Apartment Choice

Photo via Kev Harb via Flickr The emergency Penn Station repairs that began in July will be completed on time with regular operating service resuming on Sept. 5, Amtrak announced Thursday . After delays and a few train derailments , Amtrak closed 21 tracks at Penn earlier this summer. Nearly seven weeks of the eight scheduled weeks of repair work for this “summer of hell” have been completed thus far. Repairs at Penn Station, courtesy of Amtrak According to Amtrak, their engineers focused on the “A-interlocking” mechanism. This mechanism sorts the incoming and outgoing trains that enter and exit Penn Station from the Hudson River tunnel and the Long Island Rail Road ’s West Side Yard to the correct station tracks and platforms. This summer, Amtrak worked to totally replace some of the station’s tracks and switches. In a statement, the co-CEO of Amtrak, Wick Moorman, expressed gratitude for the customer’s patience. “We also appreciate the collaboration and support of our commu...

6 2960 International Dr Ypsilanti , MI 48197 (734) 434-0297 Aspen Chase is a good place to live. Relatively safe, good support staff and building managers. Beware, however, the rents advertised are not the rents you will end up paying. My apartment is supposed to be $699 but they charge extra $20 per month for my cat, plus extra monthly fees for the electric costs of the general property, garbage and sewage fees, plus administrative handling fees and water for the property. (This does include the water bill or the electricity bill I get for my individual apartment). I've never lived in an apartment complex where I had to pay an extra fee for garbage collection... Also, the fees change per month so it is hard to budget for them. (Average rent I pay total is $750-800). If they advertised the actual rents, I wouldn't have said no to taking an apartment here for $750 a month, it just feels really crappy to see all these extra fees for expenses that should be covered by the man...

Jim Pantaleo’s phone winked out sometime after 6:00 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2012. The last message he sent before it died was to his wife, Allison. “Love you forever,” it said. And then, nothing. Jim had spent the day before writing and drinking, slowly. From his perch at the corner of an L-shaped bar at a pub in Toronto’s east end, he tapped away at his laptop. He sipped beer and he did shots of “liquid cocaine,” a mix of Jagermeister and Goldschlager schnapps. Jim had arrived at the pub, Rails and Ales, at about 3 p.m. “He seemed very normal,” says Len Grammenopoulos, the bar’s owner. He ate some food. He joked around. Sometime after midnight, he sent his mother an email with seven letters inside. At about 2:30 a.m., he paid his tab — maybe $60, $70. He high-fived Len and he walked out. “I remember him saying ‘I’m gone,’” Len says. “And that was it.” Jim was gone. When Jim and Allison Pantaleo first met — as coworkers at a pub called Gabby ’s on the Danforth — it was something close to ...

When American doctor Stephen Yoon thinks of North Korea, he does not think of ballistic missile tests or the threat of nuclear war. He remembers instead a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who suffered from spastic quadriplegia that made her unable to stand or sit. Five years ago, she went to Yoon's developmental-disability program at Pyongyang Medical University Hospital , where she received treatments from Yoon and his team of local doctors. After almost a year of exercise therapy and some surgeries, she walked out of the hospital on her own. The event was heralded in North Korean state media as a national victory, but it received no notice in the U.S., where few people even know about the roughly 200 Americans like Yoon who work and live under the rule of Kim Jong Un. Carefully monitored by the regime, they have come and gone for years, doing educational, medical or infrastructural work, and sometimes raising families in a nation that has been officially at war with the ...

A multi- story affordable housing complex built on top of a Wal-Mart or Raley’s … or Trader Joe’s for that matter. And located on land once earmarked for a Costco store at the PlacerCountyGovernmentCenter in North Auburn? PlacerCounty supervisors provided the raw materials for such a vision during a wide-ranging discussion on affordable options this week during an update on housing needs. Supervisor Kirk Uhler of Granite Bay was the chief proponent of a closer look at melding housing and commercial development , not specifying a particular location for a multi- story structure but name-checking Raley’s and Walmart. “How many more apartment units going an additional one, two or three stories above the Walmart ceiling height … could you put on that piece of dirt?” Uhler asked. “You’ve now got two utilizations of the same square foot – the commercial floor area and the residential above it.” The result could be more walkable commercial areas and better locations for transit, he s...

T he way Lai Jie sees it, there are two kinds of relationships. There is romance. And there is marriage. They are not always the same, and in a city such as Shanghai, the deciding factor on who to wed can have little to do with personality, interest or chemistry. It comes down, instead, to a little brown book, the hukou (pronounced hoo-koh ) document, part of a household-registration system that creates distinctions between urban haves and have-nots that influence salaries, education and, it turns out, love lives for huge numbers of migrants. hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share in Beijing on March 10, 2015. The documents decide what services Chinese people can access, from home-ownership rights to public school enrolment, based on their families’ place of origin." /> Li Xue, 21, who does not have hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share i...

The struggles of the impoverished are well documented. But how about the unique pain and struggle associated with being wealthy in New York City? In her research for “ Uneasy Street : The Anxieties of Affluence” ( Princeton University Press , out Sept. 5), Rachel Sherman interviewed 50 New York-area parents of young children, whose household incomes ranged from $250,000 to $10 million and with assets totaling up to $50 million. These locals live pampered lives — with multiple high-end properties, teams of household employees and frequent, lavish vacations — but still, they do impressive mental gymnastics to avoid identifying themselves as truly rich. For instance: Helen, a stay-at-home mom with an annual family income of $2 million, describes herself as “in the middle, in the sense that there are so many people with so much money. They have private planes. They have drivers. They have all these things.” This kind of creative (and self-serving) logic is prevalent among Sherman’s su...