NYC NOW - October 3, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Brooklyn’s Woodhull Hospital will remain closed for several days as it undergoes repairs from Tropical Storm Ophelia. Plus, New York City Mayor Eric Adams takes a trip to Latin America. Also, WNYC��s Sophia Chang reports on a new trash system that's the first of its kind in the entire country. And finally, with the writer’s

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jene Pierre. They are our public hospital. They are the hospital where the influx of migrants, they're seeking care at Woodhaw. No one can be turned away there. We begin in Brooklyn, where a public hospital was forced to evacuate more than 100 patients over the weekend. Officials say Woodhaw Hospital is still undergoing repairs from Tropical Storm Ophelia and will remain closed for several days.

Councilmember Jennifer Gutierrez says the shutdown highlights the importance of Woodhull in the community. She's been in close contact with leaders at the hospital. I just really believe that it was like a tough decision. I hope that once everything is kind of back to normal, we can kind of assess what we could have prevented here. Gutierrez says more updates should be coming later this week. Hospital officials say none of the patients moved to experience adverse health effects. Mayor Eric Adams is going to Latin America this week to talk. better understand the paths migrants take. WNYC's Elizabeth Kim has more.

The four-day trip will include a stop at a dangerous jungle crossing used by many migrants. It comes as the Adams administration is ramping up both its rhetoric and pressure on President Biden to address the crisis. Over the weekend, Ingrid Lewis Martin, Adams' chief advisor, gave a TV interview imploring federal officials to, quote, close the border. And last month, Adam said the crisis was, quote, destroying New York City. He's also ordered budget cuts, which he blamed on the lack of sufficient funding from Albany and Washington, D.C. The trip will likely inflame tensions with the White House. Biden did not meet with Adams during his recent visit to the city.

Stay close. We'll head to Harlem after the break. One public housing complex, one public housing complex, in Harlem is getting a trash system that's the first of its kind in the entire country. WMYC's Sophia Chang takes a look. It seems like something from a sci-fi movie. Bags of trash and recycling sucked away by a giant vacuum. But this will soon be the reality for 4,000 residents of the Polo Grounds public housing development, where Nicaa is building a $32 million pneumatic garbage system.

Once construction is completed, the garbage and recycling from the complexes four buildings will be hoovered into big tubes at speeds as high as 60 miles per hour. Then the trash will be whooshed away to a central plant on the campus to be collected by sanitation workers. NYCHA project manager Katie Bergeo showed me around the construction site where workers were jackhammering into the bedrock for the underground tube network. We don't have tubes in place yet, but we have the trenches. How big will the tubes be?

20 inches in our diameter. 20 inches? Places like Disney World and some hospitals have used this sort of technology for years, but the last time a residential pneumatic garbage system was built in the U.S. was on Roosevelt Island, back in 1975. And the Polo Ground system is the first ever residential system in America that can take on two streams, recyclables as well as household trash. Nica Deputy Director Chavon Watson says the new system will benefit not just the residents,

also the staff at the polo grounds, who spend the majority of their work days hauling heavy trash bags. Our waste management plan looked closely at how we manage waste now and found that caretakers can actually spend up to 60% of their day just moving garbage around the campuses. But some residents like Javier Cordero, who lives in Building 3 right next to the construction site, say the racket is a lot to deal with. It keeps me up. The days that I have off, just wrecks my spirit. The construction?

Serena Chandler is the president of the Polo Grounds Tenet Association. She remembers seeing the smoke from on-site incinerators that burned trash right outside the apartment buildings back in the 70s. For her, the construction noise was a temporary and worthwhile trade-off. We do have a little bit of construction fatigue, and we know that we're probably going to be under construction for, some time to come still. But, you know, we can look forward to a better campus and more quality of life. So for me, it's great. The pneumatic trash system is expected to be up and running by the end of next year.

That's WNYC's Sophia Che. Five months ago, film and television production came to a halt. Now, with the Hollywood writer's strike in a rearview and actors resuming talk, this week, cast and crew, writers and directors are all getting ready to work again. But New York's film and television industries were in a tough spot before the strikes, and that hasn't necessarily changed. WMYC's Ryan Kylath has more. Noah Eveslin is a longtime TV writer and producer. Scandal, Gray's Anatomy, NCIS, Hawaii.

And he says these strikes are a symptom of tensions that had been brewing for years. The strike is kind of a by-prosephemy. of the wheels falling off in a weird way. A little backstory. Before the streaming revolution of the past 10 years, Ebselin says working on a sitcom or a TV drama was a solid middle-class lifestyle. 22 episodes a year, pretty steady work.

Really, the golden age was the 90s, the late 90s. Like, we were earning better money back in the 90s than we are now. Streaming is so ubiquitous now. It's a little hard to remember. 10 years ago, watching movies and TV on the Internet was a new, unproven technology. And so around the time of the last strike in 2008, creatives accepted lower pay for this newfangled distribution tech.

And then everything became streaming. You know, when 60, 70% of working TV writers are working for streaming, they're all now working at this huge discount. Streaming compensation and AI were two of the biggest issues in these strikes. And the writers won both pay increases and protections against AI. But the industry still faces all the same macro problems it did before. From a slowdown in ad spending to the end of the peak TV era, where all the streamers and studios were spending a ton to out-compete each other.

Even though this one threat we're beyond it, what's next? There's more threats that we're all facing. Netflix, for example, made plans to cut $300 million from its budget this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. On the company's most recent earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Spencer Newman took a question on content spent. how much cash they put into shows and movies. What's the content spend outlook for the next few years?

What is normal post the strikes, plural? Well, what you've seen is, and what we talked about, was that we would keep our cash content spend roughly flat. He goes on to say Netflix has passed the, quote, most cash-intensive phase of building out our original programming strategy, end quote. In other words, our peak TV big spending days are over for now. And lots of the big studios have been making similar corporate noises for a while. In the New York area, industry workers were seeing the effects of this even before the strikes.

An extremely conservative measure of the latest city employment data through April of this year, shows film and TV employment down more than 5.5% from its pre-pandemic levels. The true number is likely much higher. Noah Evesland's prediction? There's going to be less shows made, less shows bought. There's just not going to be a lot of work. Also, a lot of people left the industry this last five months, agents, managers, producers, even crew. They just didn't make it.

So it's just we're going to see a very different landscape. Of course, you can still expect a burst of new shows and movies as the reservoir of stalled projects gets flowing again. But aside from that, the production industry seems to be slowing its role. And that could hurt workers who need steady income. But not everyone is concerned with the next year or two or three. Jeff Stotland builds sound stages, and his company, Sunset Studios, is about to build a brand new facility in Manhattan on a pier in the Hudson right off 54th Street. We're not day traders, so we're not really looking at it like what's going to happen next month or next year. Stotland's new studio should open in 2025, and he sees production booming again in the years after that.

What kind of production? Really, the target is either talk shows, unscripted shows, or, just original content production like you might find on traditional linear TV or streaming. His investment horizon is the next 10, 20, 50 years. And on that time frame, the future of New York production looks bright to him. That's WMYC's Ryan Kyleov. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.