Mayor Bill de Blasio at his alma mater, Columbia (Newsday)
Dear Mayor de Blasio:
We are writing to you as graduate students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, to put forth a series of policy recommendations. The priorities in this letter are based on the results of a survey of SIPA’s student body. As SIPA is your alma mater, you know that we represent a diverse community with a strong commitment to public service. After reviewing the survey results, we offer the following strategies to help you and your administration address New York City’s most pressing problems.
Affordable housing in New York is at risk due to a highly speculative market, scarce housing supply, and an imperfect set of code enforcement mechanisms. To mitigate these problems we recommend:
Creation of a landlord rating system and increased sanctions against failing landlords. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development currently tracks building violations, ownership, purchase price, property debt, and outstanding taxes and liens. While a landlord may face fines or liens for transgressions there is currently no mechanism to control for overleveraging of affordable rental units, and many fines and liens are never collected because the cost to collect exceeds the amount of the penalty. Using the available information, HPD should create an index that holistically assesses the quality of New York City landlords, resulting in publicly available grading system. Landlords with poor grades should receive heavy financial penalties, and/or be barred from purchasing additional property in the City. Landlord ratings are likely to be well received by New Yorkers, who have become accustomed to grading criteria in other areas such as restaurants and food trucks.
Create a survey of vacant properties, and use these lots to support the New York City Community Land Initiative. NYCCLI represents a coalition of community groups seeking to reduce market speculation through the implementation of Land Trusts, a non-profit vehicle that preserves affordable housing in perpetuity through land use restrictions and the development of housing units. Successful models exist in San Francisco, Burlington, and Berkeley. By conducting the survey and unlocking vacant lots, the City can minimize the impact of market forces on affordable housing in vulnerable neighborhoods.
Use mayoral discretionary power to dedicate an additional 1 percent of the Department of Homeless Services Budget for programs that serve long-term housing needs for the homeless. In particular, these additional funds should be used to purchase land for the New York City Community Land Initiative and to develop low-income affordable cooperatives in NYC, both mechanisms for building asset wealth in traditionally marginalized communities.
New York City Transit is underperforming and cannot efficiently move its current ridership. Congestion is a daily challenge and accessibility continues to marginalize outer-borough communities. Priorities for this administration should be:
Establish “congestion” or “fair” pricing to alleviate gridlock. Former transportation commissioner Sam Schwartz and MoveNY have outlined a “fair” pricing plan that shares the tolling burden among residents of all the boroughs. This plan institutes moderate tolls on the East River bridges, while decreasing the tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows, Whitestone, RFK, and Throgs Neck. This toll system should be implemented and the funds must be directed to strengthen public transportation infrastructure against the effects of climate change and to expand outer borough select bus service routes.
Institute a commuter tax. Suburban residents who work in the five boroughs utilize city services, though the cost of paying for these services falls on city residents. A modest commuter tax of 0.005 percent of income—costing $250 per year for a commuter with an annual salary of $50,000—could generate millions in annual revenue for the city. The funds from a commuter tax should help improve NYCT and finance its capital projects.
Workers employed in science, technology, engineering, or math fields earn 12-60 percent more than similar workers in other fields, with the greatest advantage going to those with a high-school degree or less. Despite the projected creation of 29,000 tech-sector jobs by 2020, graduates of local colleges and universities are twice as likely to major in humanities than STEM fields. In addition to expanding universal Pre-K and reaching a contract with the city’s teachers, the mayor must capitalize on the growth of math-dependent sectors by taking the following steps:
Promote education in STEM subjects, particularly among girls, minorities, and other traditionally underrepresented groups. The city should expand the number of teachers receiving training in these subjects, provide dedicated time for professional development to encourage student achievement, and produce an annual analysis of the progress that individual schools make in increasing student participation in advanced math and science courses.
Prepare students for immediate post-graduate employment by providing hands-on experiential learning and alternative pathways to certification, additional degrees, or advanced standing, as has been done at P-Tech in Brooklyn. This mayoral administration should make the successful components of P-Tech a standard for future high-school redesign activities, and pilot transferrable course modules in other city schools in the next academic year.
