Paul Massey (photo: Samar Khurshid/Gotham Gazette)
Real estate executive Paul Massey, a leading Republican mayoral contender, held a week-long campaign launch earlier this month, concluding with a focus on community policing. Having visited each borough with a daily theme, Massey said in an email blast on March 17, “I’ve heard many concerns in my discussions with city residents this week and one that stands out is that our city feels less safe.”
It wasn’t the first time Massey made the claim, and it wasn’t the last, as he takes to the campaign trail attempting to paint Mayor Bill de Blasio as an ineffectual and corrupt leader who has presided over declining quality of life in the city. Massey has repeatedly pointed to cherry-picked statistics that show certain crimes are up in the city, or in certain geographic areas, contributing, he says, to unease among New Yorkers about their safety. In doing so, Massey is attempting to make a campaign issue out of one of de Blasio’s strongest overall metrics -- in reality, major crime has declined over the last three years and the city continues to hit historic lows in crime rates virtually each month.
De Blasio, a first-term Democrat, has already positioned himself to run on declining crime. The mayor has taken to holding monthly press conferences with NYPD leaders to tout new crime numbers, while also arguing that he has reformed the police department to improve police-community relations. The mayor’s campaign often recycles a statement for news stories about the mayoral race that includes “crime is at historic lows” in summarizing de Blasio’s record.
Still, Massey and his team see an opening. The first-time political candidate, who recently moved to the city from Westchester in order to run for mayor, ran a real estate business throughout the five boroughs for decades. While his campaign has been focused on critiquing de Blasio, Massey must first win the Republican primary (though he has already secured the Independence Party line).
In its early stages, Massey’s campaign identified what it saw as a few major areas of failure for de Blasio: housing, jobs, quality of life, and schools. Each issue presents a debate de Blasio and his supporters are seemingly ready to have. Yet, Massey has struck the chord on several points of substantive criticism of the mayor that have more supporting evidence than claiming rising crime -- homelessness, the administration’s top-down approach to rezoning neighborhoods, crumbling infrastructure in public housing, and long-struggling public schools, for instance.
Massey has also decided to take on the mayor’s record on public safety, arguably the most important job for the Mayor of the City of New York.
“We will maintain public safety and fight terrorism by providing the resources, support, and leadership our police officers need and deserve,” Massey’s campaign account said in a tweet on March 17. Another refrain of his campaign is that NYPD members “feel like they can’t do their job because the mayor doesn’t have their back.”
Asked for further explanation of those points, Mollie Fullington, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in an email to Gotham Gazette, “Perhaps it goes without saying that men and women in uniform do not feel [de Blasio] has their backs for a variety of reasons, and we also know our public spaces feel less safe, with random slashing attacks targeting pedestrians, commuters being pushed in front of subway cars, and a 55% increase in hate crimes and bias attacks.”
Fullington also pointed to a 32 percent increase in crime in city parks, a 4 percent increase in crime at public housing, and 14 percent increase in crimes in a South Bronx precinct last year. She added, “The Mayor has failed to maintain the counter terror capabilities of the NYPD, resulting in the first major terror attack in New York since 9/11,” seemingly referring to the bombing in Chelsea last year.
Those numbers are countered by the fact that major felony, or “index,” crimes tracked by the NYPD have decreased overall by about 9 percent between 2013 and 2016 under de Blasio, according to year-end statistics released by the NYPD in January. The number of murders, 335, was the same as three years ago after having seen slight fluctuation each year, and rapes and felony assaults did increase from 2013 to 2016, by 4.2 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. But, overall, 2016 was the city's safest year on record -- robberies were down 19 percent, burglaries were down by 25.5 percent, grand larceny was down by 2.4 percent. Gun violence also decreased significantly - there were 998 shooting incidents in 2016, the first time that number was below 1,100 in the decades of modern data-tracking.
Massey’s campaign appears to be the first and only entity to attribute the jump in hate crimes, widely seen as having been sparked by forces in and around Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, to a failure by the de Blasio administration, which includes the NYPD.
