolish two Fulton buildings and replace them with mixed-income towers when residents revolted. Chastened, the mayor’s office launched a working group process, where tenant representatives, community board members, and officials hashed out the gritty details of repairing both complexes under the local RAD variant (known as Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, or PACT). There were asbestos issues to consider, as well as leaks, mold, outdated elevators, and faulty heat and hot water. A delicate compromise was reached, with tenants agreeing to conversion on two conditions: no demolition of residential buildings and a limited amount of new market-rate construction. After NYCHA and tenant leaders chose Related and Essence to lead the project, community meetings were held, and tenants were bused to sample properties to demonstrate the companies’ good work. In 2022, Keitt recalled, the developers promised that tenants would receive renovation plans the following year.
Instead, tenants received a shock. In 2023, NYCHA and tenant leaders announced that it was now a demolition and redevelopment project. Many learned about the change from a press release, on social media, or from a story in The New York Times: “to improve public housing, new york city moves to tear it down.” Rebuilding was more cost-effective than renovating, officials explained. To rehab all 2,056 units would cost $1.14 billion, whereas the developers could reconstruct the buildings from scratch for just a touch more, at $1.3 billion. The main thing, though, was the benefit that the new plan would provide: Tenants’ apartments would be replaced with brand-new ones. Reconstruction would occur in phases, meaning that nearly everyone would move only once, directly into their new homes. The few tenants who were required to move twice would be placed temporarily into freshly renovated units on the same campus for the estimated three years that the first phase of construction would require. A rezoning would allow the developers, over at least the next 16 years, to deliver retail spaces and apartments to the housing-starved city, including 3,500 mixed-income units, with most renting at market rate and approximately 1,000 restricted to middle earners. A survey, administered by NYCHA, showed that tenants preferred this course of action.
Much about this change of plans outraged tenants who had been part of the process. The renovation estimates used to justify wholesale demolition, which had ballooned from $492 million to more than $1 billion when rerun by the developers, seemed fishy to say the least. Tenants believed that their buildings were in sound structural condition. And NYCHA and its partners helped nothing by failing to provide a third-party building condition and cost report, claiming that it was not officially required by HUD now that the plan was to redevelop. In 2025, the figures were called into question by a former NYCHA chief architect, who balked at the notion that rehabilitation costs could have doubled in the space of two years and suggested that the numbers were likely invented to support the partners’ preferred plan. (NYCHA contends that it has provided tenants and community groups with cost estimates. New buildings will provide a higher “degree of preservation,” a spokesperson said, meaning that they will last longer before needing repairs, not to mention offer greater value for NYCHA and the city.) Meanwhile, the housing authority and the companies stood to split $16.3 million annually in revenue from the first Section 8 tower alone. Tenants, of course, wanted repairs for their homes. But they suspected that the land they lived on was becoming a piggy bank to cover NYCHA’s capital shortfalls and “unlock tremendous value,” as the project’s website put it, for two real estate giants.
Particularly galling to skeptics was the claim that tenants themselves had chosen the new plan. The survey in question had asked them to pick between “rehabilitation of existing units” or two types of “new construction.” Nowhere was the term “demolition” used. Only 29 percent of the population of 3,388 eligible tenants responded; 57 percent, 550 tenants total, marked a preference for new construction. Now, NYCHA and the developers were trotting out these results to claim consent. “I’ve never seen anything so obviously disingenuous,” said Thompson, of the Community Service Society, who worked with tenants throughout the process. “It was just terribly, terribly dishonest.”
An irony of all this engineering is that it only hardened some tenants’ opposition. Their resistance was not limited to objections about an illegitimate process. As details emerged, tenants learned of significant material costs inherent in the plan. For one thing, conversion to a Section 8 lease and private management would mean a loss of certain protections afforded them by conventional public housing—despite New York City’s expanded rights for program participants. Tenants, for example, are no longer permitted to transfer into other complexes. Most consequential is a seriously defanged grievance process for issues like nonpayment of rent and succession of tenancy after a relative moves or dies, legal advocates have said, with private landlords moving more quickly to remove tenants and frequently bypassing required procedures intended to keep them housed. “We know that there is an increased eviction rate after a conversion,” said Celines Miranda, a lifelong resident of Elliott-Chelsea and vice president of its resident association, who strongly opposes the plan. “This is an issue throughout the city as a whole.”
