Construction workers at work (photo: Edward Reed/Mayoral office)
New York City is on a long road for recovery from COVID-19. Many of us have a family member, friend, neighbor, or co-worker who has been directly infected with this horrible disease. Because of our tragic experience, New Yorkers recognize better than people from any place across the globe the importance of masks, social distancing, and handwashing, and we have transitioned from the epicenter to become one of the safest places in the country.
But while we have taken many necessary steps to combat the spread of COVID-19, the tragic loss of life has coincided with a demoralizing loss of livelihood. As a new federal administration prepares for the next four years, we need to focus on reviving our economy. Close to one million New Yorkers are out of work and the Partnership for the City of New York predicts that as many 75,000 small businesses may never reopen. Those are our neighbors, friends, and loved ones. Many are wondering how they’ll pay the rent or mortgage, get health care, or put food on the table.
At times of deep unemployment, infrastructure projects often provide an economic stimulus that can make a big difference in our neighborhoods. One of those projects is right here in Queens.
NRG plans to upgrade the technology at the Astoria Generating Station to make it much cleaner and much more efficient, providing an economic and environmental boost to a neighborhood that needs both. These are well-paying jobs with benefits. Many employees live in Astoria, supporting local businesses and helping to create even more jobs. They pay taxes and support community groups year-round.
This is one of the plants the state relies on to provide extra power when electricity demand surges. For example, if the plant hadn’t been activated during August’s tropical storm that resulted in massive blackouts across New York, hundreds of thousands more city residents could have lost power. Much of what took place in California is the direct result of shutting down power plants before there is adequate power generation to replace them.
That’s why NRG plans to replace these 50-year-old turbines with cleaner technology that will reduce peak air emission rates by 99% per hour. The project will create 175 new good-paying union jobs at a prevailing wage and with full benefits.
Many unions and labor organizations – including the 100,000-member Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York that I lead – are proud members of Climate Jobs NY. We’re dedicated to projects that meet the state’s aggressive commitment to addressing climate change, which this plan will do. The technology that our members will be installing in Astoria is fully convertible to hydrogen fuel in the future, giving New York State even greater opportunities to achieve its zero-carbon emission goals.
These jobs would come at a crucial time during this historic economic downturn. Right now, one in eight working-age adults in Queens is out of a job. If a second COVID-19 wave moves into New York City this winter, our economy is likely to take another hit.
In addition to the full-time jobs created at the work site, the project will create an additional 1,000 jobs—stemming from increased business at local restaurants, shops, and other businesses. In all, according to an independent economic study, the project stands to inject more than $325 million into the local economy, a crucial lifeline for countless small businesses that are struggling to get by.
Approving this project should be a no-brainer for the state. The new technology is available now, is better for the environment and helps the state meet its climate goals. It creates good-paying union jobs and supports the local economy in an area hit hard by the pandemic. It’s important that everyone understands what this project will bring, because we can’t continue to let some activists disrupt crucial opportunities to add jobs because of their narrow definition for what the borough and its people need.
And essentially, upgrading the Astoria plant ensures that New York City has reliable power at a time when demand is increasing. For all these benefits, the project doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. NRG is fully funding these improvements.
For all these reasons, let’s make sure the Astoria Replacement Project moves forward to help our communities. We can’t turn our backs on Queens.
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Gary LaBarbera is president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, an organization comprising local affiliates of 15 national and international unions representing 100,000 working men and women in New York City. On Twitter @NYCBldgTrades.
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Small donations can power campaigns (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
We’ve never seen this many candidates before. There are more than 300 declared candidates for New York City Council running in 2021, along with more than 50 running for positions like Borough President, City Comptroller, and Mayor. There are 51 City Council districts, so on average, voters will have six or more choices for their ranked-choice vote just for their local Council member in the June primaries. These unprecedented numbers demonstrate an unqualified success for the city’s campaign matching funds program that has recently been improved to lower contribution limits and increase public matching dollars.