Massey may have difficulty gaining traction on public safety as a campaign issue, though he will certainly not fall on deaf ears. Voters are divided along demographic and party lines on the mayor’s handling of crime, with the city’s lopsided enrollment tilting things heavily in de Blasio’s favor (Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one in New York City voter rolls; there are also over 1 million unaffiliated voters Massey is hoping to woo). At the same time, Massey and other Republicans have pointed largely to the perception that crime is getting worse, even if the numbers look good.
The latest Quinnipiac University Poll from March 1 shows 54 percent of voters approve of the way de Blasio is handling crime while 39 percent disapprove. Along party lines, the difference is stark -- 69 percent of Democrats approved of the mayor’s handling of crime while 17 percent of Republicans felt the same. The polling also shows racial differences -- 73 percent of black voters approve and 56 percent of Hispanics approve, while 44 percent of white New Yorkers gave the mayor a thumbs up on crime.
“The truth of the matter is, whether [Massey] likes it or not, crime is down,” said Christina Greer, professor of political science at Fordham University. “By saying that crime is up and everything’s violent, he’s trying to tap into the white fear that [former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani and [President] Donald Trump consistently tap into.”
Greer believes that Massey could get some amount of support by hammering home his message on crime. “But the type of people who believe that,” she said, “are people who aren’t interested in looking at the data.”
Before de Blasio came to office and early in his term, there were those who worried about his rhetoric concerning the NYPD and its tactics, and warned that he would oversee a rise in historically low crime from the Bloomberg era. De Blasio stringently opposed the overuse of stop-and-frisk policing, and his opponents pounced on that to paint him as anti-police. Over much of the last three years, he has been at pains to correct that impression, portraying himself as a strong ally of the police department, especially after his mayoralty hit a low point in late 2014 and early 2015 when two police officers were killed and others publicly turned their backs on the mayor.
Many who warned that curtailing the use of stop-and-frisk would lead to a spike in crime citywide were proved wrong, and some admitted so. The New York Daily News Editorial Board, which was strongly critical of de Blasio’s position on the policing tactic, published a mea culpa in August. “We are delighted to say that we were wrong,” the editorial read, admitting that the increase in murders that they foresaw never occurred while crime hit record lows.
Even de Blasio’s harshest critics have conceded that he’s kept the city secure. “Keeping the streets safe is one thing de Blasio has managed fairly well, by avoiding too much political interference with the NYPD, the best police force in America,” wrote the editorial board of the New York Post in December. (The Post and de Blasio are frequent targets of each other’s ire, with de Blasio famously feuding with the tabloid last year, refusing to take questions at a news conference from one of its reporters and calling the paper a “right-wing rag.”)
But crime is an “emotive topic,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and state prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I think that public safety never goes away as an issue,” he said. “It may appear to be taking a holiday, but every mayor knows you’re never more than one day away from public safety catapulting to the top of the list.”
Poll numbers bear this out. The March 1 Quinnipiac poll shows that 82 percent of voters said crime is a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” problem, compared to 17 percent who said it is “not very serious” or “not a problem at all.” O’Donnell said a single incident -- like the recent terror attack in London or the murder of a black man in midtown by a white supremacist from Maryland -- could easily dominate the conversation. “Emotion can quickly eclipse statistics,” O’Donnell said. “New York City is provably super safe,” he added. “The difference between perception and reality can change quickly.”
O’Donnell did acknowledge that public safety would resonate as an issue in the mayoral primary, particularly with the Republican base in the city, but it will be “daunting” for Massey to venture beyond that group. It also smacks of the irony in the public safety conversation, as O’Donnell points out. “A lack of safety mostly affects minorities. White New York has generally been safe but they’re the ones that are fearful,” he said.
Former Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, de Blasio’s main general election opponent in 2013, said that crime and quality of life issues “are always high on the agenda.” “Some people are more worried about street cleanliness than they are about crime and vice versa, but crime is an issue because it’s the quality-of-life nature of it,” he said. In 2013, Lhota’s campaign argued that de Blasio was a risk to public safety. (Some of the consultants who worked on that campaign are working for Massey, who has raised and spent about $2 million.)
Although he couldn’t speculate whether public safety will gain traction as the race progresses, and he gives credit to de Blasio and the NYPD for continuing reductions in crime, Lhota echoed O’Donnell’s point that singular events could change that. “Campaigns are a function of things that happen in the city and in the world,” he said. “Events take control of elections, events take control of campaigns.”
But Lhota reiterated that there is indeed anxiety among New Yorkers about crime. “Polling is showing people still have a sense of fear. So another question is, how do you eradicate that fear and is it [eradicable]? I’m not sure.”
He added, “The argument will be, ‘People don’t feel safe’ and the mayor’s argument’s gonna be, ‘But the numbers say that they are safe.’ And so where does that debate go? What’s the next question? What is your policy on homelessness? What are you going to do about reducing the rate of growth in the budget in the city of New York? Those issues could become more important. Homelessness could be, sanitation pickups could be. That’s where I’m saying events can take over. An opponent will talk about the feeling of crime and the mayor will have the ability to stand behind his record on crime.”
Perhaps the one constituency that Massey may be able to spotlight is rank-and-file law enforcement, which has had an adversarial relationship with the mayor since before he took power. Although de Blasio has taken many opportunities to try to repair that dynamic, especially over the past two years, there are few signals that much has changed.
Last year, an internal survey by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents more than 24,000 rank-and-file officers in the NYPD, found that morale among its members had bottomed out under de Blasio. About 96 percent disapproved of the mayor’s policies on public safety and policing, and 95 percent said they felt “less safe” on duty. This has become one of Massey’s consistent talking points.
“Nothing’s changed,” said Albert O’Leary, PBA communications director, of officer sentiment towards de Blasio. “He’s still mayor, he’s still perceived as a supporter of anti-police segments of our society. He’s viewed as anti-police by police.”
O’Leary also indicated that the recent settlement of the PBA contract with the city, which de Blasio and PBA President Patrick Lynch announced in a rare joint appearance, had done little to assuage those sentiments.
Using this relationship as a foil, Massey has emphasized that he will show the NYPD the support he says the mayor has failed to display. “I will always stand with police and work with the police commissioner to fully empower and fund the NYPD’s community policing,” he said in the March 17 statement. It is not clear what additional empowerment or funding the NYPD needs for community policing given what de Blasio has invested in the effort that is one of his hallmarks, including adding 1,300 officers to the force.
De Blasio is now fighting for NYPD funding in terms of $110 million in federal anti-terror funds that are currently under threat from the Trump administration. Greer, from Fordham, said this actually works in the mayor’s favor. “I think that relationship is on the mend,” she said of de Blasio and the police, “and the mayor’s in a good position because Trump’s trying to defund the NYPD.” Greer also said Trump, with his proposed cuts to NYCHA, the NYPD, and elsewhere, has inserted himself into the mayoral race and that any Republican candidate would have to address that. Massey has repeatedly said he will not make the mayoral race a “referendum” on President Trump as he thinks de Blasio is trying to do.
At a November 29 news conference, when asked about morale in the police department, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said, “There are ebbs and flows with morale depending on what goes on around the city and what the sense of appreciation that the police feel from the residents of the city. I think we’re in a good place now. It can always be improved, but we look constantly to make things better for our police officers.”
He continued, “And the number one thing that I do is that I respect that the work that they do, and they know that because I’ve come up through the ranks. So, I think that having a police commissioner that’s come up through the ranks, I think that’s appreciated by the vast majority of the members of the New York City Police Department who continue to do an outstanding job every day.”
De Blasio then added, “There’s tremendous appreciation for how the NYPD protects people from any terror threat. I hear that from the public all the time and I hear it from the officers that I talk to that they get those thank-yous and they appreciate those thank-yous.”
He also said that the department’s new neighborhood policing model is improving relationships between cops and communities. “There’s a lot of mutual respect and a lot of appreciation and it’s stated quite frequently. I know our officers appreciate that. And I agree that having a leader who came up through the ranks means a lot to our officers. I’ve also heard that from many officers that they really appreciate that their leader experienced everything that they experience, and they know that Commissioner O’Neill has their back.”