In addition to threatening tenant rights, the redevelopment of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea would gobble up valued open space, reducing well-used playgrounds and recreation areas across the two campuses by roughly 28 percent to make way for mixed-income buildings. In their place, developers have proposed an uninspiring set of new playgrounds and pocket parks that would largely be divided by massive high-rises or enclosed within their courtyards, disconnected from the sidewalk and the neighborhood. “If you look at the before-after renders, there is no significant improvement,” explained Matthias Altwicker, an architecture professor at the New York Institute of Technology who studies open space in NYCHA developments, and is otherwise a proponent of the city’s version of the RAD program. “These are terrible spaces compared to the existing through-block playground and sitting areas that were typical of NYCHA historically.”
Meanwhile, tenants like Ruffin, who were expected to relocate during construction, would lose their neighbors as they moved to temporary apartments in buildings where they knew nobody. Even under the best circumstances, the strong networks of the complexes would be radically disrupted. “We will lose a sense of community, something that has been so essential in our lives,” Miranda said.
In her professional life, Keitt had seen beloved community gardens destroyed when developers wished to erect towers on the land, with little regard for the harm it caused, she told me. Now, she looked at the plan for her home and recalled the botched public housing redevelopments of cities like Chicago. She glanced around her own city and saw NYCHA partnering with notorious slumlords like Pinnacle Group that subjected tenants to miserable conditions. Keitt decided to fight. At tenant meetings, she met Miranda and other neighbors who distrusted demolition. Together, they knocked on every door across the complexes, collecting more than 1,000 signatures on a petition against the plan, nearly double the number who selected “new construction” on NYCHA’s survey. Today, Keitt and Miranda not only are officers in their resident association but also lead the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Tenants Against Demolition, a multigenerational, multilingual group of residents that crashes NYCHA board meetings, testifies at City Council hearings, and stages rallies outside the Related Companies’ glassy Hudson Yards HQ. “It’s a constant fight, a constant battle every day,” Keitt said. “There’s a sense of violation of our homes. I’m worrying about the seniors. I’m worrying about everyone.”
There are, of course, pro-demolition tenants who simply want improvements to their homes, come what may. Miguel Acevedo, the president of the Fulton Houses resident association, has been especially outspoken on behalf of those eager for new construction. His attitude is basically pragmatic. Washington is not coming to the rescue, Acevedo reasoned: “If you have no funding, you get nothing fixed. If you get some type of funding, at least you have the opportunity for capital improvements.” Fears about poor-quality redevelopment are unfounded, he told me. Related and Essence are “the best of the best.” Tenant opposition he dismissed outright as being ginned up “through lies.” His position has resulted in some pretty ugly confrontations in community meetings with the anti-demolition crowd.
NYCHA and the real estate companies, for their part, are adamant that the project responds to tenants’ wishes. Engagement is their maxim. Jamar Adams, who spent his early years in public housing and played professional football before founding Essence, has become the face of the project. He points to an input process that entailed more than 65 community meetings. “I brought the transparency, the thoughtfulness, the desire to engage with the residents and not make decisions without them,” Adams told me. “I see a lot of the residents very much like I see my family.” Despite this familial thoughtfulness, however, many participants still ended up feeling blindsided—and pushed to the margins of their community.
The Chelsea neighborhood, over the last two decades, has witnessed a dramatic influx of wealth in one of the most extreme gentrification processes in the country. Part of the rationale for allowing developers to clear public land for new housing is that it will absorb the renters who want to live there, a supply-side logic that has gained traction in recent years. Adams is fluent in this line of rhetoric. “Everyone knows that we need housing,” he said, yet “we allow the loud minority to slow down and stop and delay much-needed housing stock in the city of New York, and it’s not OK.” But those in public housing can’t help noticing that the new mixed-income towers will include few if any rentals that they, their families, or their friends can afford.
Neighbors of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea have become involved in the fight. In the area, there is no shortage of well-heeled townhouse owners, middle-income renters, and social activists who have taken up the cause. Many were genuinely appalled to learn that the redevelopment could mean living alongside a construction zone for decades. They were similarly appalled by the city’s treatment of public housing residents, said Layla Law-Gisiko, the local Democratic district leader, who has been one of the plan’s most steadfast critics. “It became very clear that this was a major concern across Chelsea, not only for public housing tenants but for neighbors, local businesses, and residents of surrounding developments,” Law-Gisiko said. “As the scale and duration of what was being proposed became clearer, people became increasingly alarmed.” These forces, the “loud minority” to whom Adams apparently refers, now rally alongside tenants, and pro-demolition partisans have seized on that support to discredit the opposition. There’s an impressive level of message discipline on this score. “There are some very loud, vocal groups, and we have to be honest that those are somewhat organized by outsiders,” Heather Beck, NYCHA’s chief real estate officer, told me. “I think outsiders have come in and stoked concern with residents that it’s a ‘land grab,’” Adams said. “That’s NIMBY,” Acevedo said. “That’s selfishness.”