In the middle of a global pandemic and widespread economic distress, matching funds are more important than ever. Here’s how the matching-funds program works. For every dollar up to $175 a New York City resident donates to a political campaign, the city adds eight dollars up to a total of $1,400 per contribution. There are strings attached for candidates. Candidates who opt-in must participate in debates, abide by a spending cap, and open their spending to increased scrutiny. Executed as intended, it’s a strong and balanced system benefiting smaller donors, candidates, and the public.
When the program was initially implemented in 1989 and altered several times, most recently through significant amendments in 2019, no one could have imagined the dual pandemic and economic crises that New York City would be facing for the 2021 city elections. New York State has no such program currently but will make one available for the 2024 elections. It’s a good thing the city has this program in place right now.
Still about seven months before the June primaries, there are already 50 more Council candidates than in all of either 2017 or 2013, the last two city government election cycles. And if this year follows historical rates of matchable contributions, the New York City Campaign Finance Board will pay out millions in its initial December 15 public funds payment on their way to tens of millions of dollars this cycle.
These public fund payments are crucial. They provide salaries for campaign workers and rent for office space. A candidate might have just a few thousand dollars in the bank right now, but can be owed tens of thousands more under this system. With New York City’s latest unemployment rate at over 13% and office vacancy rates at nearly 9%, these funds are a lifeline for campaigns and those who depend on them to be able to pay their bills and survive. And, of course, the funds pay for the distribution of important information via pamphlets, mailers, and digital advertisements that define and distinguish the candidates while informing the public. Community organizers have worked hard and hustled to raise funds from their neighbors. These public funds allow campaigns to swing into high gear.
Above all, each campaign represents a choice for voters as well as someone’s dream to serve their community. This program expands both. This year, in Manhattan, there were 14 candidates for seven contested state legislative races in the Democratic primary. Eleven seats saw incumbents run unopposed. For 2021, enabled by the matching funds program, there are already 54 announced candidates for City Council across ten races in the borough. All but one district has multiple candidates. Even more candidates are likely to announce. It’s clear that the availability of these public matching funds is enabling hundreds of New Yorkers to run for office and create more competitive elections.
The city’s matching funds program has already been proven to work. In the 2019 Public Advocate special election, small-dollar contributions went from about 25% of all funds raised to more than 66%, according to data from City Council Member Ben Kallos of Manhattan. That race drew 17 candidates, a harbinger of what was to come for 2021. New York City’s matching funds program means more candidates, better campaigns, and greater choices for voters at the ballot box.
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Martin Rather is the Co-Founder of The November Group, a NY Political Compliance Firm. On Facebook.
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Housing on the line (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor’s Office)
On the eve of the pandemic, I gathered with my neighbors outside their building in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx to sound an alarm. For those tenants, it wouldn’t be true to say that “crisis had hit home.” They had been steeped in crisis for some time.
For three decades, the landlord of 2201-2205 Davidson Avenue had racked up a $12.6 million debt in unpaid property taxes while the tenants lived with the unlivable: black mold that crept over lead-painted walls, rats that chewed through clothes and stoves, leaks that never stopped, elevators and hot water that hardly ran. Then, the investors that took over the building issued over a dozen eviction notices to tenants on rent strike.
At the press conference, tenants unfurled a banner from the fire escape that read: “We are ready to take control. NYC, are you ready?” It was February. By March, COVID-19 hit our city like a tsunami, plunging us deeper into housing, health, and economic crises. With winter upon us and COVID-19 cases on the rise again, tenants are bracing for our government to lift eviction bans come January.
My Bronx community in City Council District 14 is ground zero, with the highest rate of evictions in the city prior to the moratorium. We didn’t know it back in February, but the Davidson Avenue tenants’ message was pointing us towards what an equitable and just recovery requires: a path to community ownership to secure our future.
We know that the pandemic has shot unemployment rates to levels unseen since the Great Depression. When the Depression had reached its peak in the 1930s, landlords delivered hundreds of thousands of eviction notices to tenants unable to pay rent across the city. In response, Bronx residents mobilized for rent strikes and eviction blockades to prevent their neighbors from being thrown out on the streets. Similarly today, evictions are on the rise in the face of mass unemployment.
So I took to the streets with hundreds of tenants from across the city to end evictions and demand rent relief. Unwilling to stand idly by when millions of New Yorkers stand to lose our homes, in October we barricaded Broadway with furniture until police came to forcibly remove us. While we are clear in our demands of legislators to cancel rent and deliver a homes guarantee for our state, there are specific ways city officials must show leadership for a just recovery.
Now more than ever, we need short-term fixes, including an immediate extension of eviction moratorium and expansion of Right to Counsel in housing cases across the city, and long-term structural changes that democratize and decommodify housing.
We know this is possible during a crisis. We need only look to how our people commanded the government and banks to respond when our city nearly went bankrupt in the 1970s.
Planned shrinkage and racist redlining practices diverted investment and critical services away from poor and working class communities of color, and the Bronx was burning with landlord arson and abandonment. But our people organized to hold their landlords, government, and banks accountable and rebuilt our communities from the ground up. The city sold public land to our communities for cheap so they could launch cooperative and non-profit housing companies, and tenants passed legislation for rent stabilization to safeguard affordability.
I recently fought alongside a statewide coalition of tenant organizations to defend those laws and remove loopholes that landlords exploited to displace our people. When we won, we believed that it was our time to dream big again. Learning from history, now is the time to invest in real collective ownership over where we live — in transfer of land and supportive infrastructure to sustain it for the long haul.
Crisis brings into sharp focus inequities that were already present. It also presents an opportunity to come to new conclusions, to write new futures. We each have a choice to make about how we will show leadership in this moment. Our government could choose austerity and cutbacks that reinforce a system in service of wealth and power for the few. Or we can reach for solutions that put our people at the center and invest in long-term sustainability.
So what could real community ownership look like today in New York City? When Davidson Avenue tenants proclaimed to the world that they were ready to take control, they acknowledged that landlords, courts, banks, and their government had failed them. Instead, they would be prepared to own and govern the buildings they live in, collectively advancing a vision to steward land and stabilize our communities.
The City Council must support grassroots-led efforts for community ownership and social housing. Last month, as part of a city-wide movement, I joined Bronx residents at a town hall with Bronx Council members focused on resisting displacement, preserving long-term housing affordability, and establishing self-determination through transfering publicly-owned land to the Bronx Community Land Trust. Land in our city should not be a commodity. It is our urban commons — something we all need to share in order to survive and to live with dignity. We’re on the precipice of the biggest homelessness crisis that the city has seen in decades. But we can’t be evicted if we own where we live.
“How do we live like this?” a nine-year-old boy asked when he took the mic at that press conference. I felt his question in my bones. By age 12, my family had moved from one dilapidated building to the next, never finding the security we deserved, never able to afford better on my mother’s salary as a home health aide. It’s the kind of experience that will lead you to read a speech with shaking hands in the freezing cold before a row of cameras. It will fuel you to fight with your community so that no family ever has to feel that powerless. It will move you to run for public office to push these aspirations in the City Council.
By dropping that banner, my fellow Bronxites were issuing a call across the city to everyday people — poor and working class, Black and brown, immigrant and worker, queer and gender-nonconforming, elder and youth. Our people are calling for emergency actions and long-term solutions. It is time for our representatives to get on the same page. Instead of putting bandaids over deep-rooted inequities, let’s guarantee our people’s shelter, health and wellbeing. Let’s make sure we all have the freedom to thrive.
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Adolfo Abreu is a candidate for New York City Council in District 14, in the Bronx. On Twitter @Adolfo4Council.
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