De Blasio quickly named O’Neill, who had been chief of department, as commissioner after former Commissioner Bill Bratton announced his intended retirement from the NYPD last year. De Blasio has stressed that O’Neill is the architect of neighborhood policing and, in announcing the new PBA contract, focused on the agreement that all officers will wear body cameras within three years. This has become a campaign talking point for the mayor as he seeks to assure his base he is a reformer who is improving accountability at the NYPD. Some see de Blasio as more vulnerable on policing from the left than the right -- activists have questioned the scale of de Blasio's reform of the NYPD, attacked him for a lack of transparency and accountability at the NYPD, and long-time policing reformer Robert Gangi, executive director of Police Reform Organizing Project, has declared his candidacy in the Democratic mayoral primary.
The mayor’s campaign is scarcely worried about Massey’s attacks. A Quinnipiac poll from Feb. 28 showed de Blasio handily beating Massey in a head-to-head contest, winning 59 percent of the vote over Massey’s 25 percent (with about 15 percent undecided). Massey’s campaign has spun the poll as a positive, stating that voters have begun to recognize their previously unknown candidate and winning approval from one-fourth of voters this early in the race is a promising sign.
Massey’s campaign is also set to roll out detailed policy positions over the next few weeks. At his first official news conference in February, Massey had little to say on policy and said he hadn’t “established an answer” yet on stop-and-frisk, the controversial policing tactic that dominated much of the 2013 election cycle. At subsequent events Massey said that the NYPD is “currently using stop-question-and-frisk and I believe it’s one of the necessary tools and that there are many that we need to have for our police.” He stressed the importance of the Mayor supporting the police and said, “They will never turn their back on me because I will never turn my back on them."
Dan Levitan, a spokesperson for de Blasio’s campaign was confident when asked about Massey’s public safety positions. “Mayor de Blasio ended the overuse of stop-and-frisk and brought crime to record lows while improving relations between police and the communities they serve,” Levitan said in an email. “That’s a record we are happy to compare with anyone.”
As Lhota also said, “[Crime] won’t be the only issue in the campaign I guarantee you. Will it be an issue? Yes. Will it be the issue that makes the difference? Probably not.”
Note: this article has been updated to provide more specific felony crime data for 2013 to 2016.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to create a legal defense fund to pay fees incurred from the recently concluded state and federal investigations into his fundraising activities may face significant hurdles after the Conflicts of Interest Board issued an advisory on Wednesday establishing clear contribution limits for such defense funds.
The mayor and his administration were the subject of two separate corruption investigations -- a federal probe into whether donors to his 2013 electoral campaign or defunct nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, were promised or granted government favors in exchange for their contributions; and a state probe into whether de Blasio and his team violated election laws in funnelling large donations to Democratic state Senate candidates in 2014. State and federal prosecutors announced earlier this month that they were concluding their investigations without bringing charges against the mayor or his aides.
De Blasio said in February that he would not use taxpayer funds to pay the law firm of Kramer, Levin, Naftalis and Frankel for his personal legal defense in the two cases, instead announcing plans to create a defense fund and raise money from donors. “All legal efforts on my behalf are not paid for by the taxpayer, as opposed to other city employees," he said. “That’s money that will have to be raised. So that’s the reality, because I guess you didn’t know, I’m not a billionaire like my predecessor.”
But the Conflict of Interest Board, an independent ethics watchdog, wrote in an advisory opinion issued Wednesday that contributions to a legal defense fund created by a public official “are no different from gifts directly to the public servant,” and therefore subject to a number of restrictions, chiefly a $50 limit on donations.
The Conflicts of Interest law is intended to prohibit individuals and firms from currying favor with city officials and defines any gift worth $50 or more as a “valuable gift.” City officials cannot accept a valuable gift, the board wrote, from individuals or firms that have or seek to have business with the city. It also noted that successive gifts within a 12-month period are not allowed and that the $50 limit applies as an aggregate to donors who are related. The aggregate limit also applies to donations by multiple “directors, trustees, or employees” of one firm or affiliated firms.
“In the absence of specific legislation that distinguishes gifts made to public servants through legal defense funds from other gifts to public servants,” the advisory opinion reads, “there is no legal basis for the Board to treat gifts made through legal defense funds differently.”
The law also holds that a public servant may not accept gifts of any value from a subordinate and no “valuable gifts” from people just by virtue of holding their public office. The only allowable unlimited contributions can come from either a family member or a close personal friend “who is not engaged in business dealings with the City, who does not appear before the City, and who otherwise has no non-ministerial dealings with the City,” the opinion reads.
