Mayor de Blasio at a housing construction site (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Last year, as the pandemic crushed the economy and public life, annual new housing construction in New York City dropped by 4,600 units to 20,200, the lowest since 2015, according to the city Department of City Planning. While new affordable housing kept pace with previous years and overall housing production picked up in the latter half of 2020, building permits remain relatively low in the first several months of this year, portending an uncertain future for the city's housing stock.
New York has faced a housing emergency for years before the onset of the pandemic, with low vacancy rates and a large portion of residents rent-burdened. The number of units on the rental market more than tripled last summer and remains more than double what it was pre-pandemic. But the ratio of new jobs to housing has remained high since the Great Recession and there is broad agreement among city planners and developers, among others, that more housing is a critical need in the near- and long-term.
“New housing, especially affordable housing, is key to an equitable recovery. Since construction resumed last year, New York’s housing production has been resilient, with ongoing significant levels of development, permits issued and a large amount of housing in the pipeline," wrote Joe Marvilli, a Department of City Planning (DCP) spokesperson, in an email. "DCP will continue to prioritize affordable housing, economic development, health and other facilities that meet community needs.”
A number of factors contributed to the dip in new housing, including an economy in freefall and a statewide construction halt on market-rate housing last spring. While the freeze on construction was lifted and economic conditions are improving, the fate of tax abatements in Albany and the attitude of incoming city lawmakers' toward development could make the difference between a slow ramp-up to pre-pandemic levels and an explosion of housing production.
"Maintaining this average rate of production in the teeth of the pandemic is, in one sense, very good – perhaps, even surprising – news," said Carl Weisbrod, an urban development consultant and former head of the Department of City Planning and City Planning Commission, in response to the latest housing construction figures. "On the other hand, if New York City is to significantly address its housing shortage, it must up the game on housing production."
While low compared to recent years, the number of new housing built in 2020 was buoyed by ongoing affordable housing production, especially in the Bronx, which continued through the construction freeze (from March 30 to June 8) thanks to an exemption for "essential" projects. New housing in the Bronx was stable between 2019 and 2020, with roughly 4,400 units completed each year, according to the Department of City Planning, while Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan saw completion numbers dip. Seventy percent of the new housing in the Bronx was considered affordable.
East New York, the first neighborhood to be rezoned under Mayor Bill de Blasio's signature affordable housing initiative, Housing New York, had the most units finished of any neighborhood in 2020 at around 1,000, due largely to the completion of several fully-affordable buildings on Fountain Avenue.
The city is advancing rezonings in the SoHo-Noho section of Manhattan and in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to allow new housing construction and residential conversions in more affluent, amenity-rich neighborhoods. Under legislation enacted in 2016 known as Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), a certain percentage of new units in the rezoned areas would be required to be affordable (there are different ratios of market-rate to rent-regulated units that can be applied depending on affordability levels). A number of other neighborhoods and swaths of the city have been discussed for such rezonings to foster more housing and community improvements under the next administration.
"We came up with a target of about 25,000 units a year...and that's what we've been able to do despite the pandemic," said Jeremy House, a spokesperson for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In 2020, HPD financed the construction or preservation of roughly 29,500 units, more than the 26,260 the year before. He said the city is on pace to reach 300,000 affordable units by 2026, Housing New York's twelve-year goal. To date, the city has financed almost 178,000 apartments, according to HPD's website. The full scope of changes to the affordable housing landscape is hard to determine because HPD does not track how many units exited affordability.
There were about 3.5 million housing units citywide in 2017, according to the HPD's latest available Housing and Vacancy Survey.
On top of the unhalted affordable housing construction, "[w]e have made real progress on affordable housing during the de Blasio administration in large measure due to the allocation of substantially more capital dollars to affordable housing, in part due to [Mandatory Inclusionary Housing]," said Weisbrod, referring to the 2016 legislation that requires a certain level of affordability when rezonings for more housing are approved, whether for a single plot of land or a larger area. Other programs like legal services for tenants facing eviction "have also helped reduce the number of affordable units falling out of the affordable housing stock – a not insignificant data point,” Weisbrod added.
As the city continues to finance affordable housing under the mayor’s plan, key questions include how much overall housing will be produced in the city in the near-term and beyond, and whether city government can help encourage a building boom that may contribute to a more affordable city with space for everyone who wants to live in it.
"It was wise for government official >s to recognize the critical need for affordable housing by ensuring those projects could continue moving forward last year," said Basha Gerhards, senior vice president for planning at the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), the city's largest association of developers. "We absolutely need more affordable housing. However, it’s important to understand that we also need more housing overall and we need City and State policies that can practically facilitate efforts to increase the number of below market rate units as part of that housing growth.”
According to the Real Estate Board of New York, since the end of the 2008 recession, the city added over 858,000 jobs but only 125,000 newly constructed units, a rate of .15 new units per job. Pre-pandemic, the population was expected to grow by over half a million by 2040.
In the last decade, New York has trailed behind 17 other major U.S. cities in terms of housing units permitted per resident (25.3 units per 1,000 residents), according to an analysis from Citizens Budget Commission. The city added 206,000 units to the housing stock in the last decade, just over 20,000 per year. In this year’s mayoral election, former federal and city housing secretary Shaun Donovan, has said the city should be building about 50,000 units of housing per year, the largest number cited by any candidate.
