Leading Immigrant Advocacy Group Releases 2022 New York City Policy and Budget Agenda
Immigrant support rally (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
Make the Road New York, the state’s largest organization representing immigrants and working New Yorkers, is releasing a new New York City policy and budget agenda on Wednesday as it hopes to influence the ongoing city budget process.
Claiming more than 25,000 members who mostly live in New York City, Make the Road issued its priorities including investments in housing, worker protections, greater immigrant protections, hate crime prevention, removing police from schools, expanded access to health care, and increased funding for adult literacy.
The agenda comes just after the New York City Council released its formal response to Mayor Eric Adams’ $98.5 billion preliminary budget, released in February, for the 2023 fiscal year, which begins July 1. Adams’ spending plan included cuts across most city agencies, leading to criticism from some that it is “an austerity budget” without enough investment in a variety of acute needs. The Council’s response calls for billions more in spending on services and infrastructure, as well as more deposits in city reserves based on higher expected revenue totals.
Make the Road New York echoes some of those priorities with its own particular focus on immigrant communities.
“It really reflects what the needs are in the community,” said Kenny Minaya, Make the Road’s director of government affairs, about the policy agenda. “We're still in the midst of the pandemic, although I get our elected officials want to move on. We want to make sure that all communities in the city, Black and brown immigrant communities recover and that there’s special attention paid there. It's really about kind of rethinking how we emerge from this pandemic and making sure that we're taking an equitable approach.”
The group has several major demands to tackle housing affordability and homelessness. Chiefly, calling on the administration to deepen housing affordability through the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program, which mandates that developers build a certain amount of rent-restricted housing when seeking upzonings from the city. The de Blasio-era program is initially hailed as a means to increase affordable housing but critics say has not reached enough people at the lowest levels of affordability.
Make the Road also calls for greater enforcement against landlords who ignore repairs or harass tenants and an expansion of eligibility for city-funded FHEPS voucher. The vouchers currently provide supplemental rent to rent-controlled tenants, military veterans, and clients of adult protective services, and Make the Road wants them to be expanded to households that are at risk of eviction.
The group’s biggest budget demand is a complete divestment from policing in schools and “a DOE budget that reflects the needs of students that's more centered on supporting our students as opposed to gearing them up for the school-to-prison pipeline,” Minaya said. The group is calling on the mayor to remove all police officers from schools citywide, eliminate metal detectors and surveillance equipment, and reinvest the $450 million currently spent on the NYPD’s school safety division towards young people instead. They are also pushing the administration to refuse to fill 1,363 vacancies among school safety agents. Adams has reversed the planned transfer of school safety officers from the NYPD to the Department of Education.
Make the Road also wants an additional $118.5 million for a citywide expansion of school-based restorative practices, which eschew traditional punitive discipline in favor of social and emotional learning and conflict resolution. That goes hand in hand with the ask of $150 million for hiring 500 new school counselors and social workers, with a goal of achieving a ratio of one social worker and one guidance counselor for every 150 students in most schools, and one for every 50 students in high-need schools over the next five years. Another $75 million is included in the agenda for hiring 500 community members in supportive positions and $5 million to baseline funding for mental health services in schools.
“This conversation is particularly important now as everybody is kind of rethinking public safety,” Minaya said. “We want to…reiterate that you can't have public safety without investments in the community. Communities must thrive and that's a big component of public safety.”
The NYPD’s Vice Unit has long been a target for police reformers who have pushed to decrminalize sex work in the city and state, and Make the Road is advocating for reallocating the unit’s $18 million budget to services for sex workers. In particular, the group wants the funding to be redirected to the COIN Clinic in Callen Lorde facilities, which provides free health care to sex workers, to legal representation, education services, and non-profits that work with sex workers.
“The funds that are being given to the police can be given to us so that we're able to work and we're able to not be discriminated against in society,” said Dulce, a trans woman and sex worker who is a member of Make the Road, through a translator.
“It's important for the mayor to take our voice into consideration, to no longer give any more funds to the police and instead give that money to our communities,” she added. “For example, for us to be able to have a place to live, for the money to be invested in programs so that we can learn the language, programs for us to have better job opportunities.”
Make the Road is calling for targeted investments by the city to prevent deportations of immigrants including $1 million in baselined budget funding for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative which provides counsel to those at risk of deportation or ICE detention. It also wants the City Council to continue maintaining a minimum of $16.6 million for the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, which gives legal counsel to almost all individuals in ICE detention facing deportation. In addition, Make the Road calls for new legislation that would give individuals the ability to file suit if they are wrongfully detained by the NYPD, Department of Correction, or the Department of Probation at the request of federal immigration authorities.
Also included in the platform are broader protections for the city’s most vulnerable working-class New Yorkers. Make the Road calls on the Adams administration to restore and baseline $4 million for the Low Wage Worker Initiative, which provides funding to a coalition of legal service groups that help workers with wage theft and discrimination claims. They also called on the City Council to increase funding for its Low Wage Worker Support initiative to $1 million; the initiative funds community groups that educate and inform workers of their rights in multiple languages.
Last year, New York City established “just cause” protections against termination for fast food employees to give them greater job stability. Make the Road wants those protections extended to all low-wage industries where workers would otherwise be discouraged from reporting workplace violations for fear of being fired.
Mayor Adams’ proposed preliminary spending plan reduced budgets across the board for almost every city agency including the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) and the City Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), in part by removing unfilled but budgeted positions and targeted efficiency savings identified by the individual departments. Those agencies are at the forefront of tackling the workplace issues that Make the Road members face, and the organization is calling for those specific agency cuts to be restored to avoid staffing issues and insufficient essential services.
Make the Road also wants the City Council to renew funding for the Job Training and Placement Initiative, which includes $5.25 million for the Consortium for Worker Education “Jobs to Build On” program and $2.2 million for Worker Service Centers.
To improve adult literacy rates, Make the Road is pushing to restore and renew funding for several programs, including restoring $1.6 million for the Adult Literacy Case Manager Services pilot project and renewing it for a second year; an additional $13.5 million in adult literacy funding for programs through the Department of Youth and Community Development; doubling the City Council’s funding for its adult literacy pilot project to $5 million, and renewing the Council’s $4 million Adult Literacy Initiative.
Make the Road wants the Council and mayoral administration to make key investments in health care for immigrants and the city’s broader populations that suffer from the lack of it. The Adams administration should, the platform says, put at least $100 million each year to fully fund the NYC Care program that gives free and low-cost services to those who cannot qualify for or afford health insurance. And the Council is asked to expand funding for certain programs including increasing funds for the Access Health Initiative to $4 million, allocating $2.3 million to the Managed Care Consumer Assistance Program, and maintaining funding for Ending the Epidemic program at $7.7 million, and the Immigrant Health Initiative at $2 million.
In order to combat increasing incidents of hate violence, Make the Road also calls for $1 million in renewed funding for the city’s Hate Crime Prevention initiative, which supports community-based organizations that work to reduce hate violence and serve communities that are most vulnerable to it.
Make the Road is among many stakeholders that are attempting to have their requests approved in the city budget, which is far from final with almost three months till the July 1 deadline for the next fiscal year. The mayor will soon issue his executive budget, which will be followed by another round of hearings by the City Council before more negotiations and attempts to influence the final budget deal.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Funding for Adult Literacy and Other Immigrant Services To Be Contested in City Budget Negotiations
Council Member Shahana Hanif (photo: @ShahanaFromBK)
How city government is addressing the needs of immigrant communities is shaping up to be one of several key issues as Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Council negotiate the next city budget, due by the July 1 start of the new city fiscal year.
Among a series of March hearings held by the Council on Mayor Adams’ $98.5 billion preliminary budget plan, representatives from the Mayor’s Office on Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) and advocates appeared before Council members to discuss the allocation of resources to the city’s different programs designed to support and empower immigrant communities. The hearing was led by Council Member Shahana Hanif, a recently-elected Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Council's Committee on Immigration.
Hanif is co-chair of the Council’s Progressive Caucus and represents District 39, which includes parts or all of Park Slope, Borough Park, Kensington, Windsor Terrace, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill, and includes large Southeast Asian communities, including the Bangladeshi-Americans Hanif is among. Hanif has been among those critical of Adams’ approach to his first budget plan, which included planned reductions in spending at many city offices and agencies but not at the NYPD, which Hanif believes should see a significant reduction in funding to reinvest in communities.
MOIA is a relatively small office within the Mayor’s Office, not its own city department, with roughly seven staff members and, in Adams’ budget plan, funding of a little over $800,000. But MOIA is not the only city entity serving immigrant communities, instead operating more of a policy and coordination function, while also running some programming. The city’s major programs serving immigrant communities are run through specific city departments.
In her opening statement at the hearing, Hanif stressed the importance of addressing the needs of immigrant New Yorkers, zeroing in on recent cuts the Adams administration had proposed to adult literacy programs and calling for restoration in funding. Adult literacy was an issue Hanif returned to repeatedly during the hearing, then elevated afterward on social media, and is among the top priorities for immigrant advocates year in and year out in the city budget process.
The city’s adult literacy programming is run out of the Department of Youth and Community Development with coordination and policy development by MOIA, but Hanif said coordination among agencies is important, and that she is still seeking clarification after DYCD denied cuts during a separate hearing.
“It was evident to me that these agencies are not necessarily working as closely as they should to protect this vital programming and initiatives that are geared towards immigrant communities,” Hanif said in an interview with Gotham Gazette a few days after the hearing.
During the hearing, MOIA Commissioner Manuel Castro confirmed that there was a proposed reduction to funding for adult literacy programs. A report released by MOIA shows the funding proposed for fiscal year 2023, which begins this July 1, falls millions of dollars below that for the current fiscal year, FY22.
During the hearing Hanif called this proposed cut a “massive disappointment and a move toward disinvestment that will absolutely harm our immigrant communities.”
Though the specifics remain somewhat hazy, Hanif told Gotham Gazette that she understands the $1.6 million reduction is connected to the Adult Literacy Pilot Project out of DYCD, whose representatives said at the hearing it was due to underspending on case managers for that project.
Hanif described adult literacy programs as “essential to navigating healthcare, education, access to better jobs, and participating in the city’s recovery effort.” Further, she referenced recent targeted attacks on members of the Pan-Asian community throughout the city and described adult literacy classes as venues where the needs of this community, in particular, could be articulated.
During his opening testimony at the hearing, Commissioner Castro mostly reviewed the mission of his office and reaffirmed the need for an equitable recovery in New York City post-pandemic. Immigrant New Yorkers are generally less likely to have health insurance, more likely to be rent-burdened, and often suffer higher poverty rates, Castro pointed out, adding that both federal and state policies often fail to take into account the experiences of immigrant communities.
In a recap of MOIA’s activities in 2021, Castro listed emergency relief programs implemented during the pandemic, as well as covid vaccine outreach targeted at undocumented New Yorkers, language access and interpretation support, immigration legal services, and outreach for both the city’s “NYC Care” health care program and the IDNYC municipal identification card program, which are geared toward undocumented New Yorkers.
The Adams administration is committed to language access, Castro assured, saying 22% of New Yorkers have limited English proficiency and over 200 languages are spoken in the city.
Hanif noted she herself has helped assist in the translation of legal materials during her tenure working in predecessor Brad Lander’s City Council office. “Our big issue this year looks like it will be language access,” Hanif tweeted after the hearing. “The Mayor’s office is dragging its feet on Local Law 30, and we’re outsourcing too much translation work in a City that speaks 900 languages. We need a public language corps, and we need it now.”
Local Law 30 established baseline requirements for language access across city agencies. It mandates that city agencies appoint a language access coordinator and develop language access implementation plans, as well as provide over-the-phone interpretation in a minimum of 100 languages, translate the most commonly distributed government documents into the 10 designated citywide languages, and post signage about the availability of free interpretation services. Commissioner Castro affirmed that Local Law 30 should be enforced and mentioned that the language services team provides interpretation and translation for mayoral offices including MOIA.
As for her call for a public language corps, Hanif explained to Gotham Gazette it would mean a program hiring New Yorkers who speak the languages in their communities to well-paying translation and interpretation jobs.
“I really want to make New York City a city where we’re not relying on outsourcing language access providers from big companies and instead look towards us, look towards everyday people, immigrants, undocumented people who speak the languages, and then for us to be able to provide training,” she said.
Hanif referenced African Communities Together, a local non-profit organization, as a prime example of an effective worker cooperative model that services languages of limited diffusion, or languages spoken by a relatively small group of people throughout the city. Hanif also stressed the importance of feedback, explaining that if translated materials are written in jargon recipients are less likely to understand the vital information the documents hope to convey.
“Translation and interpretation save lives,” she said. “If you don’t know what your rights are you are more likely to open the door when ICE comes knocking.”
During the hearing, the Q&A section focused on several budget specifics. When prompted about the new needs MOIA might have in the upcoming year Commissioner Castro mentioned that the office had recommended to the mayor an emphasis on language access initiatives and support for refugees, including those from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, in the budget.
Hanif requested a number of different figures throughout the conversation including class sizes for the city’s adult literacy classes and enrollment numbers in IDNYC and We Speak NYC – the city’s free English Language Learning (ELL) program which provides online and in-person instructions across all five boroughs. MOIA staff was not able to provide many of the requested numbers during the hearing but assured Hanif they would follow up. A few days later, Hanif had still not received those numbers but said she hadn’t followed up yet.
“If we’re trying to make sure that the deeper investments are going towards immigrant specific initiatives,” Hanif said, “[it’s important] that we have the right numbers because those right numbers determine where we need to expand on outreach, and how many languages we need to bring into either MOIA’s translation and interpretation team, or the advocates’ effort to call on the city to broadly expand translation and interpretation across many more languages.”
As the Adams Administration tightens belts slightly at most city agencies, including by eliminating many vacant positions, Commissioner Castro mentioned that the municipal identification card program of IDNYC, open to all New Yorkers regardless of immigration status, would lose three budgeted positions that are currently unfilled. In his testimony, Castro emphasized the importance of outreach and enrollment so that the value of IDNYC could be better quantified, and shared that MOIA plans to increase enrollment by engaging with ethnic community media and advertising on social media.
In MOIA’s fifth annual report, released recently, it reported that since its inception, IDNYC had received upwards of 1.8 million applications – with the largest share coming from Brooklyn and Queens.
As for NYC Care, another focus of the hearing, Castro said the city plans to reach as many communities as possible, specifically immigrant communities, assuring outreach in the next year will be extensive and targeted. Launched under Mayor Bill de Blasio, NYC Care provides low- and no-cost access to health care for city residents who do not qualify for or cannot afford health insurance. It seeks to match individuals with primary care doctors, an important step in keeping people healthy.
Tom Tortorici, the Director of Legal Initiatives at MOIA, said past outreach has been conducted in 21 languages. As of February this year, over 100,000 New Yorkers had been enrolled in the NYC Care program.
Several other pressing issues facing immigrant communities were addressed at the hearing, including access to meaningful legal services, including those for refugees, and outreach for the Know York Rights (KYR) campaign – a system of city-sponsored forums that help ensure immigrant New Yorkers understand their rights and protections under the law regardless of immigration status. Hearing participants also discussed the need for an easier contracting process with the city for community-based organizations. Commissioner Castro, who previously served as the Executive Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a Queens-based nonprofit, said he knew firsthand how challenging the process was and how many barriers exist.
“I can’t lie, there’s a lot of work to be done in this area,” Castro said of contracting, explaining that there was a consensus around the city that this was a process that needed to be refined in order to lift up local nonprofits. Mayor Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander recently issued a joint set of plans for improving the procurement and contracting processes aimed especially at helping nonprofit human service providers.
Several of those nonprofits were in attendance at the hearing, and as the meeting moved toward public testimony representatives from a broad array of organizations made their case for maintained or increased city funding.
Representatives from The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP) as well as CUNY Citizenship Now! spoke on the importance of providing legal defense for immigrants facing deportation or detention. Both organizations were seeking over a million dollars to support their on-the-ground efforts to defend immigrants and their families.
Rex Chen of Legal Services NYC said immigration cases are taking longer since the pandemic, and there is a higher need for social services support. Terry Lawson of Unlocal, an organization that provides legal support to undocumented New Yorkers, said in her testimony: “World events are demonstrating more clearly than ever that migration is a human right and we support efforts to create greater access to migration for all.”
Council Member Hanif echoed that sentiment in the interview with Gotham Gazette, expressing a desire to expand pro-bono legal services for immigrant New Yorkers.
“Ensuring that we’re strengthening these legal service organizations and the services is going to be critical,” she said, “alongside fighting for ending the racist criminal carve-out for NYIFUP.”
There were a number of other governmental actions Hanif referenced in the movement for greater protection of immigrant New Yorkers, including the Dignity Not Detention Act, a state bill that would end all current and future contracts between ICE and immigration detention centers in New York, and city legislation around the ban of space heaters without automatic shutoffs in the wake of the recent and fatal Bronx fire.
“The Council broadly has been showing that we are in support of our immigrant neighbors, our undocumented neighbors – that gives me a lot of joy and hope” Hanif said.
Jeffrey Lau, who heads up the Chinese-American Planning Council’s Adult Literacy program, echoed Hanif on the classes being a lifeline for the Asian community, including in helping members respond to the wave of anti-Asian violence. “How do I ever recognize racism if I can’t even speak English? How do I learn even how to protect myself,” Lau said, delineating the concerns of students or potential students.
A number of students in adult literacy programs joined the hearing to share their own personal experiences as well, explaining that the classes had helped them advocate for themselves in the workplace and assist their children with homework. Hanif drilled down on the importance of the classes on social media afterward, writing: “This is a vital program to so many New Yorkers, and we should be investing MORE in helping our immigrant communities grow and flourish.”
A number of others joined the hearing to speak for increased investment in the Our City Our Vote program, based on a recently passed law that will allow hundreds of thousands of non-citizen legal residents to vote in municipal elections. Theodore Moore, the director of policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, called Our City Our Vote a real step towards representative democracy, and implored the Council to invest in the implementation of the law.
NYIC and other groups are seeking $25 million to ensure that the program is rolled out effectively.
“There are adult literacy programs that double as civic education hubs, and we can't forget the inspiring work of the women-led day labor centers across our City,” Hanif wrote on Twitter of the effort. Speaking with Gotham Gazette, she doubled down on the importance of Our City Our Vote, calling it a major priority in equitable post-pandemic recovery.
“The mayor’s preliminary budget did not include anything about Our City Our Vote,” Hanif said. “For there to be a successful mechanism to get those who are newly eligible to vote, registered, it’s going to take all of us and it’s going to take a deep investment.”
Reflecting on the “marathon” hearing, Hanif told Gotham Gazette she feels “so blessed to be the face in the Council for immigrants.”
The Council will soon craft its formal response to Adams’ preliminary budget in advance of the mayor’s executive budget, which will take that response, the new state budget due April 1, and other factors into consideration. After that budget plan is released, the Council will hold another round of hearings.
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by Anna Kaufman
@GothamGazette
At Hearing, Garodnick Lays Out Adams Administration Planning Values, Talks Budget and Policy
City Planning Chief Dan Garodnick (photo: Joanna Graham/Mayoral Photography Office)
In a presentation to the New York City Council Wednesday, newly-appointed Department of City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick discussed the Adams administration's proposed budget and values for how land should be used to shape the city's future.
The Department of City Planning, which helps craft proposed changes to land use rules, including zoning regulations and applications, is working towards some of the pillars of inclusive economic growth and crisis adaptability contained in Mayor Eric Adams’ economic recovery "blueprint," released earlier this month. The department examines community, borough, and city needs and opportunities, and helps develop plans for the future related to housing, economic development, green space, and much more. Its work is also closely tied to the City Planning Commission, a body made up of appointees of several city elected officials where Garodnick serves as Chair and which is one step in the approval process for land use changes.
The Department of City Planning is focused on a few key areas to address the overlapping crises of housing availability and affordability, climate, and health, Garodnick told members of the City Council. The goal is to continue creating new housing, build coastal resiliency, adjust central business districts, and make local investments with and without rezoning, he said while touting new capital funding mechanisms that are still "in formation."
"It's a plan that will be nimble, and will focus on a broader and equitable geographic distribution of economic opportunity," said Garodnick, a former City Council member from Manhattan who chaired the Council’s economic development committee and, before that, the land-use planning subcommittee. As a Council member, Garodnick worked with the Department of City Planning and City Planning Commission to pass a long-negotiated rezoning of East Midtown to enhance its office and commercial space, transit, and more. Between leaving the Council and being named to the Adams administration, Garodnick spent several years running Riverside Park.
An overarching goal, he said Wednesday, is to engage every neighborhood in the city in land-use talks and ease the experience of rezoning applicants.
His presentation to the Council's Land Use Committee, part of a series of hearings this month to examine Adams' $98.5 billion preliminary budget, included details of the Department of City Planning’s $45.3 million proposed budget for next fiscal year, beginning July 1. The plan amounts to what would be a modest overall budget increase of $354,000 and a headcount reduction of 16 employees out of over 300, made up of vacant and expiring positions, he said.
At different points during the hearing, Council members questioned whether DCP would have enough staff to dedicate to things like community board outreach, siting health-care facilities in underserved areas, and supporting the city's redistricting commission. When asked by Land Use Chair Rafael Salamanca, a Bronx Democrat, about DCP's 63 current vacant staff positions, Garodnick said the department had enough resources to fulfill its mandate.
"We are doing our very best to work with the resources that we have and will," he said. "We have talented people. We are working to reallocate as necessary to be able to perform at the highest capacity."
In terms of the vacancies, "it is not as dire as it sounds," he assured the committee, noting 13 positions were expiring or "dormant" and another 26 were being recruited or onboarded. Mayor Adams has insisted on belt-tightening and the elimination of many vacant positions at most city agencies. Some, including former Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Vicki Been, have said that DCP and other planning and housing-related agencies are understaffed to meet their mandates and ideal workforces to meet the city's significant needs.
While the Department of City Planning is relatively small, it has immense purview and plays a key role in mapping the future of the city. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, DCP helped craft what became neighborhood rezonings in several areas, like East New York, East Harlem, the north shore of Staten Island, and Downtown Far Rockaway, among others. Those plans include changes to land use rules to encourage more housing development, including affordable housing, as well as a variety of other community investments.
While the de Blasio administration focused on rezoning mostly lower-income communities of color until the final two neighborhood plans, for Gowanus and Soho, that were passed late in the mayor’s final year, Adams has pledged to pursue rezonings, especially focused on affordable housing, in wealthier areas of the city.
