Photographs by David Gonzalez/The New York Times Teachers from South Bronx public schools stocking up on school supplies in the World Vision storehouse in Port Morris.

A low-slung building along a desolate industrial stretch of Port Morris is packed to the rafters with everything from office furniture, dishes, clothing, books and toiletries — all stockpiled by the international Christian relief group World Vision.

These products are not destined for Third World villages ravaged by AIDS or earthquakes, the places that most Americans associate with World Vision’s work. They will go to churches, community groups and even public school teachers working with the poor in the South Bronx and in Washington Heights in Manhattan.

While scenes of wraithlike adults or sad-eyed orphans can tug at heart — and purse — strings, there is a need in our own city that can be as out of sight as the World Vision’s Bronx warehouse. Overseas poverty is often attributed to underdevelopment, while poverty closer to home is attributed to lack of ambition.
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While senators in Washington continued to debate on Tuesday whether to provide more financial help to the unemployed, thousands of New Yorkers were finding ways to cope with the loss of their weekly jobless benefits.

The state’s Department of Labor estimates that about 8,000 people in the state — 3,500 of them city residents — exhausted their regular unemployment benefits last week. Those people had been collecting unemployment for 26 weeks but were not eligible for an extension because of the timing of their job losses. State officials expect an additional 12,000 New Yorkers would run out of unemployment insurance coverage this week and next week. Read more…

Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times Kyle Cameron Studstill, a strategy consultant, led a class on making irrational decisions on Sunday.

On Sunday evening, 16 people gathered in a cramped Lower East Side storefront for a class on making irrational decisions. One woman was between jobs and apartments and wanted help thinking things through; the artist sitting next to her wanted to shut off the part of her brain that impedes creative thinking. No money changed hands. Instead, the teacher asked everyone to “pay” for the class by bringing ideas — an example of a good decision made in the last two weeks, and one made in the last five years.

The organizers of this place call it a Trade School, but they’ve turned the “trade” into a verb. It’s a month-long experiment in bartering services and ideas where teachers, D.I.Y. buffs, Maker Faire entrepreneurs, even high school students sign up for classes ranging from the concrete (crocheting and portrait photography) to the abstract (daydreaming and the foundations of ghost hunting).

In return for their services, teachers have received a trombone serenade, a block of cheese, a pair of socks or even Tootsie Rolls, as payment. So far, more than 800 people have matriculated. Read more…

Scoop St. is a new group-buying site that hopes to capture part of an emerging market.

Sometimes following the crowd is not a good idea, but at other times it makes economic sense.

Scoop St., a Web site that allows individual members to receive group rates for spa treatments, sporting events, theater and other entertainment events in New York City, has announced its official start. Although it was not intended to be, the site’s business model is at the nexus of the economic downturn and the rise of social media.

Members can get 50 percent to 90 percent off retail by signing up for collective vouchers if enough people sign up for the deal. Scoop St.’s first deal sold more than 80 Knicks’ tickets worth $62 at Madison Square Garden for $29. Another deal, with the New York Shaving Company, offered $50 worth of tonsorial services and goods for $20. To activate this deal, 20 people needed to sign up; and at the end of 24 hours, Scoop St. had sold more than 110 “scoops,” or vouchers. Read more…

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Fewer couples in New York City are getting married, though the number of marriages in New York State is on the rise.

Money doesn’t buy love and it doesn’t buy happiness, as we should all know by now. But money woes can certainly cause problems for couples, especially during the economic downturn. The bottom line: It’s complicated.

Several studies have been released recently by the National Marriage Project, an institute at the University of Virginia that’s been studying the effect of the downturn on relationships. It published a study in December [pdf] that found a “silver lining” of the recession: tough times bring a renewed sense of financial dependence on family networks. A spouse is more likely to depend on health care from a spouse, or on in-laws to help finance a mortgage or to assist with child care. And the ones who are hanging tight are retrenching and redeveloping an appreciation for time spent together. Read more…

Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times Anthony Townsend, a research director for the California-based Institute for the Future, rents a work space at the Hive in downtown Manhattan.

Although the Internet gives freelancers the ability to work in a cafe, in a library or in their pajamas, some people miss the buzz of the office. Anthony Townsend, a consultant for a research organization in California, is one of them.

On a recent Thursday morning, he was typing away on his laptop in an office-type setting surrounded by seven strangers doing the same thing. Mr. Townsend has paid for time at the Hive at 55, a space in downtown Manhattan where contract workers and freelancers can rent a quiet spot to work.

“I was evicted by my baby,” said Mr. Townsend, whose office used to be the second bedroom in his East Village apartment. He now works out of the Hive, at 55 Broad Street, two days a week. Read more…

On the 10th floor of an office building in the West Village, situated a few doors down from a video store advertising “blowout prices” and a “huge selection,” and a “gourmet” deli that offers two eggs and a coffee for $3, students of various ages, occupational backgrounds and ambitions are in class, training to be medical assistants, chefs and hotel managers.

