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Biden Plan Gives New York State a Two-Year Reprieve from a Damaged Budget


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Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo (photo: governor's office)


President Biden’s stimulus package is proceeding down the legislative path in Congress. This is great news for New York residents and for New York governments’ beleaguered budgets. The $1.9 trillion plan includes $350 billion for State and Local Governments, Tribes, and Territories.

The monies will likely be apportioned in a manner similar to the earlier stimulus package, meaning that New York State, at 6% of the nation’s population, would get close to $21 billion to shore up the budgets of the state government, the city government, and the rest of New York’s municipalities. New York residents would, of course, be getting the direct checks and increased unemployment aid that are outlined through September 2021. The income cutoff levels for the direct checks are still being negotiated and, of course, the final package could still be modified.

A respite of this magnitude could not be more welcome. The city and state governments will effectively get a two-year grace period for their economies to recover from the COVID-19 recession, with budgets heavily sustained by federal aid until the 2023-2024 budget year begins in April 2023. The dimensions of the new federal aid are extraordinary, but there’s no doubt New York will hit a fiscal cliff when the federal money runs out.

How the Biden Plan Will Help New York
The plan working its way through Congress far exceeds Governor Cuomo’s initial expectations about federal aid in the coming state budget, due for adoption by April 1. Governor Cuomo’s 2021-2022 Executive Budget, submitted to the Legislature on January 19, anticipated a baseline of $3 billion from the new stimulus plan for each the coming fiscal year and the 2022-2023 fiscal year, or $6 billion over two years. The table below presents that assumption. Note that the federal receipts are new anticipated funds, not reflecting the already substantial infusions of federal aid provided in 2020 or 2021 thus far:

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The table below is from the submitted Executive Budget showing how a federal funds infusion of $15 billion could offset widespread budget cuts and tax increases in New York over the next two years:

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New York’s potential aid in the Biden plan, at an estimated $14 billion, is close enough to the governor’s estimate above to hold New York State’s budget harmless from spending cuts and tax increases for two years. That does not count the additional aid of $7 billion that could be passed through to local governments, assuming New York got a full $21 billion share of the $350 billion aid package for State and Local Governments. The table above does not factor in Enhanced Federal Medicaid reimbursement of an additional $2 billion for New York State approved by the Biden administration after the Executive Budget was released, or funds from Biden’s COVID-19 assistance plan for schools.

A Fiscal Cliff in Spring 2023?
The governor’s budget plan uses federal aid as a substitute to replace state spending. As a result, if no underlying adjustments were made to state revenues and expenditures that were temporarily being replaced, significant deficits would likely reappear in the 2023-24 state budget, even assuming the economy is finally recovering.

The governor’s budget forecast a $6 billion deficit for New York State in fiscal year 2024, which starts April 1, 2023. That forecast assumed the Legislature would enact his proposed tax increase on very wealthy New Yorkers, bringing in $2 billion a year, budget cuts of $3.5 billion in 2021-22, and addressing, in a manner not specified, a 2022-23 deficit of about $3 billion. Failing to enact the spending and revenue adjustments in the new budget due by this April 1 would add to the 2023-24 deficit forecast of $6 billion, adding $5.5 billion to that deficit for a resulting $11.5 billion that year with the extraordinary federal aid in the Biden plan exhausted.

In fact, no one knows what the course of the economy will be over the next two years, along with the state and the city budget deficits. The recovery will be driven by the success of the COVID-19 vaccine and its distribution. New York State coped with a similar size deficit, about $10 billion, in 2011 when the two years of aid from the Obama stimulus package expired, with painful budget cuts. Fortunately, the national and state economies became robust at that time. Once again, New York must restore the health of its economy, and that means the health of the New York City economy, which over the past ten years has been 70-80% of the state’s job growth.

A New York City Comeback?
New York City will have to come back from what may be its most damaging decline since the fiscal crisis of the ‘70s, or even the Great Depression. Tourism and hospitality, the arts, entertainment, culture, international investment, all the prime elements of a premier international city in a global economy, have all been devastated. New York City lost 12% of its employment between December 2019 and December 2020 and nearly 60% of the state’s job losses were concentrated in the city. 

The city recovery has lagged the state and nation since the country’s covid lockdown. In fact, the City has only recovered 361,000 of the 944,000 jobs it lost between February and April 2020, or 38%, while the rest of the state outside the city has recovered 52% of its job losses, according to the New York State Department of Labor (my calculations of its data). The January 2021 jobs report just released by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the nation as a whole has recovered about 12.5 out of the 22.4 million jobs lost since February 2020, or 56%. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s latest weekly report shows the city economy’s employment growth has stalled since October 2020 (and jobs actually declined in December). It’s not clear that a healthy recovery can really begin until a massive number of New Yorkers has received the vaccine, possibly not until late summer or early fall.

