Gotham Gazette

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Opinion

A Black Agenda for New York City


crystal hudson with voters

Crystal Hudson, middle, with voters (photo: Crystal Hudson campaign)


We’re nearing the end of Black History Month — a month of celebrating and honoring the Black people who have enriched and advanced our city. From Audre Lorde to Shirley Chisolm, we have no shortage of artists, entrepreneurs, and trailblazers to celebrate.

We’re also nearing the end of another February in America. A month in which we continue to see Black people die at the hands of the police at alarming rates. A month in which we continue to face a pandemic that is killing Black people at twice the rate of other Americans. A month in which our city’s vaccine roll-out continues to leave behind Black people who have experienced a disproportionate amount of loss from this crisis.

As we close out this month, we have to ask: how is our city actually supporting and protecting Black New Yorkers?

This is a conversation for every month.

To truly uplift Black New Yorkers, we need to advance a forward-thinking, explicitly anti-racist and pro-Black vision for our city’s future. We have to acknowledge our history and take specific and intentional action to right the wrongs of the past and the disparities of the present. We need A Black Agenda for New York City.

When Black New Yorkers thrive, all New Yorkers thrive. This means a guarantee of safety, housing, access to quality jobs, and the ability to raise families without the constant surveillance of law enforcement or the child welfare system. However, all too often our inability to zero in on the specific issues impacting Black New Yorkers means our solutions to structural and institutional racism are deeply insufficient.

I’m proposing a comprehensive plan to upend the injustices facing Black New Yorkers, starting with six urgent recommendations that speak to the gravity of this moment.

First, we must put money directly in the hands of Black New Yorkers with baby bonds and a paycheck guarantee so our city can set Black families up for long-term financial stability while addressing the ills of the past. We must create a pipeline for sustainable, unionized non-law enforcement jobs for Black New Yorkers to form a reliable pathway to the middle class and promote wealth-building. We must also build Black generational wealth and prevent displacement by encouraging community homeownership.

To address the disastrous impact of gun violence on our communities, New York City must pilot a basic income program in zip codes with the highest rates of gun violence so families can secure housing, put food on the table, and reduce the anxiety associated with being unable to afford daily necessities — factors that so frequently lead to violence and cycles of trauma.

Ultimately, to move forward, we must acknowledge the harm of the past; the city must launch a citywide truth and reconciliation process focused on race and reparations and create a racial equity commission to ensure every new policy and piece of legislation is written and enacted in an anti-racist manner. From the ills of the racist and misguided War on Drugs and widely practiced policies like stop-and-frisk to the surveillance and removal of Black children from Black parents and families, our city’s own government has committed undue harm to Black New Yorkers.

As a Black queer woman and candidate for New York City Council, I look to represent a district that has had to bear the pain of gentrification and displacement of Black residents, the overwhelming burden of rapid development that was never intended for us, the destruction of a healthcare infrastructure, and the erosion of businesses that can no longer afford to stay in our neighborhoods.

But my community, where my family has lived for three generations, is also home to so much of what makes Black New York remarkable: Soul Summit in Fort Greene Park, Black-owned retail and restaurants along Fulton Street, Dance Africa at BAM, Afropunk at Commodore Barry Park, the Caribbean diaspora in full display on Utica Avenue, the West Indian Day Parade along Eastern Parkway, and so much more. I’m fighting to protect the Black New Yorkers of today — the artists and entrepreneurs, the nurses and frontline workers, the unhoused and the vulnerable. But I can’t do it alone.

It’s time for New York City to show up for us and ensure that Black New Yorkers can thrive across all five boroughs.

***
Crystal Hudson is a Democratic candidate for City Council in Brooklyn’s 35th Council District. On Twitter @crystalrhudson.

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A Tale of Two Indigenous Monuments in New York


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(photo: Matt Ballard)


The New York State Department of Transportation (NYS DOT) recently began installing engraved murals of New York’s Native American history on the Capital Region’s Northway. A few days later, the same NYS DOT threatened to demolish the Shinnecock Nation’s billboard monument on Sunrise Highway in eastern Long Island by issuing stop work orders, fines of $2,000 per day, and claiming it would forcibly remove the monument in 30 days.