The need for affordable housing has increased in the past two decades. From 2002 to 2017 median rents increased 37%, while renter income grew only 20%, according to a presentation from DCP and HPD. While the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) accounts for 8% of the city's housing stock, it makes up 79% of rentals under $500 per month. Close to 50,000 individuals stay in city Department of Homeless Services shelters each night, with tens of thousands more in other shelters or types of temporary housing.
Coming out of the first year of the pandemic, encouraging employment figures and businesses reopening mean the landscape is ripe for new housing growth, experts say. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City's seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate dropped below 12% in March for the first time since March 2020. Last month, private-sector employment topped 3.5 million, an increase of about 42,000 from the month prior, according to a recent report from city Comptroller Scott Stringer's office. "Private employment remains 578,000 below pre-pandemic highs of February 2020, but has grown by 324,000 since the shutdown of April 2020," according to the report.
While after an early-pandemic dip median asking rent has been relatively stable since last fall, the number of available units has dropped, which the comptroller's report suggests indicates "a stabilizing market." The number of available rentals fell to 55,000 in February, far greater than pre-pandemic levels but significantly lower than the decade-high of 75,000 reached in August. "Some of the decline may be due to landlords pulling apartments from the market in anticipation of a stronger demand in the future," the report warns.
With robust vaccination efforts, businesses reopening, and jobs increasing, the city is poised to begin increasing housing production. But whether and when it will reach pre-pandemic levels depends on more than just improving macroeconomic factors.
"There is going to be a slow and steady ramp up, it's not going to be like this one 'aha' moment," said Alicia Glen, a former Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development who spearheaded the Housing New York plan, in an interview.
"But I also think because of a bunch of regulatory things that are happening -- the...expiration of 421a -- and the very, very toxic anti-development politics which have taken root, you're going to see an overall slowdown in production," she added.
By the end of 2020, the number of units with active permits issued in any year was around 89,000, roughly the same as previous years, according to the Department of City Planning, though Glen believes much of that could evaporate before units are completed. "People could have filed for lots of plans but nothing counts until you have foundation permits and it's real. There's a big fall off between what DCP will have and what will actually happen, generally speaking."
In the current fiscal year (FY21) through March, the number of new housing units permitted, either in new construction or alterations to existing buildings, stood at roughly 21,400, a 10,000-unit drop in permitted units from the year prior and the lowest it's been since at least fiscal year 2018, according to the city Department of Buildings. Foundation permits in 2020 dropped by about 500 to roughly 1,300 from the year before.
“Of course developers want to advance new projects that will deliver more housing, including affordable housing," said Gerhards of REBNY. "But we need to remember that even before the pandemic created new economic challenges, virtually all below market rate housing construction in New York City relied on both private sector financing and some form of property tax benefit to address immense construction costs and the City’s inequitable property tax system that disincentives the creation of rental housing. It’s going to be crucial for elected officials and policymakers to keep that in mind as we move forward."
Also on the table are proposals to convert distressed hotels and office buildings into housing, to legalize and advance ways to create livable basement housing ("accessory dwelling units"), and more.
Developers are concerned about the expiration of the 421-a tax abatement program, which is set to lapse in June 2022 and provides incentives for building affordable housing, though it has been questioned for its efficiency. At least one leading candidate in this year’s race for mayor, Comptroller Stringer, has called for an end to the program.
"Not sending signals that that is going to be renewed is having a real deterrent effect," Glen said. Critics of the program have called it a give-away to developers, who they say would build the housing anyway, and that it often does not lead to housing that is affordable enough for New Yorkers with the lowest incomes. But, according to Gerhards of REBNY, the last time 421-a expired there was a massive drop in permit filings until there was a new program.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Betsy Head Park in Brownsville (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Four candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to become New York City’s next mayor appeared at a virtual forum Monday night to share their visions for the future of the city’s parks and open spaces. The coronavirus pandemic has both added attention to the importance of the city’s parks and had a negative impact on its green spaces, which have a history of under-investment, neglect, and inequitable distribution across the five boroughs. New Yorkers’ increased demand for open space during covid highlighted those disparities, exacerbated by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to slash the Parks Department budget by $84 million last June, the second-largest cut of any other city agency.
The next mayor, due to take office in January, will play a critical role in shaping the future of the city’s parks and open spaces. Most leading Democratic mayoral hopefuls, including Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley, have outlined detailed parks platforms, but others including Eric Adams and Andrew Yang have yet to release policy on the future of the city’s parks. Neither Stringer nor Adams nor Yang were in attendance Monday night.
The mayoral forum, “A New Vision for Parks & Open Space,” was co-hosted by New Yorkers for Parks and the Play Fair Coalition, a group that includes more than 300 parks advocates across the city. NY1 political anchor and reporter Juan Manuel Benítez moderated the discussion, presented by New York Law School. Much of the forum’s discussion centered around New Yorkers for Parks’ Five Point Plan for Park Equity, which was released a month ahead of the forum and outlines what the parks system needs from the city’s next mayor, according to the group. The plan broadly calls for increased funding for the city’s parks, green space equity in historically underserved communities, cross-agency coordination and comprehensive planning, capital process reform, and meaningful support for not-for-profit partners and volunteer groups.