The Career Academy of New York, a training/trade school at 154 West 14th Street, known as CANY to those who attend it, has experienced a boom in enrollment prompted mostly by people looking for a leg up in the bad economy.

“Although the recession is extremely bad, “ said Mony Lotfi, the school’s director of admissions, “it’s really giving them more of an incentive and more of a push to say, ‘ what was I waiting for, now is the time.’”

Many students are choosing trade or training schools over traditional colleges or universities because of the quick turn around from enrollment to graduation (as early as nine months) and the prospect of “recession proof” careers. Read more…

On Monday, City Room published a video report about lawyers destined for the corporate track who were diverted into public service. The video featured Chris Reid, a Fordham Law School graduate who was originally recruited by Ropes & Gray to work in their patent litigation practice, then gave him the option of finding a public interest job in lieu of his first year. Mr. Reid ended up working with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn housing court, keeping families in their homes.

Here, he responds to some of the questions readers asked about his experience. Read more…

Some law students respond to a higher calling to create justice and serve the common good.  Others respond to the call of the money gods, the pedigree and the cerebral challenge. But the economic crisis of 2009 has created an unusual laboratory where some graduating students who thought they were heading for the corner office were thrust into crowded courtrooms.

Virtually an entire class of law school graduates heading down the corporate track had the plans of its members derailed by the recession.  Law firms said they could not afford to take on the new employees they had recruited in the years before.

Instead, 140 prospective corporate lawyers signed up for an unusual new program organized by the New York City Bar Association:  Serve the public good for a year, then hop back on the corporate track.
 
These “deferred associate externs,” as they are called, are now defending immigrants threatened with deportation; preventing tenants from being evicted; fighting home foreclosures; and representing battered women in domestic violence cases. Read more…

While Mary Ceruti recognizes that the recession has cast some shadows on Long Island City, Queens, she says the area is still better off than it was eight years ago. Ms. Ceruti, executive director of a nonprofit gallery called the SculptureCenter and a resident who lives there with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, can point to plenty of abandoned development sites and unemployed neighbors. But she is also grateful for the restaurants and boutiques that have cropped up with the opening of so many new condos. Read more…

“Everybody wants to hit it big; that’s why they gamble,” said Brian Wagner, hunched over a meal in a restaurant at the Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway. “But that’s why they call it gambling, because it’s a sucker’s bet.”

Mr. Wagner, a big, barrel-chested man of 56, said he had curtailed his gambling habit since the economy took a downward spiral.

He’s betting less and taking fewer trips to Atlantic City, opting instead for the more convenient Empire City.

He is also spending more time on the sidelines.

“I’m watching my girlfriend gamble more than ever,” he said with a mischievous grin.

Still, others are upping their ante in hopes of a windfall, from Empire City’s slot machines to the Aqueduct racetrack in Queen to the local bodega.

While the gambling industry is down, Empire City has seen steady gains. Much of that is because of a pumped-up marketing campaign and a successful players’ reward program, said Ryan Murphy, the casino’s director of marketing. Read more…

Raymond McCrea Jones/The New York Times Damian Loverro, seated at left, and his business partner Angel Albertorio, right, with a customer at Lit Fuse Cyclery in Brooklyn.

Even in the city’s current cycling boom, with streets striped with fresh lanes and filled with expensive new bicycles, Damian Loverro has struggled to keep his new bike store afloat.

He and two partners, Angel Albertorio and Dmitrius Halis, opened the Lit Fuse Cyclery in March on a shoestring in an old Bedford-Stuyvesant feather-processing factory. The 2,200-square-foot space was a fixer-upper, but with help from friends, they bolstered sagging floors, scraped inches of blackened dander off the ceiling and cleared a forest of dead pipes and giant cobwebs. Read more…

Benjamin Samuels Milo Meed, center, with blue shirt and cap, celebrated the grand opening of his new restaurant and outdoor cafe, Island Salad.

For the decade that Milo Meed has lived in Harlem, he has been frustrated with the lack of healthy food. Watching his 11-year-old son, Danny, grow up, he grew even more concerned, as he noticed far more obese children north of 96th Street.

For a few years, he tried to convince other businesses to fix this problem. As a consultant to local small Harlem businesses, he suggested that they open a restaurant specializing in salads. Then he reached out to more than a dozen healthy food chains to see if they would expand onto 125th Street. But no one was interested.
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It was the rhythm of the real estate boom: As apartment rents throughout the city soared, more New Yorkers flooded East Harlem, formerly dominated by Italian and Hispanic residents, looking for affordable apartments. Soon developers eager to cash in on East Harlem’s revival followed, building thousands of new apartments. Then small-business owners like Andre Mauro, 27, and his brother, Matthew, 23, profited as they rented out more of the neighborhood’s old and new spaces.

Now the Mauro brothers — along with the developers they worked for and the tenants they rented to — are feeling the pinch of the recession. Andre Mauro described how the neighborhood where they live and work is suffering.

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