A plan for internet access at school and home (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
The coronavirus pandemic has shown all of us the importance of a reliable high-speed home internet connection, whether for remote learning and working from home or for gathering virtually with loved ones. There is a common cliché that “the virus doesn’t discriminate,” but the reality is that coronavirus disproportionately harms low-income communities of color impacted by systemic racism in government and the private sector.
With many households in these communities lacking high-speed internet, the shift to social distancing has been particularly challenging. As we prepare for a second wave, or for the next virus, we must rebuild our society with the guarantee of universal broadband—finally treating the internet as a utility like phone service or electricity. We must use all of New York City’s local regulatory power to deliver on the promise of universal broadband by establishing a Universal Internet Guarantee.
Mayor de Blasio recently took a step in the right direction when he announced $157 million in funding to expand broadband internet access to 600,000 underserved New Yorkers, including 200,000 public housing residents. But New York City’s public housing authority (NYCHA) has 173,762 public housing units, home to 381,159 authorized residents, and this plan could still leave half without internet. More than 1.5 million New Yorkers do not have broadband, and this plan would leave nearly 1 million of them on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide.’
To deliver truly universal broadband, we need several fixes at once. We could start with rezoning to require affordable Mandatory Inclusionary Internet, just like we required affordable housing with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. We could create incentives for 5G providers to offer affordable access. We can require cable providers to expand affordable internet offerings we already won to every single low-income New Yorker. And if the providers won’t do it, we can take over their networks and do it ourselves by establishing a municipal broadband network.
We can upgrade existing infrastructure by speeding along the conversion of old payphones into free internet kiosks and add WiFi to bus stops. We can even open up the city government’s wireless network to the public.
The pandemic has shown us the importance of giving every public school student who needs one a laptop and affordable broadband in the home to eliminate the ‘homework gap’ (that became a ‘schoolwork gap’ during the pandemic) and give a whole new generation a real chance at equity. Where all else fails, for those we still haven’t reached in low-income communities of color, we must invest the millions promised by the mayor in businesses owned and operated by women and people of color to spur innovation and connect every last New Yorker.
In partnership together, with an eye toward each of our roles in the city’s franchising, we have authored a report that focuses on some of the most important aspects of the digital divide and proposed solutions to help close it and bring us closer to the equitable New York City we need to move toward immediately.
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Eric Adams is the Brooklyn Borough President and has a vote on internet franchises through the FCRC. Ben Kallos is a New York City Council Member with a vote on internet franchise authorizations in the City Council. On Twitter @BKBoroHall & @BenKallos.
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Housing is the focus (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Over the next several months, New York City will continue deciding how to disperse roughly $34 million in federal Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) and related funds that are available for the current period. However, at this juncture, the magnitude and intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects suggest strongly that going forward the money should go to community-based groups focused on meeting two urgent needs: relieving hunger and preventing homelessness.
CSBG funds are made available under a federal program that has existed nationwide since the 1960s War on Poverty. In New York City, determining how to spend them involves collaborative work between 41 Neighborhood Advisory Boards (NABs), designated as “representatives of the poor,” and the Community Action Board (CAB) under the supervision of the City’s Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). The work typically begins with a roughly four-month long triennial exercise known as a Community Needs Assessment, an information-gathering and analysis process by the NABs of their communities. Ultimately, requests for proposals (RFPs) to address those needs are issued by the DYCD to community-based service-providers, based on the findings of these assessments.
The most recent Community Needs Assessment wrapped up in the autumn of 2019, and the NABs had submitted their recommendations to DYCD shortly before the pandemic struck the city in March 2020. For the past eight months, the issuance of RFPs based on these recommendations has, like much of life in New York City, been in limbo. They’re now expected to go out in the next couple of weeks; a realistic timeline for disbursing funds is perhaps the fall of 2021, or even later.
In preparing the RFPs and in evaluating the responses to them, DYCD should give added weight to meeting the city’s hunger and homelessness emergencies over less-pressing demands.
First as to hunger: According to the nonprofit organization Feeding America (perhaps the nation’s largest hunger relief organization), by the end of 2020 an estimated 19% of New York State residents will be struggling to put food on the table. That’s up from 11% in 2018. Feeding America also expects a greater rate of food insecurity to persist well into the post-pandemic period. This worsening hunger scenario is also confirmed by the experiences of non-profit organizations such as Staten Island’s Project Hospitality, which lately has reportedly been distributing about 2,000 meals a week across that borough, and Manhattan’s Urban Outreach Center, which regularly feeds many hungry people from all across the city. Ominously, the ranks of the food-insecure include college students, single mothers, new immigrants, and homeless or displaced young people.
The immediate and long-term outlook on homelessness is also grim. At mid-November, New York City’s daily headcount of people in homeless shelters hovered around the 54,000 mark. There is little doubt that number will rise dramatically if existing eviction and foreclosure moratoriums lapse at year’s end. Even if extended, it’s just a moratorium: tenants, many of them deprived of income during the pandemic, will still eventually owe all their back rent. Absent emergency federal help to tenants, the city will, in the recent words of New School housing policy expert Alex Schwartz, “experience a rise in homelessness the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”
Making the specters of both hunger and homelessness even worse is the fact that there are many thousands of previously employed undocumented immigrant city dwellers who were unfortunately left out of the federal COVID-19 stimulus assistance payments who have now tumbled into poverty.
