Council Members Richards, left, and Reynoso, the authors, address a crowd

As co-chairs of the New York City Council’s Progressive Caucus, we have worked closely with Mayor de Blasio since he took office. It is clear that the mayor has delivered for our constituents and all 8.4 million New Yorkers in transformative ways. From affordable housing to quality jobs to expanded educational programming, New Yorkers are doing better and the scale of the accomplishments is substantial.

In partnership with our Speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the City Council, Mayor de Blasio has been helping to create a more equitable New York City. But this progress did not happen by chance, and it’s no foregone conclusion that we will be able to sustain it. We cannot allow our momentum to be derailed, destabilized, or diminished.

Under a boldly progressive mayor and Council speaker, New York is safer and public policy is more equitable than at any point in our lifetimes. We must protect our progress, join us as we launch our #ProtectProgress campaign, which includes the following highlights of this work, the Top 10 Accomplishments, by the Numbers:

1. Making Communities Safer: With two consecutive years of record low violent crime statistics, New York is the safest big city in the country.

2. Making Pre-K Universal: More than 68,500 children are getting the head start they deserve this year with full day pre-kindergarten classes for all of New York’s four-year-olds.

3. Developing and Preserving Affordable Housing: Over 100,000 New Yorkers have access to 40,000-plus new units of affordable housing. More affordable housing units were created in 2015 than in any year since the city’s housing department began.

4. Creating Economic Growth: More New York City jobs than ever before, totaling 4,296,100 across all five boroughs as of March 2016. This includes 254,900 new private sector jobs created during this administration, resulting in an unemployment rate of 6.1%, lower than other large cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. This is in part due to new legislation preventing discrimination against job seekers based on credit scores and prior convictions.

5. Improving Police-Community Relations: Reducing unlawful stop-and-frisks, which disproportionately affect African-American & Latino New Yorkers with a 97% decline over four years.

6. Expanding Learning Time: The Mayor’s universal after-school program for 113,874 middle school students (double the number previously served) is providing quality programming during a critical time for childhood development.

7. Embracing Immigrant Communities: IDNYC enables non-citizens to participate in the civic and cultural life of the city, with 855,000-plus cardholders who have secured the peace of mind that comes from recognized government identification.

8. Extending New Yorkers’ Legal Right to Sick Leave: 3,400,000 private and nonprofit sector workers have access to paid sick leave thanks to an expansion created in partnership with the Council and the Mayor’s robust education campaign.

9. Making Streets Safer through Vision Zero: In 2015, New York City saw the fewest traffic fatalities in history, with a 22% reduction resulting from reduced speed limits and comprehensive safety plans.

10. Supporting a Living Wage: A $15 living wage is now guaranteed to every City worker and employee of nonprofit organizations contracted with the City, and the Mayor and Council have advocated for higher wages for all workers across the state.

We must be proud of these accomplishments while we also build on them. Today, we call on progressives from Bushwick to Harlem, from the Rockaways to Riverdale to step and up and #ProtectProgress. Parents: tweet from your UPK sites that didn’t exist two years ago! Bicyclists: tweet images of your new protected lanes that are helping to save lives! IDNYC cardholders: tweet from wherever you are putting your card to use!

Let’s get #ProtectProgress into the conversation, so that together we can promote real results that Mayor de Blasio and the City Council have delivered for New Yorkers.

***
City Council Members Antonio Reynoso and Donovan Richards are co-chairs of the Council’s Progressive Caucus. On Twitter @DRichards13 & @CMReynoso34.

U.S. Education Secretary John King (photo via USDOE on flickr)

Educational civil rights in New York are once again front and center.

The Civil Rights Project at UCLA calls New York City the most segregated school district in the country.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in her award winning This American Life podcast, "The Problem We All Live With," documented the toxic racism embedded in Americans’ assumption of school district autonomy, no less a problem here.

In "School Money: The Cost of Opportunity," NPR similarly reported in detail how district property taxes stoke profound inequities in school spending, long identified as a key issue in New York.

All students should have the opportunity to attend integrated, well-resourced schools. Yet, instead of our leaders saying "the buck stops here" and meaning it, today's dime-store impostors continually pass the buck to those least able to tackle this crisis.

Ex-New York State Education Commissioner, now Secretary of Education John King is reported saying "local policymakers are the ones with the real power to integrate schools."

New New York Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa announced last week, regarding desegregation, that “I believe this is one that has to be done at the local level versus being mandated."

Most memorably, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina argued that desegregation should occur "organically" and more recently said not she, but community district superintendents and principals, should engage local real estate agents to solve the problem. "One of the things I’ve recommended to superintendents is have breakfast with your real estate agent, particularly the real-estate agents in the new developments going up,” she said at a community forum where she also suggested better school public relations might be a useful tool.

Huh?

That these officials are a black male and two Latinas may mean civil rights don’t matter anymore. But the research cited by UCLA, Hannah-Jones, NPR, and other sources says otherwise. In yet another study on the long term effects of desegregation and school quality announced last Wednesday, researchers found court-ordered school desegregation did not affect outcomes for whites, it significantly improved the adult attainment of blacks born between 1950 and 1975.