Participating candidates included Art Chang, a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase who has had a wide variety of civic roles, former federal housing secretary Shaun Donovan, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, and former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire.
“Our next mayor must treat parks as critical infrastructure. It was encouraging to hear the candidates who participated in our forum come out strongly in support of a more robust and equitable parks and open space system in New York,” said Adam Ganser, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, in a post-forum statement to Gotham Gazette. “We heard unanimous agreement for significantly increasing parks funding to at least 1 percent of the City budget; improving park access and creating new parks in underserved communities; and instituting a Director of the Public Realm to oversee a comprehensive, citywide strategy. As we near the June primary, we hope to see all the candidates go on record with a similar commitment to reverse NYC’s decades of underinvestment in its parks and open spaces.”
In his opening remarks, the dean and president of New York Law School, Anthony Crowell, emphasized the critical role the city’s parks system played in people’s lives during this year of isolation and shutdowns brought on by COVID-19. “Last year has shown parks have been both a place for relief as well as a crucial part of our city's public health, environmental, and economic infrastructure.” Crowell said. “Investing in our parks as infrastructure must be a part of this city's recovery and the future. We must do so in a way that addresses the systemic inequities in park access that have been decades in the making.”
Asked what they would do within their first 100 days as mayor to help the city achieve a more robust and equitable park system, candidates broadly agreed to expand greenspace in the city.
Chang honed in on the unequal access to open greenery in the city, saying, “The first thing I would do during my first 100 days is to start a comprehensive open space planning project that encompasses all five boroughs,” which would examine the distribution of park space across the city and be conducted “bottom up — engaging with communities and non-profits, like New Yorkers for Parks and Fair Play Coalition.”
Donovan spotlighted his signature “15-minute neighborhood” plan, which would remake New York such that all residents live within walking distance of greenspace, in addition to transportation, health care, good schools, and more. “In fact, I would go to 10 minutes as the standard within your front door on parks because they're so important,” said Donovan. He went to on say, “I would create an Office of the public Realm at City Hall >to coordinate all of the work. We know the capital process is broken. We know that it is far too hard to get parks built.” Donovan concluded by saying that he would expand the Parks Department budget from half of 1% to at least 1%, before saying he would leverage his connections with the Biden-Harris administration to secure “the capital that we need.”
Garcia emphasized how the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for additional green space in the city. “It was essential before; it is more essential now,” she said. “I have committed to 150 million square feet of green infrastructure,” said Garcia, who pledged to replace 100 blacktop schoolyards with brand-new green spaces, green all school roofs, and expressed support for Green New Deal for NYCHA, as well as Renewable Rikers, which would convert Rikers into a renewable energy zone.
Garcia cited her extensive experience in city government, adding, “I understand capital budgeting. I've done $8 billion worth of capital budget work in my time in city government,” before saying she would ensure “that we have Open Streets, that we are using those to create active areas in the city,” at least while her proposed green policies are going into effect.
Candidates cited their professional backgrounds and experience when asked what set them apart from other mayoral hopefuls in the race.
“I'm trained as an architect and planner,” said Donovan, who went on to stress, “I've been a leader in innovative ways to create green space.” Donovan cited Via Verde, an eco-friendly affordable housing development in the Bronx he helped create while working as the city’s housing commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and where he launched his mayoral campaign, as well as Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which he spearheaded during his tenure in the Obama administration, and his work with Rebuild By Design “to make our waterfront not just more accessible and to create more parks, but to do it in a way that really accounted for climate change.”
Garcia called for expanding the Parks Department budget to 1% of the city’s $90-plus billion budget, which she said would ensure that parks are fully staffed with workers, as well as outfitted with park rangers and patrol officers, and that GreenThumb gardens are supported. “You can't just build it, you also have to manage it,” said Garcia, citing her 14 years of experience in city government at the Department of Environmental Protection and Sanitation Department, and in other roles.
Citing his architectural and design background, Chang said, “I'm the only one who's actually built waterfront parks, who's built community parks, and who's actually thought about coastal resiliency, to adapt to climate change and the relationship that has the softening the waterfront, and allowing for waterfront parks to exist, which I think should be expanded greatly throughout the city.”
McGuire then joined the forum and cited his “leadership role” with the Hudson River Parkway, where he said he helped implement artist David Hammons’ public art installation piece “Day’s End,” for which construction is well underway.
McGuire half-joked about not having an architecture degree, and made the argument that he doesn’t need one in order to solve the city’s equity problems when it comes to green space. “We don't need to create new [parks],” he said. “We need to fix the ones that we have, especially in communities that don't have parks, that don't have open spaces.”
Benítez prompted candidates to formally pledge to commit 1% of the city’s budget to parks, and all four agreed.
