Housing (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
New York State’s drawn-out budget process is finally done, but the largest issue in the minds of New Yorkers, housing, was virtually untouched.
Thousands of New Yorkers are struggling to find housing options they can afford, millions of square feet of commercial space sits empty, and more than 77,000 people live in New York City shelters, including more than 25,000 children. Fortunately, there are proposals that have received widespread support among the Legislature and other stakeholders when it comes to housing. They involve tools to support the conversion of empty offices to housing — including new affordable units in Manhattan.
State lawmakers have a moral imperative to support these measures before they wrap up this session — even if it means their summer vacation starts a little late. If they wait until next year to find solutions, the City will have to dig itself out of a far deeper economic challenge.
We are a third of the way through the decade and New York City is already well behind the lackluster housing production of the preceding two decades. That’s why we can no longer afford to let a select few Manhattan members of the Legislature from affluent areas use “progressivism” as a Trojan Horse to slip poison pills into housing policies — as we saw them attempt during the budget process.
Real champions of hardworking New Yorkers would be committed to constructive solutions to get housing built. They would work like hell to provide relief for the full half of New York City households who cannot afford to live here anymore, according to a recent study by the Fund for the City of New York and United Way of New York City. You would think they would look at the fact that at least 30% of those people’s incomes go to rent and feel compelled to get to “yes” on lifting the floor-to-area ratio (FAR) cap or expanding office-to-residential conversions. But instead, a select few have fear-mongered and blocked any prospect or opportunity for Black, Latino, and Asian people to move into their neighborhoods.
We have to be better and dream bigger. The warped view of perfect policies from those who have challenged these reforms has stopped the rest of us from getting anything done. The decadelong effort to keep the FAR cap in place has led to a mere 45,968 new units across Manhattan from 2010 to 2019, according to the Furman Center. That’s 10,000 fewer units created on the island than in the preceding decade – one in which two major crises temporarily slowed production. Such a downturn in production is a major reason why the average monthly rent in the borough has ballooned to $4,000.
Housing production in the 2020s has become even more anemic. Last year saw a mere 626 new projects filed with the Department of Buildings, according to data tracked by the Real Estate Board of New York. The 22 buildings that sought foundation plan approval last December represented a 90% drop from the same time a year earlier, signaling a lack of pro-housing policies has real implications.
It’s incorrect to say we’re barreling toward a crisis when we’re already in one, particularly when you consider the simultaneous explosion of commercial vacancies. Just recently, both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times pointed to a potential economic strain worse than any we’ve seen before.
Let’s be clear: many Class A office buildings are still attractive. It’s why you still saw big commercial projects carry on through the pandemic. But Class B and C commercial space is underperforming overall, driving the historically high 16% commercial vacancy rate in Manhattan. There are serious implications the longer this goes on as real estate taxes account for the bulk of New York City’s revenue. Fewer tax dollars from empty properties means less money for the City in the years ahead, which translates to less money for schools, sanitation, mass transit, and other services New Yorkers depend on.
Lifting the FAR cap and expanding conversions, with an incentive to create affordable housing, are popular policies that Albany leaders can get done this year. No, they alone will not create the 800,000 units Governor Hochul has pledged to create to meet demand and allow growth. It would be a fool’s errand to hold out for a single, magic policy to deliver. What these measures can do, however, is create as many as 50,000 new housing units where they’re most needed – namely Manhattan.
There’s no other policy that’s united five borough presidents, nine community boards, dozens of advocacy groups, 32BJ SEIU, and elected officials at all levels of government. This is a proposal that’s united the Governor, the Mayor, and the City Council Speaker, as well as Council Members from across the political spectrum. When something looks this good, we shouldn’t let it slip by.
Our elected officials must stop using fear tactics to block good legislation and punt this into the next session. You can tell someone “Wait till next year” when their favorite team loses. But it’s cold comfort to someone about to lose their home or someone desperately looking for their first.
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John Sanchez is executive director of the 5 Borough Housing Movement and a former Bronx community district manager. On Twitter @NYJohnSanchez.
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Students (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
It is budget season in New York City, a time when we all try to calculate the relative value of the things that are important to us. At a time when young people are struggling to cast off the psychic weight of the pandemic and great social unease, it is common to hear talk of the value of mental health, particularly for adolescents.
