(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's office)
The New York City Board of Elections last week delivered a City Charter-mandated report to Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council on how it will implement a new voting method, known as ranked-choice voting (RCV), in the 2021 municipal elections, when all of city government will be on the ballot.
The report, which was submitted June 30 and obtained by Gotham Gazette, shows few procedural and operational changes to casting and counting ballots, possibly indicating a light lift for elections administrators ahead of the changes next year. But at least one government watchdog is concerned that the report's lack of detail and deadlines bodes poorly for the rollout of ranked-choice voting, especially given the difficulties voters experienced casting absentee ballots this summer.
"We recognize that the New York City Board of Elections is under a great deal of strain, but the lack of detail in this report is pretty concerning," said Tom Speaker, a spokesperson for the good government group Reinvent Albany, by phone. "The Charter calls for a plan for achieving the timely implementation of ranked choice voting, and in the report there is almost nothing about timing or about deadlines or about benchmarks."
Ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting, was approved by New York City voters last fall after being placed on the ballot by a Charter Revision Commission. The commission was created through legislation by the City Council and included appointees of the Council speaker, mayor, comptroller, public advocate, and the five borough presidents. The system of ranked-choice voting that was proposed to voters and approved is only for special elecitons and party primary elections, not general elections, and only applies to New York City government positions.
Modeled on systems used in a handful of cities throughout the United States, RCV allows voters to select more than one candidate, ranking them by order of preference. If no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes in the initial counting, the candidate with the fewest is eliminated and their ballots are redistributed according to the voter's second preference, a process that then continues until a winner crosses the 50% threshold.
Proponents of RCV say it will eliminate the need for expensive and poorly-attended runoff elections and would neutralize so-called "spoiler" candidates, those who have a low chance of winning but who sap votes from more viable candidates.
The 2021 elections for city office will include contests for mayor, comptroller, and public advocate, as well as borough presidents, and dozens of open City Council seats, all of which will be conducted by ranked-choice voting (again, only in special and primary elections, not the general election). With the first instance of ranked-choice voting likely taking place in a special election in as little as six months and an expected 500 candidates running in the primaries next year, Speaker says the lack of planning is especially concerning.
While the report notes that the layout of the ballot will change to reflect the ranking system, it details few other changes to the experience of voters and administrators on election day. Voters at their polling location will still be handed a ballot sheet to mark by hand and will feed them, completed, into the same scanning machines.
Though the existing ballot-scanning machines can accommodate RCV, they require software updates to run the counting algorithm. That may need approval from the State Board of Elections, which the report says the city board is seeking clarity on. Even if the software doesn't require state approval, the New York City Board of Elections must still go through a public procurement process in accordance with city rules. The report does not specify any timeline for making the determination or for procuring and installing the software.
The plan states that Unofficial Election Night Results will be available as they typically have been (with the exception of the 2020 primary and general elections, which saw an unprecedented number of absentee ballots due to the pandemic). The report makes no contingency plan for potential changes to the absentee rules that would make election night results impossible.
With the "amount of turmoil that can happen between now and whenever the first ranked choice voting is, it's just easy to see how a lot of these steps might actually never be taken," Speaker said, referring to potential waves of coronavirus in the future.
The board does not describe any adjustments to poll worker and ballot canvasser training or what instructions will be provided to voters at poll sites. The board says it plans to undertake a public education campaign "utilizing various traditional media and social media platforms to effectively communicate with voters," but doesn't say what the campaign will entail or what resources it has available to implement it.
"The Board will disseminate the details of the public education plan as same are available," the report reads.
Advocates and elected officials, including Brooklyn Borough President and mayoral-hopeful Eric Adams, have been pushing the city Board of Elections since February to undertake a serious public education effort to inform voters on the new voting method. At a February news conference in front of the board's office in Lower Manhattan, Adams, along with Council Member Alicka Ampry-Samuel of Brooklyn, and Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause NY, called for the city to allocate $10 million for the effort.
The board’s report was submitted just one day before the July 1 start of the current fiscal year, and it makes no mention of any budget needs. The city allocated $136 million to the New York City Board of Elections for fiscal year 2021.
Even with the most significant changes appearing relatively simple, like redesigning ballots and installing new software, Reinvent Albany’s Speaker says the devil will be in the details.