The mayor has not yet specified what his own defense is expected to cost, although it’s likely in the hundreds of thousands, if not more. The city had spent about $10.5 million on outside legal fees in defending the administration and de Blasio’s aides as of earlier this month, Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter testified at a City Council budget hearing.
[Related: Law Department Budget Hearing Focuses on De Blasio Administration Legal Defense]
The COIB opinion poses a major hurdle to de Blasio, who may have to shoulder those legal costs himself or make the unpopular choice of using city funds to pay off a good portion of them, which he is entitled to do. At an unrelated news conference on Wednesday, the mayor indicated that he may take up the advisory opinion with the COIB. “This now initiates a dialogue,” he told reporters. “They’re a government body like everyone else. You can go back and say, ‘Well what about this example or what about this history.’ and again, this is not just applying to me, it applies to other people who may need to use this approach.”
When asked by reporters, de Blasio said that he did not ask for the COIB advisory himself and that he could not think of any very wealthy close friend who could give him the money he owes. He called a legal defense fund a "fair and appropriate tool."
The Board noted in its opinion that distinguishing legal defense funds from gifts would require new legislation or an amendment to the city charter, which the mayor brought up at the news conference. “As they’ve indicated, a potential solution is through legislation,” he said. “That’s a perfectly fair possibility. I’m not committing to anything yet because they literally just put it out, we have to think about it, we have to talk to them.”
The mayor nominates the five members of the COIB, who are confirmed by the City Council.
Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a government reform group, praised the COIB opinion as an important measure in preventing “influence peddling by those who do business with the city.” “The ways that people can seek to influence an elected official’s decisions through the use of money become more and more limited within the city over the course of time and this was the one big remaining loophole that was left out there that the Conflicts of Interest Board has now closed,” he said.
Dadey also conceded that the mayor could fall back on city funds to pay his bills. “[Mayor de Blasio] allowed taxpayer funds to pay for the defense of his staff and I think the city may be in a position to pay for his own defense, particularly since he was not charged with anything,” he said.
For de Blasio, who is seeking reelection this year, every option appears to be a minefield.
The mayor said Wednesday that he doesn’t “feel comfortable” with the idea of revisiting use of public money for his legal bills. “I think because I’m the leader of this whole operation it is better not to ask the taxpayers to cover expenses even if they’re valid expenses,” he said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
(rendering of new affordable housing being built in the Bronx, via HPD)
In Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2017 State of the City speech delivered at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he referred to the affordable housing crisis as a threat to “the very soul of the city.” The singularity of that “soul” captures de Blasio’s desired outcome of “the tale of two cities,” which he has said exists in New York, alternately for those with and without wealth, resources, and opportunity. In the final year of his first term and amid implementation of his major city-wide affordable housing plan, a recent lawsuit has brought an old housing policy to the fore of conversations about racial segregation in the city.
At the center of the suit is a Koch-era policy that reserves half of all available units in city affordable housing lotteries for locals already living in the community district of the desired housing. The City Community Preference Policy is lauded by proponents as a tool that curbs displacement – a bi-product of redevelopment since the 1980s – and gives low-income residents greater access to local affordable housing even as their neighborhoods change. To the extent that the policy is meant to help low-income residents stay in their communities, however, it is said to make racial integration of neighborhoods more difficult, and is being challenged in federal court.
Stakeholders are divided on the merits of community preference. Contemporary supporters endorse it as a measure that helps to preserve affordable housing options, mitigate community rupture, and preserve the “fabric” of community in the wake of growing market pressure, neighborhood upzoning, and new resources.
Among opponents, where it is sometimes referred to as the “outsider restriction policy,” it only serves to perpetuate an already-segregated city landscape. Critics of the policy say it prevents movement, especially of people of color seeking affordable housing in de facto segregated, predominantly white communities, which often have greater access to city services, schools, supermarkets, and other basics and “amenities.”
The court case unfolds against the backdrop of the city’s 10-year, 200,000-unit affordable housing plan that includes the construction of 80,000 new apartments across the five boroughs. Many of those new units will be built as part of rezoning plans intended to create greater housing density, commercial space, and services like schools and parks in about a dozen neighborhoods throughout the city.