If that talk is sincere (and as the Head of School at Children’s Aid College Prep Charter School in the Bronx, I hope it is), then I would expect the relative value of social-emotional learning (SEL) and a reliable, easy-to-use assessment tool to be high. I would expect our city and schools to want to continue making an investment that has paid dividends in better behavior, stronger mental health, and more citizenship. I would be shocked if a city that says it values the social, emotional, and mental health of its young people lets the use of a valuable tool slip away.
Yet that could happen. The city recently told school superintendents in a letter that they could lose access to an important SEL tool on June 29, a year earlier than expected. This would interrupt the city's delivery of SEL to students who need it now more than ever, and would also deprive parents of information about their children's social and emotional wellbeing.
This tool is the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment, but everyone refers to it as the DESSA. It is a rating scale that teachers use to assess students’ SEL-related strengths, such as how well a child works in groups, how often a student offers to help someone, how well a student gets things done on time, and how persistent a child is. Educators more recently have come to understand and accept that we all learn through our feelings and that young people especially are most successful in learning environments that elicit strong, positive feelings.
The DESSA takes minutes for a teacher to complete, but gives the teacher and the school valuable guidance on how well children are using and developing SEL skills and allows schools to make adjustments or spot issues.
It is no secret that young people now are facing plenty of issues not of their own making, yet city kids historically have scored well on the DESSA. My feeling is that to live in this city, all of us – children included – must have a baseline competence in social-emotional skills. It has helped that organizations like Children’s Aid and the Urban Assembly (which organizes support based on the DESSA throughout New York City Public Schools) have made plain the value of SEL and how to measure it.
In this time of anxiety and sparse mental health services, one particular value of the DESSA is to help schools discern the difference between a young person with a mental health problem and one who is enduring the stress of living during challenging times. These things are not the same.
One trend we’ve seen with the help of the DESSA, for example, is that older young people are challenged to maintain optimistic thinking and goal-directed behavior. Right now it can be hard for them to see a clear future when they’ve witnessed or experienced three years of uncertainty, loss, and socio-political turmoil. Understandably, this can create feelings of loss or pessimism, but it’s not a mental illness. Arguably, it’s a rational reaction to the times.
While the DESSA is not perfect (no assessment tool is), it does give educators the language and the ability to see the difference between pessimism and clinical depression. And the DESSA gives teachers a map on how to use SEL instruction to address the social and emotional skills that children as well as adults need to thrive.
We have all collectively lived through a traumatic experience. The way to heal trauma is through positive experiences and connections with others. The use of SEL in school puts a premium on that, and it recognizes that emotionally competent children are better academic performers.
We all want children to learn well. We want them to behave well. And of course we want them to manage themselves well and relate well to others. Let’s not stop investing in a tool that helps make all of that happen.
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Drema Brown is Head of School at Children’s Aid College Prep Charter School in the Bronx, the educational home of 600 K-8 students. She has been a leader in city schools for 20 years.
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The BQE (photo: NYC Department of Transportation)
The key question about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) right now isn’t two versus three lanes for the Brooklyn Heights cantilever. It is whether New York City should proceed with its piecemeal Brooklyn Heights project prior to development of a wider corridor plan.
If Mayor Adams and the city’s Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) have their way, downtown Brooklyn and adjacent areas will be forever stuck with a moderately updated version of the BQE as we know it. And their plan comes with an absurd, blighting set of elevated highway ramps NYC DOT has proposed building in DUMBO to make driving through Brooklyn’s densest district even easier than it is today.
The city’s rush to rebuild the cantilever is bizarre and unnecessary when there is strong public and elected appetite for re-thinking urban highways generally, and the BQE in particular. It should be suspended while city and state leaders sort out a framework for taking a longer, harder, and more fundamental look at the BQE and the future of transportation in Brooklyn and Queens.
I was frequently at odds with transportation decision-making during the de Blasio administration, but our past mayor was right when it came to the triple cantilever. Late in his term he called for shoring up the cantilever structures and reducing the rate of deterioration with traffic and weight restrictions, all in order to create breathing room to create a strong, future-oriented plan: “We’re now talking about having the time to do the really big, creative stuff”, he said.
Today the challenge is finding a way to get to the big, creative stuff while preventing Mayor Adams from unalterably locking us in to a transportation infrastructure that promotes urban car use.
Rhetoric about the BQE this winter and spring began building in this direction. Elected leaders across the borough demanded that the city’s limited project be transformed into a city-state plan encompassing the entire length of the BQE. But now that demand needs to be sharpened.
Just “getting the state involved” won’t get us what we need. The state Department of Transportation (NYS DOT) is little better equipped to undertake a thoughtful and creative BQE plan than the Adams Administration. Consider NYS DOT’s track record with highway removal. After decades of pressure from local groups and elected officials, in late last decade NYS DOT changed the little-used Sheridan Expressway from an interstate-style highway to a boulevard. But while pedestrians can now cross the roadway at three signalized intersections, the Sheridan right of way remains a 9- to 11-lane scar across the Bronx cityscape and retains suburban-style ramp connections to both the Bruckner and Cross-Bronx Expressways, all in a corridor with negligible traffic levels. Nothing creative and nothing that could be labeled urban design was applied at all to the Sheridan rebuild. The city played no role at all, even though it has ways to involve itself in state road projects within the five boroughs.
Getting past the state and city agencies committed to keeping cars happy requires a new institution capable of weighing the problems, data, and potential of rethinking the BQE with ideas and applications more beneficial and appropriate than an interstate highway. This has in fact been a key recommendation in thoughtful looks at BQE issues over the past five years, but recently it has been buried under Mayor Adams’ charge at the triple cantilever and in fevered rhetoric about the legacy of Robert Moses.
The Arup/City Council study explicitly called for creation of “a new I-278 corridor governing body,” while the de Blasio expert panel and Regional Plan Association both urged a federal/state/city/stakeholder working group. It’s also the intent behind Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon’s bill to create a BQE public authority.
All that may sound process-y, but we do in fact need to establish one conversation and one decision-making body capable of sorting out everything from today’s tunneling technology and the impact of congestion pricing to an analytic framework for assessing future travel demand broadly and without bias. We sorely lack that today.
Successful highway transformation projects around the world have all framed key goals outside the realms of counting cars and trucks. Tear-down of the Cheonggyecheon Highway was framed as restoration of the cultural and natural heritage of downtown Seoul. Lane reduction on the Peripherique is being cast as an air quality project and opportunity to dramatically expand green space in the outer Paris region. Let’s learn from these and similar efforts, and engage their expertise.
New York has done this successfully before. We have Hudson River Park and a pedestrian-permeable West Street today instead of a superhighway thanks to a multi-disciplinary task force established by Mayor Koch and Governor Mario Cuomo, and decisively including representatives of Borough President David Dinkins. We need something similar for the BQE, encompassing not only transportation agencies, but also city planners, urban design experts, elected officials, and civic stakeholders.
One of their charges should be to examine other cases of urban highway transformations, and they should be empowered to engage consultants with experience in modeling and estimating not just traffic growth, which is all American DOTs seem able to imagine, but how demand in the BQE travel market could be accommodated or managed differently, with better outcomes for the city and its neighborhoods. For example, perhaps the anticipated Interborough Express doesn’t need to sit at the back of a very long MTA project queue, but could instead be folded into a Brooklyn-Queens corridor program, and built with highway funds as a way to ease demand for BQE car trips.
Once they’ve read this, I certainly don’t expect Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul to decide they agree and begin to act. Perhaps one way to elevate the issue and provoke action is for engaged elected officials to assemble their own expert group to further develop the framework for a corridor-wide approach, directly challenging the city’s piecemeal effort. Such an undertaking needs to be clear that Mayor Adams’ drive to impose a “solution” for the Brooklyn Heights cantilever will almost certainly foreclose other options and predispose any look at the corridor toward the status quo.
Unfortunately, piecemeal is how New York does most things. Public interest in the BQE is a chance to change that for transportation in the city’s most populous borough and beyond, if we seize the opportunity.
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Jon Orcutt is a transportation policy consultant, long-time transportation reform advocate, and was NYC DOT Policy Director from 2007 to 2014. On Twitter @jonorcutt.
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