Starting in January, the Norwood News will run a youth journalism program for Bronx high school students in their sophomore, junior or senior years.

The nationwide home foreclosure crisis sweeping the country is hitting the northwest Bronx particularly hard. Now local homeowners and neighborhood housing advocates are scrambling to recover and limit the damage already done by subprime lending practices.

Pat Logan is leaving Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation after a decade of coordinating community improvement efforts in the areas where the Housing Corporation owns property. He’ll be nearby in Kingsbridge working on affordable housing financing at Community Preservation Corporation, but we’ll miss him nonetheless.

For years, grassroots neighborhood improvement efforts have focused on tenant issues, and for good reason. But homeowners, even in smaller percentages, tend to stabilize communities. They are simply more invested than renters. If those investments are taken from them and from our neighborhoods, our communities will suffer. Our elected officials should collectively figure out a way to provide more counseling and financial services to Bronx homeowners.

I seem to recall that the elected officials who promised jobs actually did nothing to secure a Project Labor Agreement. If they had used standard PLA language, they could have invoked zip code radius hiring in order to ensure that some Bronx folks got interviewed for the jobs. While several local elected officials – including members of both the Rivera and Diaz clan – said that job creation was a goal, I suspect that they knew as well as everyone else that the trades wouldn’t have too many members who would meet the zip code requirement.

Re: your article about members of the Assembly rethinking their positions on the filtration plant (Oct. 4 – 17, 2007). I wonder if the "misled" excuse by our elected officials will be applied to the stadium project as well. At least with the filtration project, there is a monitoring committee. Here in CB4, we have nothing – no accountability and no information. Now with the Industrial Development Agency issuing bonds to a corporation that has a track record of incompetence and default, more of our parkland will be destroyed for multi-level parking garages in the asthma capital of the world.

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To coincide with a national day of action for the peace movement on Saturday, Oct. 27, the hearty group manned their stations and were met with thunderous honking. Events and marches occurred across the country, but the 15 Kittay House seniors who braved the elements in wheelchairs and walkers were just as dedicated as the thousands who marched in Manhattan and elsewhere.

Bronx State Senator Efrain Gonzalez’s federal trial for corruption and fraud charges has been postponed until late April 2008 at the earliest, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case.

Policeman Jose, 7, and maid Lisa, 10, were just two of the students who packed the cafeteria at PS 291 last Friday night for the school’s annual Halloween dance.