The first neighborhood that has been rezoned under the plan – East New York, in Brooklyn – is set to see the construction of 1,200 new affordable housing units begin in the next two years.
[Related: The East New York Rezoning, One Year Later]
The New York City metropolitan area also claims the second-highest level of racial segregation in the country, according to Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center, which is challenging the community preference policy on the grounds that it violates the city’s human rights statutes and the federal Fair Housing Act. An analysis of 2010 Census data shows that nearly 80 percent of New Yorkers live in segregated neighborhoods.
The Anti-Discrimination Center is representing three African-American women who were unsuccessful in their lottery bids to attain affordable housing in predominantly white “neighborhoods of opportunity” in Manhattan in 2015. Gurian contends that the community preference policy skews the chances of many black and Latino income-eligible applicants when the relatively few affordable units in better-resourced areas do become available, which allows decades-old lines of segregation to be maintained.
The case also draws concerns over the city’s approach to fair housing placement when choosing areas to rezone. Some in support of the policy have pointed out that the greater problem is the city’s unbalanced approach to building affordable housing when it nominates low-density, predominantly black and Latino areas to be rezoned, while neglecting other mostly white areas that could also bear an increase in housing.
As part of the city’s housing plan, a signature initiative of Mayor de Blasio known as Housing New York, the Department of City Planning, with the East New York rezoning in motion, is currently undertaking planning studies in several more neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Five of eight neighborhoods in the pipeline – Southern Boulevard and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, East New York and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and East Harlem – are predominantly black and/or Latino with small non-Hispanic white populations. Before the city paused a housing study because of federal hurdles and infrastructural challenges last spring, City Planning had been considering rezoning part of Flushing, Queens, the population of which is roughly two-thirds Asian and one-third white.
In a statement written for the court by former Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Vicki Been, the then-commissioner supported the community preference policy as a measure that “is intended to ensure that local residents, many of whom have deep roots in the community and have persevered through years of unfavorable living conditions, are able to remain in their neighborhoods as those neighborhoods are revitalized.”
Racial Segregation in the City
In New York City, where close to a quarter of the population identifies as African-American according to the 2010 Census, 17 of the 59 community districts have African-American populations of less than five percent. In 11 other community districts, by contrast, more than 50 percent of the population identifies as African-American, and six of those have particularly extreme levels of segregation.
The pattern of segregation between Latino and white New Yorkers is similar, and combining levels of segregation experienced by both African-American and Latino New Yorkers, who together made up 51 percent of the city-wide population in 2010, shows that over half of New York’s community districts are heavily segregated.
The racial breakdown within the subpopulation of New Yorkers who qualify for rent-regulated affordable housing is roughly the same as in the larger city population.
“If you have the city as a whole, the income-eligible households are pretty diverse,” Gurian told Gotham Gazette in an interview last year. “When you apply an outsider restriction policy...You wind up, by definition, with a more segregated tenancy than you otherwise would have had.”
And that is illegal, he argues.
Employing the types of metrics used in determining affordable housing eligibility, Gurian described the example of households making 40 to 60 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI) - equivalent, in 2016, to between $36,200 and $54,400 for a family of four. In Gurian’s example, black, white, and Latino New Yorkers each make up slightly under a third of the people who fall into that band of income-eligibility. This, he says, is the profile of the applicant pool – and it would be the profile of the resulting tenancy that Housing Connect, the lottery, would have per district if the community preference policy did not limit the access of outsiders to affordable housing.
“Those are the numbers [city-wide],” Gurian said, “and those are not the numbers within individual community districts. So we think there’s a big problem.”
From a legal standpoint, Gurian believes that this argument is enough to show that community preference creates a “disparate impact” on New Yorkers of color, which would signal the end to the policy if the courts agree with him. But other factors, like where the city chooses to build or subsidize affordable housing, also impact the racial layout of the city.
Fair Housing Assessment
To many who have dealt with the issue in predominantly low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, abolishing the community preference policy would only serve the public good in a theoretical sense. On the ground, community preference, according to these proponents of the policy, is a legal instrument essential to maintaining both housing options and a sense of justice for those living in historically underserved districts that have only recently begun to see investments from the city.