In response to questions, Garodnick said the Adams administration would continue neighborhood rezonings but didn’t say what areas are under consideration. During the campaign, the new mayor pointed to swaths of the west side of Manhattan as among the areas he would look to upzone to increase housing in the city, including more affordable housing in wealthier, transit-rich neighborhoods.
Garodnick is interested in adapting land use policies to meet emerging needs created by the pandemic and climate change. He commended the City Council for making New York's open restaurants program permanent and pointed to other immediate changes he said were needed to correct outdated zoning restrictions on things like electric car charging and nightlife. DCP is collaborating with the city’s Economic Development Corporation and other entities to develop the offshore wind industry and implement the city's Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.
The Adams administration is also examining other shifts and needs, Garodnick said, with an eye toward commercial-to-residential conversions. With so much of the city's workforce working remotely DCP is looking at possible changes to the city's biggest commercial corridors whose economies are no longer supported by a daily influx of commuters. Some conversion mechanisms would require state action, but DCP is looking at what can be done as-of-right and through local rezonings. On the flip side, that also means investing in the smaller commercial areas outside of Manhattan, near more residential sections, that have grown during the pandemic.
"Covid has changed the way people are living and working and it has changed the way that we need to think about some of our commercial buildings," Garodnick said. That doesn't mean wholesale changes to commercial districts, "but it does mean we want to afford a certain level of flexibility for commercial buildings to evolve so that a building owner is not just boxed in to one use."
Garodnick touted the administration plan to launch a new capital investment mechanism as part of a proposed "SEED (Strategy for Equity and Economic Development) Fund," which was included in the economic recovery blueprint. According to Garodnick, the fund will identify short-term "catalytic" investments in projects that meet multiple agencies' capital budget needs and would spur economic activity in historically divested neighborhoods, with set-asides for MWBE contracting and local hiring. Neither Garodnick nor the blueprint gave specific examples of SEED Fund investments but both indicated they would be projects that meet multiple city goals like creating housing, alongside jobs and essential services like childcare and transportation. The fund will also incorporate a stakeholder engagement function to inform longer-term investments.
"We have high hopes for this mechanism," which is still "in formation," he said.
New York City's population is expected to grow by roughly 300,000 people to 9.1 million by 2030. The population growth, on top of existing affordable housing shortages and shrinking household sizes, means the city needs to do much more to meet the demand for housing. Over the past decade, the city has added roughly 20,000 units a year to its housing stock. When pressed by Council members, Garodnick could not yet say exactly how many units the city needed to add each year.
"We have to do more and we need to sustain higher levels of production here in order to provide housing for everybody who needs it," Garodnick said. "This is an all-hands-on-deck situation."
"What I'd like to do is have the conversation with you and my colleagues about what that number is," said Council Member Erik Bottcher of the city's projected long-term housing needs, and, "if at all possible come to some kind of collective understanding about what we need to generate, and then work together on some kind of larger plan to do it."
Adams is expected to present a housing plan in the coming weeks or months, led by Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz, in collaboration with Garodnick’s planning department and other city entities.
Housing affordability was a concern of multiple Council members, who asked Garodnick about plans to adjust the formula under de Blasio's landmark Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program, which changed land use laws to require developers create a certain percentage of “affordable” units in areas upzoned for greater density, based on a set of formulas and choices.
While a major equity and affordability initiative and a component of de Blasio’s goal to create or preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing over 12 years, MIH has been criticized for not offering enough affordable units or units that are affordable to the lowest-income New Yorkers. Many officials and advocates have called for revising the program.
"There has been a concern within the Council that it does not do enough," said Salamanca, who was also land use chair during the last Council session and killed a proposed rezoning in his district that de Blasio’s city planning department had pursued.
"I supported MIH when it first was instituted by de Blasio and I have to say it's not been a great number in terms of units," said Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat.
"We are eager to have this conversation with you in the Council,” Garodnick responded, “as to whether or not we've got the right balance here if we're relying on the private sector in these contexts to build our affordable housing."
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Ben Max contributed to this story.
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