“I want to invite all the viewers tonight to join me when I announce that I will support New York City parks with 1% tomorrow at the basketball courts at Owl’s Head Park because that is an area that actually also desperately needs a new park,” said Garcia, referring to Bay Ridge, where Owl’s Head is located and where Garcia has pledged to build a new park, among other underserved communities, particularly parts of the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. “I believe that if you build it, you've got to take care of it. I understand what it means to take care of capital infrastructure over the long haul,” said Garcia.
Chang promised to go further, saying, “Absolutely. I'm not sure that 1% is enough, though, because, as we know, the range in the world for park budget is 1% to 2%, and so 1% is just at the very bottom of that range.” Chang went on to decry the city’s “very poorly coordinated capital process.” To maximize the Parks Department budget, Chang said, “We need to be able to bring cross-coordination between the different agencies who are responsible for parks.” He added that he’d like to see “1% of this capital budget for the parks also being spent on arts in the parks.”
At this point, Garcia jumped in to clarify that the budget to which she had been referring to in her response was specifically regarding the city’s expense budget. “There already is a percent for arts in all of the capital budget that is already required by the City Charter,” she said.
Donovan made the argument that he is the best candidate to acquire and utilize all available federal resources and other means citing federal conservation climate funds as examples.
“We should make sure that we're doing everything, not just directly through the budget, but through other ways to harness the power of parks in people's lives, to bring the private sector to the table to do this in an equitable way, where we're sharing the resources we can raise through value capture, and through friends and conservancies across the city and building partnerships that will provide technical assistance to many communities that don't currently have those groups and need to build them,” Donovan concluded.
“In the firm in which I've transitioned, we manage $4 trillion a day,” said McGuire, referring to Citi. “I’ve been held accountable for 13 years, which is the longest any person in that job in the history of the corporate world,” he said of his position leading the company’s global investment portfolio.
Candidates unanimously agreed to expand the number of park rangers and parks enforcement patrol officers in the city’s parks, though they specified different number targets, while pointing out other parks-related issues, as well.
“We need to at least double the number of parks rangers that we have,” said Chang, who pointed out that parks rules and regulations can’t be properly enforced without adequate staffing. He also suggested making better use of the city’s 311 system. “The park rangers — even doubling that is not going to be sufficient. So providing people with the real way to actually complain, to talk about things, and offer suggestions in a real customer service type of response is going to be critical to actually making this work,” Chang said.
Donovan also agreed that the number of positions should be doubled, at least. He used his response time to spotlight his Youth Horticulture Corps plan, a smaller component of his larger jobs plan, which guarantees the city will connect every high school student to at least one paid job or internship opportunity by 2026. “We have to be training and developing the next generation of leaders on parks, those who will work in our parks, those who will value our parks,” he said.
McGuire emphasized utilizing the city’s parks to cultivate the arts. “Let's commission five artists by borough to create different outdoor spaces and experiences for the parks. Let's make sure that we can create art fairs for our children in each one of the parks during the course of the weekend and during the course of the summer.” He also called for using parks to host summer camps for children.
Garcia stressed infrastructure upkeep in her response. “We also do need to ensure that we are investing in the capital infrastructure for parks and increasing. I think it's a little bit shy of $5 billion over the next four years in city parks. That needs to go up by a significant amount,” she said. She also pointed out that it was important parks projects are completed “in a timely fashion,” citing their track record of delayed delivery, “which costs time and costs money.”
Asked how they would allocate appropriate funding for community gardens and how that funding would be assessed through the lens of structural racism, Donovan reiterated his involvement on Via Verde, which grew community gardens on the roofs. He also flexed his connections to the Biden-Harris administration again, saying, “I’m the only one, really, in a position to be able to work closely with them to find new models like that.” He restated his earlier suggestion to utilize different federal funds and city partnerships “to build a more equitable financing system outside government funding directly.” Lastly, he highlighted his “15-minute neighborhood” proposal, which he argued would deliver funding and resources equitably across the city, especially for historically marginalized communities.
McGuire and Garcia didn’t directly say how they would allocate funding, but they both emphasized equity in their responses.
“We need to make certain that as we distribute the funds that it’s done equitably, and so that it has a conscious design in mind,” McGuire said vaguely. Benítez pressed him to address the issue of community gardens in his response, to which he said, “I would especially invest in community gardens in the lower-income neighborhoods where we have not invested.”
“I have a long relationship with the community gardens and they have been my partners on many fronts, particularly as master composter sites,” said Garcia, who went on to discuss the soil quality of the gardens. “We need to ensure that in every neighborhood, people have open space. And when I'm mayor, I'll ensure that we are looking at that lens of where's the money going, so that we can support and protect our community gardens.”
“The budget has grown by $18 billion,” said Chang, referring to the city’s roughly $92 billion budget and its growth under Mayor de Blasio, adding that “there is at least $10 billion of wasted overhead and administrative costs and duplicate services that can be cut down. Some of that money can be transitioned to support the neighborhood gardens.” Chang also suggested using the city’s first lien position to take over properties with property tax delinquencies and then convert them into community gardens.
Candidates were asked how they would utilize NYCHA’s available inventory of green space not suitable to build additional housing and create sustainable parks, gardens, and flood protections.
