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New York City Can’t Be Foolish When It Comes to the Census


Rivera outreach census

Council Member Rivera, one of the authors (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


Monday may be April Fool’s, but the one thing New Yorkers shouldn’t be joking about is the importance of the 2020 Census.

April 1 marks one year until Census Day, and in preparation, elected officials are fanning out throughout the five boroughs to talk to New Yorkers about the importance of participating in the census. You may be asking – why is there so much urgency when we still have a year to get ready to fill out this form?

The census is more than just a simple count of persons. It determines the economic and political reality of the United States and its localities, including our city.

Virtually every domestic policy decision the federal government makes in the next ten years will be conditioned by how many people it believes live and work in the country and its specific regions, states, cities, and other municipalities. And the census affects whether New York will continue to receive roughly $73 billion in federal funds for programs like SNAP, Section 8, WIC, and Medicaid, as well as how much representation New York has in Congress and the Electoral College.

If we don’t invest in a serious outreach and education effort, New York State could be at serious risk of an undercount on April 1, 2020 -- when counting begins -- and an underinvestment for New York for many years to come.

New York has struggled with census response rates going as far back as 1990. In 2010, the initial response rate for New York City was 61.9 percent, compared to 76 percent nationwide.

This is because more than half the people in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn live in official “hard-to-count” neighborhoods, which is also the case for those in specific neighborhoods in Manhattan and Staten Island. These areas may be home to large populations of young children, people of color, foreign-born individuals, low-income households, limited English proficient communities, and frequent movers.

And while new changes to the census process such as improved language access and the ability to respond online will help, numerous obstacles must be overcome to reach these populations.

But as co-chairs of the New York City Council’s 2020 Task Force, we are working to re-engage these communities. We are working with each of the city’s 51 Council members to coordinate outreach with local organizations that have a proven track record in their communities.

We are also keeping up the pressure on elected officials to invest serious financial resources in outreach and education. We are disappointed that in its new budget the state only allocated up to $20 million for this critical effort, far short of the $40 million that advocates have been calling for. We need more details about how this funding will be distributed and will keep fighting to ensure that community based organizations in New York City get the funding they need to get an accurate count locally.

We need these resources because the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to ensure there is an undercount in states like New York, including fighting to place a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

Regardless of the legal outcome of that fight, persuading foreign-born New Yorkers to participate will now require a level of outreach unseen in any previous census.

But regardless of the difficulties we face, we know we must succeed, in part because we both personally know what failure could mean for New Yorkers.

Our parents were able to provide wonderful homes for us because of the supplemental food programs that fed our families and the subsidized housing we lived in, and we were able to focus on our educations because of other financial support services that help low-income families like ours access funds for basic necessities. We probably wouldn’t have become New York City Council members without those programs, and we need to ensure that the next generation of New Yorkers who grow up in poverty have a shot at becoming a doctor, a CEO, or an elected official.

We know President Trump is eager to see us fail. But we can make him look like the fool on April 1, 2020 if every New Yorker does their part, fills out the census, and fights for the basic right for everyone to be counted.

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City Council Members Carlos Menchaca and Carlina Rivera are co-chairs of the New York City Council’s 2020 Task Force. On Twitter @cmenchaca & @CarlinaRivera.

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New York City Needs Real Criminal Justice Reform from Albany


city council rikers jail coreyjohnson

Speaker Johnson, the author (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


In New York, you can be locked up based on purported evidence that isn’t even disclosed to you, until a trial that can be postponed indefinitely, unless you are wealthy enough to pay your way out. That is the reality under our state’s antiquated laws governing cash bail, discovery, and speedy trial. With Democrats truly controlling both houses of the state Legislature and the governorship for the first time in decades, we now have a meaningful opportunity to modernize these regressive laws and bring justice to our criminal justice system.

We have made great strides in criminal justice reform in New York City. We have reduced arrests and eliminated prosecutions for low-level offenses that have no impact on public safety. Through bail funds, supervised release programs, and ability-to-pay assessments, we reduced our jail population from over 11,000 in early 2014 to just under 8,000 by the end of 2018. Despite these efforts, every day thousands of New Yorkers charged with a non-violent felony or a misdemeanor await trial on Rikers Island. They have not been found guilty of anything -- they simply cannot afford to pay bail. We need the state to act to end this gross injustice.

Our discovery law compounds the injustice of indefinite detention by forcing people charged with crimes to make crucial decisions about their cases without knowing what evidence the government has or doesn’t have. It allows District Attorneys to withhold even basic evidence, such as police reports, until the eve of trial, a form of institutionally-sanctioned sandbagging. Currently, defense investigators must scramble at the last minute to locate favorable witnesses or secure video evidence that could exonerate someone, but which may be long gone by the time of trial. By hamstringing the defense through New York’s blindfold law, we have turned “innocent until proven guilty” into “guilty until it is too late to prove otherwise so you just give up.”  

Lawmakers in Albany have nothing to fear from discovery reform. New York is one of only four states – the others are South Carolina, Wyoming, and Louisiana – that do not allow a defendant to know anything about the witnesses against them before starting a trial. But we don’t even need to look outside our city to see how progressive discovery practices can work -- for decades the Brooklyn District Attorney's office has committed to open discovery without compromising the safety of witnesses.

Our state’s bail laws are as antiquated as our discovery laws, but our city’s programs designed to reduce the jail population have proven that we don’t need to derail people’s lives by setting cash bail in order to ensure that they return to court. Eighty-eight percent of people released on their own recognizance return to court, as compared to 91% released on bail and 92% placed into supervised release.

We cannot justify spending $250,000 per year to incarcerate someone for a 3% higher chance they come to court, especially with a cheaper alternative that produces better results. Cash bail takes people away from their families, from their jobs, and from their lives, and forces family members to choose between putting food on the table and paying exorbitant fees to a bail bond industry that profits off of their poverty.

Cash bail is nothing more than punishment for the poor. Harvey Weinstein simply paid his way to freedom, while Kalief Browder languished on Rikers for years, because of a system that, as New York Times bestselling author Bryan Stevenson wrote, “treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

Our speedy trial laws are controlled entirely by the state. Under New York law, there is no right to a speedy trial -- there is only a right to have prosecutors state they are “ready” for trial within 90 days for a misdemeanor and six months for a felony. This framework encourages prosecutors to manipulate the system by using procedural maneuvers to postpone cases when they are not “ready” in order to minimize their speedy trial obligations.

In many instances these three nightmares coalesce: a person can’t make bail, can’t start their trial, and can’t get access to the documents that provide the basis for their prosecution and defense. We continue to do what we can in New York City to right these wrongs. But the truth is that we need the state to act right now to reform its laws and achieve real justice in our criminal justice system.

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Corey Johnson is the Speaker of the New York City Council. On Twitter @NYCSpeakerCoJo.

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Fair Wages are Good for the Economy, Albany Should Pass an Expanded Prevailing Wage


may bdb nycha active construction

(photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayoral Photography Office)


As the next state budget is being debated in Albany, increasing attention is being paid to the state’s prevailing wage laws. With so much misinformation out there, let’s set the record straight. Paying construction workers a middle class wage is a net positive for New York’s economy.

Specifically, the issue is how construction workers are paid for projects that receive public funds. Since 1897, projects receiving taxpayer funds are required by New York State law to pay fair wages to their workers. The problem is that developers are increasingly exploiting loopholes created by the growth of public-private projects, which blur the lines of what’s considered “public work.”

One recent example is the Chelsea assisted living facility on Long Island. The project received $15 million in public funding, but because that money came through the Brookhaven Industrial Development Agency (IDA), there was no requirement to pay workers a middle-class wage.

Legislation currently making its way through the legislature would close that loophole. The bill,

S1947(Ramos)/A1261(Bronson), would clearly define “public work” as any large-scale project that is paid for with public funds. By ensuring that projects subsidized with public funds support middle class wages, the law will strengthen the middle class and the state’s economy.

Chances are that you’ve seen folks in the business community argue the opposing viewpoint – but when you look under the surface, those arguments tend to rely on overly simplistic or just plain inaccurate information.

Take the industry-backed argument that paying workers a middle-class wage would force costs to skyrocket and immediately put an end to all development. When a wealthy developer complains that much about paying a fair wage, you have to wonder how little they’re actually paying their workers.

As an academic, I rely on data and evidence to form a judgment. The data show that labor costs for construction projects usually amount to about 23-24 percent of the total project cost. To keep the math simple, let’s say that a prevailing wage law results in a 10 percent raise for construction workers in a given region. At most, that would increase total cost by 2.5 percent. A 2.5 percent cost can be easily offset by the efficiencies gained from paying the highly-trained workers you attract with a prevailing wage. Trained, skilled workers mean higher productivity along with fewer accidents, errors and change orders.

Of course, that’s only looking at the prevailing wage from the point of view of big developers. If we look at the prevailing wage as regular New Yorker taxpayers, the benefits multiply.

The overwhelming body of research shows a strong positive connection between prevailing wages and economic development. Prevailing wage laws increase consumer demand, helping to build a strong middle-class community. That helps more than just those families. For every dollar spent on a prevailing wage project, $1.50 is generated for the local economy. In addition, when workers are paid a fair wage, they pay more in taxes and are less dependent on government assistance.  

In a state like New York, prevailing wage laws also protect local workers. When developers are forced to pay middle class wages, they hire skilled, local workers instead of trucking in cheap labor from outside the area.

Next time you hear developers make outlandish claims about the devastating impact of a prevailing wage, remember that the only impact they care about is to their own personal bottom line. By not paying fair wages, they’re forcing the rest of us to carry the burden of the inevitable consequences of lower pay and working class poverty. In economics we call this a “market failure” as builders shift costs to taxpayers to keep their wages low and profits high. As taxpayers, we’re the ones left holding the bag.

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Kevin Duncan is a professor of economics at Colorado State University-Pueblo and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

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