Sen. Alcantara, the author, & Mayor de Blasio (NY State Senate Photography)
In April, New York City certified its 5,000th Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE). Its proud owner is Miguel Cabrera, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to the U.S. in 2009 and owns a transportation business.
When I met Miguel earlier this month in Albany, we talked about immigrant life in the United States. He told me that he became City-certified so that he could reinvest in his local community in the Bronx.
He embodies the spirit of New York City. It is a place that empowers people from different backgrounds to display their entrepreneurial spirit and turn their American Dream into a reality.
There are countless business owners like Miguel who need the support of the City to overcome historical barriers to accessible capital and contracting opportunities. In order to address the impact that discrimination has had on the marketplace for City contracts, Mayor de Blasio has made an aggressive commitment to help foster success among the city’s M/WBEs, including establishing a goal of certifying 9,000 firms by 2019; awarding $16 billion in contracts to M/WBEs by 2025; awarding 30 percent of the value of City contracts to M/WBEs by 2021; and creating loan programs such as the Contract Financing Loan Fund, which give M/WBEs access to loans of up to $500,000 at a low 3 percent interest.
This renewed focus on M/WBEs has led to slight but significant increases in the number of M/WBEs that do business with the City. In Fiscal Year 2015, the City had an 8 percent rate of M/WBE participation among firms that did business with the City. That number rose to 14 percent in FY 2016 and then 19 percent in the first two quarters of FY 2017.
To continue seeing progress, the State must step up and give the City additional tools to address the historic effects of discrimination in the marketplace and spur growth among M/WBEs, which make up more than 50 percent of New York City businesses.
A bill I introduced earlier this month, S.6513, would do just that.
Currently, City agencies have discretionary spending authority that allows them to spend $20,000 to $35,000 without a formal competitive process. The State’s threshold, however, is up to $200,000 and it’s time we allow the City similar flexibility, a move the de Blasio administration fully supports.
I often hear from constituents that the time associated with a formal competition can discourage M/WBEs, which are mostly small businesses, from going through a lengthy procurement process for projects that are small and offer only a slight profit margin. The loss of time and resources M/WBEs shoulder during the competitive process can hinder their growth. This is compounded by the fact that this is a subset of small businesses that have historically been at a competitive disadvantage. To address this problem, my bill will significantly raise the City’s threshold for discretionary spending to be more in line with the State’s.
This provision would help the City make swifter progress in addressing the historical and current impact of discrimination, and would help M/WBEs build capacity and the experience needed to successfully bid and perform on City projects.
To my colleagues in the Senate: small businesses are the backbone of any successful economy. They hire locally and reinvest in their communities. All of our local communities and businesses should have the opportunity to flourish. Please join me in giving the City and its M/WBEs these much needed tools.
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Marisol Alcantara is a state Senator whose district includes Washington Heights, Inwood, and the Upper West Side. On Twitter @NY31Alcantara.
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(photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
Make no mistake, our great city has a racial caste system that continues to plague us. It is time that we craft and execute a comprehensive and coherent progressive urban agenda.
I have not been able to find such an agenda from any leader or institution, not from Barack Obama or even Bernie Sanders. It's as if an urban agenda, since the long ago days of JFK and LBJ and our nation's anti-poverty programs and civil rights movement, has gone out of political fashion.
In the current vacuum, my team and I have begun crafting an urban agenda, with the immediate purpose of promoting racial, social, and economic justice for all New Yorkers.
A work in progress, it consists for now of these fundamental policy reforms:
*Ending, not tweaking or adjusting, the blatantly racist and deeply inhumane quota-driven "broken windows" policing practices that target poor New Yorkers of color -- sometimes via false arrests or bogus summonses -- for engaging in infractions that officers virtually ignore in white communities.
*As recently proposed by the blue-ribbon Lippmann Commission (and rejected publicly by Mayor de Blasio), decriminalizing four minor offenses: marijuana possession; sex work; fare evasion; and gravity knife possession.
*Closing the jails on Rikers Island by the end of 2018 and housing the city's reduced inmate population in existing borough facilities.
*Instituting small classes and integrated student bodies for the 1.1 million children attending our city public schools.
*Providing homes, not just shelters, for 60,000 homeless New Yorkers, over one-third of whom are children.
*Providing truly affordable housing units for low-income households so they can live in their neighborhoods or a neighborhood of their choosing. Work primarily with experienced and proven community-based housing groups to achieve this, including creating suitable entities like community land trusts and removing big real estate from the equation.
*Instead of arresting New Yorkers for fare evasion as is the NYPD's frequent practice -- at the rate of over 70 such arrests per day -- providing free fares for low-income people who need to use public transportation to get to work, job interviews, school, medical appointments, child care providers, and elsewhere.
*Taking a chapter from our nation's New Deal history book, institute at the city's Parks Department, its housing agencies, and other appropriate entities a public works project program that provides living wage jobs and valuable work experience to unemployed New Yorkers, whose assigned tasks will focus on repairing the city's decaying infrastructure.
*Providing free tuition at CUNY colleges for New Yorkers from low- and middle-income families.
Skeptics may call this urban agenda impractical or too far-reaching, but it is animated by the spirit behind the saying that Robert Kennedy borrowed from George Bernard Shaw and used often in his 1968 presidential bid: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others see things that never were and ask why not."
While recognizing the good that these reforms would achieve, other doubters may question where we'd find the money to pay for them. For starters, we point to these potential savings: the $275 million and the $1.1 billion that Mayor de Blasio has included in his recent budget proposals to build a new police academy and to design new jails. Plus, our police and criminal justice reforms would lead to significant reductions in the approximately $10 billion per year that the the city spends on its law enforcement system.
This new urban agenda, which we’ll continue to develop, would enrich the quality of life for all New Yorkers, especially the most vulnerable and heretofore discriminated groups. Given how much progress it would make toward creating a truly just, safe, inclusive, and affordable city for all New Yorkers, the question is not ‘how can you do it’, but ‘how can you not?’
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Bob Gangi is a Democratic candidate for Mayor and former executive director of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP).
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(photo: Tarry Hum)
The New York City Council recently passed an “Aggravated Illegal Conversions” bill by a 49-0 vote. The legislation -- sponsored by City Council Members Gentile, Williams, and Grodenchik, and Brooklyn Borough President Adams, and signed into law by Mayor de Blasio -- significantly increases the civil penalties for owners who illegally subdivide their residential property to create three or more dwelling units (typically single rooms) above the number legally permitted by the property’s certificate of occupancy. Unpaid penalties become a tax lien that the city can recoup through a forced property sale.
Representing the South Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, and Bensonhurst, Council Member Gentile has long argued the high risks and costs of illegal conversions in terms of tenant and emergency responder safety and overburdened public infrastructure. Media coverage of several incidences of illegal conversions in summer 2016 added momentum and renewed urgency to the bill’s passage.
Illegal conversions provide a housing source of last resort and their prevalence in working-class, immigrant enclaves and neighboring areas underscore New York City’s acute housing crisis. The outstanding demand for affordable housing augmented by rising real estate values are the driving forces behind predatory landlord practices. Investor-owners subdivide their property in order to maximize rental profits; homeowners may similarly seek to capture untapped profits, or they may depend on rental income to support a huge mortgage debt.
In either scenario, modest one- to three-family properties have become “modern-day tenements” where working-class New Yorkers are only able to afford a substandard, single room. A common sight in Sunset Park and Flushing are bulletin boards with numerous notices publicizing single rooms for rent. Long discarded as a viable source of housing for low-income tenants, SROs were recently touted as a niche alternative for affluent millennials.
In addition to identifying and punishing predatory landlords who profit by subjecting tenants to substandard housing, Council Member Williams noted, “It is also our responsibility to offer a realistic, affordable housing alternative to the residents.”
There is no question that illegal conversions pose a present danger to the thousands of New Yorkers who rely on this form of shelter. However, this legislation offers no alternatives or protections for tenants whose only source of “affordable” rental housing typically entails risk to personal safety, arbitrary eviction, and hazardous conditions.
The law -- which increases fines, requires the DOB to seek an access warrant and vacate illegal conversions, and potentially, dispossess offending property owners -- has tremendous appeal for middle-class homeowners and civic associations who are, foremost, concerned about a diminished neighborhood quality of life and aesthetic as measured by overcrowdedness, lack of street parking, and front yards converted to parking spaces. Bob Cassara of the Brooklyn Housing Preservation Alliance worries that illegal conversions will tip the balance of a neighborhood’s demography: “Once a home is sold and illegally converted, people refuse to live next to a home with triple the legal occupancy.”
During an October 2016 City Council hearing, Council Member Williams expressed concern that the aggravated illegal conversions bill may appear to be targeting particular tenant populations such as immigrants and people of color. “I know there were some questions of what this bill was and if we were trying to hurt specific demographics and whether it was Haitians in my district and Chinese in Council Member Gentile’s district,” Williams said.
There is good reason for his concerns. Since Trump’s election, New Yorkers — including community board members representing the city’s celebrated hyper-diverse neighborhoods —feel emboldened to express anti-immigrant sentiments. A longtime member was recently removed from Community Board 4 in Queens for her comment that bicycle lanes will no longer be needed once Trump “removes all the illegals.” According to a DNAinfo map of the November 2016 elections, a large part of Council Member Gentile’s district voted for Trump. Less than a month after the presidential election, a Muslim off-duty NYPD officer and her son were the targets of a racist verbal assault in her Bay Ridge neighborhood. News accounts of escalating fears of detainment and deportation has prompted Congressional Rep. Nydia Velazquez to introduce legislation that prohibits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from identifying themselves as local police officers.
Mayor de Blasio has declared our city a sanctuary for immigrants. In this climate, we need to actively ensure that all New Yorkers have safe haven. While this illegal conversions law rightly seeks to punish predatory landlords and their exploitative practices, without the provision of alternative, safe and affordable long-term housing, this law deepens the crisis facing our most vulnerable tenant populations including immigrants, seniors, and the working-poor.
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Tarry Hum is a professor at The City University of New York (CUNY) and author of Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood. On Twitter @TarryHum.
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