Garcia, McGuire, and Chang generally agreed that the fenced-in nature of much of NYCHA’s green space was a detriment to the housing authority’s residents, as well as the community at large.
“I would integrate NYCHA into its community and use its green space,” said Garcia. “There are opportunities to use that green space like they are doing at Red Hook; they're creating lily pads, which is actually to protect the structures from flooding using landscaping.” Garcia also pointed out that seniors residents at NYCHA are “aging in place” and “the structures that we have there are not conducive for our seniors to be able to gather in a park-like setting.”
McGuire also emphasized the importance of green space access for seniors, saying, “I would create parks and make sure that the seniors are able to plant in those parks.” He added, “ I've gone to a number of the NYCHA homes where they take so much pride in the garden that they've created. We need to do more of that. And we need to get the NYCHA residents involved.”
“The fact that there are fences indicates that there is a very poor relationship between the tenants and their feeling of ownership over the space,” said Chang, who suggested “converting NYCHA into some form of social housing.”
Donovan said he would “organize a worldwide design competition with billions of dollars available to our public housing resident organizations” to come up with “bold new solutions to reimagine what the landscapes in public housing cna be.” President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, which Donovan spearheaded, launched a similar initiative. (Donovan said he had to leave for another appointment at the end of that answer.)
Asked how they would reform the capital construction process, which is known for delays and high costs, McGuire and Garcia cited their budgetary experience, while Chang pointed to the 2014 Survey of Capital Projects Management document assembled by New Yorkers for Parks and Public Works Partners.
“I am uniquely positioned because this is what I've had to do for a living,” said McGuire, who cited his experience managing over 50 budgets. “You have to have discipline and a budget process, you have to eliminate the waste, and you have to make it more efficient. And so I have a track record of having done that.”
“There are too many oversights on the capital process,” said Garica, who noted, “because we are that bureaucratic, it costs us more money.” She continued, “I understand how to hold these agencies accountable and cut down on where they are spending time and money.” Garcia also pointed out, “We also need to have more innovative delivery processes,” citing the Department of Design and Construction for delivering projects more quickly during covid “because they were skirting all the rules,” which they were allowed to do because of emergency declarations suspending procurement laws. She suggested partnering with different non-profits for delivery, but did not go into further detail.
Chang summarized the survey’s main recommendations as ones he would follow as mayor: “A new project management capability within the Parks Department,” “the need for technology to support project management, to support integrated design and construction, to support planning,” “the need to bring in in-house design, so the city has control over its own fate,” as well as revising the City Charter so that funding for the city’s parks is less reliant on discretionary allocations from City Council members and Borough Presidents.
For the final question of the forum, candidates were asked how the city’s parks featured in their respective plans for the city’s recovery from the devastation wrought by covid.
“Parks are at the core of my climate agenda in terms of ensuring that we are protecting New York from what is possibly going to happen around the corner,” said Garcia, citing recent severe weather in California and Texas. “One of the best metrics I've heard recently is when they did open spaces in the Meatpacking District, the revenue at all those businesses went up 30%. These two things go hand in hand, a more livable city is a more prosperous city.”
“I would have a director or deputy mayor for the public realm, who would be responsible for the intersection between streets and our urban spaces,” said Chang. “It is so clear that for future resiliency of our city, we need to think about those spaces as something that can adapt and flex as unanticipated things come up.” Chang also called for “bringing the arts in a much more robust way back into the parks.”
McGuire spotlighted his plan to foster 500,000 jobs in the city, which would include bringing back 50,000 small business jobs through wage subsidies that would cover “50% of their wages for one year.” As part of his larger recovery plan, McGuire reiterated his intention “to hold a comeback festival in June of 2022, where we include all of the artists, we include the outdoor spaces.” McGuire also said he would award grants to 1,000 artists to create projects in vacant commercial spaces and outdoor venues, including the city’s parks.
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by Allison Smith for Gotham Gazette
@allison_n_smith @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio pushes pre-K (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayoral Photography Office)
Just three months into his first term in 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio was successful in convincing the state Legislature and Governor Andrew Cuomo to approve funding for universal pre-kindergarten, still his signature accomplishment after more than seven years in office. It was his boldest policy proposal as a mayoral candidate, one that he talked about incessantly throughout his 2013 campaign, along with the tax increase on high-earners that he wanted to pay for it, and that continues to be hailed as a success, and one he has expanded on by launching free public preschool for three-year-olds.
As the 2021 mayoral race to replace de Blasio progresses, with the June primary just two months away (early voting starts June 12, primary day is June 22), the Democratic candidates are offering extensive platforms of their own as they try to portray themselves as the most qualified and visionary to bring the city back from the brink of the pandemic and usher in a prosperous future. Some of the leading candidates — there’s a top tier of eight — have advanced big, transformative ideas akin to de Blasio’s “UPK” that they are trying to hammer home as defining proposals, while others are pitching their candidacies on more complex multi-pronged plans for the city’s recovery.
Of course, there are many differences between New York City in 2021 and 2013, when the city was in the early years of an economic boom that would last until the coronavirus hit last year. De Blasio won eight years ago on a platform of addressing inequality, with universal pre-kindergarten as his central policy promise, while also stressing police reform and more.