Seemingly galvanized by these provocations, this coalition of supporters has poured time and money into scrutinizing the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea plan by researching public documents and posing challenges in the courts. A variety of legal filings exploits everything from land-use arguments to state public housing statutes to tenant law in an effort to halt demolition. In several cases, Ruffin is a named plaintiff. “She has been harassed and threatened,” one filing reads. NYCHA is firm that its conduct is about working with tenants to find a resolution. “It’s absolutely not harassment,” said Bova-Hiatt. “It’s engagement.” The legal approach, however, has created obstacles. Early this year, tenants won a temporary restraining order, bringing all the engagement to a grinding halt, at least for a time.
If tenants seem needlessly intransigent about a plan designed to build them brand-new homes, it’s worth considering the program’s record. When people fret about privatization of public goods, a primary concern is the drift away from strong democratic oversight. Across the country, turning public housing over to real estate barons has come with abuses undeterred by public regulatory agreements and accountability procedures, including failed relocations, wrongful evictions, and wretched living conditions.
Miami offers the most vivid warning in its conversion of Liberty Square, the subject of a chilling PBS documentary that Keitt has screened at the Hudson Guild Theater as political education for her tenants. In a rapidly gentrifying district of the city, the housing authority worked with a subsidiary of Related Companies on a $300 million redevelopment of the historically Black public housing complex. Input sessions were held; promises were made to avoid displacement. But before the new mixed-income complexes came online, the housing authority turned around and offered tenants the option to take vouchers for the private market in place of their right to return to reconstructed homes. In the end, only five of the more than 600 original families remained in the community. Complaints about mold, leaks, and cracks in the walls have continued in the replacement buildings.
San Francisco, one of the first cities to convert the bulk of its government-run stock, attracted $800 million in capital improvements across the system. Yet tenant complaints increased drastically for issues like lack of heat and hot water, plumbing malfunctions, and nonworking appliances. Private management companies have reportedly been combative about fixing routine problems.
New York City, with its newfound will to remake an expanse of noncommodified brick towers into productive assets, provides some of the most extensive data on the outcomes of RAD conversions. More than 44,000 units have been converted to private management under the program since 2016, and another 18,000 are marked for inclusion. In a survey published in 2024, the Community Service Society found that tenants of converted properties were more likely to report that their new landlords met their repair needs—as should be expected, given the large capital infusions to the developments. At the same time, however, tenants were more likely to describe issues like leaks, mold, and faulty heat and hot water as “serious” than those in conventional NYCHA public housing. New York City tenants have also suffered more than 10,000 code violations in converted developments since 2021, according to data from the independent local news outlet The City Reporter. In the worst cases, such neglect has allegedly led to catastrophes like a recent gas explosion at the Boston Secor Houses in the Bronx.
To account for the stacks of violations at converted developments, NYCHA has cited analysis by a housing research group showing that such conditions are acute during the construction phase but decrease after renovations are complete. But the aggregated data hardly explains the many alarming tenant complaints about particular landlords years after their buildings have been renovated, as captured by the Community Service Society, nor the hundreds of incidents, identified by The City Reporter, in which NYCHA has been forced to hire vendors to perform emergency repairs that private managers ignored.
Converted properties in New York City have also shown higher eviction rates. One problem is the loss of a rigorous grievance process under private landlords, according to attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group. Tenants technically retain the right to request a hearing to dispute rent increases after a loss of income, resolve nonpayment, or plead for succession of tenancy. But it is significantly more burdensome for them to do so, and whereas the housing authority is prevented from pursuing evictions during the grievance process, private landlords under the program are not. That change has undermined succession rights and led to a shift away from NYCHA’s long-standing efforts to avoid removing tenants. Indeed, in 2024, eviction rates in NYCHA properties under private management were nearly five times greater than in conventional public housing, according to a report from the New York City comptroller’s office.
NYCHA took exception to claims of a weakened grievance process, saying that it handles income recertifications and holds grievance hearings with tenants in a timely manner—and that it takes pains to protect public housing succession rights. The housing authority also challenged the findings of the comptroller’s eviction report. “The fact remains that there have been very few evictions” under the program, a NYCHA spokesperson said. “The program upholds resident rights and protections and provides households with ongoing social services and financial assistance to resolve existing rental arrears.” The agency’s own data shows that in 2025, eviction rates in converted properties were well below the citywide rate and in line with those in conventional public housing. Advocates, however, have continued to worry about systemic problems observed in the comptroller’s report, like routine failures by private managers to provide struggling tenants a copy of the grievance procedures or offer repayment agreements, as required before filing an eviction.
