NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Gov. Hochul on Tariff Impact, Hochul Defends Doctor in Abortion Case, Miniature City for Sale, Beyoncé Tour Stops in NJ, and NYC Fire Victims Face Delays

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Governor Kathy Hochul warns that President Trump’s new tariffs on Canadian imports will raise costs for New Yorkers and disrupt trade between local businesses and their Canadian partners. Meanwhile, the governor says she will not cooperate with Louisiana authorities in the case of a Hudson Valley doctor facing criminal abortion charges. Also, installation artist Matt Bua is selling his unique 26-acre property in Catskill, which includes woodlands, a brook, and a handmade 30-building miniature city. Plus, Beyoncé has announced her Cowboy Carter tour dates, with four performances at MetLife Stadium. Finally, as winter fires leave hundreds of New Yorkers displaced, many face months or years of waiting for repairs. WNYC’s David Brand reports.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WDWNYC. I'm Sean Carlson. Governor Kathy Hokel says President Trump's new tariffs on Canadian imports will hit New Yorkers hard and fast. Speaking on MSNBC Sunday, Hokel warned that the added fees will drive up prices for consumers and disrupt trade between New York businesses and their Canadian partners. New York State is the economic engine of the country. When you do something that hurts New York, because we are in such close proximity, to Canada, it's going to have a ripple effect across the country, and I'm concerned about that. Trump's order imposes 25% duties on imports from Canada and Mexico and increases tariffs on

Chinese imports by 10%. The tariffs were set to go to effect on Tuesday, but Trump announced on Monday he has postponed tariffs on goods from Mexico for a month. Canada and Mexico are promising to respond with retaliatory tariffs of their own. China says it will challenge the move through the World Trade Organization. Governor Hokel says she'll do all she can to protect a Hudson Valley doctor facing criminal charges. Dr. Margaret Carpenter is facing charges of, quote, criminal abortion in Louisiana. She's accused of prescribing abortion medication online to a resident of the state. Hockel says she's not going to cooperate with the Louisiana authorities.

There is no way in hell that I'm going to be signing an extradition agreement with the state of Louisiana to turn over in New York State doctor. The governor's comments came after she signed a bill making it. easier for New York doctors to prescribe abortion medication anonymously. The new law will allow doctors to keep their names off the prescription bottle in certain cases, but they'll still be required to list an address of their health clinic. A unique real estate listing has hit the market in the town of Catskill in New York. The 26-acre plot of land includes woodlands, a brook, and a 30-building miniature city built by the property's longtime owner, artist Matt Bua.

W.N.I.C.'s Hannah Frischberg has more. At the foot of Vedder Mountain, step off the road and down into a wooded hollow, and you will find a fantastical city built entirely of trash. For 19 years, Matt Bua and his friends, but mostly Matt Bua, have been constructing a whole world of delightfully bizarre buildings down here. Their cicada house, a bunker made of dirtbags, the tower of LP power, a two-story structure cited entirely in LPs, and a lowercase version of an A-frame home.

Now, Bua is ready to move on and is seeking 269,000 for the property. He hopes whoever buys it will continue adding to the world he created. Beyonce has announced the dates for her highly anticipated Cowboy Carter tour. The global tour kicks off in Los Angeles on April 28th. It'll later make four stops at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey at the end of March. Beyonce says she's delayed the initial announcement because of the wildfires in Los Angeles. She released the date Sunday, just hours after Cowboy Carter won a Grammy for album of the year. Up next, a string of the first.

apartment fires in different parts of New York City have displaced hundreds of families. But why are repairs taking so long? We'll have more after the break. Fires have torn through several apartment buildings across New York City this winter, leaving hundreds of residents homeless overnight. But once the flames are out, what happens next? For many, it means months, sometimes years of bouncing between shelters, staying with friends, and waiting on slow-moving repairs before they can return home. As WNYC's David Brand reports, one lawmaker has introduced legislation to try to get residents back in their homes faster. When Renee Thompson Castro and her husband heard fire trucks outside their apartment in the Bronx's Soundview neighborhood, she called her mother, who lives across the street.

