Comptroller Stringer testifies at the 2019 Charter Revision Commission (photo: @NYCComptroller)
The charter revision commission created through New York City Council legislation concluded its first round of public hearings last month, receiving dozens of suggestions about improving the functions and structure of city government. Unlike the commission established by Mayor Bill de Blasio, which has three proposals on this November’s ballot, the Council-created commission is set to propose changes to the city’s central governing document via the 2019 election.
Among those who testified at the 2019 commission’s initial hearings were several elected officials who presented their own broad proposals that could significantly change how the city conducts its business and how those who hold power can wield it. They included City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Comptroller Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Staten Island Borough President James Oddo, and several City Council members from the five boroughs.
Johnson -- who appointed the commission’s chair Gail Benjamin, the former head of the Council’s land use division, and three other members -- sees in the commission an opportunity to fix the balance of power in the city, which tilts toward the mayoralty and at times can diminish the oversight and accountability role played by the 51-member Council.
In testimony at the September 27 hearing held at City Hall, Johnson noted the Council’s limited ability to review mayoral appointees to head city agencies, and that the body cannot remove an agency head. He also suggested that the commission examine whether the budgets for certain offices “which are uncertain and subject to political considerations as opposed to substantive need, should be fixed or independently set.”
Johnson also recommended the commission look at the structure of the Law Department and the Corporation Counsel. “One lawyer attempting to serve two separate branches of government is an invitation for confusion and disruption and may not be in the best interests of the City,” his testimony reads, in reference to representation of both the executive and legislative branches of city government, an issue that has come to the fore as Council members have sought to join a lawsuit against the city’s property tax system.
Johnson is also pushing for changes to the city’s budget process to give the Council a greater voice and to tie budget allocations more closely to city programs, and also argued in favor of instant runoff voting, also known as ranked choice voting.
The most sweeping reforms that Johnson proposed, however, deal with the city’s land use process, which is almost always contentious and has been recently as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has moved to rezone several neighborhoods -- mostly low-income, communities of color -- to increase density and create more affordable housing. Johnson and other members of the Council’s Progressive Caucus have advocated for a citywide planning framework that gives communities greater say in land use decisions and balances equity with development. They have also called for an independent City Planning Commission, as opposed to the one currently composed largely of mayoral appointees. Council Members Diana Ayala, who co-chairs the caucus, Keith Powers, a vice co-chair, Brad Lander, and Adrienne Adams each testified on those proposals at separate borough hearings. “The status quo of ad hoc planning is just not working…We need a larger vision based on equity, a vision in which low-income communities do not have to slowly bear the brunt of the city’s every housing and infrastructure need,” Ayala said at a September 12 hearing in the Bronx.
Those goals are also in line with a report released in January by the Regional Planning Association, a prominent think tank, in partnership with community advocacy groups, academic experts and partners in city government. The RPA report, titled “Inclusive City”, was also presented to the charter commission and cited by elected officials, including Brewer, who also testified at the Sept. 27 hearing. Brewer, along with Public Advocate Letitia James, was the driver behind the legislation that created the commission and has expressed hope that it can bring a sea change the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1989 charter commission fundamentally altered the structure of city government, giving it its present form.
In her testimony, Brewer emphasized a more thoughtful process for land use decisions that includes early input from community boards and elected officials before applications are certified through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). “With pre-planning we can do more than merely react—we can shape a project,” she said.
She also pushed for more technical improvements to zoning and permitting procedures, in the context of a long-term citywide approach. “There needs to be a citywide comprehensive plan every ten years,” she said. “This planning process could distribute new development equitably across the city, rather than concentrate rezonings in communities of color.”
Similar to Johnson’s testimony, Brewer advocated for increased transparency in the city budget. She also said the Civilian Complaint Review Board should be strengthened and its budget tied to the NYPD’s, to ensure that the watchdog agency has sufficient resources to deal with a growing police body. Additionally, she noted her opposition to term limits for community boards, which have been proposed in a ballot question by the mayor’s commission. Borough presidents appoint most community board members.
