NYC NOW - Midday News: New Developer Chosen for Atlantic Yards Affordable Housing, NYPD Expands Hybrid Fleet, and Long Island App Tracks ICE Sightings

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

A long stalled plan to build nearly 900 affordable apartments at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards site is getting new life after state officials tapped a new developer. Meanwhile, the NYPD is deploying 140 new hybrid patrol cars as it works toward the city’s 2035 all-electric vehicle mandate. And on Long Island, the group behind Islip Forward, an app that lets residents report and track ICE sightings, says it will keep operating despite criticism from the Trump administration. Founder Ahmad Perez joins us to explain.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, October 10th. Here's the midday news from David First. A stalled plan to build nearly 900 units of affordable housing at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards is getting a redo. WNYC's David Branch reports. New York officials selected a new developer for the project after a previous owner failed to build apartment. required under a 2014 legal agreement. The state waived millions in monthly penalties for that flop,

but the new group is pledging to cover up to $12 million. Michelle de la Uze runs Brooklyn's fifth Ave committee and negotiated the 2014 deal. She says she wants the state to demand more. It doesn't erase the fact that we don't have 877 units of affordable housing today that can address the affordable housing needs of communities. And so the 12 million, is insufficient to address that.

Executives from the development team say they don't yet have a timeline for the new housing. The NYPD is adding 140 new hybrid patrol cars, but the department says major hurdles remain before it can meet the city's mandate for fully electric police vehicles by 2035. Keith Kerman is with the city's administration services department. He says electric police cars face unique power demands beyond civilian vehicles. Look at that police car. You've got lights and sirens, communications, equipments.

Some of our police vehicles have alert boards. You know, you see around the city where they're going to actually have a, you know, they're sending you messages. Kerman says supporting round-the-clock police operations electrically would require a massive expansion of the city's charging port network. 60 degrees right now, we're expecting sunshine all day to day, a high of just 62 degrees. This is WNYC. Stay close.

There's more after the break. A Long Island organization that runs an app helping locals report and track immigration and customs enforcement. Sighting says it isn't going anywhere. Isleap Forward is just one of many apps that give people information about ICE's whereabouts, which the Trump administration says put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs. Ahmed Perez founded Ice Lip Forward. He joins us. Now, Ahmad, let's start with the basics.

Tell us, how does this app work? Yeah. So this is a progressive web application that you can download straight onto your phone, your laptop, your tablet. And what it will do is we'll send push notifications straight to your device once our team verifies an ice siding in the neighborhood. We started this ice tracker because what was happening on our streets was terrifying and invisible. Ice agents weren't just showing up at courthouses. They were waiting outside delis, laundromats. supermarkets. And so people were afraid to even step outside, not because of rumors, but because

what they were actually seeing. So locals submit these sightings. How does I slip forward to verify these sightings? So every alert on the tracker goes through a strict process. But people submit reports through a secure form with no names, no tracking. Then our verification team cross-checks time, location, photos, and local confirmations as well. And so if it doesn't check out, it doesn't go up. A lot of our submissions are folks who are on the ground, on their way to work, who are seeing these enforcement activities happen in real time. And so our submissions are videos, photos, testimonies. We've been able to accumulate all of that to help inform our database and sightings that we push out to the public. And how many sightings have you had through the app?

Right now we've had upwards of 146 sightings on our application since we've started in January. January. And this includes both Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island. Now, the Department of Justice, Apple and Google have opted to ban ICE tracking apps from their stores, but this does not affect Ice Lift Forward's tracker because it doesn't use the app stores. Did your organization expect something like this to happen? 100%. When we got this application set up earlier this year, we knew it was going to be tested in ways that we cannot imagine. And so amidst this crackdown from the Department of Justice on these types of apps, one of the things that we want to make sure they understand, you can't

delete community, right? Our tracker isn't an app that you can bully a billionaire to take down from an app store. It lives on the web and it's built by volunteers who refuse to be silent. Long Island is a place where a lot of people and elected officials have expressed support for increased immigration enforcement. As you know, Amad. Now, how do you respond to claims that apps such as yours might be obstructing the will of the voters or even putting ICE agents at risk, again, as the White House claims? Yeah, so this app is solely based off of public information. This is no different than other apps that document law enforcement activity in the efforts of transparency and accountability. What we're showing is how agents are operating within our communities, highlighting operations

that would usually go unnoticed adjacent to schools, laundromats, delis. So we want to make sure that we are just simply showing folks law enforcement practices and activity in the neighborhood. We're not at all encouraging folks to interfere or, you know, cause violence in any way. And since this app has been up, we have never seen anything like that before. But you're potentially causing them to evade the law? I would say that we are equipping folks on the ground. with the information they need to know how law enforcement is operating within their communities,

which is not illegal. Have you been contacted by DOJ or any other law enforcement agency in any way? Are they tracking your app or doing anything like that as far as you know? We know that there have been attempts to make the agency aware of our efforts. We believe that just based off of the number of times that they've been contacted for comment about our work, that there is someone who has. aware of these efforts, but simultaneously there is also someone who's aware that this is completely legal as we have not been contacted and there have been no efforts to stop our work so far.

Are you concerned about getting anything like that? And what would you do if you do? We are not concerned. And I think, you know, honestly, this goes back to the fact that this is doing nothing more than shining a light on operations in our communities and showing folks how they're actually operating. This is all about transparency and accountability. Good. Amad Perraeus is a Brightwood Long Island native and a founder of the organization, I slip forward. Amid, thanks so much for joining us on this. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC.

Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.