Why is the NYS DOT creating a highway monument to honor Native American heritage in upstate New York and fighting ferociously to destroy a Native American highway monument in eastern Long Island? As the young people say: make it make sense.

Whether hoisted up or torn down, historical monuments are proxies of political power. Each carries its own negative with it: what else could/ should be here? What else was here? A highway monument honoring indigenous communities is denigrated as anathema or praised as progress depending on how it casts and shifts power; these are the tensions of our unreconciled settler history. 

The billboard monument on Sunrise Highway is a source of revenue for the Shinnecock Nation, a federally-recognized Native American tribe struggling to provide for its people in the bastion of wealth that is the Hamptons. The revenue from the billboards will be used for child care services, food security, reproductive health access, dental care, and other urgent needs, and will be a foundation for future economic development projects. Beyond aesthetics, this monument furthers the Shinnecock Nation’s ability to survive and thrive on their land.

The engraved mural on the Albany highway has little economic benefit for the communities it is supposed to honor, the Stockbridge-Munsee, St. Regis Mohawk, and Delaware tribes. The native dancers are a concession, a compromise meant to smooth over the NYS DOT’s determination to build on a sacred site. The DOT promised to “include the aesthetic treatment [to] reference the Native-American heritage and culture…” after learning that the site for the proposed flyover was ancient, and sacred. The image of native dancers petrified in rock unlocks the space for thousands of cars to whizz by on a new flyover. If there are potential benefits for the indigenous communities, they lie in the realm of representation and spirit; the material benefits flow directly to the State of New York. 

On Long Island, the billboard monument trumpets the Shinnecock Nation’s continued presence within the place known as the Hamptons. The violent settler narrative of the “vanishing Indian” is no match for the 20-foot billboards and the twinkling lights offering one singular message: this is indigenous land.  

This unapologetic assertion of Shinnecock presence has called down controversy on the monument since construction began in 2019. For some of the neighbors in the Town

of Southampton, this vision of indigenous survival and presence was a distasteful intrusion into their highly-priced dream of rural bucolia. Vacillating between concerns about aesthetics, to potential driver distraction, to the need to preserve the ‘character’ of the Hamptons, residents of Southampton claimed that their aesthetic preferences should be valued over the Shinnecock’s economic development agenda. But NIMBY hardly works when it is not actually your backyard!

The Shinnecock Nation builds the monument on its own sovereign land without the say-so of New York State. This is as it should be: this is a federally-recognized tribe with the right to utilize their land. A New York State Supreme Court judge affirmed the Shinnecock Nation’s sovereignty and land rights in a May 2020 ruling, calling the Shinnecock’s rights to the land “undisputed” and expressing doubt that New York State would be successful in refuting the Shinnecock Nation’s claim of sovereignty. 

If the Shinnecock billboard monument is a vision of future-facing indigenous sovereignty, the Albany mural’s origin story has troubling echoes of the past. The engraved dancers were a condition of the NYS DOT’s construction, but when the new flyover opened at the end of 2019 the mural was not installed; the DOT attempted to break even this modest promise about the erection and placement of these murals. After being prodded and cajoled into keeping its word, the state finally began installing the Capital Region murals in January 2021. The Northway’s monument tells an old story, a weary narrative about the slipperiness of New York State’s tongue toward indigenous communities echoes again. 

How to reconcile the different reception of these two indigenous monuments, one built by New York State, the other threatened by New York State?   

The Capital Region mural requires little of the state government and the non-indigenous neighbors. The engraved dancers are an aesthetic supplement furthering the priorities of the Albany government; they do not displace the status quo bequeathed by the settler past. Alternatively, the Shinnecock billboard monument is a vision of indigenous sovereignty come to life and bathed in neon light. Created and designed by the Shinnecock Nation, it directs wealth to the Shinnecock, alone. Trumpeting the vibrancy of a community rowing hard toward continued survival, the billboard monument sends an unmistakable message of permanence and power.  