Comptroller Stringer’s ideas, in number at least, outpaced other elected officials. In an exhaustive report presented at the City Hall hearing, Stringer recommended 65 revisions to the charter ranging from proposals on city budgeting and procurement to housing, cybersecurity, children’s services, campaign finance and voting reforms.
“Since the last major charter revision nearly thirty years ago, New York City has grown by 1.2 million people and the world has changed around it, yet its charter is not prepared to meet the needs of today’s challenges,” Stringer said in a statement. “The Charter Review Commission is an opportunity for us to build a better government that takes aim at our affordability crisis and builds a fairer city by giving a voice to New Yorkers.”
Chief among Stringer’s proposals was a push for a Chief Diversity Officer in the mayor’s office and in each city agency, to ensure diversity in hiring and in contracting. Stringer has advocated for increased investment in Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (M/WBEs) and he noted that though New York City spends nearly $20 billion on goods and services each year, less than 5 percent of the contracts are given to M/WBEs.
He also proposed a new Office of Inspection independent of the Department of Buildings and the Housing and Preservation Department, which he said play conflicting roles since they both approve new construction and development and are also charged with enforcing housing and construction codes. In line with his role as the city’s chief fiscal officer, Stringer also pushed for reforms to the capital budget, which funds infrastructure projects in the city. He said it should be transparent enough so the public can identify the cost of specific projects and be informed when those costs change.
Several other City Council members also weighed in on proposed charter revisions.
Council Member Ben Kallos, also co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, proposed 72 ideas in total, in updated testimony, including a citizen “Bill of Rights to free higher education, affordable health and mental health care, and, access to parks, libraries, public transit and affordable internet.” He stressed that any revisions to the charter brought about through a ballot referendum should go through further changes only after being presented to voters again. He pushed to give the Council and borough presidents the ability to make appointments to mayoral boards that have land use authority and said the charter should be amended to allow city residents to propose legislation and be heard before the Council. “Our City’s Charter is truly a living document,” he said in a statement, “but it is up to us to make sure it remains alive.”
Council Member Helen Rosenthal pushed for the charter to formally adopt the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW), and also advocated for reforms to the city's contracting process to ease burdensome requirements on non-profits that provide early childhood
education, homeless services, senior services, and mental healthcare.
At the September 20 hearing in Queens, Council Members Adams and Francisco Moya, who is not a Progressive Caucus member, supported improvements to ULURP. “Displacement in our neighborhoods is no longer a possibility but a fact of life,” Moya said, according to written testimony. He called for the charter to mandate assessments of displacement brought about by proposed development. “We cannot view our city and its neighborhoods in a vacuum,” Moya said.
There were, of course, elected officials with more borough-specific agendas. At the September 24 hearing on Staten Island, testimony by Borough President James Oddo, and Council Members Steven Matteo and Joseph Borelli (all three Republicans, unlike all of the other aforementioned officials, who are Democrats), advocated for greater freedom for the borough from “bureaucrats in Manhattan,” as Oddo and Matteo put it.
Oddo and Matteo, in submitted testimony, said that city agencies should be restructured to give borough commissioners more power over local issues. “Agencies should be restructured in such a way that the chain of command within the agency is clear, and that one individual on the local level is not only responsible and accountable, but specifically empowered within the agency to act,” they wrote.
Borelli similarly pushed for more decentralization of power, expressing concern that the priorities of Staten Islanders are often ignored by city government and that new changes to the charter could adversely affect the borough. “We don’t want to be laboratories for the latest experiments in social engineering as too often seems the case on issues ranging from buses to composting,” he said. He largely argued for giving the borough president greater jurisdiction over local issues, similar to a county executive outside New York City.
He also criticized the city’s public matching funds program for campaign financing, calling on the commission to negate the potential expansion of the program that could happen through a ballot proposal put forward by the mayor’s commission. And, he advanced several other proposals -- mandating that the Independent Budget Office study the fiscal impact of every piece of City Council legislation; reducing duplicative roles played by different city agencies; making it harder to raise taxes in the city; improving the process for holding special elections; and curbing the power of the Board of Standards and Appeals.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Note - This article has been updated to include testimony from Council Member Helen Rosenthal and updated testimony from Council Member Ben Kallos.