"While it might seem there's only a small number of steps required, it seems like the BOE could really benefit from more staff and more efforts dedicated to public information especially," he told Gotham Gazette, "because what we've seen in other municipalities who have adopted RCV, is that it fails the most when there is not a robust public education campaign around it."
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Protesters demanded a $1 billion cut to the NYPD budget (photo: @VOCALNewYork)
The New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio crafted an $88.2 billion budget for the current fiscal year in what was one of the most contentious budget negotiations in years, coming amid a pandemic-caused recession and a resurgent racial justice movement that sought to “Defund the NYPD” and redirect some of its massive resources to social services in communities of color. But the budget process showed major divisions in the City Council, where several of the notable ‘yes’ votes on the agreement that was ultimately reached came from Black Council members who said that significantly cutting police funding would hurt their communities rather than advance the cause of racial equity.
Those members had greatly influenced the shape of the deal, as City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is white, explained the night of the budget vote. Some of them said the ‘Defund’ movement was being led by people, and supported by Council members, who didn’t live in their districts and were imposing a political agenda that would threaten public safety in communities of color. But those assertions, like others made during the heated debate leading up to the July 1 budget adoption, belied a more complicated reality – two Black Council members, representing similar communities, voted against the budget because it failed to significantly cut the police budget; and the movement has been led by Black activists, some of whom have been making similar demands for decades and who said the Council members who voted in support did not represent the spectrum of opinions of their constituents of color.
“Black communities, like any neighborhood, are very complex places and so to make this comment, or to make this assertion that this is what Black people are calling for is not only inaccurate, it's almost absurd on some level,” said Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center and a decades-long civil rights activist based in Central Brooklyn, insisting that the Council members who want more police in their neighborhoods were only representing a selective range of opinions. “I think that who they are listening to are mostly middle class people who have bought into the system of policing, who feel like they've got property to protect...but who have not fully considered what it would look like to have a fully safe and secure community without police and have not fully considered what the impact of police actually is on on safety,” he said.
An NBC/Marist poll conducted between July 6-8, after the budget was approved, found that 55% of New York City residents supported defunding the police in their community to spend more on other local services, while 34% opposed it. As part of the demand to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s roughly $6 billion annual operating budget, activists had called for removing police officers from non-law enforcement roles. Chiefly, they wanted the NYPD withdrawn from schools as well as removed from other purposes such as homelessness and mental health crisis response, and regularly raised questions about the necessary size of the police force.
That the budget would pass on time was a foregone conclusion, but it was noteworthy for the unusually high number of ‘no’ votes. Of the 51-seat City Council, which is almost entirely filled by Democrats, 17 members voted against the budget, which did eventually include some cuts to the NYPD but not anywhere near to the degree that police reform advocates had demanded. The nays included conservative Democrats and Republicans who opposed the cuts, and progressive Democrats, including members of color and white members, who felt they did not go far enough at a time when the city needed to invest in services for communities of color. Council Members Donovan Richards and Inez Barron were the two Black members to vote no, both arguing that the shifts to reinvent public safety through more community investment and less policing were not large enough.
The most significant ‘yes’ votes came from several Black Council members – Laurie Cumbo, Vanessa Gibson, Adrienne Adams, Alicka Ampry-Samuel, Robert Cornegy, Mathieu Eugene, Andy King, Farah Louis, Daneek Miller, Bill Perkins, Debi Rose, and Ritchie Torres – many of whom voted for the budget saying that more drastic cuts to the police would make their communities unsafe, while acknowledging the disproportionate impact that a history of over-policing has had in those same communities and the need to reform the NYPD into a more just public service organization.
They explained that their constituents want robust and fair policing, and argued that they couldn’t decry the abject devastation of the coronavirus pandemic and in the same breath vote to eliminate a school safety force composed largely of Black women. Delaying the budget to have a more robust conversation about reenvisioning public safety investment was not an option, they said, given it would mean that city workers would go without pay and that the crucial services provided by the government would be severely disrupted at an already tumultuous time.
The city budget was passed after weeks of massive public unrest following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The resulting national wave of protest coalesced into calls for reducing funding for police departments around the country and to reinvest in underserved communities of color that have particularly suffered during the coronavirus pandemic and from hundreds of years of racist criminal justice and other public policies. As City Council leadership entered final budget negotiations with de Blasio, it committed to key goals espoused by many activists.