She looked out, she said, Renee, the trucks are in front of your building. I said, what? She said, yes, there's a fire on the roof. The blaze was three floors above their place, and on the other side of the nearly block-long brick building, so they didn't leave right away. Me and my husband, we're in the house and we're still jockeying around and everything. All of a sudden, here come the water. The sprinkler system turned on.

Coming down in the apartment, I mean, everything. Oh, it was just terrible in there. The smoke, the water, all that coming down the stairs, just horrible that day. That was back in June, 2023. 20 months later, Thompson Castro and many of her neighbors are still living in homeless shelters or squeezed in with friends. And they have no idea when they'll be able to move back. We don't know what's up in the air,

but what we see now is that they're trying slowly. New Yorkers displaced by fire often face a year's long wait to return home. According to city data as of December, more than 2,200 people were living in shelters specifically for victims of fire, disasters, and unsafe conditions. Families with kids stay in those shelters for an average of nine and a half months. For single men, it's closer to 20. Unfortunately, it is a thing.

we see over and over again. Benjamin Seibel is an attorney with the Legal Aid Society. He represents Thompson Castro and her neighbors, and he says he's seen lots of these cases where repairs to a burned building get held up by a number of factors, bureaucratic obstacles, delayed insurance payouts, and in many cases, slow-moving building owners. It's hard to get the landlords to hustle up and get the building back into livable shape. Thompson Castro and other tenants are suing their landlord over the delays. And the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development has filed its own lawsuit against him. But the landlord, whose name is Ved Parkash, has so far failed to meet court-ordered deadlines to complete the work. The tenants want to judge to issue daily fines until they can move

back. They're arguing their case in court next month. This man should have had this building fixed up and ready to go again. But he's got bad history. That's Thompson-Castro's husband, David. And by bad history, he means their building is one of three owned by Parkash in the Bronx that have burned in the past two years. All were due to faulty electrical wiring, according to fire officials. That includes a blaze in Allerton last month that displaced more than 200 people. There's no reason why we're still out, still struggling and all it, because there's no reason for that. Parkash did not return a request or comment. But in a statement, his company said they had to strip asbestos from the building before they could even start renovations.

In court filings, Parkash's lawyers said he had to wait months for his insurance company to approve an estimated $20 million in repairs. Roger Reasad is a contractor who specializes in renovating apartment buildings damaged by fire. I have owners that have been fighting with insurance companies for, say, four or five months. He says he'd like to see more done to help owners streamline the complicated renovation process. I've always wished that the city would have like a fast track program for these types of issues, you know, where maybe they have like a dedicated plan examiner work with owners where tenants are displaced.

The city's buildings department says it already has a program to speed up fire repairs. But clearly, residents still face delays. In response to WNYC's reporting, New York State Senator Michael Janaris introduced legislation last week that, if passed, would require landlords to pay for their tenants to live somewhere else while repairs are done. That's only if the landlord is found at fault for the fire. Clearly what we need to do is kick these building owners in the behind and get them to repair these buildings faster and get these residents back into the buildings. When I visited the building in Soundview last week, many of the windows were missing or broken, exposing damaged walls and destroyed ceilings inside the apartments.

There was no sign of any active renovation work. My mom lived here for 18 years on the second floor right there. That's her window. to her living room right there. Arlene Santiago lived on the fifth floor. She points to a window in her mother's apartment, three floors below her own. Well, you can see even from this vantage point

that the ceiling is gone. She says she tried to get her mom to move into a newer place. She would tell me no. I'm used to being here. Everybody I know is here. Her mother did move into a building for seniors after the fire. Then she died in April. before she could return to her apartment and her friends.

So it's just that it gives me a lot of pain. And so it just hurts that we couldn't fulfill that kind of wish than I knew that she had. Santiago and her neighbors say they're committed to moving back and rebuilding their community. That's WNYC reporter David Brand. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. We catch us every weekday three times a day.

I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back tomorrow.