New York City Hall
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
This Tuesday will mark just four weeks until Election Day, November 6. The deadline to register to vote in this year’s elections is this Friday, October 12.
The elections for governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, attorney general, the state Legislature, and Congress will continue to be a major focus this week. We are awaiting news of any general election debates in the races for governor and attorney general -- the comptroller candidates will hold their first debate this week -- or between U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and her Republican challenger, Chele Farley. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic attorney general nominee Letitia James, like Gillibrand, have yet to agree to any debates with their opponents, which for Cuomo and James also include nominees from other parties.
Much of the election focus is on battleground races for control of the New York State Senate, where Republicans currently cling to a one-seat majority, and for New York seats in the House of Representatives that could help determine whether Democrats are able to flip that chamber nationally.
Democrats currently hold all the statewide seats in New York, and those on the ballot this year are expected to stay in Democratic hands, but Republicans are hoping to pull off at least one upset, whether it is Marc Molinaro for governor, Keith Wofford for attorney general, Jonathan Trichter for comptroller, or Farley for Senate.
Along with the electoral races, there is continued attention this week on the controversial confirmation of new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which took place over the weekend. And, there is some government happening in New York City, as well as a variety of panel events and conferences to be aware of, as usual -- see our day-by-day rundown below.
***Do you have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics? e-mail Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.***
The run of the week in detail:
Monday
Monday is Columbus Day. Many elected officials are marching in the annual Columbus Day parade.
Mayor de Blasio will appear Monday night in his usual weekly segment on NY1’s Inside City Hall, in the 7 and 11 p.m. hours.
Tuesday
On Tuesday, the Municipal Arts Society will hold its 2018 Summit for New York City: Shaping the City, at Saint Bartholomew's Church. There are a variety of speakers and panels schedule. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson will deliver the morning keynote address at 9 a.m.
At 2 p.m. Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio will sign Intro-954A, a bill that creates a third gender category for birth certificates in New York City, at SAGE National Headquarters in Manhattan. First Lady Chirlane McCray and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson will participate.
At the City Council on Tuesday: The Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting, and Maritime Uses will meet at 2 p.m.
At 9 a.m. Tuesday, the New York City Board of Correction will hold a public meeting at 125 Worth Street.
At 11 a.m. Tuesday, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul will deliver remarks at the Annual Fallen Firefighters Memorial Event, at Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany. At 7 p.m., Hochul will address New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, at Edison Ballroom in Manhattan.
On Tuesday morning, the four candidates for New York State Comptroller will participate in their first debate, hosted by Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) and moderated by Gotham Gazette’s Ben Max. The debate will air on MNN and be available on MNN’s YouTube channel in the coming days.
At 1 p.m. Tuesday, schools Chancellor Richard Carranza will deliver the keynote address at the Hispanic Education Summit at CUNY Graduate Center. At 5:30 p.m., Carranza "will attend an event for NYC Kids Rise, a college-savings program," and deliver brief remarks, at P.S. 76 in Queens.
At 6 p.m. Tuesday, U.S. Rep Jerrold Nadler will hold a congressional town hall meeting at Manhattan Community College’s Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
In the evening, First Lady McCray "will host a roundtable with Spanish-speaking journalists about mental health in the Latino community...Later the First Lady will make an announcement about mental health at the Latino/Hispanic Heritage Reception" hosted by McCray and Mayor Bill de Blasio at Gracie Mansion. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza will be among those in attendance.
At 7 p.m. Tuesday, the New York Civil Liberties Union will host its 2018 Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture at Reid Castle in Purchase. Insha Rahman of the Vera Institute will deliver the lecture, focusing on the “abuses and effects of the current bail system.”
At 7 p.m. Tuesday, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson will receive the Larry Kramer Activist Award at the Gay Men's Health Crisis Gala, at the Plaza Hotel.
Wednesday
At the City Council on Wednesday:
--The Committee on Land Use will meet at 11 a.m.