King, Rosa, and Farina -- and their respective partners in perpetuating segregation: President Barack Obama, State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, and Mayor Bill de Blasio -- seem to accept this in their statements. Civil rights do matter. They just don't want to tackle it. Too hot to handle. 

But we in New York have an urgent need to face this problem and it won't be solved "organically" because it wasn't created organically. Segregation by race and class is baked into our atomized system of over 700 state school districts and the city's community school districts. Our schools are hard-wired for segregation. Our political system then doubles down on this geographic inequity by imposing an educational finance system that rewards haves over have nots.

No less than a complete upheaval of American public education will change these facts and their unacceptable consequences. But an important if partial fix is available to New Yorkers, modeled on the federal Office of Civil Rights. OCR, part of the U.S. Education Department with enforcement ties to the Department of Justice, takes citizen complaints and embarks on its own investigations to remedy individual instances of inequity. New York's State Education Department should create such an office, tied to the enforcement arm of the state Attorney General.

This won’t solve our overall problem of segregation and inequity. But we need to take the denial of educational civil rights out of the hands of political cowards and create an agency the mission of which is to correct these wrongs. And in so doing we will attack the overall problem bit by bit. Black, Latino, and low-income students need this help. Asian students need this help. Special needs students need this help. Orthodox Jewish students need this help.

We all need this help.

***
David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. The third edition of his book, American Public Education Law, will be published this summer. He is on Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.

Commissioner Bratton and others (photo via @NYPDnews)

Last May, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton issued a 41-page report extolling the virtues of Broken Windows and quality-of-life policing, and promoted what he termed a “peace dividend” of “nearly a million fewer enforcement contacts like arrests, summonses, and reasonable-suspicion stops when compared to their respective highs.” He explained further in a letter to City Council Speaker Mark-Viverito: “there has been a drastic reduction in enforcement contacts between police and citizens, a benefit of lower crime that I call the Peace Dividend.” He clarified that the “dividend” is the “diminished need to use enforcement tools for every problem."

The use of the phrase “peace dividend” is telling and alarming. The term was frequently used at the end of the Cold War when many nations cut their military spending and money originally intended for the military became available for other purposes. No doubt while the Commissioner was fighting his war on crime, the police felt like an occupying army to black and Hispanic people living in neighborhoods that bore the brunt of a policy of massive arrests for trivial things.

While the commissioner’s notion of a dividend does not seem to correspond to additional government funds allotted to badly needed social programs in the affected communities, it does at least mean that more people in those same communities might be left in peace. On the other hand, Bratton’s pronouncement is redolent of an omnipotent overlord magnanimously bestowing a gift upon the residents of neighborhoods like South Jamaica, Brownsville, Mott Haven, and East Harlem, where rampant arrests and summonses have created immeasurable alienation, damage, and suffering.

Recently, in the course of another round-up of crime statistics, Commissioner Bratton noted that arrests were down by about 10 percent in April. In an effort to explain the drop, he said that the police were making fewer arrests for minor offenses and that “[w]e are trying to reduce the number of contacts we have with the public that [are] not necessary.”

On its face, continued evidence of the so-called peace dividend is laudable. Decreasing unnecessary police-citizen interactions is obviously a worthy goal. But upon closer inspection, the commissioner’s explanation is troubling and revealing.

Shouldn’t he try to eliminate, rather than reduce, unnecessary police-citizen contact? While the commissioner’s acknowledgement that some number of police-citizen contacts is unnecessary is notable for its candor, it is also disturbing for its veracity – it begs the questions of just how many unwarranted interactions there are and upon whom are they inflicted. Answering these questions is not easy, but is essential.

Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, repeatedly and defiantly argued that the ever-rising number of stops-and-frisks – that peaked at almost 700,000 in one year (2011) – were necessary for public safety. When a federal judge ruled that the stops were unconstitutional, Bloomberg excoriated the judge saying, "[T]his is a very dangerous decision made by a judge who I believe does not understand what good policing is."

To drive his point home, he observed that he was glad that the implementation would likely take place after the end of his term, saying, "I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying." Well, crime continues to decline even as the number of recorded stop-and-frisks has plummeted to a current estimate of 25,000-35,000 for 2016 (a drop of around 95 percent from the high), providing powerful evidence that hundreds of thousands of stops were unnecessary, as well as illegal.

In similar fashion, the 10 percent reduction in misdemeanor arrests has not corresponded to an uptick in crime, suggesting that perhaps the ‘peace dividend’ is being miserly applied. Why not 15 or even 25 percent? Why not try a pilot program in some precincts to see how far the dividend could go? The NYPD issues about 1,000 summonses each year for riding a bike on the sidewalk in East New York. What if the officers in that precinct were instructed not to issue any summonses for unlawful bike-riding for some period of time? If crime did not correspondingly increase, the same approach could be taken with similar low-level offenses in that and other precincts, and the number of unnecessary police contacts with the public could be further reduced.

