[Excuse_Me]

These charities are really too big to be efficient. Centralization is the problem, not corruption. Hope this wasn't posted elsewhere. I did a search on the title and Red Cross.

[Asclepius]

... The Americans who gave so generously to the Red Cross last year surely did not imagine that six months later their dollars would be paying the mortgages of wealthy TriBeCans ...

Let the New Yorkers have it. All of it. Hand it out on the streets. Disperse it from low flying aircraft. Slip into peoples' pockets or purses as they shuffle past. I can think of far worse ways to dispose of the excess cash than to simply give it away.

Take that, bin Laden. We shall defeat you with our merry absurdities.

[WillaJohns]

What a wonderful article. It made me smile and ponder the absurdity of our society. It made me wonder if I would have accepted the "free" money. Thanks for posting it.

[GeronL]

This was so bizarre a phenomenon for New York - so antithetical to the no-free-lunch spirit of the city - that people couldn't quite believe it.

Excuse me?? (no pun intended) Thats exactly what NYC is, they love welfare, they love leftists who give away other people's money, they love unions where 1/3 of employee's are always on break.

It just worries them when people give their own money away.

[Illbay]

Seventy years of Democrat wealth-transfer education has worked quite well.

[ikka]

Sounds like NYC deserved bombing after all.

[NYCVirago]

I WORK in an empty apartment in my building. It's a rather filthy place with an ominous amount of rat droppings on the floor. It's also freezing cold so I usually write in a Parka, with a little space heater pressed against my legs.

Something's really fishy about this story. On the one hand, the author is saying about how wealthy a neighborhood she lives in (TriBeCa.) On the other hand, she manages to write in a filthy unoccupied apartment in her building. How does this writer manage to use this apartment? Why isn't this apartment rented out? Is she saying that the apartment manager would rather let her write in this place than rent it out? With the housing market the way it is in Manhattan, there is no way the apartment manager would keep an unoccupied apartment open, especially in this trendy neighborhood, for the benefit of some writer to use. Not when the market value for that apartment is a minimum of $2000 a month!

[BradyLS]

I'm still in a puzzle over an individual who would work in a cold, rat-dropping infested apartment when they live in a nice place a few floors up. Since the Red Cross found his other neighbors, including the well-off, certainly he could have worked and met them there, too?

Those dollars may come back to haunt the people that took them, if they had to give out personal information to get the check. Like they'll have to claim part of it in their taxes if they make above a certain income.

[Eva]

This is ridiculous and very maddening. The Red Cross needs to be relieved of this money. These people remind me of when my five year old little sister used to walk around Woolworths, trying to find a way to spend her weekly allowance.

Meanwhile,the greedy, attention starved junior senator from NY (I hate to mention her name) is crying poor mouth and begging the feds for more money to give away.

This money should be put in an account for the college tuition for children of the victims. The rest should be put into a fund to pay future medical and disability benefits to volunteers and workers who were exposed to dangerous respiratory irritants and other related effects from ground zero.

No money should be paid from the federal gov't to victims. We have given enough.