Now framing the highway that cut through Shinnecock territory in 1959, the billboard monument makes it clear that the indigenous future is not petrified in stone, to be gazed upon and consumed; it is dynamic, shifting, and expanding around us. This monument does not ask that we remember the Shinnecock Nation, but that we respect it, its members, and their rights, today and beyond. 

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Abena Ampofoa Asare is the author of Truth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana; writes, researches, and teaches about historical justice and the African Diaspora; and is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History at Stony Brook University.

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Comprehensive Planning is Not Just About Housing and Zoning


park view cam

Rendering (photo: mayor's office)


The City Council held a hearing this week on a bill to implement comprehensive long-term planning in New York City. With the right amendments, we think this legislation has the potential to foster a more equitable and rational planning process to guide land-use changes in New York City — one that will balance local and citywide needs.

But comprehensive planning is about much more than land use. Done right, comprehensive planning touches on decisions in nearly all aspects of city life: education, transportation, public health and safety, sustainability, you name it.  

One way to think about comprehensive planning is that it will finally provide a formal structure for city agencies to coordinate what they are doing and to stop the ill-informed, piecemeal decision-making that has led to unanticipated (but hardly unforeseeable) consequences.  

Our organizations have seen this tragedy play out again and again. In 2003, for example, the City rezoned Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn with the inscrutable goal of creating a “canyon of housing.” The City pursued this narrow goal so myopically that it refused to seize obvious opportunities for preserving and creating affordable apartments--essentially extending and exacerbating the exclusive character of nearby Park Slope.  

Over a decade-and-a-half later the community is still cleaning up the mess. The resulting influx of new, affluent residents immediately caused nearby schools to become not only severely overcrowded, but far more segregated as low-income children of color could no longer find seats there. One school had to reduce its attendance zone by half, one school had to be demolished and rebuilt with triple the former number of seats, and a third had to open anew. Although situated atop three subway lines, the tall new buildings included large underground garages belching out vehicles onto sidewalks; the pedestrian experience became intolerable. Lacking meaningful design guidelines, the resulting streetscape of blank walls and ventilation grates is some of the worst in the city.  

Every one of these problems could have been anticipated and addressed through a formal process that provided meaningful opportunities for the community to engage in planning, required different city agencies to coordinate their long-term plans, and, most importantly, adhered to clear and immovable guiding principles such as racial justice, reduction of segregation in schools and neighborhoods, net creation of affordable housing, and prioritization of public transit and pedestrian safety and accessibility. This is what comprehensive planning promises.  

Imagine if diverse government agencies and community members (given the proper resources) had been planning and thinking in advance — long before this rezoning process even started…

About how upgrades to public transportation and bicycle infrastructure could obviate the need for underground garages for luxury housing towers with comparatively excellent subway access?

About a plan to coordinate the creation of new market-rate and affordable housing with innovative student-assignment policies that would lead to more affordable housing in well-resourced areas of the city, racial and economic integration of the neighborhood and its schools, and more efficient use of existing school buildings?  

About how to improve pedestrian safety and reduce traffic violence so parents can feel comfortable sending their children to the broad range of schools and parks within walking distance?

About the role of an individual action like the Fourth Avenue rezoning in advancing racial justice, equity, and integration across the city as a whole? And in shifting the benefits and burdens of city life, growth, and change equitably?

Is this a fantasy? Not at all. In fact, comprehensive planning is the norm for most municipalities of any size. New York City’s exceptional size, complexity, and competing needs only increase the necessity of a formal and predictable planning process.  

The current legislation requires some amendments to enshrine better public transit, specifically faster buses, and integration as explicit goals; to give local communities a real opportunity to plan proactively without being allowed to override the public good of the city as a whole; and to ensure that the plan will actually guide official decision-making.  

This is work worth doing. We can get this right, and the time is now to make it happen. We simply can’t tolerate any more of the status quo.  

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Danny Pearlstein is the Policy and Communications Director at the Riders Alliance. David Tipson is the Executive Director of New York Appleseed. Both organizations are members of the Thriving Communities Coalition. On Twitter @RidersAlliance, @AppleseedNY & @thrivingccnyc.

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