The awareness of necessary versus unnecessary contacts even runs through the NYPD rank and file. Back in December 2014 and into early 2015, police officers engaged in a slowdown to express unhappiness with Mayor de Blasio’s handling of Eric Garner’s death at the hands of Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo and the killings of Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. An email, widely believed to be from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, was circulated instructing officers to make arrests only when it was “absolutely necessary.” Arrest numbers dropped precipitously over the next few weeks leading to the recognition that the NYPD’s standard operating procedure included an awful lot of unnecessary arrests. Consider as well that the crime rate continued to drop even in the face of drastically reduced arrests, tickets and stops.

Hyper-aggressive policing tactics like stop-and-frisk and Broken Windows enforcement drove the number of unnecessary police contacts with the public into the millions. More specifically, it did indeed amount to a war waged in and upon communities of color. Commissioner Bratton’s peace dividend has a long way to go to rectify that reality.

***
Steven Zeidman is a professor of law at CUNY School of Law. He is on Twitter @SteveZeidman.

(photo via Health + Hospitals on Facebook)

New York City Health + Hospitals is a model public system, the country’s oldest and largest commitment to safety-net health care. Yet Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent plan to shore up finances at Health + Hospitals has led to consternation from those who would have us believe that H+H is an oversized and outdated system.

In a recent New York Daily News column, Errol Louis made this argument while saying that the burden of undocumented immigrants is a key flaw in Health + Hospitals’ current structure. Misunderstandings and misrepresentations of this structure and Health + Hospitals’ role in today’s health care landscape and within the city budget are, unfortunately, becoming more widespread.

Concerns about the financial standing of such a critical community institution are merited. The solution, however, is to promote policies that support quality, cost-effective care at Health + Hospitals, starting with Mayor de Blasio’s budget proposal.

The suggestion that H+H is unable to keep up with the health care system’s changing tide away from hospital-based care and toward preventive, community-based services overlooks the fact that Health + Hospitals is already providing comprehensive and culturally competent services across the care spectrum, from primary care in more than 30 community healthcare centers and 25 school-based health centers, to its better-known network of 11 hospitals providing acute and ambulatory care.

H+H has a diverse staff that represents the culturally and linguistically diverse communities it serves. In recent years H+H has responded to almost 700,000 patient requests for interpreter services.

In his column, Mr. Louis cites a 2014 report that one-quarter of hospital admissions are avoidable. He is right, but this is a problem of health care in general, not of NYC Health + Hospitals specifically. New York State’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) Program is currently providing health systems across the state $8 billion in incentive payments to better coordinate care and reduce avoidable hospitalizations by 25% by 2020. The largest of the state’s 25 DSRIP systems is spearheaded by none other than Health + Hospitals. Whether DSRIP is successful remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that Health + Hospitals is at the forefront of system change.

As a public network, Health + Hospitals provides care to anyone who needs it, regardless of ability to pay or immigration status. It is an important provider of care to the city’s 375,000 undocumented immigrants, who face daunting restrictions in access to both public and private insurance. Mr. Louis uses this fact to support his unfounded claim that undocumented immigrants crowd emergency rooms because they have nowhere else to go for their basic health needs.

The truth, demonstrated in rigorous public health studies, is that undocumented immigrants use health care services, including emergency rooms, at lower rates than U.S. citizens and other immigrants. Because Health + Hospitals provides comprehensive and coordinated services, undocumented immigrants do indeed use the public (read: primary care) system for “routine health needs,” as Mr. Louis says – exactly as they should.

Contributions to the tax base should not be a prerequisite for receiving health care in a modern, humane society, but it is worth noting that undocumented immigrants in New York state, about 70 percent of whom live in New York City, contributed $1.1 billion to the state’s economy in 2012, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy. They are hardly free-riders.

In the true spirit of the safety net, Health + Hospitals provides care for uninsured patients, citizens and immigrants alike, without being reimbursed for it. This is a fundamental problem for the system’s finances. The solution is not to reconsider the mission of Health + Hospitals but to support policies that reduce unreimbursed care by promoting federal and state funding for health systems and increasing access to health coverage for those who remain uninsured. These are real, meaningful steps to ensure that health care providers are adequately reimbursed for services.

Mr. Louis casts the financial needs of the city’s public health system as a threat to education, transportation, and housing. Pitting public services against one another in this way is unfair and does not recognize that preservation of health is the foundation upon which New Yorkers take advantage of educational opportunity and lead rewarding, productive lives.

A city that abandons its obligation to fill the gaps in the frayed federal and state health care safety net does itself and its residents a disservice. New York City doesn’t need a smaller or less generous public Health + Hospitals system; it needs a system that is recognized for the value it provides to our communities and that is supported accordingly.

***
Max Hadler is the health advocacy specialist for the New York Immigration Coalition. On Twitter @theNYIC.

Mayor de Blasio makes an announcement (photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayor's Office)

Passing the buck is one thing. Passing seventy million bucks is quite another.