Gregory Louis, a senior attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services, told Gotham Gazette that the anti-segregation arguments against community preference, despite being rooted in aspirations toward social restitution, seem to be ignoring the general lack of affordable housing in the city.
“A good number of the criticisms of community preferences sort of operate at a particularly abstract level, as though there is affordable housing being built throughout New York,” he said. In 2011, Brooklyn Legal Services was involved in the only other case where the community preference policy was the subject of a lawsuit against the city, decades after it was first adopted.
Louis’ argument is that, in reality, most – and the most dense – affordable housing has historically been built in the city’s non-white enclaves. This means that aside from community preference requirements barring income-eligible black New Yorkers from white neighborhoods and vice versa, it is also an affirmative mechanism that helps local black residents gain access to affordable housing when it is created in their neighborhoods.
“Taking the example of East New York,” Louis said, “that’s the place where all the people…the forsaken people, who had to sort of live without resources, that’s where they went. If that area disappears without any sort of real [anti-displacement mechanism] New York on the whole will be less ‘of color.’”
In East New York where the real estate prices are relatively low compared to most other neighborhoods in the city, having premium access to affordable housing may mean the difference between renting an apartment and being pushed out of the housing market entirely. As the cost of housing has risen, so has the number of New Yorkers living in shelters, which reached a historic high of 60,000 last fall, part of a decades-long trajectory.
The latest listing on Housing Connect is for 25 new units in neighboring Brownsville. The one-bedroom units there will go for $876 per month to one or two people making 60% of the AMI. A resident from that community district - an area with a population of about 86,000 - applying for a unit will be at least one hundred times more likely to succeed than an average city resident. Considering that apartments are in this case further reserved for municipal workers, those chances are additionally skewed.
Louis believes the persistence of segregation has to do with the city’s lack of comprehensive fair housing assessment when it comes to choosing where to build affordable housing. This is especially true, he says, in areas that will be rezoned under the mayor’s affordable housing agenda, now that the construction of much-needed affordable housing has been linked with neighborhood redevelopment (and rising property value) through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), which was passed by the City Council a year ago and requires a certain percentage of rent-stabilized units in new housing developments in rezoned areas.
That redevelopment is itself made possible by years of stagnant development and depressed local economies that have kept real estate prices low, especially in the segregated enclaves Louis refers to.
A main goal of the mayor’s Housing New York initiative is the construction of 80,000 new affordable units and the preservation of 120,000 more by 2024. Three years into the program, HPD has been on scheduleon schedule, financing the construction or preservation of just under a third of the mayor’s goal even without the help of MIH during the first two years.
Joel Feingold, a cofounding member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union, which was created in response to the displacement of low-paying tenants, points out that a disparate impact on a protected class of people, such as racial and religious minorities, is illegal under the federal Civil Rights Act when it is to the detriment of the protected group. “The community preference policy does not have any disparate negative impact,” Feingold told Gotham Gazette. “It has only disparate positive impact, especially in the context of gentrification, of displacement, and overcharged uprooting…by real estate capital.”
For supporters of community preference, as long as affordable housing continues to be built in historically segregated neighborhoods of the city that are experiencing gentrification and redevelopment, such a policy is seen as key to helping black and Latino New Yorkers attain affordable housing at all.
“Because the subset of low-density neighborhoods that are predominantly white are not on the rezoning list, the answer isn’t to remedy that imbalance but to perpetuate segregation?” Gurian asked rhetorically, in an email subsequent to the interview last year.
Studies show a link between individuals’ geographic integration and their chances of financial success and that of their children. “We find that places that have less residential segregation by race or by income tend to have higher levels of upward mobility,” Stanford University economist Raj Chetty stated in a presentation at the annual NYS Association for Affordable Housing conference, held in Times Square last year. In New York City, however, many of the Housing New York rezoning studies are taking place in segregated communities of color.
“Not all neighborhoods are equal,” Gurian wrote in the email. “If you are talking about neighborhoods of opportunities, a very, very high proportion are in community districts that are disproportionately white.”