Provide additional in-service learning opportunities — like app development for community use — and exposure to potential employers through out-of-school-time programs like Girls Who Code.
The number of people living in New York City is expected to reach 9 million by 2030. To ensure that all residents have access to the economic opportunities, clean atmosphere, and safe and secure living conditions that they deserve, we recommend that the following action be taken to facilitate robust yet sustainable economic growth:
Lobby the City Council to pass a 10 cent tax on paper and plastic bags. Cities and states across the country are adopting a bag tax to reduce waste and generate revenue. Implemented at the point of sale, 5 cents would go to each the retailer and the City. This tax would promote behavioral change for consumers and generate revenue that can be used for sustainability efforts elsewhere. From the estimated 5.2 billion bags used by New Yorkers each year, the tax could generate $520 million.
Incorporate vocational training into the services offered by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. Nearly half of the labor force in New York City is comprised of recent immigrants. Recognize the vital contributions of these communities to the city’s economy and improve access and availability to programs dedicated to workforce development. Although the Immigrant Entrepreneur Initiatives and Immigrant Bridge programs furthered the employment gains of immigrants with high levels of education and experience, capacity must be expanded to include low-skilled individuals in order to ensure mutually beneficial participation in the modern economy.
Expand the existing NYC Business Link program, which provides wage subsidies to employers who hire public assistance recipients, to include low- and middle-income applicants who do not receive assistance.
Implement pilot microgrid programs to serve Coney Island Hospital and NYCHA facilities in the Rockaways. Sandy recovery is estimated at $19 billion, and as a region, New York lost $50-60 billion in economic activity. These numbers are expected to increase by 2050. Microgrids decentralize the electrical grid and contain the impact of damage and power loss. They incorporate multiple types of electrical generation, from gas to solar, and allow communities to sell excess generation back into the grid. $294 million of the federal recovery funds from Sandy are earmarked for resiliency programs and could be used for this initiative. Implementing microgrids in these locations would both protect these at-risk populations, many of whom were evacuated during the storm and went weeks without electricity, and inspire other communities to adopt them for themselves.
As your administration tackles these challenges, it will be important to adopt a comprehensive strategy and to include a diverse set of partners: political insiders and newcomers; wealthy, middle class, and poor residents; academics and practitioners; and seasoned public servants, as well as the next generation of policy advisers. In reconciling New York's "two cities," we urge you not to neglect one in favor of the other, but to foster interdependence and shared interests between the two.
This is a special time for New York City. At SIPA we are here to help and to serve, and hope that we can contribute to your administration as it addresses the issues outlined above.
We wish you the best of luck.
Sincerely,
Lauren Andersen, Winston Berkman, Brendan Coticchia, Madeleine Gray, and Elyssa White
Master of Public Administration Candidates, Class of 2015
On December 21st, the longest night of the year, communities across America observe Homeless Memorial Day. Last year, 175 communities held an event. But most people have never heard of Homeless Memorial Day, and that's unfortunate.
Though it's been held for 25 years, it's usually not covered by the media. If ever it deserves coverage and thought, though, it's this year in New York City.
A month ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published its "Point-in-Time" homelessness count. They reported a 4 percent decline in homelessness across America in 2013 including significant decreases in urban areas. But in New York City, HUD's count, supervised by the city itself, documented a dramatic jump in homelessness.
Homeless advocates have been lamenting the record number of 57,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city. But the HUD count for one night in January 2013, estimated the city's homeless population at 64,060. That's a new record — in a bad way. It's enough people to fill Yankee stadium and jam Times Square, too.
Highlighting further the plight of children like Dasani — whose life was so powerfully described in last week’s bombshell New York Times series — HUD reported a 13 percent New York City increase including 39,601 people in homeless families. Tragically, their report for the city's homeless population, number of homeless families and homeless children may be the highest ever reported.
That makes Homeless Memorial Day 2013 especially poignant.
Homeless Memorial Day remembers those who died in our community this year without a home. Many of them might have no memorial remembrance at all if not for Homeless Memorial Day.