There is no need to start from scratch in addressing these problems. For instance, hunger alleviation services could be boosted in the various programs where they already exist, such as in family support programs touching on nutrition assistance or in runaway and homeless youth programs that furnish food, clothing, and even shelter assistance to its clients. The same goes for housing assistance programs focused on landlord neglect and foreclosure prevention. Such programs also have the ability to refer clients to city agencies in situations where the needs of clients fall outside their portfolios – for instance, cash assistance for renters, which can be available through the city’s Human Resources Administration.
It’s also essential that the program partners who are contracted to provide the services have solid on-the-ground experience with the tasks to be undertaken. This can no doubt be accomplished via appropriate qualifying specifications for prospective service-providers.
Let me end with two caveats. First, this is a prescription for fighting extraordinary conditions. After the worst effects of the pandemic dissipate, CSBG grants can be reallocated to address a wider range of needs. And second, we should all recognize that $34 million certainly isn’t enough to slay the two-headed monster of hunger and homelessness in poor neighborhoods throughout the city. But by putting it in the right hands of community-based organizations with proven track records, it can make a real difference. In the current emergency, this is what we need to do.
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Carl Unegbu is a lawyer and Vice Chair of the Neighborhood Advisory Board (NAB) 12 in Manhattan. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not in any way represent the opinions or position of any entity or agency, including the Neighborhood Advisory Board and the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD).
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Farmed mink peeking out of its nest box (Truth About Fur)
Since it was learned that COVID-19 can pass from humans to mink, farmers in the United States have put in place strict biosecurity protocols to protect their animals, their families, and public health. But instead of supporting farmers through this difficult period, animal activists -- like Priscilla Feral, who wrote about "The Covid Mink Slaughter" in these pages last week -- are fanning fears that new mink-specific variants of the virus could reduce the efficacy of vaccines, and are calling for a ban mink farming and the sale of all furs.
In fact, public health authorities do not support such extreme measures. After concerns raised in Denmark led to the culling of mink there, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control concluded, in November, that the risk to human health posed by mink-related variants of SARS-CoV-2 is low for the general public.
Similarly, leading U.S. virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “It does not appear at present that the mutation that has been identified in mink will affect vaccines or the immune effect of vaccines.”
Rather than culling – let alone an end to mink farming -- the USDA, the CDC, the U.S. Veterinary Diagnostics Lab, State Veterinarians, and other authorities recommend precautionary measures, including employee screening and testing, PPE, and restricted access to the animals. This is exactly what mink farmers are doing, in close cooperation with their state agriculture and health departments.
The real goal of some animal activists, however, is not to protect farms, but vegetarianism and the elimination of all animal agriculture. The real issue, some like Feral argue, is that “humans continue to treat animals as a means to a human goal and not sentient beings worthy of their own rights to live their natural lives undisturbed.”
The problem for animal activists is that most Americans do eat meat and dairy, and wear leather, wool, and other animal products. So fur is seen as a convenient thin edge of the wedge, and mink farming is condemned as “cruel” and “unnecessary”.
Cruel? U.S. mink farmers work hard to provide their animals with excellent nutrition and care, as this is the only way to produce the high quality fur that the U.S. is known for. Mink farmers follow strict operating guidelines developed by veterinarians, animal scientists and animal-welfare authorities to ensure the health and welfare of their animals.
Unnecessary? Fur today is sustainably and responsibly produced; it is a hand-crafted, long-lasting, and biodegradable, natural clothing material.
By contrast, the fake furs and other synthetics proposed by animal activists are generally made with petroleum, a non-renewable and non-biodegradable resource. These synthetics leach millions of micro-particles of plastic into our waterways each time they are washed; plastics that are now being found in marine life around the globe. Cruelty-free indeed!
Mink are raised on small, family-run farms, supporting employment in rural communities. Mink are fed leftovers from our own food production, the parts of cattle, poultry, and fish we don’t eat, and that might otherwise end up in landfills. Mink manure and remains are composted to produce organic fertilizers, completing the agricultural nutrient cycle.
As for the new risks posed by COVID-19, mink farmers take their biosecurity responsibilities very seriously, to protect their livelihoods, their animals, their families, and their communities.
When swine flu and avian flu were detected on farms, we didn’t ban pork or chicken production; farmers and health authorities worked together to responsibly resolve the problems. And that is exactly what we are doing now.
No one forces anyone to wear fur or leather, or to eat meat or dairy. But this does not give animal activists the right to attack the reputations and livelihoods of farm families. This is a time when we should be supporting farmers, not attacking them.
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Alan Herscovici is Senior Writer & Researcher at Truth About Fur. On Twitter @TruthAboutFur.
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