--The Committee on Contracts will meet at 1 p.m. for an oversight hearing regarding an “update on the administration’s efforts to expand contracting with minority and women-owned businesses.”
At 8 a.m. Wednesday, the Citizens Budget Commission will host NYCHA interim Chair Stanley Brezenoff at its “Trustee Breakfast” at the Yale Club. The discussion will concern “NYCHA's $32 billion in capital needs and updates on NYCHA's activities and planning since Brezenoff started as Interim Chair on June 1.”
"On Wednesday at 8:30 AM, Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams and New York City Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza will join school principals, superintendents, teachers, students, and parents in unveiling plans for the Brooklyn STEAM Center, a first-of-its-kind facility in New York City that will support students with real-world work experience in emerging professions based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard."
At 4 p.m. Wednesday, the Civilian Complaint Review Board will hold a public board meeting at 100 Church Street.
On Wednesday at 5 p.m., this week's Max & Murphy will air on WBAI radio -- 99.5FM or wbai.org -- and will feature interviews with Republican attorney general candidate Keith Wofford and Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Larry Sharpe.
At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, New York City Transit President Andy Byford will host a “community conversation” on the Fast Forward plan at the Robert Ross Johnson Family Life Center in Jamaica, Queens.
Thursday
At the City Council on Thursday:
--The Committees on Public Housing and Oversight & Investigations will meet jointly at 10 a.m. for an oversight hearing regarding “mismanagement at Throggs Neck public housing.”
--The Committee on Higher Education will meet at 10 a.m. for an oversight hearing on CUNY’s Pathways initiative.
--The Committee on Youth Services will meet at 1 p.m. for an oversight hearing regarding the Summer Youth Employment Program, COMPASS NYC, and School’s Out NYC.
At 9 a.m. Thursday, Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson will deliver keynote remarks at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies’ annual meeting at the FPWA Conference Center in the Financial District. The meeting’s topic will be “how to tackle the poverty to prison pipeline” and will feature a day of discussions. Other speakers will include John Ducksworth of New York Theological Seminary, Dr. Michael Lindsay of NYU’s McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, Ashwin Vasan of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Health Access Equity Unit, and Sharon Content of Children of Promise.
At 10 a.m. Thursday, the New York City Campaign Finance Board will hold a board meeting at 100 Church Street.
At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, New York City Transit President Andy Byford will host a “community conversation” on the Fast Forward plan at the Harlem Hospital Center Mural Pavilion.
Friday and the weekend
Friday, October 12, is the deadline to register to vote in this November’s elections (it is also the deadline to change party affiliation for next year’s primaries in New York).
At 9 a.m. Friday, City Comptroller Scott Stringer will speak at the Polish Heritage Breakfast at the Polish & Slavic Center in Greenpoint.
Mayor de Blasio may make his weekly appearance on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show at 10 a.m. Friday.
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Have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics? E-mail Gotham Gazette executive editor Ben Max any time: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (please use "For Week Ahead" as email subject).
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by Ben Brachfeld and Ben Max
@GothamGazette
(photo via NYCHA)
The myriad issues plaguing the New York City Housing Authority came to the fore at a town hall on Wednesday night, with NYCHA residents excoriating public officials and officials scrambling to respond.
The town hall, hosted by BRIC TV at its downtown Brooklyn studio, featured an audience mainly consisting of NYCHA residents and a panel of City Council Members Alicka Ampry-Samuel and Ritchie Torres, NYCHA tenant leader Lisa Kenner, New York Daily News reporter Greg Smith, and NYCHA historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom, along with a short pre-recorded interview with city Comptroller Scott Stringer. The event was moderated by BRIC’s Brian Vines.
The issues affecting NYCHA, including but not limited to an alleged cover-up relating to lead paint in apartments, approximately $32 billion in unmet capital needs, and a lack of transparency in management have hung low over the de Blasio administration for the past year. The city, beginning in the Bloomberg Administration, was revealed to have falsified documents submitted to the federal government relating to lead paint inspections in apartments, setting off an additionally intensified period of controversy beyond what was already been a mountain of challenges and persistent struggles for the authority to provide adequate housing and find the revenue needed to upgrade its deteriorating housing stock, which includes roughly 180,000 units across the city, home to about 400,000 New Yorkers.