Each year, New York City sells between $70 million and $120 million in unpaid tax debt, water charges, and emergency repair loans to a private trust. These liens—which enable the owner to foreclose on the property—then increase rapidly in value. The trust can charge nine percent interest on 1-3 family houses and 18 percent interest on multifamily housing, compounded daily.

Yes, daily. Total tax debt can triple or even quintuple in a year.

For homeowners who fall behind on their taxes and cannot enter into a payment plan with the City, being put into the tax lien sale means shooting down a steep waterslide into a deep pool of debt. Predatory lenders and equity firms often prey on them as they either try to hang onto their property or sell it for as much equity as they can possibly keep. Sometimes even being on the tax-lien sale list can lead to foreclosure by a lender.

For tenants in buildings in the tax lien sale, times can be just as hard or worse. Landlords tend to pay their taxes even if they withdraw services from a building: they want to hang on to their property. But when they stop paying taxes and end up in the lien sale, it’s often a sign that the building is already in deep trouble. Being in the lien sale doesn’t make it better. Under pressure to sell, landlords often try to harass tenants out because empty buildings sell for more than full ones.

Nonprofit organizations such as churches, daycare centers, and community gardens also find their property in the lien sale in spite of the fact that their property should be exempt from local taxes. The tax lien sale can wipe out years of tax benefits that add up to public investment in these organizations if, for reasons of age, illness, death, or simple ignorance of, or inability to navigate the Department of Finance’s new online system to renew their tax exemptions, they fail to do so in time.

Meanwhile, the city is dealing with an unprecedented homelessness crisis, an affordable housing shortage, and—by its own lights—a dearth of land and property with which to help solve these problems. And yet, at the same time, for the last twenty years, it has given up its own power to foreclose on much of this property and to preserve it for affordable housing and to meet other community needs in favor of selling this right to a bank-managed, private trust.

This wasn’t always the case. Before Mayor Giuliani instituted the tax lien sale in 1996, the City did foreclose on tax-delinquent housing. It wasn’t always a pretty story. The City managed much of this housing poorly. But beginning in 1986, under Mayor Koch, it used a lot of this foreclosed property to create over 250,000 units of housing. Much of this is the only truly affordable housing for poor people in the city apart from public housing.

With this year’s tax lien sale on Thursday, May 12, the time for reform is now, so that this year’s is the last of its kind.

The City doesn’t have to go back to the bad old days of owning thousands of units of foreclosed housing. It could divert the majority of the more than 4,000 properties a year from the lien sale and make huge strides toward meeting Mayor de Blasio’s goal of preserving or creating 200,000 units of affordable housing.

Through regulatory agreements that subordinate tax debt to permanent affordability requirements, and foreclosure and disposition to nonprofits like community land trusts and mutual housing associations (much like large, low-income cooperatives), the City can put financially shaky housing on new footing by realizing economies of scale in purchasing and management. It can preserve nonprofit assets and the public investment that went into them, and it can even turn vacant lots into affordable housing opportunities. By keeping these properties out of the lien sale, it can keep them from becoming prohibitively expensive to save.

Would it cost money? Of course. But so does passing the buck for New York’s housing crisis to generations to come.

***
John Krinsky is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at The City College of New York and a board member of the New York City Community Land Initiative.

Make the Road Action volunteers for Todd Kaminsky

Last Tuesday, many New Yorkers were focused on the presidential primaries, but there was another election that may be even more important for communities like mine. In a special election for State Senate in Nassau County, Democrat Todd Kaminsky won a seat long-held by former Republican Sen. Dean Skelos.

This result was key for three reasons.

First, it showed the importance of the votes of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color outside of New York City.

As a black Latino immigrant living on Long Island, I’ve seen first-hand how the region has changed in recent years away from being the overwhelmingly white suburban area it was once. Now, as reported by Newsday, it is likely that communities of color were the key difference in the victory of Todd Kaminsky by a relatively small margin, demonstrating the growth of our community on Long Island and our power. While we still have much work to do to continue registering and mobilizing voters, last Tuesday’s result shows that we are becoming more aware about the importance of voting in local and state elections, which often have more direct impact on our lives than federal contests. Communities of color—particularly Latino and immigrant communities—are growing in population and so too is our political weight.

Second, this choice will be important in addressing one of the main barriers blocking progress for our communities: the state Senate.

Many of the abuses suffered by our community in New York stem from state laws that fail to protect us. in many cases, we are even targeted. These laws—weak rent regulations, lack of police and criminal justice reforms, restrictions on accessing financial aid, and more—exist because for years we have had no one in the Senate from Long Island who represents us at the time of decision-making. Make the Road Action, of which I am a member, backed Todd Kaminsky because he committed to supporting our community—for example, by raising wages, expanding healthcare access, and ensuring higher education access. Meanwhile, the Republican campaign mailed anti-immigrant propaganda to excite ultra-conservative voters with a message akin to Donald Trump’s.

We will continue to fight on priority issues for our community—to pass the DREAM Act, strengthen rent laws, pass criminal justice reform, and more—and we are confident that Senator Kaminsky will be there with us.