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One person I'll be remembering is Jose Perez. He died without a home on September 12, 2013, in Elmhurst Hospital. I never actually met him, but I'll be thinking of him.
Mr. Perez was brutally beaten in Sabba Park, Sunnyside, Queens, on September 7th not far from where I live. He was assaulted simply because he was homeless and vulnerable. It certainly wasn't a robbery - homeless people are easy targets but not very promising victims for theft.
He died at the age of 42. That's way too young — but not all that young for a chronically homeless person.
Homeless Memorial Day reminds us how dramatically the trauma, stress and exposure of homelessness rob chronically homeless people of years of life.
A child born in New York City today has a life expectancy of over 80 years. Studies document chronically homeless peoples' life expectancy is in their 40s or 50s. That's three or four decades lost, needlessly, to homelessness.
Senseless attacks on homeless people are increasing according to an annual Coalition for the Homeless study reporting over 1,000 documented attacks in the last decade. That's based on very incomplete reporting because most attacks on homeless people aren't reported. Sometimes even if they are reported by the victim they go unrecorded in official statistics. That's why a quarter of the attacks reported are fatal — not because 25 percent of the beatings end in death but because most nonfatal attacks aren't recorded.
Most victims are men in their 40s — just like Mr. Perez. Most perpetrators are male, too, but about half are 20 years old or younger. The youngest documented "hate crime" attack against a homeless person was by a 9 year old. A study at California State University in San Bernardino found homeless people had a greater victimization rate — 66 percent annually — "than any other group in the western industrialized world."
But attacks and traumas are hardly the major health hazard of chronic homelessness recognized on Homeless Memorial Day. Epidemiological studies have found homelessness itself is a cause of morbidity and premature death. Those who practice street medicine and provide health care to homeless people have long known that homelessness is a public health crisis, an aggravating condition for disease and an interference with effective treatment.
It was eye-opening research from the city's Departments of Health and Homeless Services that found age-adjusted death rate for single adults in city shelters to be twice that of the city's general population. They reported homeless adults represented well under 1 percent of the population but over 1.6 percent of the hospitalizations, with their hospital admissions lasting more than 12 percent longer than average. They found some diseases rare in the general population rampant in shelters.
For instance, their report put TB rates in city shelters at 11 times that of the city overall. The HIV diagnosis rate was an incredible 16 times that of the city. Even with heroic efforts to get homeless people off the streets in bitter cold weather, there are dozens of exposure deaths in New York City annually. Mental illness and emotional distress is epidemic among people experiencing homelessness.
Homeless Persons' Memorial Day recognizes the threat to health and life that living without a home carries. Homeless advocate Bobby Watts coined the phrase "death by park bench" in painting the picture of the homelessness health hazard.
If you want to hear more about the scourge of homelessness, its health consequences, how homelessness can be overcome and to memorialize those who passed in New York City this year without a home, there are several events being held in Gotham.
Two outstanding observances are the Picture the Homeless Memorial Service at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South at 6 p.m. on Friday evening, Dec. 20; and 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 21, at the Care for the Homeless client leaders' event at New Song Church, 2230 Frederick Douglass Blvd. between 120th and 121st streets in Harlem.
Homeless Memorial Day also recognizes these deaths are avoidable. Better policies could end modern day homelessness as we know it and end the health hazard and premature death sentences it carries with it.
Jeff Foreman is policy director at Care for the Homeless. Follow him on twitter @JeffForeman2
This week The New York Times is featuring amazing coverage of homelessness in our city, in the form of a captivating series of articles about a 13-year-old girl named Dasani — after the water of the same name. The coverage is nothing short of extraordinary.
First, the sheer depth of it is remarkable. It began on Monday with an article and picture filling almost the entire Times front page above the fold, with four full pages of photos and coverage inside. That's an amazing amount of space for any story.
On Tuesday it was the front page again, and three full inside pages. The series continues.