Recognizing these problems, some advocates and policymakers have fought for federal funding to preserve the existing public housing system. The cost of full repair may sound insurmountable: A recent report from the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities found that it would take roughly $170 billion over the next 10 years to address the system’s needs. But compared, for example, to the $28 billion per year in mortgage interest deductions for homeowners, itself a form of subsidized housing, the price tag sounds less daunting, said Korey Lundin, a senior attorney at the National Housing Law Center. “The federal government could choose to do something different,” Lundin said. “Congress could choose to adequately fund federal housing.”
A bit of hope glimmered in August, when Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, a bill that would fully address the long-standing capital backlog in federal homes, modernizing them to be sustainable and environmentally resilient. That wager, however, has been shot down in the past, and in recent years Congress has mostly continued to place its bets on the private sector. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, recently passed into law with bipartisan support, makes the RAD program permanent and lifts the national cap on conversions by 100,000 units. The law also includes provisions intended to better enforce tenant rights in converted properties in the future, as well as an annual mandate for HUD to study the impacts of the program on residents. All the while, President Donald Trump’s HUD is chopping away at funding even for supposedly stable Section 8 assistance and taking measures to make it easier for cities to demolish or dispose of public housing.
In the face of capricious federal decision-making, more grassroots policy demands have arisen. Ramona Ferreyra, the founder of the New York–based public housing preservation group Save Section 9, promotes an array of state and local taxes that could provide sustaining revenue. “People kept asking, how are you going to fund public housing?” said Ferreyra, a NYCHA tenant. “Funding the repairs is the only way to stop privatization.” A state proposal would tax every transaction that Wall Street processes, and the group requests that it earmark for NYCHA 5 percent of the proceeds, which would provide $2 billion in annual operating funds. Ten percent of a local tax increase on millionaires could bring NYCHA some $400 million per year. To finance renovations, Keitt favors the use of a program called Comprehensive Modernization, which has been responsible for revitalizing several NYCHA complexes when residents negotiated funding as part of local rezoning efforts. In the end, what tenants like Ferreyra and Keitt demand is straightforward: the option to preserve public housing, without unasked-for private entanglements. “What I would like to see is democracy at work,” Keitt said. “Ask people what they want. Give them choices.”
In New York City, democracy has proved to be a contested proposition. Some advocates were hopeful that Mamdani would step in the way of what they see as privatization. On the campaign trail, he quoted liberally from New Deal Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and promised to double capital spending on NYCHA. For some, then, it felt like a heel turn when Mamdani took office and committed to moving full speed ahead with the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea redevelopment. In a video from February, Cea Weaver, an accomplished organizer whom Mamdani appointed to lead the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, could be seen at a meeting with residents of the complexes saying, “We are interested in continuing to move forward the plans here.” The room erupted in protest. Later, the anti-demolition group sent a letter to the mayor, requesting a halt to the project and a meeting with him. To date, he has not replied.
Before long, the Mamdani administration came out in full-throated support of the program. His housing plan, released in May, devotes significant funding to the local version of RAD and a related program called the Public Housing Preservation Trust, which would lease properties to a public-benefit corporation. Unable to gain an audience with the mayor himself, the opposition has taken its message to a range of public forums. In July, several dozen agitators showed up at NYCHA’s Annual Plan public hearing, held in an airy auditorium in Downtown Brooklyn. Many wore T-shirts that read PROTECT PUBLIC HOUSING. One by one, they testified against the inclusion of thousands of new conversions in Mamdani’s 2027 budget. “Our buildings are sound and strong,” said Samantha Ortiz, a Fulton resident. “We want rehabilitation, no privatization.” Miranda urged tenants not to sign new Section 8 leases. Even policymakers chimed in. Council member Chris Banks, chair of the Committee on Public Housing, has been a skeptic of the program and advocates that all tenants get to vote on whether their properties will be converted. At the hearing, he questioned the Mamdani administration’s commitment to NYCHA residents. After Banks spoke, as an official attempted to call the meeting to order, the crowd broke into shouts: “Save Section 9!” Officials looked dourly out from the stage.