Are New York’s leaders up to the challenge? Can a governor known for his competence but unwillingness to work with others come to grips with a State Legislature with far more progressives in both houses? Can a new New York City mayor halt the state’s discriminatory treatment of the city and actually engage with the governor? Can a consensus about how to solve New York’s problems really be achieved in this divisive era? One thing: the leaders are all Democrats. Can they hold together and chart a path that will keep New York successful?

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Jim Brennan was a member of the New York State Assembly for 32 years, where he chaired four committees. On Twitter @JimBrennanNY.

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Everything Says Put Housing First; So Why Does New York Put Housing Last?


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Supportive Housing (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


For several years, perhaps the foremost issue in New York City politics was homelessness. But for all the talk, not much has been done. In fact, things have in some significant ways only been getting worse.

Housing is a human right. It is a physiological need and we cannot have a functioning society without it. Yet our city has made this most basic need one of the hardest to achieve. 

Housing First – prioritizing permanent housing for all – must be at the center of any proposed approach. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the most effective thing to do, and it’s the most cost-efficient thing to do.

Unfortunately, New York City couldn’t be further away from Housing First. We can describe our framework as Housing Last.

This urgently needs to be addressed: Over 80,000 New Yorkers are experiencing homelessness – 20,000 of them children. People experiencing homelessness are deemed not “housing ready,” even though most just need safe, affordable housing. For example, about 40% of families enter the city’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters due to domestic violence, and another 30% due to evictions.  

Instead of prioritizing housing, though, city government explicitly states that shelter clients are required to “gain employment, connect to work supports and other public benefits, save their income, and search for housing to better prepare for independent living,” per DHS.  

This perpetuates homelessness instead of preventing it. The average stay in the shelter system has been increasing over the past five years. In the city’s 2020 fiscal year, single adults spent an average of 431 days in the shelter system before achieving independent housing. For families with children, it’s even worse at 443 days, while adult families spent on average 630 days. 

Our system forces prolonged homelessness with little hope for stability. I recently spoke to a senior citizen who spent years living doubled up with friends because she could not find an affordable apartment. She had no recent rental history and her income was too low to qualify for available “affordable” housing units. Her only option was to enter a shelter, and become officially homeless, before she could get help finding permanent housing.  

This creates an endless cycle. Being homeless makes it harder to find employment, make it to job interviews, and get to work on time. This traumatic experience often leads to substance abuse and mental health issues. In other cases, shelters can be so unsafe that people prefer living on the streets. Children in shelters have a harder time in school, have to constantly change schools, or travel long distances. 

Stable housing is also a public health issue. A systematic review of 22 studies found that people experiencing homelessness frequently prioritize shelter and food over seeking health and social care. In a study of nearly 80 health professionals, “facilitated access to housing” was ranked the number one priority for homeless patients, above care for mental health, addiction, and other medical issues. Unsurprisingly, housing stability is associated with reducing preventable visits to the emergency room.

Beyond improving people's quality of life, permanent housing is also more cost effective. According to the Mayor’s Management Report, the cost for temporarily housing a single adult averages $130 per day. For families with children, this number is $202 per day. In contrast, when money is spent directly for permanent supportive housing, people are healthier, and the system is burdened with less medical costs, with an estimated net savings of $10,100 per person. These values don’t include the long-term benefits of increased access to jobs, support services, and stable education.

Many elected leaders have endorsed Housing First...in theory. Last year, the City Council released a 202-page report on the homelessness crisis. The report recommended dozens of policy proposals, the first being to prevent homelessness, the second to Increase Pathways to Permanent, Affordable Housing. But, reports are only as good as the actions taken.

Without enough housing, these goals are a pipe dream. To dig ourselves out of this hole, we need to shift investment from shelters to building affordable and supportive housing in every neighborhood — especially high opportunity neighborhoods

We know this can work because the city has had success with Housing First-like approaches for military veterans. The New York City Department of Veterans’ Services (DVS) made permanent housing for homeless veterans a topmost priority. The city employs a peer coordinator program, provides incentives to landlords and brokers to ensure availability, and invests in after-care services to help maintain stable housing. Since 2015, New York City has maintained homelessness levels among veterans at “functionally zero” by securing permanent housing within 90 days of entering the shelter system. 

Another success was the New York/New York III program, a city-state pact that has provided supportive housing for homeless individuals with serious mental illness, substance abuse, and disabling medical conditions, resulting in fewer days in jails, shelters, and medical and psychiatric facilities. 

These programs provide a model for making an immediate impact. The first is setting a time limit from shelter entry to permanent housing. Second is to eliminate barriers for people to receive rental assistance and be able to “graduate” out of the shelter system. Finally, we should spend more on rental assistance and less on shelters. 

Ultimately, we should prevent people from entering the shelter system in the first place. Making this a reality requires the city to integrate homelessness and affordable housing policies. These are not separate issues, but rather a cause and effect that are tightly connected. 

It’s time for Housing First on a meaningful scale. Housing is the foundation for a better life, and a better city. As we reset New York in the 2021 election cycle – it all begins with a commitment to fully realize Housing First.

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Sara Lind is an attorney, community activist, and mother of two running for City Council in District 6 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On Twitter @saraklind.

Research and Contributions by Tiara R. Ahmad, PhD of Science for New York (Sci4NY), an organization that helps connect local scientists and decision makers through project-based interaction.

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The Attorney General’s Lawsuit Against the Mayor and NYPD is a Needed Option


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The Mayor and PC Shea (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against the City and the NYPD “to end the pervasive use of excessive force and false arrests by the NYPD against New Yorkers in suppressing overwhelmingly peaceful protests.” The suit was in response to the NYPD’s use of force at last summer’s racial justice protests. The complaint alleges multiple examples of excessive force, and presents a detailed critique of the NYPD’s handling of both the summer protests and many other peaceful protests that came before.

Litigation seeking systemic reform is a long and messy process and should never be a first resort. But because Mayor de Blasio has consistently refused to make necessary reforms to the NYPD even when given specific roadmaps about how to do so, litigation is now the most promising option on the table. Indeed, as the Attorney General’s complaint points out, nothing short of a federal monitor has yet to change the Department’s behavior in this area. To that end, the complaint alleges that the NYPD has engaged in unlawful practices against peaceful protests for years and failed to voluntarily take corrective action despite multiple warnings in the form of reports and lawsuits. A failure the Mayor and Police Commissioner now concede.

We have seen this process play out in similar circumstances ourselves. For five years we ran the City’s Department of Investigation, which oversees the NYPD’s Inspector General. During that time, we issued several reports on systemic failures that were largely brushed aside by the NYPD’s top leadership and the Mayor. Most importantly, in 2018 we issued a Report that demonstrated that the NYPD repeatedly failed to properly investigate sexual assault and continuously failed to properly staff and train the officers responsible for these investigations. Despite the Report, and despite the protests and City Council hearings it fostered, the NYPD failed to take action on its most central recommendations.  

Moreover, these were not new problems. During our investigation into the Special Victims Division, we discovered that an internal 2010 report had come to the same training and staffing conclusions and thereafter there had been repeated complaints from the head of the unit about these problems. So, the NYPD had been ignoring these issues for at least eight years. The Mayor and Police Commissioner were unwilling to insist on key police reforms, even where rape cases were often poorly investigated or at times not investigated at all. According to the NYPD IG’s most recent Annual Report issued last year, over half of DOI’s recommendations regarding investigation of sexual assault remain unimplemented.

Another example – which has disturbing echoes of the problems identified by the Attorney General in her lawsuit – involves the NYPD’s reporting on use of force. In a lengthy Report in 2018, DOI found that the NYPD, despite promises to the contrary, was failing to properly monitor, track, and report on the use of force by its officers. Specifically, although the NYPD had created a Threat, Resistance or Injury (TRI) form to track use of force, too often officers either failed to fill out the form or did so improperly. Again, the Police Commissioner and the Mayor refused to make significant changes – as of the most recent reporting by the NYPD IG, over half of the recommendations have still not been fully implemented.

Indeed, according to the most recent Annual Report from the NYPD IG, just slightly over half of all recommendations made since 2014 by DOI to the NYPD have been fully implemented. And these recommendations themselves were the subject of extensive discussions between the IG and the Police Department before they were ever published. They are not recommendations issued in a vacuum without consideration of the realities of modern policing.

None of this is intended as an overall indictment of the 36,000 officers in the NYPD – the vast majority of whom do a difficult job exceedingly well. Indeed, calls to defund the police miss the mark and will not result in necessary reforms. We do not need a vastly smaller police force; we need a police force that reforms certain specific dangerous and unconstitutional practices. A federal monitor of, rather than defunding, the police is the best way to get there.

Two arguments have been raised in opposition to the Attorney General’s lawsuit: First, that the NYPD already has multiple monitors and second, that last summer’s protests presented a volatile situation that was difficult to police. While both statements are true, neither, as an argument, should prevail. As to the first, while there are multiple NYPD monitors, none, in this area, have the backing of a federal court and thus the NYPD has felt free to disregard the monitors’ recommendations. As to the second, policing protests is certainly difficult; however, that is exactly why it requires proper training and must be done correctly.

It is important to acknowledge that the monitor sought here would only deal with the one issue raised in the Attorney General’s lawsuit. Nevertheless, monitorships have been powerfully effective in the past, most recently in reducing the use of stop-and-frisk. A monitorship here could give the hardworking officers in the NYPD the tools they need and the training they deserve to be better partners with the community.

This Mayor and his police commissioners have repeatedly shown an unwillingness to make needed changes even when confronted with evidence of problems. If they haven’t taken steps they’ve known were needed for the last seven years, it’s hard to imagine they will do so now.  For this reason, we’ve reached the point where a federal monitor to force change on the NYPD is the best option for this Department.

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Mark Peters and Lesley Brovner are the founding partners of Peters Brovner, LLP and from 2014 to 2018 served as Commissioner and First Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Investigation, the City’s Inspector General.

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