The Daily News reported in June that the de Blasio administration had used a blood-lead level benchmark significantly higher than the federal standard, resulting in only 19 children living in NYCHA being identified as having elevated lead levels; by the federal standards, 820 children in NYCHA had elevated levels, a number revised to over 1,100 in August. And last winter, hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents were left without working heat and hot water because of defective boilers in critical need of repair.
A federal consent decree, which has yet to be formalized by a judge, would have New York City spend $2 billion on critical repairs and appoint a federal monitor to oversee the ailing Housing Authority. The judge has yet to name a monitor. In practice, the deadline has been extended twice by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, first from July 11 to September 12, and then from September 12 to whatever date the judge formalizes the consent decree.
When tenants testified in court about NYCHA conditions on September 26, the judge, William Pauley, expressed shock at their stories, and has been hesitant to approve the consent decree without changes.
Several speakers had been personally affected by the lead paint scandal, with their children facing the possibility of lifelong repercussions as a result of the lead-infested apartments they spent their formative years in.
“Y’all exposed them to lead dust and continue to disrespect me and violate me,” said Lynone Faison, a resident of the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene whose child was exposed to lead. Faison said she would prefer living on the street to living in her apartment, but was refraining from doing so because she was worried that ACS would take her children.
“I’m not going to let you just keep walking all over us. I look at you two,” she said, referring to Ampry-Samuel and Torres, the elected officials on the panel, “I’m telling you snakes, you all need to be fired. You all need to be fired. I’m sorry, but you need to be fired, you’re not helping me.”
Another woman, a former resident of the Al Smith Houses on the Lower East Side, detailed how her son had been exposed to lead during her pregnancy; she left NYCHA after giving birth, when the woman she and her husband had been caring for passed away and the city evicted them. She also referenced the stark inequality that has been spotlighted in the development’s vicinity.
“Our children are seeing these rapid changes happening in the world, and they are being told that they are not part of it,” she said. “So we want to ask questions, you know, we want to ask questions. When will our children be part of it? If these developments are happening -- within months, they’re renovating houses. I mean, what on earth, months it takes to renovate a house, but years and years of lead poisoning [in NYCHA]. I mean, this is a genocide here.”
Ampry-Samuel is the current chair of the Public Housing Committee, and Torres is a former chair of that committee and the current chair of the Oversight Committee, which has looked into NYCHA and helped reveal some of the recent issues that have come to light. Both grew up in NYCHA housing, Ampry-Samuel in Brownsville and Torres in Throggs Neck, and relayed their experiences in public housing frequently throughout the hearing.
“I don’t believe or have faith that anyone cares about us at all,” Ampry-Samuel told the woman from Al Smith Houses. “As an elected official, it’s difficult, but I can speak my truth and I can speak what I’ve seen because I’m not worried about my next election. I’m not worried about the next office that I’m gonna run for because I’m just worried about how I’m gonna, in a sense, protect the people, protect my people. And when I look at the mayor’s housing plan, and I look at all these infill deals, at no point at all do they take into consideration the NYCHA voice.”
Infill is the controversial process by which the city is allowing private development on NYCHA land to create new housing, some of it affordable, as well as new revenue for NYCHA.
Despite their ties to NYCHA and efforts to provide oversight, the politicians in the room were heavily criticized as detached from conditions on the ground, taking home a $150,000 salary, and being funded by real estate interests. Questioners repeatedly expressed derision at the panelists not answering their questions, even those on the panel who are not politicians. The frustration of the NYCHA residents characterized the mood of the event.
“How do they get to go forward with RAD or infill when they’re under a federal investigation,” asked Karen Blondell, a resident of Red Hook Houses since 1982. RAD refers to Rental Assistance Demonstration, an Obama-era program that privatizes building management and changes ownership of the property to a public-private partnership, with funding coming from Section 8 vouchers rather than Section 9 public housing subsidies. One complex, the Ocean Bay Apartments in Rockaway, has undergone full RAD conversion. Initial results have appeared somewhat promising in the city, and elected officials have praised the use of the program, though many residents are worried that the program is de facto privatization of public housing.