Weaver seems unconvinced by these eruptions. She has, in many ways, become the spokesperson for the mayor-as-landlord, in part because she’s unusually willing to respond to critics, scrapping with anti-privatization crusaders on X and absorbing the most searing accusations from tenants. (Section 8 is “a form of public housing,” Weaver told Keitt when they clashed at a recent NYCHA tenant forum hosted by the mayor’s office. “I’m not understanding how you keep telling my tenants that,” Keitt replied. “It’s not the truth.”) A onetime opponent of the RAD program, Weaver is now a true believer. Above all, she emphasizes its publicness. The program is a more “politically stable, hopeful option for a democratic socialist administration,” Weaver told me. NYCHA maintains control, with the private partner enjoying little more than a “vendor relationship” to the public agency. Strong accountability measures encouraged by the city—including a “roundtable” of providers to support tenants during conversion, and potentially even “co-management” agreements between resident associations and new private landlords—will help enforce tenant rights and monitor renovation quality. If landlords fail to uphold their end of the agreement, NYCHA can always kick them out. “Everything about this is made possible through public money, public control over the asset,” Weaver said of the program. “This is something that is entirely with the public sector in the driver’s seat, and that’s important because the public is where democracy happens.”
What gets lost in policy debates is that the people who actually live in public housing may have separate motivations from those of political and real estate elites. For them, it doesn’t seem like NIMBYism to say that they don’t want their perfectly good apartment buildings razed for the sake of the bottom line.
Anti-demolition tenants have a different form of democracy in mind, one in which they make the final decisions about the fate of their homes. That fate will far outlast the oversight intentions of the Mamdani administration. What gets lost in policy debates is that the people who actually live in public housing may have separate motivations from those of political and real estate elites. It doesn’t seem like NIMBYism for them to say that they don’t want their perfectly good apartment buildings razed for the sake of the bottom line. It doesn’t sound outrageous to ask the city, which funded public housing for decades, to scrounge up money to sustain it—at least as much as it finds for programs like police and schools. Nor does it seem strange to expect the new mayor, who promised to tame the excesses of the private sector, to protect working people rather than surrendering them to the whims of profiteers.
In July, an appeals court lifted the temporary restraining order that had throttled the plan at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea. For developers, that means it’s open season. Yet NYCHA must turn the buildings over unoccupied. The Mamdani administration, high priests of pristine optics, would prefer to avoid the spectacle of hauling seniors into housing court. At the moment, the city’s approach is “bespoke, one-on-one engagement,” according to NYCHA, with groups of city officials knocking on holdouts’ doors to inform them of their rights and persuade them to move into temporary apartments. As of late September, there were no takers. But in the end, the housing authority is a landlord, with all the tools of one. Recently, it delivered lease-termination notices to those who remain. The agency has repairs to consider, revenue, and especially development—not just of homes for the “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” of the Roosevelt era, but these days, apparently, for all of Gotham’s twinkly-eyed in-movers. “We never want to evict somebody,” Bova-Hiatt said. “But we can’t let a handful of people stand in the way of progress.”
Doris Ruffin has remained immovable. Early one Friday in August, Ruffin took her morning walk, four laps of the track at Chelsea Park, across from her building’s front door. On the soccer field, it was peaceful. Runners lapped the red clay track in the rising heat. Someone kicked a soccer ball around the damp grass of the field. The exercise and fresh air helps with her condition. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, mustering the resolve of a cancer survivor at the prospect of NYCHA taking her to housing court. “I’m going to fight tooth and nail.”
But all the uncertainty is stressful, she said. Will her home be demolished? Will it ever be rebuilt? Will her new landlord be worse than the last? She loses sleep. “I put in my time,” she said. “I worked. I should be able to live in peace, not worrying about who’s going to knock on my door.” She has contributed to her family and community, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent to landlords in the private and public sectors. Now she’s sick. What she wants, she feels, is simple: repair without loss, improvement without displacement. For some reason, this city, this state, this country are no longer designed to provide that.
California has already streamlined CEQA. Proposition 45 goes too far.
<span data-lab-italic_desktop="italic" class="italic m-italic">Reg</span> readers land on 'Binface' as name for UK space cleanup mission
The UK Space Agency asked for names for its Active Debris Removal Mission, and, of course, the Register readership didn't disappoint.
The Active Debris Removal Mission, led by ClearSpace UK and intended to remove a pair of UK-registered satellites from Low Earth Orbit (thus demonstrating Blighty's prowess when it comes to orbital litter picking), needs a name.
Let's face it, Active Debris Removal Mission hardly rolls off the tongue and, while engineers have long found ways to make meaning from acronyms (this writer has always been rather fond of PICNIC – Problem In Chair, Not In Computer), the UK Space Agency decided it needed a proper name.
What could possibly go wrong? After all, it's not as if the great British public has form when it comes to picking interesting names (as the infamous Boaty McBoatface debacle demonstrated).
SpaceyMcSpaceFace and Binny McBinFace therefore took an early lead in voting (for our American readers, a bin is a word for a trash can).
Other suggestions included a reference to the long-running British game show, 3-2-1, with "Dusty Bin". Dusty Bin was the show's booby prize, and it's good to know that some people are at least as old as this writer.
Another, clearly inspired by our own PARIS and LOHAN, was SHART – Satellite Harvesting And Re-entry Tug, and there was the delightful Project TIDY (Targeted Intervention for Debris in the Yard), which sounds a little too much like it might win.
We at The Register tend to steer clear of politics if possible, but "Prime Binister" tickled our fancy. As did a tribute to the UK's most famous second-place candidate: Baron Binface.
For readers unaware, a candidate named Count Binface, presenting as an intergalactic space warrior with a dustbin for a head, stood in the Clacton by-election in 2026. The candidate came second after almost ten thousand voters decided they preferred a novelty candidate to the incumbent, Nigel Farage.
Farage won by a substantial margin. However, Binface (and McBinface) have secured the popular vote for a satellite clean-up mission. At least as far as Register readers are concerned.
We asked Count Binface for thoughts on the mission, and will update this piece should a response be forthcoming. ®
Nurses, community advocate for mother-baby units
Nurses, physicians and community members came together Saturday afternoon in defense of Watsonville Community hospital’s mother-baby service lines, which include labor and delivery and neonatal intensive care, at a town hall organized by nurses.
Pajaro Valley Health Care District is considering closing the labor and delivery and NICU service lines at WCH due to ongoing financial issues exacerbated by H.R.1, a federal law that changes federal spending for healthcare and welfare.
The Pajaro Valley Health Care District has not confirmed a date to release its final recommendation on closing service lines, but a discussion is on the agenda for the board meeting on Oct. 28.
Around 90 people were in attendance for the Care Not Cuts town hall on Oct. 24 led by intensive care nurse Roseann Farris, who has worked at the hospital for 30 years. Farris called on community members to attend the Oct. 28 PVHCD board meeting and contact board members expressing their support for the mother-baby service lines.
She presented the hospital’s history of cuts and financial issues and addressed the H.R. 1 cuts, which she said will cut vital healthcare to some of the most vulnerable patients and communities. At Watsonville Community Hospital, the cuts are expected to cost the hospital $4 to $6 million over the next year and close to $100 million over the next 10 years, according to a presentation by CFO Julie Peterson at the Sept. 22 PVHCD board meeting.
“Regardless of these looming challenges, we are not going to somehow cut our way to a better place by closing the women’s and children’s services department,” Farris said.
A panel consisting of a range of WCH mother-baby service providers presented their concerns and perspectives on the situation.
Thanh Pitchforth, a labor and delivery nurse, and Heather Brown, a NICU nurse, spoke about the importance of experience and regular practice in their units.
Obstetric emergencies, such as when the shoulder of a baby is stuck in the birth canal, require specialized experience to treat safely and effectively. For the mother, this likely leads to an emergency cesarean section and can develop into a postpartum hemorrhage, a dangerous bleeding after childhood, both of which take a team to treat. For the baby, it requires a neonatal nursing specialty and practiced skill to restore oxygen levels, according to Brown.
Minutes matter for maternal outcomes, affecting things such as postpartum depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome and short-term and long-term disabilities, Pitchforth said.
“You can’t be a skilled registered nurse in any nursing specialty if you are not practicing those clinical skills on your shift on a daily basis,” Pitchforth said. “What I and what any experienced labor nurse would also worry about is … what could happen to a mother and child in an emergency situation.”
Brown said she is concerned about the chance for “catastrophic outcomes” should a neonatal or obstetric emergency happen in the emergency department.
Transportation, both for the mother in labor and for transferring premature babies, was a concern among panelists and community members. Commute times to the neighboring maternity wards in Salinas and Santa Cruz can take up to an hour and many low-income families share vehicles or do not have access to a car, according to Pajaro Middle School community school specialist Laila Vazquez.
Madhu Raghavan, who worked as a physician in Watsonville for 39 years, called on major companies in neighboring Silicon Valley to step up financially.
“Can some of those tech companies help the small farmer communities where they benefit from all our products?” Raghavan asked. “All that is very small change for them.”
Raghavan and Farris also called for attendees to vote yes on Measure E, the temporary half-cent sales tax created to protect the health and welfare community services threatened by federal cuts.
Mother and baby units generally do not make money for hospitals, a pattern that is true at WCH, where the combined units lose an average of $27,000 a day, according to PVHCD Chair Tony Nuñez. Andrew Harkins, a pediatric hospitalist at WCH, said the hospital is becoming a victim of the imbalance system caused by the underlying incentives of our medical system, which prioritize profit-generating care.