New Yorkers are looking to de Blasio’s successor to fix the city’s multifaceted crises, exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic and for which there is no panacea.
“Things were pretty well, were kind of in an equilibrium and kind of balanced and things seemed okay in 2013, which enabled de Blasio to project Universal pre-K as his signature idea of how to make things better,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist with the firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, in a phone interview. This year, however, “In some sense, there's a higher standard for being able to, in effect, make the case for a signature idea.”
Still, owning a signature policy idea that appeals to a large swath of voters and opinion-makers can be beneficial in any electoral race, just ask de Blasio — or the current frontrunner in the race to replace him: Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who came to prominence running for president on Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang, riding high off the name recognition and goodwill from that campaign, has been leading mayoral polls in the early months of his bid, while offering a significantly adjusted cash relief plan.
Here’s a look at how the top Democratic mayoral candidates are pitching a signature idea or set of ideas:
Andrew Yang: Cash Grants for the Poorest New Yorkers
Yang is the early frontrunner, jumping into the race with announcing a mayoral race version of a cash relief plan modelled off the Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal he ran for president on. His plan for the city would give 500,000 of the poorest New Yorkers an average of $2,000 every year, at a cost of about $1 billion, which Yang has said he would seek to grow through a combination of government and private funds. He hasn’t fully explained how he would pay for the initial $1 billion, though he has pointed to some of the big buckets he says the money would come from, including government efficiencies, and any mayor may be able to figure out how to carve $1 billion out of a $90-plus billion budget for a signature program, especially if it helps create its own savings, as Yang says his grant program would.
Among the other ways Yang proposes raising the money is through eliminating tax breaks for property-tax exempt landlords like Madison Square Garden and Columbia University.
Basic income is by far Yang’s most popular idea, though not an original one, and one that even other mayoral candidates have embraced in some form. Through the program, Yang aims to end poverty in the city, a laudable but arduous goal in a city where about 19% of residents lived at or below the federal poverty line even before the pandemic.
While Yang is clearly still known based on UBI, the mantle for which he says he picked up from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others (Martin Luther King III is a co-chair of Yang’s campaign), he has not made his municipal cash grant plan quite the same focus as he made UBI during his presidential bid. That could change as the race heats up and he starts airing television and other ads. Yang talks about the plan regularly, but has often been much more focused on his broader push for the city’s economic recovery.
Eric Adams: The People’s Plan
Adams’ chief proposal is a three-part “People’s Plan” that directly takes aim at the inefficiencies in city government that he says cause socio-economic and racial disparities.
At the core of the plan is his proposed MyCity centralized digital portal that would allow New Yorkers to easily access all city services, automatic cash benefits, and free or discounted childcare.
The portal would help with everything from obtaining food stamps and renewing business permits to creating bank accounts and resolving building code violations.
Adams’ People’s Plan also includes a commitment to universal childcare. Among the measures he has proposed is reducing the costs for childcare programs by setting aside space in city-owned buildings, offering density bonuses to residential developers who guarantee permanently free or low rent to childcare providers, and tax breaks for office building owners to create such space free of charge.
The third aspect of his plan is NYC Advanced Income Deployment (AID), which would increase the amount of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and provide it to needy families in advanced monthly payments. According to his campaign, the credit would increase from about $250 annually to $3,000 annually for a family with two children earning $30,000 a year.
“To reverse inequality and help New Yorkers who are struggling, Eric will launch his People’s Plan to provide cash, benefits, and childcare through one platform, automatically delivering assistance when it is most needed,” said Evan Thies, a campaign spokesperson, in a statement. “This revolutionary approach will lift up working people and people of color to get through this crisis and ensure they have the resources they need after to thrive.”
While Adams regularly talks about these ideas, he has not been beating the drum about them in the way that would make even those following the mayoral race closely able to quickly identify them as his signature ideas.
Scott Stringer: Universal Affordable Housing
At an April 8 forum hosted by The Nation, when asked about his signature initiative, Stringer talked about ending the city’s hoomelessness crisis by addressing the shortage of low-income housing. “I want to make sure that we're finally going to do something that Michael Bloomberg couldn't do, or Bill de Blasio wouldn't do, and that is to build real low-income housing,” he said. “I didn't say affordable housing, I said low-income housing.”
Stringer has been focused on affordable housing as comptroller, repeatedly critiquing de Blasio’s housing plans and approach to homelessness, while offering his own extensive housing platform from the comptroller’s office that became the basis of his campaign plan.
In a statement through a spokesperson on Friday, Stringer added, “My big idea is that New York should be an affordable city for everyone to live in, and my plan is Universal Affordable Housing: require any new building that gets built with more than 10 apartments — anywhere in the city — to make 25% of those apartments actually affordable to middle- and low-income families. It would fundamentally change the paradigm of how we build housing in this city and create affordable housing and greater diversity in every neighborhood.”
Stringer proposed his plan early last year, releasing it officially from the office of comptroller but clearly aimed at the mayoral campaign. His plan would require that all the units built under the Universal Affordable Housing mandate would have to be at an average of 60% of Area Median Income, which is about $58,000 annually for two adults making minimum wage with a child. He would also end the $1.6 billion annual 421-a tax break for developers, he has said, which is supposed to spur affordable housing set-asides in wealthier areas but has been roundly criticized as inefficient. A change would need state approval.