Ampry-Samuel has been supportive of the RAD program in the past and has sided with the de Blasio administration on its expansion. However, she agreed with Blondell that critical repairs must be made the top priority of the authority.
“I don’t think NYCHA should move forward with anything right now,” Ampry-Samuel said of major new programs, “because there’s questionable management, there’s questionable dealings, and if there’s any kind of investigation happening right now, if Judge Pauley is reviewing the consent decree, I don’t think they should be moving forward. What they can be doing is just making sure that they’re fixing the heat and hot water systems right now that are happening as we’re going into the heating season, and they can make sure they’re going into the apartments doing what they’re supposed to be doing with the lead abatements.”
Blondell replied that her apartment underwent a long-awaited lead inspection last week, but the “industrial hygienist” who showed up for the inspection was armed only with a flashlight.
“Come on now, come on, I could do better testing by sending away for a kit to the EPA,” she said.
In response, Torres signaled his critiques of the consent decree.
“There’s no evidence that more monitoring is going to improve public housing,” Torres said. “We’ve had a monitor for mold for five years, and we’re no closer to remediating mold in public housing.” A vocal critic of the mayor and his housing policies in particular, Torres said at the town hall that affordable housing under the mayor’s plans are not actually affordable for the people they’re intended for -- some have called for incorporating NYCHA into the larger city affordable housing plan so that it gets more attention and is more clearly approached as part of a valuable stock of rent-regulated apartments, or for at least more closely aligning affordable housing and NYCHA plans.
There have been ample calls for prosecutions of NYCHA officials involved in the lead scandal. Though NYCHA is under federal investigation and its offices have been raided by authorities, prosecutors have not announced any charges.
“When we as residents had to deal with zero tolerance from the Clinton administration to present time, how is it okay for NYCHA to have falsified, fraudulently reported about lead, mold, and everything else, and no one’s being criminally charged,” Blondel asked. Smith noted in response that an active criminal investigation into NYCHA is currently taking place to look into fraudulent lead paint filings.
One woman, a former tenants association president at Washington Houses in East Harlem, referred to tenants association leaders as “crooks.”
“That tenant participation activity money that was meant to be spent for us in these developments to create programs and things for our families and so forth, that’s HUD money, we don’t even know what’s happening with it. We was promised there was gonna be a hearing, that ain’t happened yet,” she said.
Kenner, the tenant leader, spoke in defense of tenants associations.
“As president, you do not get paid, you know, it’s a thankless job,” Kenner said. “But you live where you live, and you want better for your people and yourself.”
The woman from Washington Houses vociferously criticized the city government and the Council members, and advocated for direct action against the city as a means of securing tenants’ rights.
“The only way we’re gonna get justice is by shutting 250 Broadway down,” she said in reference to where main NYCHA and City Council offices are located.
Smith made a similar call later in the program, saying that the hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents should vote as a bloc.
“If NYCHA residents, there are 400,000 people who live in New York City housing. So if you have an organized effort to vote with one voice, you will have a voice that people will actually listen to,” Smith said. This message received a mixed response in the room, and Vines reiterated a point made earlier about how NYCHA residents did not have monolithic thoughts on all issues.
“NYCHA is not a monolith,” Vines said. “We’re not all of the same mind on everything. Is it going to take those 400,000-plus residents of NYCHA to become single-issue voters, regardless of what your politics may be, if your home comes first? Is that really a viable answer?”
To that question, Torres responded in the affirmative and endorsed Smith’s proposal.
“Of course,” Torres said. “What’s more important than your home? I mean, if the political leadership of the city has no regard for your basic living conditions, are refusing to provide you heat or hot water, or protect you from lead poisoning, or lying to you repeatedly, of course you should hold them accountable. And if I have a constituent who’s living in disrepair, I have an obligation to make sure they get their repairs. Of course I do. You should hold us accountable.”
Watch the full BRIC TV NYCHA town hall
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by Ben Brachfeld, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette