Apartment City

Kansas City firefighters now take two simple safety steps that might have saved the lives of two colleagues in a 2015 building collapse . The steps were among the recommendations in a federal report released Thursday . Emergency tones are sounded, as they were two years ago, when firefighters are ordered out of a collapse zone. But now heads are counted to make sure everyone got the message — which was not done before. Fire Chief Paul Berardi acknowledged those steps might have saved the lives of John Mesh and Larry Leggio, who perished at a fire scene on Independence Boulevard. The federal report cites a series of operational failures that contributed to the firefighters’ deaths. The report said the two men should not have been in an alley next to the three-story building after all personnel were directed to pull back because of fears the walls would collapse. Six minutes after that order was given, they died in an avalanche of bricks. Poor communication and the failure to establi...

How the fight against displacement calls for New York City’s Asian immigrant communities to defect from the “ model minority ” narrative. Media Gallery When NYU sophomore Sam Kim attended a rally outside Manhattan’s City Hall in March, he didn’t think that he would be ushered into the spotlight. Kim had learned of the rally through the local housing organization CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), which called on New Yorkers to oppose President Trump ’s proposed $6.2 billion cut to the 2018 budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This cut would dramatically reduce federal funding for New York City public housing , which currently provides rent-subsidized homes to 600,000 New Yorkers. Along the City Hall steps , Kim and two fellow student organizers joined a rare gathering of tenants from otherwise disparate peripheries of the city. Asian immigrants from Chinatown and Queens stood alongside Black and Latino residents of Brooklyn and the Bronx...