Stringer also pledged to use city capital funding to finance the production of housing for extremely and very low-income households and said he would create a non-profit land bank to build 100% permanently affordable housing on about 1,000 vacant lots owned by the city (a number the de Blasio administration has repeatedly disputed in terms of how many lots are actually available and buildable for housing).
"I've fought for tenants and truly affordable housing from days as a housing activist organizing Mitchell-Lama tenants to my days in the State Assembly and to my time as Borough President and Comptroller,” Stringer added. “Real affordable housing has always been my fight, and I know that we can only address homelessness in this city by creating deeply affordable homes. As mayor, that’s what I’ll do.”
While Stringer has regularly raised his housing plan at events and candidate forums, he has thus far not made a concerted effort to be known by it.
Ray McGuire: The Comeback Plan
Former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire’s major proposal is his economic “Comeback Plan” to fuel the city’s recovery by creating 500,000 jobs.
The three-part plan, which McGuire talks about fairly incessantly, includes small business stimulus, easing the cost of doing business in the city, and an infrastructure plan. McGuire regularly says his “Go big, go small, go forward” plan will foster “the most inclusive comeback” the city has ever seen.
The plan includes a Comeback Job Accelerator to subsidize 50% of wages for 50,000 small business workers for one year. It would target businesses that lost more than 40% of total revenue in 2020, prioritizing the hardest hit communities. McGuire says he could pay for its unspecified cost through city government efficiencies and federal aid that is flowing to the city in the American Rescue Plan recently passed by President Joe Biden and the Congress.
McGuire’s plan also entails allowing businesses to retain the sales tax they collect for a year, automatically renewing permits and licenses without fees for a year, financial incentives for property owners who forgive or reduce rents for small businesses, reducing utility bills for small businesses, and creating a Red Tape Commission to ease regulations, among other measures.
It also includes a Comeback Bank Initiative to extend capital to community banks and expand lending to small businesses. McGuire says he will also create a $50 million fund for advances or low-interest loans through the initiative to help small Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses get city contracts.
McGuire also wants to reduce the cost of the city’s capital infrastructure program while accelerating its pace and the amount of funds spent every year.
Among the eight leading Democratic mayoral candidates, McGuire may be the closest to actively establishing his candidacy around his ‘big idea’ first and foremost, including through the campaign literature he has already been mailing to voters around the city. In doing so, McGuire is trying to best capitalize on his big business background given his decades on Wall Street, where he rose to one of the top executives in the banking industry.
Maya Wiley: Universal Care Economy
Former counsel to the mayor Maya Wiley has proposed a plan for Universal Community Care that would cost $300 million to provide $5,000 annually to 100,000 informal caregivers in the care economy. The funds would come partly from the federal government and partly from freezing cadet classes at the NYPD and the Department of Correction for two years. That would reduce the NYPD’s headcount by 2,250 officers and DOC headcount by 750 officers, according to her campaign.
The caregiving industry is one of the fastest growing sectors of employment in New York City and is largely made up of women of color, who Wiley has been concertedly courting in her bid for mayor. “One of the things we know about this pandemic is that it has decimated work, in particular work for women and work for women of color in the care economy,” Wiley said at the forum hosted by The Nation, touting her care economy plan as her signature initiative when asked.
Besides direct cash relief, Wiley has also proposed building Community Care Centers in the highest-need neighborhoods to provide services to 300,000 people in the first year and growing to 1 million young, old, and other higher-needs people once fully built out. The program would be overseen by a newly-created deputy mayor, she has said.
Wiley’s plan also includes stronger wage and pay enforcement for care workers by expanding the Paid Care Division of the Department of Consumer Affairs and expanding who qualifies as a care worker, a portable benefits program for domestic workers, among other steps.
“This reall >y is a game-changer in terms of how we think about care as well as the caring economy,” Wiley said at the forum.
Dianne Morales: Defund the NYPD
Former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales’ call to defund the NYPD by $3 billion and to reallocate those funds into communities is central to her campaign, and among her ardent left-wing followers and many others following the race, she has become well-known for that plan. It builds on efforts by criminal justice reformers who escalated the call for reducing police spending after the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota last year, which prompted months of sustained outrage and protest in the streets of New York City, where protesters connected it to local examples of police brutality.
“The most bloated sort of budget in this city is the...NYPD and I’ve talked about that publicly, about what I think, the idea that I feel like we need to divest and reinvest and that sort of would be one of my first priorities, to take a really hard look at that budget,” she said in a video interview with Gotham Gazette in January.
Morales has not been specific about how she would reallocate funds but has outlined various uses for the $3 billion. She wants to create a new Community First Responders Department, distinct from the police, to respond to people experiencing mental health crises or homelessness, for instance. She also wants to remove the NYPD entirely from non-criminal law enforcement purposes such as school safety, traffic enforcement, homeless outreach, or drug intervention. In the video interview, Morales could not say how those changes would affect the NYPD’s headcount. “This isn't a, you know, snap your finger or like flip a switch kind of thing. I think...there needs to be a progressive sort of reallocation. The first hit would probably be the hardest hit...in terms of just it's also reflective of a culture shift and decreasing the budget.”