Third, Senator Kaminsky's victory could be the first step in changing the balance of power in Albany.

Through November, Republicans are likely to maintain control of the Senate through an alliance with the Independent Democrats (IDC). But this special election showed that progressive candidates themselves are able to succeed against conservatives on Long Island—the first time we’ve seen that in years—and we expect to have several close state Senate elections in our region in November. With only one or two more wins, Democrats could take control of the state Senate, which would give us the opportunity to pass new laws that protect workers, young people who want to study, tenants, LGBTQ immigrants—in short, our entire community.

This election showed the growing power of our community. Now we must continue to build our strength and ensure that we are prepared to fight for our rights and vote in November, when the entire state Legislature is up for election.

***
Frank Sprouse-Guzman is a member of Make the Road Action and a Bay Shore resident. On Twitter: @MaketheRoadAct.

A rally for the plastic bag fee bill (photo via @bradlander)

It’s a fact: people who live in America’s most polluted environments are most commonly people of color and poor. New York City is no exception; thanks to decades of unfair policies, over 75 percent of the city’s entire solid waste stream is now processed in a handful of low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in the outer boroughs. Consequently, these communities bear the disproportionate burden of high truck traffic, diesel fuel emissions, unsanitary conditions, and noise pollution.

Spearheaded by communities of color living in environmentally overburdened areas, the Environmental Justice Movement emerged to collectively protect the places where we live, work, and play. Now, we’re voicing our support, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, for legislation to drastically reduce the number of plastic bags in our waste stream by attaching a 5 cent charge.

What do “free” plastic bags have to do with environmental justice? The bag that many of us were given today is just one of 9.37 billion plastic bags that make their way into the city’s waste stream every year – assuming it doesn’t end up polluting our waterways. A whopping 91,000 tons of plastic bags are hauled on diesel trucks for processing at transfer facilities clustered in industrial waterfront neighborhoods, including North Brooklyn, Sunset Park, and the South Bronx. Our communities, more than all others in New York, suffer the noxious fumes and noise pollution, the traffic congestion and unsafe streets, the high rates of asthma and respiratory problems, and the general neighborhood blight caused in part by our city’s love affair with this icon of disposable convenience.

Faced daily with these burdens, low-income New Yorkers of color already know the high cost of “free” plastic bags.

The legislation pending before the City Council, Intro. 209, is an integral part of the city’s larger zero waste goal to divert 90 percent of our waste stream from landfills by 2030. Meeting this ambitious target would improve quality of life for thousands of New Yorkers living in environmental justice communities near waste facilities. The City Council worked alongside advocates to draft a bill that addresses the concerns of low-income New Yorkers.

The bill provides exemptions for customers using SNAP, WIC benefits, and other transactions at emergency food providers. It also includes provisions for community outreach and the distribution of free reusable bags in low-income communities.

Grassroots, community-based environmental justice advocates have a long history of finding innovative solutions to proactively address the inequitable environmental burdens that we face. Int. 209 is not a cure-all for our solid waste problems – we have a long way to go to achieve a truly equitable solid waste system. But a law on the books showing the city working to meet its waste reduction goal is no doubt a big step in the right direction. By reducing the amount of single-use bags in our communities, the city can help lessen the burden of unnecessary waste and trucks in our environment, and improve the neighborhoods of low-income communities and communities of color.

***
Eddie Bautista is the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, where Priya Mulgaonkar serves as policy organizer. Mark Winston Griffith is the executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a community organizing body in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and the surrounding area.

James (at podium) & Cumbo (in green) at Barclays Center (photo: Azi Paybarah)

When Public Advocate Letitia (Tish) James served as City Council Member for the 35th District in Brooklyn, from 2003 through 2013, she was a vocal, high-profile opponent of the Atlantic Yards megaproject, as reflected in the 2011 documentary Battle for Brooklyn.

James was a plaintiff in two lawsuits challenging the willingness of government authorities to relax deals with developer Forest City Ratner, and promoted another lawsuit filed by Brooklynites who went through a coveted pre-apprenticeship training program, run by a Forest City community partner, but didn't get expected union cards and jobs.

In her successful 2013 campaign for citywide office, James even criticized mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, generally an ally, regarding his support for the project, which includes the Barclays Center and 16 towers (of which four are now rising), set to house 6,430 apartments, of which 2,250 are "affordable."

Since becoming public advocate, James, understandably, has paid far less attention to the project, which in 2014 was renamed Pacific Park Brooklyn after Chinese developer Greenland Holdings bought a majority stake, excepting the arena and one tower. James also joined local officials calling for the 2016 Democratic National Convention to come to the Barclays Center.

Still, it was surprising to learn, from New York Daily News Sports I-Team reporter Michael O'Keeffe, the main contributor to a four-part series on Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park that began April 11, that James would talk up the project at the behest of a developer she's long criticized.

As O'Keeffe told it, at about 43 minutes into a podcast, published April 22, in which we both appeared, months earlier, as he began looking into Atlantic Yards,, he reached out to James, but was eventually told she didn't want to comment.

