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As Unemployment and Crime Spike, City Plan for Disconnected Young Adults Remains Years Behind Schedule


Bill de Blasio speaking street group

The mayor is behind on a plan for disconnected youth (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


A city task force meant to address the needs of out-of-school, out-of-work youth in the city, who pre-pandemic numbered at over 118,000 in New York City, has not yet released its report, over two years after it was due. Now, with over 35% of young adults in the city unemployed and gun violence increasing, advocates like Marjorie Parker of JobsFirstNYC, an advocacy group that was a driving force behind the task force, say that Mayor Bill de Blasio has no real plan for the young people who need it most.

“The mayor has had no plan for this significant group of Black and brown kids,” Parker said in an interview. “For a progressive mayor who got such support from Black and brown groups and came into office with such high expectations, his response to this particular population has been disappointing.”

The Disconnected Youth Task Force was created by City Council legislation in 2017 and championed by Council Member Mathieu Eugene, a Brooklyn Democrat who was then chair of the Council’s Youth Services Committee. The task force was meant to bring together city agencies and outsider partners to “examine the obstacles to education and employment for disconnected youth and to make recommendations regarding measures to improve outcomes for disconnected youth.”

The Disconnected Youth Task Force was formed with 20 members, including 10 city officials, eight nonprofit leaders, a CUNY representative, and a youth representative. The city officials include representatives from the Departments of Education, Homeless Services, Youth and Community Development, and Health and Mental Hygiene, as well as the Administration for Child Services, and several mayoral offices. Besides JobsFirstNYC, other nonprofits represented on the task force include the Fortune Society and the Young Men’s Initiative.

Deputy Mayor Phillip Thompson, who hosted the task force’s first meeting in February 2019, said at the time, “The de Blasio administration is implementing a comprehensive strategy that involves working more closely with industries and companies to create relationships and partnerships that help move at-risk people into long-term careers.”

Since then, the task force has rarely met, according to Parker, and blown past its deadlines. The original Council legislation set a March 2018 deadline for its initial report. More than two years later, no report has been published. Both Parker and a spokesperson for the mayor's office say a draft is circulating.

In JobsFirstNYC’s testimony before the City Council’s Youth Services Committee, at a June 23 hearing focused on youth services nonprofit contracting during the pandemic, the organization expressed its displeasure with the Council’s “lack of leadership” on the issue. JobsFirstNYC has also criticized de Blasio for not including a working group specifically focused on young adults as part of his “infrastructure of recovery” advisory councils in wake of the coronavirus pandemic. De Blasio has appointed several advisory councils, including on both labor and workforce development and education and vocational training.

According to Parker, the Disconnected Youth Task Force began circulating a draft report among its members a few days after the committee hearing, but this meager progress still comes over two years after the report was due. “There has not been a plan at the city level around how to comprehensively address this group,” Parker told Gotham Gazette. “The mayor has not paid any attention to this particular group of young people.”

A nonprofit that focuses on what it terms a crisis of disengaged and disconnected teenagers and young adults in the city, JobsFirstNYC has completed research finding that this group is concentrated in 18 neighborhoods in the city, all but one of which is predominantly populated by people of color.

Now, young adults are one of the groups in the city’s workforce hit hardest by the pandemic’s economic fallout, with City Comptroller Scott Stringer estimating that the unemployment rate for young adults was 35% in June. Parker says this costs the city “immeasurably.” In one measure, her organization has found that the city’s economy “loses almost $400,000” for each out-of-school, out-of-work young adult, given that unemployed youth aren’t able to contribute tax revenue or to the city’s economic activity.

JobsFirstNYC has advocated that New York City adopt a "single system strategy" for addressing disconnected youth, as other cities such as Los Angeles have done, where “there is no wrong point of entry for a young person into the system” and “it’s built in a way that young people cannot get lost in the system. Wherever they show up they can get reconnected to the person who was their original point of entry into the system. It’s very comprehensive and responsive.”

The organization outlined what it would like to see in a policy paper offered to guide the task force. With such a strategy, city government and nonprofit partners would share data with each other, coordinate funding strategies, enable easier access for young people to enter the system, and be more responsive to individual needs such as housing, food, mental health care, and job training. Goals include ensuring that there is no “wrong” entry point for an out-of-school, out-of-work young person to start in the system and minimal opportunities for them to fall through the cracks through greater coordination between the city and its partners.

“I don’t think this mayor has a very good understanding about how all those systems connect,” Parker told Gotham Gazette. “The Mayor has never shown any particular interest in this group,” referring to out-of-school, out-of-work young adults, and that “this group has never been a priority for him.”

“We want the city to produce a plan and put resources behind it,” she said, while emphasizing the role of nonprofits, many of whom receive funding from the city that is imperiled due to budget cuts.

Parker also says the City Council can and should do more, saying it “needs to be pressing the mayor to invest in youth workforce development starting in the fall.” While Council Member Eugene and his colleagues pushed through the legislation to create the task force, there’s been virtually no urgency from Eugene or other Council members, including current youth services committee chair Council Member Deborah Rose, to get its work to conclusion.

Rose, a Staten Island Democrat, has made the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) a major focus, and helped lead the Council effort to resuscitate it in the adopted budget passed last after a deal with the mayor, who had cut the program when presenting his executive budget earlier this year. That will provide paid work opportunities for more than 100,000 young people this summer.

But Parker noted that the city has never had a plan for what to do with its young workers once summer ends, which risks many out-of-school, out-of-work youth falling through the cracks. Furthermore, Parker does not believe a more recent mayoral effort, CareerReadyNYC, properly attends to the needs of out-of-school, out-of-work young adults. CareerReadyNYC, with the goal of preparing young New Yorkers for stable careers, focuses on young people who are already in work or school, but who are “not on pathways to upward mobility.”

De Blasio’s office says the Disconnected Youth Task Force is finally nearing completion of its report. “The final report is being reviewed by Task Force members and is expected to be released in the coming months,” according to a spokesperson for the mayor, who did not provide a more specific estimate of the report’s release.

Meanwhile, at a press conference on Monday, de Blasio addressed the recent rise in gun violence, blaming the “many issues underlying this challenge” including that “the court system is not working, the economy's not working, [and] people have been pent up for months and months.”

“[W]e have to think about all of the tools we can bring to bear here, including how we deploy our police and the approaches they take, how we focus on young people and make sure we pull them away from the influences that are negative around them,” de Blasio said. “We have a lot to do.”

Advocates like Parker worry that young adults are currently in a desperately precarious position and at risk of being left behind.

“JobsFirstNYC remains concerned that because this effort is three years behind schedule, the city lacks the necessary resources and infrastructure to respond to the crisis situation young adults are faced with in the midst of a pandemic,” according to JobsFirstNYC spokesperson Kevin Stump.

“Any forthcoming report should include how much money the city will invest and should have a clear set of goals with timelines and who is accountable as well as a way to measure progress against those goals.”

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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
   

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Can Shaun Donovan Win the 2021 Mayor's Race? Campaign Pitch Charts Path


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Shaun Donovan (photo: Shaun Donovan for NYC)


As the 2021 mayoral election begins to heat up, with rumors of more candidates jumping into an incredibly consequential race, former Obama and Bloomberg aide Shaun Donovan’s campaign is making a confident pitch to potential supporters and donors that he has a viable path to victory.

While Donovan, a Brooklyn native with a long history as a public servant but never in elected office, has not officially declared his candidacy, he’s been taking many of the essential steps toward launching a run.

If he does run, one challenge will be introducing himself to voters. Donovan led the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg for five years, from 2004 to 2009. He then served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2014, before being elevated to director of the Office of Management and Budget, which he headed for three years till the end of Obama’s tenure in early 2017. 

Donovan’s campaign had been pitching his credentials in a 29-page slideshow obtained by Gotham Gazette that analyzes the state of the race, possible turnout and the areas of the city where Donovan is likely to receive votes, and the candidate’s key credentials.

Next year, Mayor Bill de Blasio will be term-limited out of office and there are several candidates besides Donovan who have either declared or are exploring a mayoral bid. Among the active candidates are City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Veterans’ Services Loree Sutton. Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former counsel to Mayor de Blasio, is also now considering a run, according to Politico New York.

The Donovan campaign isn’t shy about playing up Donovan’s association with President Obama, whose name appears six times and whose picture appears twice in the document. The “electability deck,” as it was labeled by the Donovan campaign, opens with a quote from the former president from when he nominated Donovan to become OMB director, alongside a photo of the two seated next to each other at a news conference.

“Now here’s the problem. When you’re good at your job, people always want you to do even more,” Obama said at the time. (The document makes little mention of Donovan’s work with Bloomberg, who is unlikely to be a popular figure in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary.)

The campaign touts Donovan as “The right candidate at the right moment” and identifies the six top issues that the next mayor must urgently address: inequality, the city’s housing crisis, the budget deficit caused by the pandemic, the relationship with the federal government, education and homelessness.

“New York City Needs a Leader,” the document declares in bold letters, along a list of reasons why, including, “To pull us together, address centuries long inequities, and make fairness real, not a slogan.” That line is no doubt a dig at de Blasio, who has repeatedly said he wants to make New York the “fairest big city in America,” but has struggled on a number of policy and political fronts. 

The campaign also points to other issues where city leadership is sorely lacking. Policing needs to be reformed substantively, it states. It warns that the city’s health systems “are stretched to the breaking point” while people are out of work and businesses are shut down. Evictions, foreclosure, and homelessness are rising. It does not point to any proposed solutions that Donovan may offer if he launches a campaign.

