2025-04-08
20 分钟My name's Eliza Shapiro and I'm a Metro reporter for The New York Times.
Something changed.
So much has changed.
New York City is becoming more for the wealthy.
And I don't think that's going to end well.
None of those people park out when you're going to sit down and drive a cab, or go stand up outside there and sell food.
Poor people make the city go, we're being exiled or we're really being pushed out when we're rolling.
The person you just heard from is a man named Cooper Sancho Prashad.
He's a city kid like me, born and raised in the Bronx.
He's 30 years old and he's been driving a taxi on and off since he was 19.
His immigrant parents did everything they thought they were supposed to do to provide a better life for their son.
They invested in his education and he had these big ambitions of maybe becoming a mechanical engineer one day.
But his dad got sick and Cooper had to take over the family business.
So he left college and he started driving a cab,
sometimes really long hours, even overnight, sleeping in parking lots at the airports.
The pandemic put new pressures on their family.
Money got tight, his dad died.
And in 2023, Cooper and his mom became homeless.
Cooper and I met a few months ago while I was reporting a story about how to make New York City more affordable,
which is a topic I've really been focused on lately.