New York is a city where homeless advocates often criticize the lack of in-depth coverage of homelessness and poverty. We can be a city where people walk by homeless people in the street daily but never acknowledge them and rarely see them at all. We're a city long suffering homeless "fatigue."
The Times coverage might do something about that.
The articles put a face on homelessness. It's an engaging, captivating child's face. Precisely for that reason it's difficult to read; but it makes homelessness personal to anyone who does.
Dasani is an amazingly resilient and optimistic child living through a nightmare. She is described as 4-foot-8-inches, has incredible responsibilities for siblings at her tender age and lives in a city shelter for homeless families.
This isn't just any shelter. It's Auburn Place, a city-run facility Dasani refers to as "the jail." It's a Dickensian horror show of a place where Times reporter Andrea Elliot finds Dasani, who sleeps near a mop bucket that serves as her family's toilet, amid mice and rotting walls, to life.
The Times articles aren't the first media tour of the substandard Auburn shelter. A year ago, when Mayor Bloomberg opined that the increased average length of stay for city shelter residents — it's well over a year now on average — was because the shelters had become "so pleasurable" residents didn't want to leave, the NY Daily News reviewed Auburn. They described it as a place housing homeless families with "rats coming through the walls, worms in the bathroom and living conditions so squalid that one man compared them with his stint in prison."
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The Times articles paint vividly, too. They tell the story of homeless children suffering "staggering societal costs" at the expensive of their opportunity for a decent education, a real chance to develop earning power or flee poverty, often leading to psychological trauma, disease, addictions and prison.
The Times also laments results for 22,000 homeless children a night in New York City shelters, which they say is the highest number since the Great Depression. But it might be worse than that.
Each year, HUD conducts a national "Point-In-Time" count of people experiencing homelessness in America. Their 2013 PIT count of one night in January reported progress. They found homelessness down 4 percent across America.
Sadly, New York City bucked that trend. HUD estimated on that night there were 64,060 homeless people in New York City. That may be an all-time record high. Worse, it included 39,601 people in homeless families.
The Times series also visits the policy choices "intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant" and meant to reduce the number of homeless. First there was the elimination of the historic targeting of some of the city's public housing and Section 8 housing vouchers specifically to aid homeless families. But the homeless population wasn't reduced — it increased.
Then there was the elimination of a city subsidy to move homeless families from shelter to housing. Again, policymakers felt the meager subsidy was just drawing people into shelters. After its elimination, the number of homeless people, especially families with children, increased. It's more accurate to say it exploded.
Advocates argue the situation is all the more tragic because it doesn't have to be this way. There are real, evidence-based plans that have worked to prevent homelessness and reduce the number of homeless people. If policy choices helped get us into this mess, they say, better policies could get us out.
The plan to end homelessness in New York City would include reinstating the priority for using some portion of the city's federal resources to house homeless families. It would include more affordable housing targeted to very-low income people and supportive housing for those who need it. It would include a housing voucher program to move homeless people to permanent housing and a strategy of better coordinating government efforts of major "feeders" of homelessness such as aging out of foster care without a home, getting time-limited out of domestic violence shelters or leaving prison without housing.
Advocates say these proposals won't cost more than we spend now on programs that haven't worked. In most cases they save money, because subsidies, supportive housing and the like are far less expensive than shelters.
But what has enthralled us this week is not policy choices but the hard to fathom story of an 11-year-old honor student making her way through seemingly impossible obstacles, and the chance — just the chance —that she might succeed.
We're charmed by her optimism against all odds. She tells the Times reporter she won't fall into the pitfalls all around. She believes that Auburn will be just a "pit stop" for her. She says she has "a lot of possibilities."
We are horrified by her challenges, and saddened when she calls herself "ghetto."
The Times called the series "Invisible Child." But of course the articles have made her saga all so visible to us. That's a fantastic accomplishment.
It's also a responsibility. If we now know there are children forced to live like this in our city — 280 of them at Auburn, and at least 22,000 more — we should do something about it. And we could. Which leaves only one question: What will we do?
Jeff Foreman is Policy Director for Care for the Homeless in New York City. Follow him on twitter at @JeffForeman2.