“It’s not about loss,” said Jessica Avila-Miller, a nurse in the telemetry unit. “It’s a moral obligation for us to support women and children.”
During the general forum period, some community members expressed concern over the board making a recommendation before the Nov. 3 election results for the county’s Measure E and the state’s Proposition 40 are released. Prop. 40, commonly referred to as the “Billionaire Tax,” is expected to generate tens of billions in revenue for healthcare over 5 years, according to the California Budget & Policy Center.
Melanie Kendall, a labor and delivery nurse, said the hospital’s partnership with Salud Para La Gente to provide culturally-responsive care, such as doulas, to Spanish- and Mixtec-speaking patients is something other hospitals in the county don’t have.
“It is so hard to be in one of your most vulnerable states delivering a child,” Kendall said. “It is crucial that Watsonville Hospital stays open, that these patients have somebody to advocate for them.”
ICE agents visit Santa Cruz County Main Jail, leave without detaining anyone
How Republicans find a new, fun hoax every election year
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. While hoaxes and conspiracies are the default currency for Republicans, they historically hit a fever pitch in October—the last full month before Election Day. And this election cycle is no different.
Thank you, Vladimir!
A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump rushes to help Russia—and screws over everyone else…
Trump is getting extra weird about men
President Donald Trump’s fascination with the male form seems to have taken over a large section of his mind palace after he appeared at a rally for Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio on Oct. 12 “I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete,” Trump told the MAGA faithful at his Youngstown stop. “And I looked, and I watched up and down, and I looked at his ass…
Starlink seems to be working normally again in Ukraine
Missouri’s GOP Has a New Strategy to Ban Abortion—Attack Trans Kids
Dr. Jennifer Smith remembers canvassing to overturn Missouri’s abortion ban back in 2024. Now she’s spending her weekends knocking doors in her white coat to make sure her home state doesn’t ban abortion again.
Smith, an OB-GYN, had seen what happened to her patients after Roe v. Wade was overturned and a “trigger” law immediately went into effect banning virtually all abortions in the state.
“You could see how scared people were to just consider being pregnant in the state of Missouri,” she said. “I had husbands feel the need to tell me that I should save their wives if something should happen in the pregnancy. And that’s a pretty terrifying place to be.”
Even before the fall of Roe, abortion access in Missouri was extremely limited. The state is home to some of the most vociferous abortion opponents in the country. Among them are Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who has made himself a leading figure in the national push to ban abortion pills; his wife Erin, a top attorney at the Alliance Defending Freedom; and Ed Martin, a stop-the-stealer who helped craft the GOP’s fetal personhood platform in 2024.
Missouri is also one of the most dangerous states for pregnant women, with maternal mortality rates much higher than most of the country. And once the trigger ban was enacted, the medical-legal landscape became even darker for both patients and doctors: OB-GYN residency applications in the state declined by 25 percent. “As a physician, it feels like we have to be afraid that if we take care of patients in the way that we normally would, that we might go to prison for that,” Smith said.
Christian Hendrix, MD, picks up signs and flyers at a No on 3 rally and canvassing event in St. Louis, Missouri. Theo R. Welling
People who needed abortions were forced to spend time and money on travel, and made to experience some of the worst moments of their lives isolated in an unfamiliar place. Some drove for hours on end while in danger of sepsis or hemorrhage just to reach a hospital that would treat them. “I had a patient who was pregnant twice in one year, and both times her baby had a chromosomal abnormality,” Smith remembered. “Twice she and her husband had to make the most difficult decision a parent can make: to end the pregnancy. And twice they had to leave the state to get the care they needed, away from their home, their doctor, everything familiar.” In 2024, Smith canvassed for a referendum to repeal the state’s near-total ban.
Missouri voters passed that referendum—called Amendment 3—with 51.6 percent of the vote. The first state to enact a “trigger ban” became the first state to reject that ban at the ballot box. But that wasn’t the end of the story: even after the ban was overturned, Missouri implemented dozens of restrictions on how abortion clinics could operate—ensuring that in much of the state, abortion was legal in theory but not in practice. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers worked to craft another attempt at a full-scale ban.
Now, Smith is back to knocking doors in her white coat. This time, she’s asking people to vote no on 2026’s Amendment 3—which, despite sharing a number with the 2024 amendment, does the opposite. And unlike the first Amendment 3, this one was initiated by the legislature, not by citizens.
“We already won the battle for abortion here in Missouri, and that is why they added gender-affirming care.”
“We have voters that we believe are confused,” said Stop The Ban campaign manager Alessia Modjarrad. “They consider themselves for abortion, for reproductive freedom—but the language is confusing, and they’re hypothetically voting yes, but really they should be voting no.”
In 2025, Republican lawmakers introduced the current Amendment 3 proposal to reestablish a constitutional abortion ban and overturn the 2024 referendum. To increase their chances of success, they adopted a strategy right out of the Trump 2.0 “Kamala is for they/them” playbook: including language in the ballot measure that would change the Missouri constitution to “prohibit gender transition procedures for minors,” banning doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat kids with gender dysphoria.
Trans youth health care is already illegal in Missouri under a law enacted in 2023. But you wouldn’t know that from Amendment 3’s marketing.
Some of the same people who pushed to ban gender-affirming care for Missouri kids in 2023 are now fighting to enshrine that ban in the state’s constitution. Prominent among them is Jamie Reed, a former Washington University Transgender Center clinic employee turned prolific speaker on the anti-trans circuit. “If we talk to people about the trans part of this amendment,” Reed reportedly told a room full of St. Louis County Republicans in September, “we can get it to pass.”
Reed—who spent much of the past 3 years touring state legislatures to push trans care bans nationwide—also became the face of a marketing campaign by the Her Health, Her Future PAC, a group run by Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s wife, Claudia. “I worked in a gender transition clinic, and saw how children are manipulated into undergoing irreversible surgeries,” Reed said. Reed has, notably, failed to back up these statements in court, has had her characterizations of what went on at the clinic where she worked disputed by patients and parents, and is not a medical professional.
But her words are backed by $5.3 million in advertising money, and abortion opponents are counting on her story to resonate with voters: in one 2023 poll, a majority of Missourians supported heavily restricting transition-related care for young people.
Doctors, medical professionals, and canvassers pose for a photo at a Stop the Ban canvassing event in St. Louis, Missouri. Many of those present also canvassed to overturn Missouri’s “trigger ban” just two years earlier. A folding table with snacks for canvassers has a sign on it that reads ‘We are 24 days from Nov. 3.’
A folding table with snacks for canvassers and a sign reading “We are 24 days from Nov. 3.” At least $5.3 million has been spent to promote the abortion ban ballot measure.Theo R. Welling
“The opposition is not talking about abortion because they know they will lose,” said state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs of St. Louis. “We already won the battle for abortion here in Missouri, and that is why they added gender-affirming care.”
State Rep. Wick Thomas, Missouri’s first nonbinary state legislator, says they’re faced with colleagues wanting to bring up trans kids every day of the week. Republicans don’t necessarily see abortion as a winning issue anymore, even in a conservative state flooded with pro-life money. But fearmongering about trans kids, Thomas said, might still win.
“I’ve had people tell me they’re only attacking the trans community right now because it works, and once it doesn’t, they’ll stop.”
“I think they knew just from the last vote that they couldn’t win on abortion alone, and that because the anti-trans attacks have historically done well for them, they decided to wrap them together, and they’re hoping that that would push it over the edge,” Thomas said.
“I’ve had Republican colleagues tell me, you know, not all of them actually even care about this,” Thomas said. They said that some of their colleagues are “secretly fairly supportive” of trans people. But 53 anti-trans bills were introduced by members of Missouri’s Republican supermajority in the past year. Total abortion bans, by contrast, are not at all popular.
“I’ve had people tell me they’re only attacking the trans community right now because it works, and once it doesn’t, they’ll stop,” Thomas said. “But when you have people’s lives in your hands, that’s an unsatisfying thing to hear.”
“We have voters that we believe are confused,” said Alessia Modjarrad (center), a campaign manager for Stop The Ban. “They consider themselves for abortion—but the language is confusing, and they’re hypothetically voting yes, but really they should be voting no.” Theo R. Welling
Jennifer Smith, OB-GYN, canvasses in south St. Louis with Stop the Ban. When Missouri’s “trigger ban” was active, the number of OB-GYN residency applications in the state dropped by 25 percent.Theo R. Welling
Smith and her daughter joined a group of medical professionals to canvas St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Their materials focused on abortion—if they were asked about trans people, one organizer told me, they would just say that it was already illegal for kids to transition medically. In a liberal community, they found support: an older man ready to vote against the ban, who just needed help finding his polling place; a group of college kids day-drinking on a balcony, chanting “NO ON THREE! NO ON THREE!” and drunkenly congratulating Smith on being a doctor.
“I hope they remember that later,” Smith said. The latest polling shows a razor-thin margin on Amendment 3, with likely no voters just one percentage point ahead of those who plan to vote yes. The measure’s opponents will need all the votes they can get.