In a subsequent interview on the Max & Murphy podcast, she said of how to execute the $3 billion NYPD cut, "you just do it," but said that any NYPD employees whose positions would be eliminated at the police department could be retrained and provided opportunities at other city agencies.
Morales has also called for an elected Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), which investigates certain types of police misconduct.
Among the other uses Morales proposed for the funds are free legal services for immigrants, investments in violence interruption programs and funding harm reduction and safe consumption programs. Along with McGuire’s focus on his economic recovery plan, Morales may be among the candidates most closely identifiable by her signature proposal at this point.
Kathryn Garcia: A True Green Future
At the April 8 The Nation forum, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia emphasized that the next mayor needs to be able to pursue multiple major policies at the same time. But, she added, “I believe that the thing that I want to leave this city is a really true green future.”
That entails, she said, 150 million more square feet of green infrastructure, eliminating peaker plants, turning Rikers Island into a renewable energy hub, a Green New Deal for NYCHA, and a fully-electrified school bus fleet, to name a few things. “Because all of these environmental programs mean not only are we protecting our planet, but we're healthier today. Our air is cleaner today. Our streets are cooler today,” Garcia said.
Her climate plan is lengthy and intersects with plans for housing, transportation, and education.
To pursue the goal of an economy fully reliant on renewable energy, among the measures she would pursue are tripling the availability of public car chargers for electric vehicles, incentivizing people to install car chargers at home, maximizing offshore wind generation, incentivizing investments in solar power, and converting food waste into energy.
Garcia aims to make the city greener by replacing 500 blacktop schoolyards with green spaces, renovating 100 parks in communities hit hardest by COVID-19, launching a “Green Boulevard” program across the city, greening school roofs, implementing a “Natural Roofs” program combining green roofs with solar panels, and planting 1 million trees over eight years focusing on neighborhoods with high asthma rates such as the South Bronx and East New York.
She aims to get the city to zero waste by restoring and expanding curbside organics recycling and making it mandatory, opening compost facilities citywide, developing a waste reduction program, and ensuring that the city procurement for construction and equipment requires recycled and post-consumer materials.
Garcia would take a district-level approach to climate resiliency, ensuring closer coordination with communities on the ground. She would also redesign workforce programs to focus on “green collar” jobs.
“As we begin the road to recovery, we face overlapping crises and a loss of trust in government services. Kathryn knows that these challenges will not be solved by one big policy idea or catchy hashtag,” said Lindsey Green, a campaign spokesperson, in a statement on Friday. “Throughout all of Kathryn's proposals she has laid out how she will cut through red tape to make New York CIty more liveable and more equitable. Among her most ambitious proposals is her Reopen to Stay Open plan that will dramatically reimagine our public spaces by removing permitting barriers, help bring back hundreds of thousands of jobs lost to the pandemic while creating over 10,000 new jobs in green infrastructure, and make it easier than ever to open a small business with a single small business permit. Her plan also includes a jobs pipeline from CUNY and trade schools directly to city government and partnerships with the private sector to create 10,000 paid internships for high school students and zero interest microloans to boost thousands of small businesses as they recover.”
Shaun Donovan: 15-Minute Neighborhoods
Donovan, the former federal housing secretary and budget director under President Barack Obama, talked about his “15-minute neighborhoods” plan, when he was asked about his signature issue at The Nation forum.
As Donovan has explained, every person should have equitable access to good public schools, fresh food, rapid transportation, green space, health care, and economic opportunity within 15 minutes of their home. It’s the type of access that already exists in wealthier, whiter communities and is missing in low-income communities of color, he has said.
Citing his decades of government experience, Donovan said at the forum, “I have seen over and over again, the deep injustice of being able to predict a child's life chances, even life expectancy, by their zip code. It's the single greatest predictor in our city, in our country of their life chances and that has to end. And it will only end until we reorient the way we plan our city around 15-minute neighborhoods.”
Donovan, also former housing commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has made the 15-minute neighborhoods idea central to his pitch to voters in a number of settings, though he’s also tried to frame his candidacy as “the man with a plan” for just about everything.
In a lengthy statement to Gotham Gazette through a spokesperson on Friday, Donovan boasted of having proposed more than 200 policy plans so far but insisted that 15-minute neighborhoods “will be the most transformative for our city” and serves as “an intersectional framework” for his other policies.
"During my time as President Obama's Housing Secretary and Budget Director, he would often tell us to never let an opportunity go to waste. At this moment, we have an opportunity as we rebuild following this crisis to completely reimagine New York City as a place that truly works for everyone,” Donovan said, in part. “A city where all New Yorkers have easy access to the resources they need to live healthy lives, and that actively works to address long standing gaps in opportunity, wealth, and treatment. A city where the zip code you're born in can no longer determine your chances for success or your life expectancy, and where the benefits of living in New York normally reserved for a few of our residents are available to all.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Ben Max contributed to this story.