“We believe that we can and should work to get to $1 billion in cuts to New York City's police spending in the Fiscal 2021 budget, an unprecedented reduction that would not only limit the scope of the NYPD, but also show our commitment towards moving away from the failed policing policies of the past,” read a joint statement on June 12 from Council Speaker Johnson, members of the Council budget negotiating team, and the co-chairs of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus.
But the final budget agreement fell far short of that goal, and for several complicated reasons that included hesitation from Black Council members.
The Council and de Blasio, who was opposed to a large reduction in police funding, found middle ground by directly cutting planned NYPD operational spending by slightly under $500 million – which is mostly (about $335 million) in reduced overtime spending and a reduction in the department’s headcount – while shifting other costs. De Blasio touted what he called a $1 billion shift, though much of his calculation included changes in planned capital expenses, like on a new police precinct, that were not part of activists’ demands. The mayor, whose claim was refuted by Council Speaker Johnson almost immediately after it was made, also included the restoration of school safety from the NYPD’s jurisdiction back to the Department of Education, a process that isn’t going to be completed in the current fiscal year and is part of a to-be-determined process of retraining toward a less punitive approach. Budget watchdogs also say that based on recent trends the reduced overtime expense projection is unrealistic.
Hanging over and complicating the discussion, gun violence spiked in the weeks before and after the budget passed. To the critics of ‘defunding the NYPD’ it’s proof positive that more policing -- and not ‘arbitrarily’ targeting police resources - is the answer to ensuring public safety. To reform advocates, it’s simply more evidence that police are not the solution since the strength of the police force hadn’t changed at all during the first half of the year and was set for only modest adjustments thereafter. The roughly 36,000-strong uniformed force has not been significantly shrunk, though the budget deal will in the course of the new fiscal year mean a reduction of the NYPD’s headcount totalling 1,163 officers, achieved through attrition and by cancelling two cadet classes.
For activists, the budget negotiation unfolding amid a multi-billion-dollar deficit and protests against police racism presented an opportune moment to reimagine the police’s role in public safety. Time and again, they have pointed out how the involvement of police in issues outside of violent crime can be detrimental, and too often deadly, whether it’s in the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness or escalating those in mental health crisis, or, more recently, in the racially disparate enforcement of social distancing rules early during the pandemic. They wanted the Council to drive a harder bargain, particularly as the mayor was slashing services to the city’s most vulnerable.
To some degree, the budget debate seemed to become about how much to cut and not about why, said City Council Member Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat who voted for the budget, in a phone interview. “That became the argument. We need to do more, we need to do less, or we don't need to touch the NYPD at all,” she said, “instead of, what does your district look like? What are the relationships between police and your constituents? That is the conversation that we didn't have. I think that was the missing piece in our negotiations. We only dealt with the finite amount of the budget cut instead of taking a look at the impact of policing and in some cases over-policing in some neighborhoods.”
She added, “What a lot of us recognized was that in some areas of New York City, shooting and criminal activity were on the rise and the hashtag, Defund the NYPD, doesn’t speak to that tragedy or to the residents who are affected by it.”
Anthonine Pierre, a spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition group, said that is a flawed view of the movement. “We have these elected officials who are visible leaders who are conflating all of the different things that Black people want, the diversity of Black communities, into their own political perspective. And that's dangerous for Black folks who don't necessarily agree with these Council members,” she added.
In an interview, Council Member Laurie Cumbo, a Brooklyn Democrat who is majority leader of the body and a close ally of Speaker Johnson, offered a range of justifications for her vote in favor of passing the budget. Though she said the members of color were generally in agreement about the premise behind ‘Defund the NYPD’ to redirect funds to community-based organizations, she couched her argument in practicality more than politics, saying a racist policing system could not be overhauled in a matter of weeks without first proposing a viable, well-thought out alternative. “It's not sexy to talk about hiring, training, staffing, integrating a new public safety program...That's not hashtagable,” she said. The activists who demanded defunding proposed an arbitrary funding cut, she argued, which did nothing to ease the fears about what would replace the police.
In some ways, the debate has been personal for her. As the mother of a three-year-old, she was particularly pained by the tragic shooting death of a one-year-old in Brooklyn a few weeks after the budget vote. It’s the type of incident that she worried could occur more often if the NYPD had been significantly defunded. “I couldn't accept my son being shot and killed as part of this purging process, this destructive process to take us to a new land and a new place,” she said, wondering how and which community-based organizations could take up the role that police play. “When do you decide that you need police presence in some of these matters such as sexual assault, such as rape, such as domestic violence, such as homelessness, all of these very intricate things?” she said.