The de Blasio administration -- and many of its City Council partners -- argue that pressures on communities are heightening and the only way to help people stay in their neighborhoods is through intervention, harnessing the free market, which creates additional housing, including affordable housing, and also brings new resources into communities.
The Anti-Discrimination Center lawsuit, which survived the city Law Department’s motion to dismiss in October, aims to remove what it calls an artificial barrier to affordable housing in areas of opportunity. The attention to the policy has revived the argument that neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area, including the surrounding suburbs, must take on more responsibility for racial and economic segregation by building more affordable housing. Through congressional action in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockland and Westchester counties each got their own area median incomes based on local incomes. At the same time, however, these relatively affluent suburban counties remain tied to the AMI calculation of the five boroughs, artificially pulling it higher.
Political Calculations
Policy debates over the best approach to integration and affordable housing provision are also hampered by political considerations. Some proponents of community preference, like City Council Member Rafael Espinal, who represents a majority of residents in the East New York rezoning area, have stated that keeping the provision is essential to getting community constituents to accept major rezoning proposals.
In her statement for the court, then-housing commissioner Vicki Been wrote, “The City Community Preference Policy ensures that neighborhoods see that new growth and investments in affordable housing provide some benefits to local residents to offset those burdens. This makes it possible for the City to overcome that resistance and achieve its ambitious affordable housing goals despite neighborhoods' understandable concerns about the difficulties that new construction and growth may pose.”
Gurian has a response to such political considerations, too: “The City responding, as it has, to those kinds of concerns - that’s illegal. That’s illegal on the basis of intentional discrimination; when you respond to concerns that want to maintain a particular racial or ethnic status quo, that’s illegal.”
Ultimately, the question of community preference is a question of where New York stands within the history of racial progress in American cities. The answers may lie in the various justifications for the policy since it was first enshrined in city law in the 1980s.
Under the Koch administration, the policy was adopted as a measure to allow low-resource communities to remain in their neighborhoods and benefit from local redevelopment. Now it is defended on similar grounds but with a new assumption, or one that has only recently become relevant: the policy is aimed at maintaining community character in the face of gentrification – whether that means preventing displacement or maintaining cultural guideposts. What had been articulated as an affirmative tool to help underserved communities gain access to city investments, is now also lauded as a way of designing a certain type of community.
In New York City in the 1980s, the prospect of large-scale geographic racial integration was uncharted territory. The legacy of unequal mortgage lending practices, restrictive deed covenants, and constrained affordable housing placement fortified the lines separating white and black neighborhoods, making community-specific renewal projects necessary for many black residents in under-resourced enclaves to benefit from city services.
Under Koch, the community preference policy was intended to assist the revitalization of communities that had seen decades of disinvestment and abandonment, the result of stagnant tenant incomes and a rising cost of living. In 1988, about half of the 252,000 affordable units the city planned to create would be on property owned by HPD. Today, the city faces the widespread displacement of communities of color due to rising market pressures and a lack of truly affordable housing to compete with them. There is also far less city-owned land to build on, though exactly how much has been a matter of dispute between the de Blasio administration and Comptroller Scott Stringer.
A lack of city-owned property means that HPD must rely almost entirely on private development to create enough affordable housing to meet its goals. Critics of de Blasio's housing plan say the income-eligibility standards for new affordable units are based on unrealistic AMI proportions, as the city tries to balance conflicting interests, and are not providing enough rent-stabilized housing for the very low-income. De Blasio recently announced a slight adjustment to his affordability targets to account that outcry.
In 2017, the prospect of redevelopment across the city accompanying changing attitudes of new generations of white, middle-class residents toward having black neighbors means that community preference, rather than providing a resource for already-segregated communities, may now serve to perpetuate that segregation even as neighborhoods change. Whatever the outcome, the mobility of people living in historically segregated communities will continue to be restricted if they must rely more and more on subsidized affordable housing as values in their local economies scale up.
“So I think our position, what we’re observing on the ground, it is extraordinarily sad,” said Gregory Louis of Brooklyn Legal Services. “It’s sort of an indictment of – I don’t know what – political reality that we are still very much having an original purpose, an almost 1960s conversation about race in New York City because we have to. We can’t even move on to the part where we can worry about integration because of the dynamics of New York City.”
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette