Gary Rubinstein, one of the best bloggers and thinkers about education in the nation, sends his daughter to the local public school in New York City. It is PS 163. The parents learned recently that a 20-story apartment building will be constructed within 50 feet of the school. The children will not be allowed in the playground during construction because of dust and toxins. The noise levels during school hours will be deafening.
The parents have complained but the Mayor and the Department of Education are unresponsive.
Gary asks for your help, especially if you live in New York City.
He writes:
“The parents have urged our local lawmakers to intervene and we are grateful to Mark Levine, Helen Rosenthal, and other city council people who are sponsoring bill number 420 which would require:
that noise shall not exceed 45 DB during normal school operating hours in any receiving classroom in any public or private preschool or primary or secondary school on lots that are within seventy-five feet from the construction site, and that noise levels at such schools sites shall be continuously monitored during normal school operating hours.
“With all the talk nowadays about putting students needs above ‘adult interests’ it is amazing that a common sense bill like this will require a lot of phone calls to the council people who have not yet agreed to support it. Parents from the school are currently making calls to the different council members, but the council members will be more likely to support this bill if they are getting calls from all over as this is something that will not just affect the kids in PS 163, but all the kids from all the other schools that may face a similar situation in the future.”
The parents have created a website.
Here is a list of City Council members and heir contact information.
This is a chance to put students first. Please help.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dust, toxins, and kids!? Not a good combination. I hope cooler heads prevail.
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This PS 163?
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/education/in-one-school-students-are-divided-by-gifted-label-and-race.html
WebMD says 45dB is between average home background noise (40 dB) and normal conversation (60 dB). I suspect that noise levels exceed 45 dB at the vast majority of NYC DOE schools. How about legislation that helps all of them, too?
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Why didn’t they start this project during the summer? Why can’t they stop during the day to let kids go out and play? Didn’t the planners consider this before they started? It sounds like to me they want children to un-enroll in public school and go charter instead. That means more campaign donations for politicians after all.
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Public Education is under attack on many fronts. Our bucket is shot full of so many holes by self-serving outsiders and a corrupted media that we can’t refill fast enough to meet our kid’s needs.
Let’s pick our battles carefully. Sending your child to a school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and then complaining that it’s noisy and somebody wants to build a building is a little difficult to get behind — sorta like living in a taffy factory and complaining that the air is too sweet.
With all due respect.
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I take it you don’t live in NYC?
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I do live in NYC and have all my life. What did I say that made you think otherwise?
Just curious.
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Your comment seemed to suggest that Rubinstein’s complaint is trivial. It just didn’t seem like the comment of someone who’s actually experienced, or is capable of imagining, what it’s like to live or work 50 feet from a construction site in this city.
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Clearly the Mayor, and thus the Council, is not going to sign off on a bill that would amount to a ban on new construction near schools (which is what it seems a 45db limit would be). I wonder what other compromises there could be.
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The building to be put up next to PS 163 is a nursing home. Like Rubinstein says it does affect all of us living in the neighborhood. This corridor (97th Street) is very congested and at capacity for what it can reasonably handle in terms of foot and car and truck traffic. There have been four pedestrian fatalities recently in this neighborhood and too frequent car accidents.
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Whatever the major party political label, “not being afraid to make the hard choices” seems to translate into—
1), Whatever adversely affects the vast majority is just a necessary cost of ‘doing business’ and I will resist the rabble like a junk yard dog defending its turf; and 2), I will fight until my last breath for whatever favors the already-favored, the multimillionaires and billionaires, because they need to be defended against the undeserving and unworthy vast majority.
At least they’re consistent…
😒
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“Damn the asbestos! Full speed ahead”
Noise and toxic dust?
This building is a must!
Forget the schools
The little fools
Are simply over-fussed
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Another option to speed up the construction would be to go modular—and then they could wait—after the foundation was in place—before putting the building up during the summer when school was out. Most of the construction would be off sight in a factory.
http://www.modular.org/
Watch the video to see how it was done in China. It took fifteen days to put up this 30-story building. You can see the process in 2.53 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU7kplHtC98
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I must say, there is something terrifying about this.
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What’s terrifying about this?
The modules are build in factories on an assembly line simliar to the auto industry and workers have jobs—-at least in China they have jobs, because the CCP in Beijing knows how important it is to keep people working so they don’t start a revolution and kill the country’s leaders. Then truck drivers, who have jobs, drive the material to the site—where workers, who are also paid, use the modules that are often of a higher quality than what’s built stick by stick on site—-to construct the building in a few days.
Quality control in a factory with an assembly line and inspectors that are there 100% of the time usually leads to higher quality construction. And believe me when I say that if they cut corners that causes a scandal and deaths, the CCP will track down who was in charge, try them in a Chinese court and then sent them to prison for life or have them executed. In China, the CCP sends a bill to the family for the cost of the execution of someone who cuts corners and costs someone else their life—that is if there is a scandal of some kind that embarrases the CCP.
In the U.S., seldom does anyone who cuts corner that costs lives serve time in prison or even end up in court. The corporation ends up in court but the individuals who gave the orders usually don’t.
In the U.S., I understand how this might be terrifying, because in the U.S. many jobs are being turned over to robots/automation, and that might explain why the poverty rate is climbing here.
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I’m not sure. The buildings are ugly. The work seems hyper-specialized in a way that makes me think of ant colonies — less discretion used by workers, less skill required of them, and more amenable to automation and robotics. These are just gut-level and partly emotional reactions. Maybe it’s a wonderful thing.
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Have you ever built a house or a building the traditional way? I have. Most of the work is tedious “cut this and nail that with saws and hammers” [and sometimes smash or cut yourself to the bone and then bleed a lot—I always keep cayenne pepper nearby because it stops the bleeding fast. Just clean the wound and fill it with that fine-ground red pepper] and you follow the building code or else do it over [I’ve had to do that too a few times]. It’s hard, tedious, physical work. You sweat and roast or freeze on the work site.
I’ve added additions and replaced roofs on more than one house that I owned—myself—and I can tell you it’s no fun to spend months, part time, doing the job and when it rains you scramble to cover the house with a tarp to keep the rain out. And when the wind blows, the tarp doesn’t cooperate.
But from what I’m reading about these modular buildings, the job comes in for less of a cost and is over in a matter of days once the factory finishes all the modules that are designed to fit together.
And many of the newer modular houses available in the United States look like any on-site, stick-built houses, but they are usually better built and of a higher quality at a lower cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAfwNJGcdM
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Thanks, interesting stuff. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the modular-skyscraper trend has been unfolding with lots of conflict and headlines here in NYC.
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/debate-modular-construction-rises-tower-stalls-article-1.1944612
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Flerp!
The labor unions who represent the on-site workers won’t like this if the workers in those factories aren’t unionized, and I suspect that will probably be the case.
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Also, the man behind the “30-floor building in 15 days,” Zhang Yue, appears to be quite a character, to put it mildly.
http://www.wired.com/2012/09/broad-sustainable-building-instant-skyscraper/all/
“In person, Zhang himself seems to move at an impossible time-lapse clip. He’s almost always surrounded by Broad employees, all wearing identical white button-front shirts (the uniform for the corporate office) and all offering papers for him to review or sign. When I arrive, he’s issuing a steady barrage of instructions while spinning himself around in his office chair. When he’s finally ready to start the interview, he abruptly stops spinning and, without looking at me, barks out, ‘Begin!’
“The pace of Broad Sustainable Building’s development is driven entirely by this one man. Broad Town, the sprawling headquarters, is completely Zhang’s creation. Employees call him not ‘the chairman’ or ‘our chairman’ but ‘my chairman.’ To become an employee of Broad, you must recite a life manual penned by Zhang, guidelines that include tips on saving energy, brushing your teeth, and having children. All prospective employees must be able, over a two-day period, to run 7.5 miles. You can eat for free at Broad Town cafeterias unless someone catches you wasting food, at which point you’re not merely fined but publicly shamed.”
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I’m not surprised. The Broad Group is a Chinese based company and let’s not forget that China has never been a democracy. In fact, how many corporations in the U.S. are run like democracies?
Think of Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, etc. and what it would be like for the rest of us in the 99.9% if they become the leaders of the United States as its oligarchs.
The govenrment they have in China today—you know the Chinese Community Party [CCP]–is actually the only government in China’s history to have ever done anything to improve the quality of life for the people. In 1949, life expectancy in China was around 35, and about 95 percent of the people lived in poverty, but today life expectancy is approaching 80. Even at the end of the Mao era, life expectancy had improved into the 60s.
In fact, China, using corporate style authoritarian management methods, is responsible for 90-percent of the poverty reduction in the world in the last thirty years. China never really had much of a middle class but today the middle class in China has almost more people than the population of the United States, and if you can afford it, there are little to no travel restrictions. The goal is to have a highly educated middle class of more than 600-million people.
Chinese have become the largest tourist block in the world. With such a huge emerging middle class, more Chinese are flying out of China on vacations each year visiting other countries than any other country on earth—about 50 million annually. And they fly home when the vacation ends becausee that’s where their middle class job and house is.
We’ve been in some of those homes, and you feel as if you are in a new middle class home in the U.S.
The CCP has even been described by corporate CEOs in the United States of operating just like an American corporation instead of a traditional government.
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In addition, here’s another video that’s 4:12 minutes long that shows building a 15 story hotel in 6 days.
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