Mayor de Blasio doing Census work (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
When our communities are undercounted in the Census—as seems sure to happen in light of the recent Supreme Court decision—it costs us seats in Congress and money for local schools, health services, food assistance, highway construction, and many other services. When our communities are not counted in land use decisions, it costs people their housing, their small businesses, their social networks, and their culture.
With so much on the line, the City of New York developed a $40 million program to ensure a full Census count in New York City. A major component was the $19 million “NYC Complete Count Fund,” which allocated money to more than 150 community organizations to reach people across races, ethnicities, and over 80 languages. For the Census, the city made extraordinary efforts to reach into all minority and immigrant communities, knowing their residents are at highest risk of not being counted.
By contrast, for land use decisions the city ignores race and ethnicity, and assumes all residents, business owners, and employees are equally likely to be displaced or to benefit from a rezoning or other major land use action.
We commend the de Blasio administration’s critically important efforts to reach historically undercounted populations for the Census. Every New Yorker, regardless of citizenship, neighborhood, or culture should participate without fear or worse, apathy. With the Census, City Hall values our diverse communities in federal dollars. With land use, City Hall does not seem to value the authentic small businesses, arts districts, and unique cultures in our diverse communities—the enduring cultural legacies that make New York the city it is.
The opportunity presented by the city’s Census work provides a template for land use planning, and it’s time to follow it.
The city can create a more equitable and inclusive land use process by incorporating data, specifically about race and ethnicity. The current city process routinely ignores race and ethnicity by minimizing assessment of risks disproportionately concentrated with residents of color and minority-owned businesses. Yet many predominantly-minority neighborhoods that have been targeted for city-backed rezoning—the Bay Street Corridor on Staten Island, Jerome Avenue and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, East New York and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and East Harlem in Manhattan—are areas in the bottom 20% of Census self-response rate nationally, and where the city makes special efforts to count people for the Census.
Given its intentional outreach for the Census, the mayoral administration should make a similar effort when it comes to land use changes, especially since the Census has been prematurely cut off, imperiling New York’s federal funding stream and making local resource allocations all the more consequential. And major land use decisions have impacts that extend far beyond the next decade.
A bill that has been proposed in the City Council, mandating the use of a Racial Impact Study in major land use actions, offers a step forward. This bill would require the city to consider the likelihood of disproportionate impacts across racial and ethnic groups of proposed land use changes. By requiring the city to break out impacts by race and ethnicity, the city could identify negative impacts on specific groups before they occur and thus take steps to avoid such harm while fostering development that equitably distributes benefits of land use changes, growth, and public and private investment.
Racial impact studies are entirely feasible, as other cities like Seattle and Minneapolis have demonstrated. Any argument that this is too cumbersome to require in the Environmental Review process ignores disparate impacts unmitigated development can cause. These neighborhoods need investments in critical resources like schools, libraries, and transportation options in ways that do not create displacement pressure.
The changes seen in Williamsburg-Greenpoint and Park Slope-Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn have been calculated on the back end. Retrospective analysis has shown the folly of omitting a critical racial lens from decision-making. In these neighborhoods, despite overall population increases in the years after the rezoning, thousands of Black and Latino families have been forced out.
We applaud the city’s substantial Census effort to ensure that every New Yorker counts. But now that the door has been slammed in our face by Trump and the Supreme Court, we have to make sure another door opens. Help us pressure the City Council to pass the requirement of a Racial Impact Study.
When we are all taken into account, our communities win.
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Alex Fennell is Racial Impact Study Coalition Coordinator. Maxwell Cabello is an urban planner and housing policy analyst. Paul Epstein is Co-chair Inwood Legal Action. Robert Jackson is the New York State Senator for District 31 in Manhattan.
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Council Member Justin Brannan, the author, with constituents and allies
As the City Council Member representing the 43rd District in Brooklyn, I represent the largest Arab community in the City of New York. This community has weaved itself into the complex fabric of my district, especially in Bay Ridge, where our avenues are lined with Arab-owned businesses, and several non-profit organizations that have been serving Arab-Americans and Arab immigrants for decades. I am proud to serve this community, and proud that its members are a part of what makes our district so unique.