But the document delves into headlines of Donovan’s resume and his role in the federal government overseeing the response to several crises including the housing crash, the Ebola and Zika virus outbreaks, and Hurricane Sandy. 

“Shaun’s record of progressive accomplishments is second to none,” it states, listing various policy decisions and positions. He was the first cabinet secretary ever to endorse marriage equality, it highlights. He reversed a HUD policy that prohibited ex-offenders from moving in with family members in subsidized housing. He worked with 32BJ, the prominent property service workers union, to raise wages for workers in affordable housing. And so on. 

The document, labeled "path to victory," reiterates what most political experts and consultants agree on, that the 2021 race will be a change election with voters looking to candidates who can set themselves apart from de Blasio. “After 8 years of Bill de Blasio, New Yorkers are looking for something different. They want a Mayor with vision, experience, and the ability to get us out of the crises we face and make this a city that works for everyone,” the document reads. “Shaun Donovan is that candidate.”

The document -- which is the type of literature presented to community, labor, and political leaders, among others, as relationships are cultivated -- takes stock of the competition, particularly the perceived top tier of current candidates: Adams, Stringer, and Johnson, who are all term-limited next year, though they aren’t named. The campaign notes that the three previous comptrollers ran for mayor and lost and the three previous Council speakers ran citywide and lost; it wrongly states that no borough president has ever won the mayoralty, though David Dinkins and Robert Wagner pulled off that feat (no borough president since Dinkins and no Brooklyn borough president has become mayor). It even looks at mayoral races in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta to note that perceived frontrunners rarely win the election. For instance, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot won the mayoral election last year with 73% of the vote in a runoff, even though she placed at 7th place with just 3% of the vote in early polling. De Blasio himself was initially written off by most people who watched the early 2013 race, and received only 7% of the vote in a poll that put him at 5th. He eventually won the all-important primary with 41% of the vote. 

Donovan’s campaign emphasizes that those candidates won because they demonstrated competence, presented bold ideas and a vision for the future, while communicating to a broad electorate in the finishing stretch and running lean campaigns to save their funds for when they will need them. They also garnered effective endorsements from community groups and newspaper editorial boards. 

Each of those campaigns also had the same team that is now working for Donovan, the document explains somewhat dramatically.

Both BIll Hyers and Rick Fromberg, who ran de Blasio’s campaigns in 2013 and 2017, respectively, are on Donovan’s team. Other operatives signed on in the early phases include Amelia Adams, who was political director for former Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and worked on de Blasio’s reelection; and Mike Fishman, former president of 32BJ SEIU who is the campaign co-chair. The campaign is also relying on an “exhaustive network” of experts, fundraisers and policy wonks from the Obama and Bloomberg circles. 

One major change in next year’s election will be the first-time implementation of ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting, which will require candidates to make their case to a broader swathe of voters beyond their traditional bases. In a ranked-choice system, voters choose candidates by order of preference and a candidate must meet a certain threshold of first-preference votes to win. If no candidate meets that threshold in the first round, the one with the least first-preference votes is eliminated and those votes are redistributed to second-preference candidates and so on until a victor is declared.  

The Donovan campaign examined the 2013 mayoral election, the last time it was an open contest, and concluded that Donovan will have support in some key areas where turnout was high. Donovan has lived in Brownstone Brooklyn for years, and it accounted for 15% of the vote. He grew up on the east side of Manhattan, which contributed 9% of the vote. The Bronx is “wide open territory” with 12% of the vote, the campaign believes, and its where Donovan’s early career was in rebuilding housing. Other areas they will have to target include Southeast Queens (9.5% of the vote), South and East Brooklyn (9% of the vote) and Harlem (8% of the vote). 

In other communities such as the west side of Manhattan, Central Brooklyn and Flushing, Corona, Elmhurst, and western Queens, the campaign estimates that Donovan will be an appealing second or third choice for voters.

With the 2020 primaries now over (though votes are still being counted) and the next 2021 campaign finance filing deadline imminent, the mayoral race will soon pick up steam. There has been added scrutiny of the current mayor over the city’s response to multiple crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, responses to protests against racist policing, and a massive budget gap, with a new city budget passed this week, and several likely or declared candidates like Donovan have been staking out positions while plotting their next moves.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note: this article has been updated to reflect that the campaign incorrectly stated that no borough president has been elected mayor when David Dinkins and Robert Wagner were both Manhattan Borough President and became mayor. 

Note - this article has been updated to correct the name of Chicago's Mayor. It is Lori Lightfoot, not Laurie Lightfoot. 

Max & Murphy Podcast: Council Member Brad Lander on the New City Budget


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City Council Member Brad Lander (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


July 1, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Council Member Brad Lander on the New City Budget

City Council Member Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat and 2021 candidate for city Comptroller, joined the show to discuss the new city budget, which he had voted "no" on just hours before this discussion.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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