She was particularly opposed to the proposal to eliminate school safety agents without a replacement plan. “Are we going to replace them with 5,300 guidance counselors? That would be great...Do we have the time and the capacity to recruit 5,300 guidance counselors?...Nobody wants to talk about that.”
Activists also took the fight for funding cuts to her doorstep. Among them was Jabari Brisport, a state Senate candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Going further than other activists, DSA had called for slashing $3 billion from the NYPD, about half its operating budget.
Though Cumbo did not directly mention DSA, she did launch into a lengthy tirade about “colonization” and what her colleague, Council Member Robert Cornegy, called “political gentrification.” Those phrases were quoted in a recent New York Times article on the divide among Black lawmakers about defunding the NYPD. In the interview with Gotham Gazette, and in a statement to constituents after that article was published, Cumbo sought to provide more context about her comments. She explained her belief that white progressive activists (read: DSA) newly arriving in gentrifying neighborhoods have adopted support for the Black Lives Matter and ‘Defund the NYPD’ as a means to building political power. She said their preferred candidates, like Brisport, who she called out specifically, are unlikely to represent the interests of Black and brown communities over time. “It's my projection that those initial Black candidates that were initially elected are not going to go the distance,” she said of their likelihood to get the things they’re espousing done when in office.
But that criticism conflates ‘Defund the NYPD’ with white progressive activism while ignoring the decades-long activism of Black-led organizations and protest movements, their intersection, and the newer Black leaders of reform activism. The argument was similarly employed by other Council members, who claimed that white progressive activists and lawmakers were attempting to supplant their voices in an issue that would affect Black and brown lives. They also seemed to ignore that fellow Black Council members voted (with some Latino and white members) against the budget.
Council Member Richards, a Queens Democrat who chairs the public safety committee, which has oversight over the NYPD, was one of two Black members who voted against the budget, though he recognized why his colleagues voted for it. “There's no contradiction in saying you need reform and you need service,” he said of their explanations.
But he echoed Council Member Adams in noting that the discussion of the police’s role in public safety fell by the wayside. “I think it's time to have that conversation around what investment looks like in these communities. Why aren't there community centers in these places? Why haven't there been investments in our small businesses? Why is housing quality so poor?...This is about access and opportunity. If you want to take a gun out of somebody's hand, you have to give them opportunity.”
Council Member Barron, a Democrat from Brooklyn, was the other Black member to oppose the budget. Barron is known for casting dissenting votes, often the sole one on the left of an issue, often around police reform. “The policing that is going on specially in our neighborhoods, that is being executed by the NYPD has historically targeted Blacks and Latinos for undue arrest and harassment,” she said. “And increasing the numbers of police does not in fact reduce crime. If that was the case, there should have been no increase in any type of crime since January, because there's been no reduction in police since January.”
Instead, she wanted to see aggressive investment in anti-poverty programs and jobs and workforce development. Rather than police, public safety should be promoted through community outreach and particularly by increasing funding to “violence interrupters” who seek to preempt crime among at-risk youth. “Those are the kinds of models that’ve been proven to be effective,” she said.
Even with the budget behind them, activists have not given up on the defunding debate. It’ll carry through to the next budget, they say, which will be due shortly after a primary election that will determine who becomes the next mayor of New York City.
Brooklyn Movement Center’s Griffith said the Council showed a failure of imagination and missed a golden opportunity to build a new system of public safety. “They're refusing to go out there and imagine and lay out for people a different vision of what is possible because one thing we do know is that through stop-and-frisk, through broken windows policing, through the war on drugs, we know that this idea of throwing police at a problem has not worked,” he said.
For activists like Griffith, piecemeal reforms at this stage are insufficient. Successive mayoral administrations, police commissioners and particularly police unions have always resisted reform. Just recently, unions sued to stop the release of officer disciplinary recommendations after a law shielding them was repealed. “So when you've got a system that is so resistant to change on any level, then you go to the place where you say, ‘Hmm, maybe we need to dismantle this system and rebuild a new one,” Griffith said.