Which is why every time Election Day rolls around, when I start to get calls from constituents complaining that there is once again no Arabic translation available at poll sites, I am totally distressed. Despite major efforts by groups attempting to turn out the Arab vote in recent years, voters continue to show up at the polls hoping for assistance, only to be turned away. Not only are translators not provided, but if campaigns or other organizations try to bring in their own to assist a voter, they are summarily denied access to the polls. It is clear the Arab community wants to vote and wants to participate, but its members are not given the assistance they need to fully do so.
The problem: in order to ensure ongoing translation services in a particular language, a community has to reach a threshold percentage of residents who speak that language, and the state Board of Elections will then consider adding that language to the ballot. Unfortunately for my district, this data comes from the Census, which presents a unique challenge for the Arab community, because “Arab” is not an option on the Census – Arabs are told to check “white.” This has led, as I have written in the past, to countless issues of under-representation and underfunding for our neighborhood – it simply looks like a large community of color does not live here when, empirically, anyone who spends more than five minutes in my district knows that is not the case. And the fact that this year’s Census looks like it will lead to a drastic undercount does not bode any better for the next decade.
In absence of state-level action on this issue, I introduced legislation in 2018 in the hopes that the City would provide the funding and staffing for supplementary translation services at the polls – as they do with several other languages that haven’t met the state thresholds, like Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. While City Hall has shown little interest in making this happen, the new city Civic Engagement Commission has finally made some progress -- it will pilot a new program this election cycle, which will provide Arabic translation separate from the Board of Elections at four poll sites, including the last two days of early voting (October 31 and November 1).
This is great news for our district, but it is not a permanent solution. We need reliable, regular language translation for Arabic speakers at our poll sites.
Translation at the polls is not a luxury or a privilege. Every citizen has a right to vote, and it is a right that new Americans deeply treasure. New Americans go through months of study, English classes, paperwork and appointments, and expensive filing fees to be able to become citizens – so when the time comes to vote, can you blame them that they want to participate and do it correctly? Specifically, so many of my constituents come from countries whose implementation of democracy is unreliable at best. They want to vote the way they wish, they want to vote correctly, and they want their vote to be valid and secure.
I often hear criticism that we shouldn’t need translation at the polls, because anyone who is a citizen passed an English test, and at this I cannot help but laugh. Ballots in recent years have been multiple pages long, they’ve included information on city- and state-wide referendums that are described in multiple paragraphs in barely readable fonts, they’ve included ballots that instruct you to choose multiple judges, or multiple presidential delegates – three candidates in one column, one in another. It is enough to confuse many native English speakers and lead to many invalidated ballots! Yet, all of these are choices that any citizen who pays taxes and participates in this community deserves to weigh in on, and they should not be prevented from doing so because of their level of English reading comprehension.
When we do not assure a community that voting will be easy, safe, secure, and valid, a community will not show up in its full capacity. And that’s the case with ALL communities. When voters hear about long lines at poll sites, invalidated ballots, broken machines – they don’t show up. Language access is no different. By refusing to have Arabic translation at the polls, we are telling the Arab community – a community that has fought so hard for representation – that its votes do not matter. We simply cannot do that in our modern democracy. Not for any community, but certainly not for one with so much on the line.
The Arab community has a lot at stake in this election. Its members’ home countries are in the midst of political upheavals, viruses, economic upswings and downturns. In the U.S., federally, they face the prospect of restrictions to immigration reform, travel bans, and a rise in Islamophobia. And locally, these are families who want to have a say in who represents them in elected office, their schools, their public transportation systems, their housing. It is unjust that the Arab community is so often the subject of headlines, but its members are being denied an opportunity to control their futures.
While I’m glad that Arabic translation will be provided at a few poll sites this year thanks to the efforts of the Civic Engagement Commission, it is crucial that we get this pilot right, and that we come up with a permanent solution for all poll sites. It is the right thing to do at any time, but particularly when so much is at stake.
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Justin Brannan is a member of the City Council representing parts of Brooklyn. On Twitter @JustinBrannan.
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Eric Adams at a Brooklyn business (photo: @BKBoroHall)
At the height of the pandemic New York City did the unthinkable in the city that never sleeps: it closed up shop. To stop the spread and protect lives, we shut down everything—including the tens of thousands of small businesses that are the backbone of our local economy.
The sacrifice was immense. New Yorkers gave up their livelihoods and put their American dreams on hold. Some lost everything.
It did not have to be this way. One good thing that Washington did during the crisis was to fund a lifeline for small businesses. Hundreds of billions of dollars of federal relief was applied in the form of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). But far too little of that money ended up in the hands of small business owners in New York.
Why? Bias and greed. The big banks that were the main conduit for the funds did not have preexisting relationships with small businesses that needed help, especially those owned by people of color. So those businesses were often either denied the loans or outright ignored. Even worse, while the biggest banks were excluding small businesses, they were funneling PPP money to huge corporations that already had lucrative relationships with the nation’s largest lenders.
It may go down as the largest rip-off in the history of the United States—and it happened in our backyard; most of these banks are headquartered in New York. While they were arranging for big restaurant chains and major retailers to get fat government checks from the top floor of their skyscrapers, locally-owned eateries and gift shops on the bottom floor were closing forever.
Mad yet? No? This should do it: not only were those banks taking money that New York’s small businesses desperately needed and doling it out to their friends at Fortune 500 companies, but they were simultaneously getting city tax breaks.
Citibank, for example, has received more than $100 million from New York City taxpayers over the past 30 years. What did we get in return? The bank cut its city workforce in half.
Then, after covid hit, news reports were everywhere that Citibank was relocating its remaining workers to the suburbs. At the same time, analyses of their PPP loans and that of other big banks shows they favored their very wealthy clients and corporate customers over small businesses.
As the center of global commerce, New York has helped build big banks, providing the talent and tax breaks they relied on to create immense wealth. In return, the financial sector has been an important source of jobs and tax revenue for our city.
In this time of crisis, those banks should provide significantly more new small business loans and capital to boost our recovery than they have committed to so far, and hold firm on the employment promises they made in the past. In this respect, JP Morgan deserves credit for moving forward with its new headquarters in Manhattan, and being vocal about getting its employees back to work in the city.
And Citibank has also now committed to buying $50 million in loans made under PPP by smaller lenders to city employers, and making another $1 billion in loans nationwide designed to close the racial wealth gap. But if past is precedent, we can’t just take them at their word. New York City government should instead take steps to ensure big banks better serve New Yorkers going forward.
First, let’s use our leverage as a major regulator and customer of big banks. The City’s Banking Commission -- which has a three-member board of the mayor, city comptroller, and commissioner of the Department of Finance -- has the power to determine which banks can operate here, hold city government’s billions of dollars in deposits, and handle our bond issues. Our comptroller also plays a key role in choosing which banks manage our pension funds.
That’s a lot of leverage to force big banks to do right by New Yorkers. We should use it. We should also use the city’s deposits to significantly expand the program to capitalize local lenders, referred to as CDFIs, who loan to our smaller employers and already have deep relationships with minority-owned businesses.
Finally, there are 360,000 households in New York that are unbanked and another 780,000 households that are underbanked, meaning they rely on sketchy services such as check cashing and payday loan parlors. The city should work with landlords and larger banks to offer discounted space -- which is unfortunately now much more available -- in lower-income communities to open branches to help those New Yorkers improve credit, access financial tools, and build savings and wealth. And those banks should hire locally for those branches.
What happened to New York’s small businesses during the covid crisis is a crime. If we don’t toughen up and show some teeth, nothing will improve. If we don’t stand up for our small businesses, who will?
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Eric L. Adams is the Brooklyn Borough President. On Twitter @ericadamsfornyc.
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