As his publication date approached, and after the developer likely knew there was critical coverage coming about issues like sexual harassment by construction workers, low pay for arena staff, and neighborhood disturbances, O'Keeffe "got a call out of the blue" from James.

While James told him she's not in touch with the grassroots, she said, as O'Keeffe put it, that "she doesn't really hear a lot of complaints from residents, what she hears is a lot of excitement about the possibility of affordable housing."

O'Keeffe asked her if the developer - whose local face remains Forest City Ratner - asked her to call, and she said yes.

James apparently did not know the specifics of O’Keeffe’s coverage, such as the harassment by construction workers and arena attendees toward a 23-year-old African-American woman. (James is the first woman of color to hold citywide office in New York.)

On the podcast, I speculated that James was thinking about a 2021 mayoral run, as Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park criticism has less weight, and friendly relations with powerful developers can be helpful.

But her posture - perhaps a lapse or poor political judgment - still seems strange. (She declined comment, in response to my queries.) Had James looked on my blog or sources like Atlantic Yards Watch or Instagram (see the #bciza tag), problems faced by arena neighbors have been amply documented.

It's precisely her responsibility, as Public Advocate, to serve as a watchdog over the city agencies that have failed to curb, say, illegal parking or construction activities that spill out blocks from the project.

While James understandably supports "affordable housing," the devil's in the details. James was critical of some of that housing, for example, challenging the developer regarding the percentage of family-sized units, lower than promised, in the first tower under construction, the lottery for which just opened up.

She did appear at the December 2012 groundbreaking for that tower but was not quoted in any press release, and has stayed out of December 2014 and June 2015 press releases saluting two "100% affordable" towers. In other words, she had until recently kept her distance.

Beyond a focus on her next campaign, perhaps James has been influenced by Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a Brooklyn nonprofit, who was de Blasio's nominee to the City Planning Commission, and remains James' representative.

De la Uz in 2014 helped negotiate a new timetable to deliver the 2,250 Atlantic Yards affordable housing units by 2025 rather than 2035. (That's faster than the previously extended timetable, of 2035, but a ten-year buildout had been touted when the project went through approvals in 2006 and then 2009.)

That was progress, but de la Uz downplayed the fact that two "100% affordable" towers that came out of that deal skewed toward middle-income households earning six figures and were less affordable - in terms of incomes served - than the developer long pledged. De la Uz and allies in the BrooklynSpeaks coalition had actually once criticized that original configuration as not affordable enough.

Today, de la Uz and allies likely have James' ear more than those bearing the brunt of Atlantic Yards impacts. But the Daily News series, as well as my coverage of a public meeting in mid-April, detailed continued frustration from neighborhood residents, as the harassment victim pointed out how state officials, in a report to an Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park advisory board, had downplayed the harassment. The developer did say it would roll out a color-coded ID system to make it easier to recognize construction workers.

Similar political calculations may be at play for James's successor on the Council, Laurie Cumbo, who in the wake of the Daily News series was curiously silent. After all, Cumbo chairs the Council's Committee on Women’s Issues and has regularly spoken out about issues of sexual violence, including those affecting women and girls in Nigeria.

During her Council campaign, Cumbo did criticize Atlantic Yards, but soon adopted a wishy-washy posture; she's regularly praised the below-market housing without reference to its actual affordability. Had a less powerful constituent than the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park developer been connected to the harassment, I have to think Cumbo would have been less cautious.

Though Cumbo did not respond to an April 18 request for comment, after she was informed that this article was in the works, she sent a statement Wednesday that, among other things, cited her work on women’s issues, including “legislation that will raise awareness to prevent sexual harassment and assault.” She noted that venues in the district had brought more traffic and thus quality of life issues, and that in recent weeks there has been “greater visibility on the need to address sexual harassment within our community.” She said that New Yorkers face “cat calls, lewd gestures, inappropriate language and unwarranted comments about the physical characteristics of their bodies” and that “in the City of New York, these acts will not be tolerated."

Her statement, interestingly enough, didn’t acknowledge the victim but indicated respect for the developer. “I want to acknowledge Ashley Cotton, SVP of External Affairs, Forest City Ratner Companies for working with the NYPD, Barclays Center, contractors, and unions to implement several measures including a color-coded identification system for its workers to improve accountability and a guest code of conduct for Islanders games to enhance public safety,” Cumbo wrote. “These preliminary steps are indicative of our collective commitment to fostering a safe environment for women, the LGBTQ community, and countless others who deserve to freely commute.”

Fewer than 90 minutes later, Cumbo circulated to her mailing list an announcement about the application process for 461 Dean, the first Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park affordable housing tower.

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Brooklyn journalist Norman Oder writes the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report.

Homelessness policy announcement (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)

On April 11, the de Blasio administration announced the results of its 90-day review of homeless services. The review’s inclusive and collaborative process is impressive. The city consulted numerous stakeholders, including two groups too often ignored: clients, specifically homeless individuals in shelters and on the streets; and nonprofit homeless service providers. With respect to clients, the city surveyed 630 individuals in homeless shelters and conducted focus groups with over 80 Coalition for the Homeless, VOCAL-NY, Picture the Homeless, and Urban Justice Center Safety Net Project clients. Sixty nonprofit providers were also engaged in the review process.

As the city implements the 46 reforms in its review, it should continue including and collaborating with clients and providers. It would be a grave error to continue the mistakes of the past where clients’ concerns about shelters and providers’ requests for capital repairs were ignored.

The first opportunity for inclusion and collaboration is the Interagency Homelessness Accountability Council (or the Interagency Coordinating Council in City Administrative Code § 21-307). Both nonprofit service providers and currently/formerly homeless individuals should serve on the Council.

The vehicle is already in place: the Homeless Services Advisory Board set forth in City Administrative Code § 21-306 - as City Council General Welfare Chair Stephen Levin noted during the April 21 hearing, “Oversight: An Examination of the Department of Homeless Services 90-day Review.”

To better understand why the city should listen to providers, look to the Mayor’s Supportive Housing Taskforce, where supportive housing providers alerted the city to the unfeasible scattered-site supportive housing rates before it rolls out the first 500 units of a new program this year.

In addition, the city would do well to include and consult more formerly homeless individuals as it provides homeless services. This enables the city to utilize those with direct experience and also addresses the review’s Reform #25: Promote career pathways for shelter residents.

One area to include consumers is the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) Office of the Client Ombudsman. The city can also employ formerly homeless individuals as homeless outreach workers and continue to utilize peer specialists as DHS case managers. The mental health field recognizes the invaluable role of peers and so should homeless services.

Another opportunity for client inclusion and collaboration is around the review’s Reform #12: Increase safety in shelters through a NYPD management review and retraining program. As the NYPD re-trains DHS security staff, it should utilize training akin to the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training that NYPD officers receive to de-escalate situations involving persons in emotional distress. Whereas that training draws on the experiences of individuals with mental health challenges, this can also draw on the experiences of homeless individuals.

As the city continues to work to improve its homeless services, there are no better people to seek guidance from than those now or recently involved in related programming on a daily basis.

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Nicole Bramstedt is the Director of Policy at Urban Pathways, a nonprofit social services and supportive housing organization serving homeless adults. On Twitter at @UrbanPathwaysNY.

Last week, the New York City Council approved the contested East New York rezoning - the first of 15 proposed neighborhood rezonings through which Mayor de Blasio intends to advance his goal of preserving 120,000 units of affordable housing and producing 80,000 new units at below-market rents. Described by some as a rezoning taking place “under the radar,” the Department of City Planning (DCP) has been conducting a planning study and holding numerous community town halls on a ten-block area of Queens dubbed “Flushing West.”

This proposed rezoning would have a transformative impact on Flushing, a densely populated, pan-Asian immigrant neighborhood with a sizable Latino population and a small but historic African-American community. Although DCP recently postponed the April certification of the Flushing West rezoning plan (which would have initiated the uniform land use review procedure (ULURP), the plan continues to move forward and remains a key piece of the mayor’s controversial housing program.

As the rezoning of Flushing West moves forward, the existing affordable housing stock there is at risk.

After much public debate and protest, Mayor de Blasio’s mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) plan was approved by the New York City Council in March. MIH is a citywide policy that requires residential developers in newly upzoned areas to provide some below market-rate housing, either inside a new development or somewhere off site. As MIH (and the related Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA) plan) moved through ULURP, communities contested the plan on numerous grounds: it would not build enough affordable housing; the affordable housing that would be built would be too expensive for those most in need; increased density would exacerbate transportation, education, and infrastructure problems; large new buildings would alter local streetscapes; and, most importantly, the plan would spur luxury development and hasten gentrification.

Relative to the vigorous and sustained public debate on these issues, there has been little public discussion on the ways that the city’s proposed rezonings are already impacting New York City’s largest form of affordable housing: rent regulation through rent control and rent stabilization.

Rent regulation accounts for nearly all of Flushing’s affordable housing. The neighborhood’s white-hot real estate market, however, increasingly threatens these rent-stabilized apartments.  DCP’s proposed rezoning - which links the production of affordable housing with the construction of thousands of luxury units - has only increased land speculation and, therefore, landlords’ imperative to deregulate their holdings. Though the rezoning has been paired with an increase in funding for anti-eviction legal services, it has already catalyzed a number of hyper-speculative real estate transactions in downtown Flushing, including within the rezoning area.

Based on the 2014 state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) list of rent-regulated buildings, there are 388 rent-stabilized buildings in Flushing. This list, however, includes buildings that have partially converted to co-ops, meaning some units are owned by residents. Conversion of rental buildings to cooperatives requires a minimum of 15 percent of tenants opting to purchase their apartments. DHCR lists properties as rent stabilized as long as there is at least one rent-stabilized unit in the building.