CPR’s Pierre said the debate about eliminating police presence from schools became too simplistic, as Council Members sought to protect the majority Black school safety agents. “It's a narrow and near-sighted understanding of what Black communities are going through,” she said. “If we can't provide for all Black communities, then we're picking and deciding who can be saved right now.”
Pierre also criticized the accusation that Defund the NYPD has been coopted by white voices. “They're playing sort of a sneaky game of trying to discredit the entire Defund movement,” she said, noting that Cumbo’s disagreement seems to stem more from her animosity towards Brisport. “To conflate a political fight with a fight that very deeply affects and governs the lives of Black New Yorkers is irresponsible,” she said
During the budget process, when Cumbo and others were raising questions about who was leading the Defund movement, Crystal Hudson, a candidate for City Council who was formerly Cumbo’s chief of operations, took to Twitter to name the many Black activists and organizations who were on the front lines. “I think that there is definitely a misrepresentation of the work and of the advocacy and the activism that's been happening,” she said in a phone interview.
“Defunding the police does not mean that communities become any less safe,” she added. “Defunding the police means that we're investing in the social services needed to keep our communities safe. It means that we're deepening our investment in Cure Violence programs and adapting that model as our system of community policing.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio breaks ground on an affordable housing project in Brooklyn (photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayor's office)
New York City’s housing stock has failed to keep pace with job growth over the last decade and most newly created housing continues to be attainable only for higher-income residents. A panel of experts examined those trends, presented in a new report released Wednesday, and the policy choices that led to them, and recommended solutions that the city and state should adopt if they hope to mitigate a housing crisis that has been further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Between 2010 and 2018, the number of jobs grew by 22% in the city and housing stock increased only 4%, according to the report released by Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog organization. The city issued fewer permits for new housing units in the last decade than in the 2000s and most of the new growth was concentrated in a few neighborhoods, the report found. The city’s per capita rate of issuing building permits was about 25 units for every 1,000 residents in that time, far below other cities, including those that already have high population densities. For instance, Seattle approved 126.9 units per 1,000 residents, Washington D.C. approved 71.2 and San Francisco approved 41. The report also found that housing production rates in suburbs such as Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk were some of the lowest across the U.S.
“New York’s low housing production is the product of decades of policy choices made by City and State officials – some deliberate, others unintended – that have slowed the pace of new construction in many neighborhoods,” the report stated. Besides outdated construction codes and liability laws specific to New York that increase costs, the report also points to the high cost of land, an inequitable property tax system and state policies that limit density in the city and fail to incentivize the building of housing in the suburbs. The effects have led to large swathes of low-density zoning districts, a shortage of as-of-right development sites, uneven capacity for density, and leftover vacant lots that can be hard to develop.
CBC’s report, authored by senior research associate Sean Campion, recommends that New York City create a comprehensive citywide housing plan rather than take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach, update zoning codes to encourage more density and fix building codes to reduce the cost of construction. It also urges the state to pass laws that can mandate zoning for growth, reform the property tax system and amend laws that limit affordable housing production.
Following the report’s release, CBC hosted a panel of experts who weighed in on the problems with housing in New York, and the findings and recommendations in CBC’s report. The panel included Vicki Been, deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development in the de Blasio administration; Hal Fetner, President & CEO of Fetner Properties; Jessica Katz, executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC); Jenny Schuetz, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution; and Barika Williams, executive director of Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD). CBC President Andrew Rein moderated the discussion.
“However you slice it, every single measure of whether or not we have enough housing suggests that we don't,” said Been, who took over as deputy mayor last year. Been previously served as commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in de Blasio’s first term, and played a prominent role in helping create the mayor’s Housing New York plan which aims to create and preserve 300,000 units of rent-restricted housing by 2026. That plan has been criticized for largely rezoning low-income communities of color to create more density, while doing little to build deeply affordable housing units.
ANHD’s Williams said there’s a “mismatch” between housing supply and the city’s population, noting that half of New Yorkers fall under the income band of 80% of area median income (AMI), a measure that is used to assess eligibility for affordable housing. New York City’s AMI is about $113,700 for a family of four. Households making up to 60% of AMI qualify for low- and extremely-low income housing. “What we really need is supply specifically at the bottom end of the housing market,” Williams said, noting that new housing construction that isn’t supported by city subsidies is largely aimed at the higher end.
