Public space (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
Summer is in full swing and street fairs, parades, and block parties are enlivening public space across New York City. But these vital signs of city life exist alongside indicators of the challenges we are facing: trash blocking sidewalks, lack of staff to keep crucial community spaces activated, and the threat of traffic violence.
The activity on our streets, parks, and stoops helps define what makes New York special. These spaces would not thrive without committed neighborhood volunteers who fill in the gaps in management and operation on open streets, business corridors, and local parks as well as our waterfronts, plazas, and natural areas. This over-reliance on neighborhood partners is emblematic of a lack of a coordinated framework to adequately fund and manage our critical shared spaces.
There is currently no holistic management or investment in New York’s public space. Every Open Street, block party, or neighborhood safety initiative is the product of intense volunteer effort, organization, and coordination. Too often, city government agencies and departments are working in isolation instead of focusing on collaborative problem-solving. This has to change.
New York City needs leadership to ensure public spaces throughout the five boroughs can thrive regardless of available resources. We need public spaces that reflect the complexity of the communities that use them and can do the important work of bringing the city together.
Our organizations are pushing for innovative approaches to these issues. We believe the city must make a commitment and investment to equitably planning and managing our public spaces. We have joined forces to advocate for solutions in the shared public spaces that span interests and geographies — from commerce to culture, safety to sustainability, mobility to making space for play at the local, borough, and city-wide scale.
Our group envisions a public realm that celebrates and enriches city life. Well-managed public space is critical to keeping people safe, connected, and healthy. It reinforces the vitality of our communities and supports local businesses. Leadership can close these gaps and make this a reality in every neighborhood.
The innovation needed here isn’t just more bureaucracy, it is about how well the government is organized to address nuanced challenges that have real-world impacts on how people experience and work with our city’s public spaces.
Effective governance looks like expedited permitting for users in the public realm from street vendors to block associations. Designing spaces so that people can be comfortable in all seasons starts with a plan to plant trees for shade and ensure access to sun during the colder months. Partnership is sharing the responsibility for the success of Open Streets so that areas need not be anchored by a business improvement district to function. Cooperation is coordinating city services across departments to better support BIDs planning, managing, and programing public space.
We call for structural leadership through the appointment and empowerment of a central, accountable Director of the Public Realm to plan for citywide needs. We call for management leadership through the creation of a new Office of Public Space Management designed to more equitably manage our streets, permits, and day-to-day operational needs for our most in-demand corridors. We call for design leadership to uplift the quality of public spaces and their interface with private developments that maximize the expertise of architects, landscape architects, and planners.
The new city budget fell short of the opportunity to fully invest in our city’s shared spaces, meaning the gap between what is possible and what is funded exists department to department and neighborhood to neighborhood. This gap is further expanded by missed opportunities to advance mutually beneficial goals across agencies and address longstanding infrastructure needs in historically underinvested neighborhoods. Cuts to agencies are already being felt and seen across the city. Failure to fully fund the Streets Plan leaves too many gaps in our citywide system and pushes the responsibility to invest to a future administration and City Council. This choice to partially fund only prolongs the impacts and increases the costs.
Now that this year’s budget fight is over, we must advance and implement visionary policies that equip the city to coordinate, set goals, and actualize the benefits from a shared management framework. Ideas like the five-point plan by City Council Member Shekar Krishnan and the bills introduced by Council Member Carlina Rivera to create an office of pedestrians and require a citywide plan for greenways between the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Transportation are important opportunities.
The City Council is responding to pressing challenges on the ground but would benefit from expansion to cover more of the public realm’s critical systems and address opportunities for increased coordination and implementation. We are also encouraged by Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement of the creation of an interagency task force to ensure healthy commercial corridors in the Blueprint for Economic Recovery and the New New York Blue Ribbon Panel.
We need leaders who increase collaboration across departments by setting and advancing meaningful goals for equity, livability, and performance. We need a dynamic investment strategy that can increase accountability, bring new infrastructure to underserved neighborhoods, and respond to opportunities to prototype and scale innovations within the public realm.
The city we want now, as well as the city we are building for, is built upon the success of our streets and public spaces. Leadership helps us bridge the short-term opportunities to the longer-term strategies to keep New York City competitive, livable, and resilient. A holistic vision must combine funding, policy, and coordination to create a thriving and vibrant New York City.
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Elizabeth Goldstein is the President of the Municipal Art Society of New York. Benjamin Prosky is Executive Director of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY). Jackson Chabot is the Director of Public Space Advocacy at Open Plans. On Twitter @AIA_NewYork, @OpenPlans & @MASNYC.
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Health care (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is an affront to the key principles of United States citizenry by failing to protect the life, liberty, autonomy, and health of those who can become pregnant. The recent cascade of total bans or severe restrictions on abortion is not based on science, but ideological biases, and is clearing a legislative path to a draconian future in reproductive freedom and health.
The ramifications of this decision on health and society, not just women, will be devastating. A recent study projected that a total ban on abortion in the U.S. would increase maternal death by 21% in the second year following such a ban, with Black women the most affected with 33% more deaths. Maternal mortality and morbidity is already a crisis in the U.S. – higher than most developed countries – and disproportionately affecting Black mothers due to institutional racism and socio-economic inequities. When mothers die or are unable to care for their families, all of society pays the price.
New York City and State are valiant safe havens protecting the reproductive rights and health of all Americans. On June 13, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a six-part legislative package to immediately protect the rights of patients and empower reproductive health-care providers; and Friday she announced the Abortion Access Always public education campaign supporting safe, legal abortions for all. In May, she announced a $35 million investment, the largest in the nation, to support abortion providers serving more patients including low-income people. Such services are guaranteed to all New York residents.
At the same time a national ban on abortion and curtailing of reproductive health should be expected if Republicans control Congress and the White House, as promised by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy on Friday with the posit of a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks.
This erosion of health rights is a dire outcome that we as a state and a nation must not allow.
As a public health professional and pediatrician who has worked in vastly under-resourced maternal clinics in the U.S. and all over the world, I have seen first-hand the personal anguish and loss facing those for whom preventive health services and family planning are not available. In the wake of this court decision, I now contemplate how detrimental the impact will be for so many, especially those without the financial or family resources to access comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion services if they choose it.
What protections are there from illness and death when a woman has a troubled or ectopic pregnancy? What effect is there on her mental health and ability to work and care for a family, when carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term?
Perhaps even more dystopian, when politicians are permitted to rule on conception, what is to stop them from banning birth control, IVF treatment, pre-conception planning, and other services that help women and families make proactive decisions to prevent or enable pregnancy based on their own needs and free will?
As the dissent stated, “Taking away the right to abortion, as the majority does today, destroys all those individual plans and expectations. In so doing, it diminishes women’s opportunities to participate fully and equally in the Nation’s political, social and economic life.”
Studies cited in a “friend of the court” document accompanying the dissent show that access to abortion has reduced teen motherhood, and increased the probability that women attend college and enter professional occupations. Research has long demonstrated that children’s ability to thrive is linked to maternal well-being, education, and economic status.
In the wake of this ruling, those of us in the public health arena must act to fiercely protect the public health and rights of those who are now put at risk.
We must open and proliferate clinics offering comprehensive reproductive health care, online education, and physical and mental health hotline access. We must redouble our work in preparing public health professionals to widen, not narrow, these options. And we must educate voters on how their legislators and judges can protect the right to public health that is now unthinkably in peril.
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Dr. Ayman El-Mohandes, MBBCh, MD, MPH, FAAP, is Dean of CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.
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Puerto Rican Day Parade (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
Though the governor and lieutenant governor races are getting the most buzz this state election cycle, a number of state legislative races—both Assembly and State Senate— are also surprisingly competitive.
Five of those competitive races happen to be in Latino-majority or Latino-plurality Assembly districts of New York City: two in the Bronx, two in Queens, and one in Brooklyn.
These are the five to watch as the Assembly primaries are decided on Tuesday, June 28:
The Bronx
Jose Rivera has represented the 78th Assembly district in the Bronx since 2000, when he won a seat previously occupied by Roberto Ramirez. Prior to winning this seat in 2000, Rivera served on the New York City Council, and before that, a five-year stint in the New York State Assembly. (Disclaimer: I have informally advised Rivera on his campaigns.)
Rivera represents the last of a generation of pioneering Latino politicians that are in elected office. He rose to power in 1982 after defeating the incumbent Sean Walsh. This was a time of rapid demographic change in the Bronx as Puerto Ricans spread to areas beyond the South Bronx. Rivera took on the powers-that-be of the time, mostly Irish and Italian, and after years of organizing, won his seat exactly 40 years ago.
Now, Rivera has a fight on his hands as he seeks to fend off challenges from George Alvarez and Emmanuel Martinez.
Alvarez has the support of Congressman Adriano Espaillat and this endorsement has led to that of two others — Bronx City Council Members Oswald Feliz and Pierina Sanchez. By strategically endorsing Alvarez, it is clear that Espaillat is attempting to solidify his hold in the West Bronx, opting to depart from the unwritten rule of incumbents supporting other incumbents.
Martinez, who served as chairperson of Community Board 7 in the Bronx and was also elected a Democratic State Committee member, has received the support of the Moving NY Forward PAC, which is largely funded by a wealthy hedge-funder who, according to the Albany Times Union, is the “co-founder of a secretive Wall Street firm.”
The Alvarez and Martinez challenges are the toughest Rivera has faced in years. Yet Rivera has a solid and loyal base, is a formidable campaigner, and is known to frequent events with his ever-present camera on hand. Labor unions and the Bronx Democratic Party are solidly behind him, and Mayor Eric Adams has now endorsed Rivera too.
Moving northeast in the Bronx, the 82nd Assembly district is also home to an intense primary race. Assemblymember Michael Benedetto faces a strong challenge from Jonathan Soto.
Benedetto has served in office since 2004. The demographics of the 82nd district have changed significantly over the last two decades, and that district now has a Latino plurality. Among the Democratic electorate, Latinos make up 45% of all voters and their turnout has been consistent over the years. Evidence of this demographic change is Marjorie Velazquez’s City Council victory last year. The 82nd Assembly district represents 54% of Velazquez’s district, and Velazquez won her race handily, including in the 82nd Assembly district portion of the district.
In this district, however, Latino votes alone will not push Soto to the victory line. Black and white voters are a significant chunk of the electorate, and to win a candidate will need to form a multi-racial coalition.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s PAC, the Working Families Party, and other progressive groups are backing Soto. He is also receiving support from the Move NY Forward PAC mentioned above. Soto is charismatic, whip-smart, and presents Benedetto’s biggest challenge yet.
Queens
In Queens, two Assembly districts are ones to watch in terms of the Latino vote—the 30th and the 35th.
As a result of Assemblymember Brian Barnwell’s decision not to seek re-election, the 30th Assembly district is an open seat and pits Steven Raga, a former Barnwell aide and a Filipino, against Ramon Cando, a Latino of Ecuadorian descent.
The district’s demographic makeup in many ways represents the diversity that is Queens. Of the potential Democratic electorate there, 29% is Latino, 24% Asian, and 22% white. Several voter data experts (including the renowned Jerry Skurnik), deem another quarter of Democratic voters in that district as “other” since modeled demographic data cannot precisely match their ethnicities. Interestingly enough, when factoring in voting participation, the ethnic makeup of the voters remains the same; no particular ethnic group dominates when it comes to turnout.
The Queens Democratic Party apparatus and a number of labor groups are supporting Raga, but for some reason Barnwell, his former boss, is not. Cando is supported by Rep. Tom Suozzi, City Council Member Robert Holden, and Hiram Monserrate’s Democratic club. While Raga has received critical establishment support, Cando’s seeming support among Latinos and white voters appears to make him formidable.
Cando has presented himself as a more moderate “common sense” Democrat, eschewing the “defund” movement to divest police funding for community investments that Raga has espoused. Election day will demonstrate whether message trumps establishment support in this district.
In the 35th Assembly district, Monserrate is taking on the incumbent, Jeff Aubrey, in a rematch of 2020. Aubrey won that race but Monserrate is presenting a formidable challenge in what is a Latino plurality district. Latinos are 43% of the Democratic electorate, compared to 21% of the electorate that is Black and 9% that is Asian.
While Monserrate will always have to contend with his controversial and criminal past, his support among many Latinos in the district remains solid, and his Democratic club is a formidable force, having helped to elect other candidates in East Elmhurst and Corona.
Aubrey has the support of the Queens Democratic organization, in addition to numerous elected officials in surrounding districts, many who are mobilizing behind him and, sometimes more so, in opposition to Monserrate. Aubrey also has been able to maintain the support of a large number of African American voters who have been in the Elmhurst neighborhood for many years.
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is also experiencing primary rumbles of particular significant to the Latino vote, in this case in the 54th Assembly district. Progressive Samy Nemir Olivares is challenging Assemblymember Erik Dilan, son of former State Senator Martin Dilan, who lost to a progressive challenger himself in the 2018 primary when he was defeated by now-Senator Julia Salazar.
The two Latina congressional representatives in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velazquez, are backing Nemir Olivares, as is Senator Salazar, the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America-New York City, and other progressive individuals and groups. By beating Tommy Torres for the district leader position, Nemir Olivares has already shown an ability to take on the Brooklyn machine and win.
This race is a particularly interesting one as a new test of the progressive-moderate split under the latest larger political context. Perhaps the race can show glimpses of where some Latino voters stand on the ideological spectrum, particularly in an area of the city where progressives have been on the rise but not necessarily because of the Latino vote. When Salazar defeated Martin Dilan in 2018, he won the most votes in the 54th Assembly district portion of the Senate district. Will the last vestiges of the Dilan dynasty fall? We’re about to find out.
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Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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