Based on a review of city Department of Finance sales data, 81 buildings, including five that converted to cooperative in the past year or so, recorded 1,198 apartment sales since 2010. In addition to the hundreds of co-op sales in rent-stabilized buildings, 42 buildings (with a combined total of 1,800 rent-stabilized apartments) were also sold during the study period of 2010 to January 2016. The sold buildings represent a sizable 11 percent of all of Flushing’s rent-stabilized buildings.

In December 2015, a massive sale of eight rent-stabilized buildings, all but one located a few blocks from Flushing’s waterfront, was covered by Crain’s New York Business. These rent-stabilized buildings, comprising 488 apartments, are clustered on Flushing’s Sanford Avenue and were sold to an investor group represented by New Jersey-based Treetop Development LLC. ACORE, a California-based investment fund established in May 2015 - only a few months before the Sanford Avenue purchases - financed the hefty $138.8 million purchase. ACORE is capitalized by a $1.6 billion commitment from Delphi Financial Group Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tokio Marine Group, Japan’s largest publicly traded insurer.  The purchase of seven Sanford Avenue rent-stabilized buildings, financed by transnational private equity investors, illustrates how multi-family, rental properties in the outer boroughs are treated as global investment vehicles with tremendous potential profits.

In order for those profits to be realized, however, rents will have to increase substantially, and in all likelihood, the apartments will be deregulated. Although Treetop Development LLC principal Adam Mermelstein reassured, “We’re not running after tenants like some landlords do, trying to induce turnover on the apartments to get them to market rate,” their $10 million investment in “an intensive capital expenditures program” portends displacement. Treetop Development LLC plans to renovate apartments and landscape gardens in order to “remake the Flushing Portfolio into one of the premier residential addresses in Flushing, Queens.” This rebranding language underscores that so-called “major capital improvements” in rent-stabilized buildings are a primary landlord strategy to permanently raise rents and facilitate tenant turnover.

This speculative activity is not confined to privately-owned buildings. Queens College students learned from a local resident that tenants were recently evicted from 132-30 Sanford Avenue. This building is listed on two real estate websites as for sale, with one site noting that the building is currently under contract. Further research indicated the building is owned by one of Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE)’s tax-exempt organizations - Community Homes Housing Development Fund Company Inc. According to the building’s deed, AAFE purchased the building in 2008 for $3.5 million. Online realtor descriptions highlight the gap in current and potential rent revenues as a key selling point: “The average monthly rent is $1,023 month, approx. 76% of the current market value, offering tremendous upside potential.” The building is now selling for $9.8 million - a 180 percent increase in just eight years.

In October 2015, DCP completed a Draft Scope of Work for an Environmental Impact Statement, which identified 13 projected development sites and included a breakdown of anticipated outcomes based on the proposed upzoning. On these 13 sites, DCP expects the production of 2,062 residential units (excluding 1,254 units of luxury housing currently under construction at Sky View Parc) of which 516 would be affordable to households earning 60 percent of AMI ($54,360 annual income for a family of four) or 619 units affordable to households earning 80 percent AMI ($69,040 annual income for a family of four).

DCP’s Draft Scope of Work was completed before the City Council added the option of 20 percent of units affordable at 40 percent AMI, which would mean the Flushing West rezoning may result in 412 units affordable to a family of four with an annual income of $36,240. The Flushing Rezoning Community Alliance, a coalition of nonprofits, unions, and churches, fought hard for this option because the median household income for downtown Flushing residents is just $34,428. The final Flushing plan may also include additional HPD subsidies toward deeper affordability, but the extent, quantity, and longevity of those subsidies is yet to be determined.

With Flushing’s remaining rent-regulated apartments at stake, it is important to look at the balance of what is being offered now: the proposed rezoning will produce thousands of market-rate, luxury housing units; a mere 412 apartments will be affordable to average Flushing residents (and then only if the local City Council member and developers choose the newly added option); and nothing at all will be built for families making below-median wages.

The neighborhood’s wholesale transformation, which has already begun in expectation of an upzoning, would sweep rent-regulated housing up in its wake and trigger even more harassment, rent hikes, and evictions than the neighborhood has already seen. This scenario demonstrates that Mayor de Blasio’s MIH program is less about preserving neighborhood affordability than turning working-class spaces into luxury enclaves, with small pockets for the middle class.

In Flushing’s overheated real estate market, where even nonprofits enrich themselves by selling rent-stabilized buildings for enormous profits, this planned rezoning is already adding fuel to fires of gentrification and displacement. The addition of a few hundred units of affordable housing could not possibly stem the transformative effects of global finance and commercial real estate speculation, and the preservation program the city is currently pursuing will do little to protect rent-regulated apartments.

City planners must stop acting as if the negative consequences of upzonings on rent-regulated housing will be mitigated by the paltry provision of new quasi-affordable units, or by increased investments in legal services (though the latter are, of course, important). Instead, we need to prioritize the preservation of rent-stabilized apartments and the production of truly affordable housing, decoupled from market-rate development and its attendant impacts on neighborhood land markets.

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Tarry Hum is a Professor at the City University of New York and author of Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn's Sunset Park.

Samuel Stein is a PhD student in Geography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.