As a housing developer, Fetner said a major obstacle is a lack of understanding among city and state legislators about building affordable housing. “They don't understand how it works. They don't understand the math behind affordable housing,” he said, insisting that developers cannot afford to build fully affordable housing without subsidies. He also lamented the lengthy approval process for new developments and how they can be derailed even as they approach the finish line after years in the works. And he urged the state to ease regulations such as the Scaffold law, which mandates strict liability for construction insurance and increases the cost of development by as much as 7%, and the cap on Floor Area Ratio (FAR) which limits the height of buildings in certain neighborhoods.
CHCP’s Katz sought to emphasize how the prevalence of overcrowded housing has been particularly detrimental during this pandemic, contributing to the spread of the virus. “In the housing business, we're fond of saying housing is health care...We kind of use it as a catchphrase, but now I think it's really viscerally hit home for people how really true that is,” she said, noting that the city does not have specific policies to target overcrowded households.
Schuetz from Brookings Institution said that the government needs to use its powers where possible to reduce the “hard” and “soft” costs of building housing. Though officials can do little about “hard costs” such as the dearth of land that can be developed or the cost of steel and concrete, she said they could improve onerous building codes. The “soft costs” she pointed to included the process for borrowing funds, designing buildings and engaging with communities to get their input on developments. “So the soft costs of the process are in some ways, where the government levers are most powerful,” she said. “Making the process shorter and simpler and more transparent will save money to the developer which translates into lower cost to consumers of the final product.”
The panellists seemed to agree that the city requires a comprehensive housing plan to combine the numerous aspects of affordable housing policy pursued by the city. As CBC’s Campion pointed out in a presentation prior to the panel discussion, “We have a lot of plans. We have a fair housing plan, an affordable housing plan, a public housing plan, a homeless plan, a sustainability plan, and we have a strategic plan, but nothing that brings them all together.”
Williams said the lack of a comprehensive plan leads to “siloed conversations” about affordable housing development, and urged the adoption of a plan that looks at the “totality of how people are accessing and being housed in New York City.” Any plan, she said, should also take note of neighborhood differences to analyze how housing is distributed and to ensure it occurs equitably.
Katz said that a comprehensive plan should include a focus on public housing, homelessness and reducing regulations so middle-income housing can be built without requiring deep government subsidies. But she also noted that allowing neighborhoods to play a strong role in development can allow NIMBYism to hamper the city’s plans. “The challenge with creating a comprehensive strategy is creating an even more uneven ability for neighborhoods to kind of self-determine their way out of any responsibility for new housing,” she said.
Having faced off against NIMBYism as part of the de Blasio administration, Been acknowledged that the balance between a comprehensive plan and neighborhoods interests may be near impossible. “I think that there is a possibility of a grand bargain, but I think it would be exceptionally difficult,” she said.
“Part of the issue is, how do we keep a plan from becoming a veto point?” Been said, noting that opponents to neighborhood rezoning efforts could use a potential comprehensive plan as a roadblock. Already, she said, the city has faced repeated legal challenges in trying to build housing and more density. She pointed to the Inwood neighborhood rezoning, which was approved by the City Council in 2018 but was held up for two years after a neighborhood group filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the city.
A better approach would be to reduce construction costs, she said. “We can plan till the cows come home for lower income housing. Until we lower the costs of building, we're not going to get that.”
Though several of the panellists said that the city could reduce costs for developers by streamline the planning and development process, Williams took issue with how that could affect low-income communities of color that typically have less political leverage in determining housing policy than richer, whiter neighborhoods.
Schuetz echoed Williams. “This discretionary process was intended to benefit neighborhoods that didn't have political power,” Schuetz said. “What's happened is it's been co-opted by wealthy neighborhoods that already have political power that have basically shut down development.” She pointed to neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Greenwich Village where prices and demand are high but that have the least amount of housing.
Fetner and Katz, however, said that the city needs to create more predictability for developers who want to build affordable housing, particularly as the city recovers from the pandemic. “In the last several disasters, affordable housing construction has been the economic driver that has gotten us out of the hole,” Katz said, noting that it has a multiplier effect on jobs and commerce and is one of the few economic activities that the government can boost on its own. “If we've reached a tipping point where the uncertainty of the circumstances and the process is so bad that we're not going to be able to use the economic development of affordable housing to get us out of this, then we're in real trouble,” she said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette