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New York History Offers Insights for Governor Hochul


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Gov. Hochul in the Hall of Governors (photo: governor's office of Kathy Hocul)


Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent State of the State address promised a new era of political collaboration and offered a sweeping agenda to improve the state. “We will share success,” she promised. “We will find common ground. We will restore trust in this government.”

At the same time, she exhibited a personal modesty that set her apart from her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I didn’t come here to make history,” she said. “I came to make a difference.”  

As historian Allan Nevins wrote, "to be governor of New York…was to occupy a position which might be distinguished or unimportant, according to the man who held it." Governor Hochul may not have come to Albany to make history but she has already done so just by being the first woman to hold that position and by restoring decorum and public confidence in the Executive Chamber.

“I have a deep reverence for our state’s remarkable past,” she said in her address. There may be some helpful insights from that remarkable past, particularly the strategies of New York’s strongest previous governors, that she could find helpful. 

Define An Expansive Vision
Great governors offer dramatic visions for their state and proceed to make them real. Gov. DeWitt Clinton (1817-23, 1825-27) championed constructing the Erie Canal, from Troy to Buffalo, the nation's most important public works project in the 19th century. The canal was a dramatic success that propelled New York City and State to national preeminence. Clinton was a visionary (foreseeing the canal as an engine for growth), advocate (crafting appeals to bring together "communities of interest": agriculture, commerce and manufacturing) and leader (negotiating approval from a factious legislature). 

He was also a shrewd administrator. He worked out financing to build the canal entirely from state resources, particularly bonds.  He realized that either starting at the Hudson River in Troy and building westward, or at Lake Erie at Buffalo and building eastward, might mean that the canal stopped mid-state if resources or public support waned, Clinton shrewdly began construction at Rome in 1817. That was near the middle of the state where costs were lowest. Building both east and west, toward the Hudson and Lake Erie, encouraged continued statewide legislative and public support until the enterprise was completed in 1825.

Hochul’s speech provided her take on New York’s inspirational historical greatness. “While we may be imperfect, New Yorkers have always been the risk-takers, entrepreneurs, the innovators, the builders, the immigrants, the students, the true believers and the dreamers who know that there truly is only one New York”

Demonstrate Highly-Visible Personal Leadership
George Clinton, New York's first and longest-tenured governor (1777-95, 1801-04), set the tone for taking bold action when models were lacking. Clinton, a patriot general fighting the British when he was elected, expressed determination in his first speech to be a strong governor and to  "exercise for the advantage of the people the powers with which they have invested me." That set the tone for the history of executive leadership in New York.

After his inauguration, Governor Clinton resumed command of patriot troops fighting in the Hudson Valley. As his military duties eased, he turned full-time to the precedent-setting work as governor. He set up state government, established New York's first system of taxation and fiscal management, and supported public education and the building of roads and early canals. 

In 1786, the governor personally commanded state militia troops to confront an armed anti-tax uprising that had started in Massachusetts and threatened to spread into New York. Two years later, he led the militia in suppressing a riot in New York City. The governor, on the front lines, was injured when a rioter threw a rock. 

Act Boldly In Crises
Hochul has promised to confront COVID- 19, stem New York’s loss of population, and substantially strengthen public education. She is aligning with successful governors who take charge and dramatically meet critical issues.

Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1929-1933), alarmed by rising unemployment during the Great Depression after the Stock Market “crash” of 1929, called the legislature into emergency session in August 1931. “New York cannot wait,” he warned in a dramatic address to the lawmakers. “You face… the problem of providing immediate relief." 

He proposed a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), its name strategically selected to connote urgency but also impermanence. This strategy addressed the need for immediate action but also disarmed critics who accused Roosevelt of pushing New York into a permanent welfare state mode.

FDR skillfully outmaneuvered his Republican opponents in the legislature by threatening to veto their weak alternative proposal and blame them for inaction. The opposition folded and the TERA bill passed. The new agency improvised and succeeded, and became a model for similar New Deal recovery and relief agencies when Roosevelt became president in 1933. As federal programs ramped up, the need for the state program diminished and, true to FDR’s promise, TERA expired in 1937.

Hochul already has FDR in mind as a model. “First as governor and then as president, FDR literally rebuilt the economy from the ground up after the crash of 1929,” she said in her inaugural address. “More than giving people jobs, he gave people hope.”

Blend Short-Term Wins With Long-Term Impact
Governor Theodore Roosevelt (1899-1901) is a good model of executive energy (he often walked briskly several blocks from the Executive Mansion and bounded up the Capitol steps two at a time); openness (twice-daily candid interviews with reporters); and pragmatic compromise (keeping the public interest paramount but dealing with the political reality of political parties dominated by bosses). U.S. Senator Thomas Platt, the de facto head of the state Republican Party, later recalled that TR had promised to consult him on policy and appointments. “He religiously fulfilled this pledge,” said Platt, “although he frequently did just what he pleased.” 

Roosevelt chalked up some impressive short-term achievements. He persuaded the legislature to pass a law to tax business franchises despite opposition from within his own Republican Party. TR was the first governor to issue an order mandating the cleanup of a waterway. He also left a long-term legacy. A commission he appointed recommended abandoning the by-then-aging Erie Canal in favor of a modern, new Barge Canal, finally achieved in 1903 (and still in operation today). Another commission recommended consolidation of scattered state education policy in a new State Education Department. TR endorsed it but political bickering delayed implementation until 1904.

Manage State Finances
Many governors have won initial public confidence by committing to cut waste and reign in non-essential public spending. Hochul has promised more efficient state spending and tax relief for New York’s middle class. Effective fiscal management is a hallmark of New York’s leading governors.

"New York faces the problem of fitting the aspirations of public service into the reduced limits of its treasury," said Governor Herbert Lehman (1933-42) during his first inaugural address, in the depths of the Great Depression. He had inherited a $106 million state deficit. Lehman got a fiscal break. As the Depression waned and military spending at the beginning of World War II ramped up, state tax revenues increased. Lehman made the most of public resources. He was a skilled administrator who dramatically expanded social programs, unemployment, and other areas. He left the state with an $80 million surplus in 1942.

These examples suggest that successful New York governors are strong leaders, visionary but also pragmatic, idealists but also political realists, flexible but also principled and steadfast. Hochul should find that their strategies and tactics are worthy of consideration as she forges ahead with her governorship.

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Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, NY. SUNY Press is publishing the second edition of his book  The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and his new book The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era later this year.

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In the Face of Anti-Asian Violence, We Want Budget Justice


(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

A remembrance for Michelle Alyssa Go (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Over Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed from the Times Square subway platform to her death. This tragedy follows a year that saw a 361% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes and came less than two weeks after Mayor Adams announced his plans to increase police presence in the subway system. Much like the federal response to the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, where money poured into local police departments under the guise of fighting anti-Asian hate crimes, we are once again seeing our government prioritize turning to the police to solve issues of public safety. 

Around the country, Asian Americans have grappled with what community safety might look like amid a pandemic, a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and calls to defund the police. But in response to tragic and awful incidents of violence against Asian Americans, as Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigration Coalition correctly argues, “we can’t police our way out of this.”

Not only is throwing more police at the problem of anti-Asian violence incongruous after sustained uprisings against police brutality, but it also does little to prevent this violence. The root of anti-Asian violence is not individual acts of hate or even so-called “random attacks,” but rather white supremacy and austerity that seeds systemic violence. Instead of expanding policing, New York City must turn its attention to budget justice.

In addition to divesting from the police, the road to justice requires direct democracy on how and where to spend public dollars. Direct democratic initiatives like participatory budgeting (PB) can help us articulate concrete, tractable policy demands for community safety for all New Yorkers.

Through PB, everyday residents, rather than elected representatives, decide how public dollars are spent. Gathering online and in person, residents connect with one another, weigh community needs, and develop new projects.

This year, for example, the New York City Civic Engagement Commission, with leadership, brainstorming, and decision-making from young people ages 9 to 24, invested $100,000 in youth organizations to make the city safer. Past projects funded through other PB programs include innovative bystander/“upstander” training for those hoping to safely intervene when they witness harassment or violence. In City Council District 39, residents voted to fund self-defense workshops for Bangladeshi and Muslim women. They did so as a true statement of racial solidarity; neighbors helping neighbors get what they need.

In 2019, we saw a record breaking 33 City Council members participate in PB to bring direct democracy to their districts. However, due to COVID-19, funding and participation was cut short in 2020 and the project was shelved when our communities needed help the most. But thankfully, vocal advocacy has renewed this vital form of community engagement and this year 15 Council members are running PB.

The connection between budget justice and racial justice is not a new idea. During the summer of 2020, Occupy City Hall to Defund NYPD camped out in front of City Hall for more than a month, asking for at least $1 billion to be cut from the police budget and invested back into communities. The Movement For Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, has also articulated direct democratic community control, and specifically PB, as central to anti-racist work.

New York City must combine participatory budgeting with calls to defund the police, to satisfy both the need to divest and invest parts of the budget justice equation. During summer 2020, a group of Brooklyn City Council candidates, including myself, wrote about how to use the power of City Council to defund the police, arguing that community control of public budgets includes the expansion and much-needed reform of participatory budgeting as well as removing police from social services and the school system. Only through investing in the services that heal our communities and address austerity can we create the conditions for real public safety.

In Council District 39 (represented by one of the authors), the Participatory Budgeting District Committee is currently leading its 11th cycle. It joins 14 other Council districts in implementing PB this year, despite difficult pandemic conditions. Whereas electoral politics typically engage with well-resourced constituents, PB can engage traditionally marginalized ones, including non-citizens, undocumented immigrants, and youth. In many districts, PB has successfully and intentionally centered marginalized voices and transferred power to women of color in meetings – often through simple, thoughtful acts like repeated invitations, childcare provision, and having appropriate snacks on hand.

Impressively, research coordinated by the Community Development Project shows that one-quarter of PB participants in New York City reported being ineligible to vote in regular elections, and that Asian American participation in PB was almost three times higher than in regular local elections.

Participatory budgeting needs more resources and thoughtful implementation to be successful. At its best, PB enables us to fund and practice new forms of critical care and racial solidarity. But without an explicit focus on equity and training for city workers as well as participants, PB can be set up to fail. Well-resourced groups can dominate the process, and innovative project proposals can be dismissed as “unrealistic” or discarded because of technicalities rather than substance.

The creative and impactful community projects highlighted above only came about when PB was expanded to potentially include short-term projects alongside long-term infrastructure. Participatory Budgeting is inherently political, and should be explicitly tied to budget justice and racial equity goals, such as those coordinated by the city’s Racial Justice Commission. With citywide participatory budgeting’s future now in limbo because Mayor de Blasio never adequately funded it, the new mayor and new Council speaker must resuscitate PB, with these priorities in mind. For the long-term safety of all New Yorkers, we can’t afford not to.

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City Council Member Shahana Hanif represents District 39, including the neighborhoods of Borough Park, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Kensington, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace. Professor Celina Su is the Marilyn Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. On Twitter @celinasu and @ShahanaFromBK.

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Housing Courts Must Change: Every Tenant Should Have Right to Counsel as Eviction Moratorium Lifts


(photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)

New York housing (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


New York City’s Right to Counsel (RTC) has proven to be successful at stopping evictions and protecting tenants’ rights. Evictions in New York City have plummeted, landlords are suing tenants less, and almost everyone who fights their eviction with an RTC attorney stays in their homes. This has been especially true during the pandemic. Amidst ever-changing laws and complicated government relief programs and administrative orders, RTC has been critical.

And it’s now even more critical with the expiration of the state’s eviction protections.

When the RTC law first passed, almost no tenants had attorneys when facing eviction in court. This meant that in order to get to a place where all income-eligible tenants had RTC (about 65-80% of tenants in court at the time), legal services organizations needed time to hire, train, and support the new attorneys, paralegals, and support staff.

In the last four years, New York City went from less than 100 tenant attorneys to over 600. In addition, the city’s Office of Civil Justice (OCJ) needed time to set up the infrastructure, coordinate with the state-run courts to implement this first-in-the-nation, new legal right. For all of these reasons and more, RTC had a five-year phase-in plan, giving the city until July 2022 to fully implement RTC for all eligible New York City tenants. However, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this timeline could no longer be justified.

The pandemic has devastated our city in so many ways. More than 400,000 New York City households are unable to pay rent, owing over $1 billion in rent. While the state’s rent relief program has helped, it is not enough. And it won’t keep tenants out of court. The rent relief program and myriad of other laws passed by the State Legislature created a confusing set of rights that landlords will surely take advantage of, as they have across the country. Tenants deserve to have their rights defended, making Right to Counsel so incredibly critical at this moment.

Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the city recognized that it could no longer move some cases forward with an attorney and others without – everyone deserves representation in court regardless of income. While this shift in implementation happened in part because so few cases were moving forward thanks to the various eviction moratoria, it was the right response morally. Our bill, recently made into law, made this model permanent, speeding up the full implementation of RTC by more than a year.

While the income restrictions haven’t been lifted under the law (this is something our statewide RTC bill would do), New York City has granted a blanket income waiver to all cases allowing legal services providers to represent tenants regardless of income.

This is an amazing victory for tenants. But, how will it work?

If there wasn’t enough legal capacity for all income eligible tenants before the pandemic, how will there be enough now given the unprecedented number of families we expect landlords will sue as soon as the eviction protections lift? How can we ensure legal services providers won’t enforce the income restrictions themselves, as a way to protect their capacity? How can we ensure that legal services aren’t overwhelmed with cases and that tenants get the thorough and zealous defense they deserve? After all, as our eviction crisis monitor shows, the neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19 are also being targeted for evictions. It would be unconscionable if these mostly Black and brown tenants could not get the representation they deserve. 

The answer is simple: Move only the cases where tenants are represented forward and adjourn all the rest until the legal services organizations have capacity to take more cases.

These adjournments happen in other courts, like family court, where there is a Right to Counsel. There is a legal basis for judges to grant repeat adjournments for the assignment of counsel and due process requires it, plus judges have a broad discretion to adjourn cases as they see fit. Thanks to New York State’s Housing Stability Tenant Protection Act, housing court judges have much greater ability to adjourn cases. 

The legal arguments for multiple and prolonged adjournments for the purposes of Right to Counsel assignment, both in terms of New York City’s Right to Counsel law and also as a matter of due process, are clear.  

Cases have already slowed down during the pandemic, and there was no great collapse. There is no reason to return to the fast-paced, high-volume courts of the past. They were unjust then, and they would be a death sentence now, especially as COVID-19 cases recently surged across New York City due to the Omicron variant. As we have done over the past two years, slowing down the court system is the only moral response. 

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Corinthia A. Carter is the president of Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA 2320), which represents the more than 600 secretaries, paralegals, receptionists, process servers, social workers, attorneys, and other non-management staff of Legal Services NYC and Mobilization for Justice. Beverly Rivers is a tenant leader with the Flatbush Tenant Coalition, a member-led group of tenant associations in Flatbush, East Flatbush, and South Crown Heights working collectively to build tenant power.

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Feed The Hungry: How New York Must Work with the Human Services Sector to End Food Insecurity


Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

Emergency food distribution (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


A new year marks the beginning of a new chapter for New York City. With Eric Adams officially sworn in as New York City's 110th mayor, a refreshed City Council and historic new City Council Speaker, 2022 offers a new opportunity to turn the tide on one of the most pressing issues facing New Yorkers: food insecurity.

Right Now, 1.5 million New Yorkers are struggling to put food on the table. The human services sector has long been on the frontlines of battling food insecurity, particularly through ongoing and annual food drives. While food drives are necessary to feed the hungry, they are a short-term solution to a pervasive problem that has plagued New Yorkers for generations, made even worse by a global pandemic. To holistically address this crisis, New York City leaders must work alongside and adequately fund the human services sector. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the human services workforce answered the call to make sure that no New Yorker went home hungry, even when some workers themselves were struggling to put food on the table. To help address the growing nutritional needs of New Yorkers, human services organizations across our city worked to mitigate record-breaking levels of food insecurity. Our two organizations alone prepared and delivered over 1,500 meals every day to vulnerable residents throughout the pandemic. At the height of the pandemic, about 14% of adult residents reported that their household was experiencing food insecurity.

The pandemic exposed long-standing structural flaws and existing systemic issues. Not only did it exacerbate the everyday issues facing so many New Yorkers, it showed that government functions best when it partners with community-based organizations to deliver services. GetFoodNYC, a program that was launched with a laudable goal—providing food for people impacted by COVID-19—struggled to succeed at first. Meals went missing and some arrived spoiled. It was human service organizations that filled in the gaps and lent their expertise to deliver meals to communities in need.

The $103 billion budget is the largest in our city’s history, including the hundreds of millions in public funding spent annually to feed vulnerable New Yorkers. Much of this is contracted out to the nonprofit sector, with little strategic partnership between the city and nonprofits on how to best utilize their combined resources to meet the needs of New Yorkers. Along with the addition of new federal and state pandemic funding, a review of citywide expenditures related to food acquisition, preparation, and distribution is long overdue and could revolutionize the way New York City addresses hunger.

The human services sector has proven time and time again that we have an intrinsic role in meeting the most pressing needs of New Yorkers. An estimated 1.4 million New Yorkers rely on human services food programs, pantries, and soup kitchens. To continue their essential role in combating food insecurity throughout the pandemic and ensuring that the workforce is adequately paid, advocates called on the city to commit $48 million in order to establish a 3% cost of living adjustment for human service workers. Our leaders responded by cutting this request by half

With historic underfunding, our organizations have joined together in a strategic partnership that will allow us to better serve New Yorkers. But we can’t do it alone. At this pivotal moment in our city’s history, our next leaders must do more to ensure that human services are included in disaster planning, pay our workforce equitably, and transform the human services program procurement system. What we do now will define how we recover and address food insecurity for generations to come.

As we settle into the new year, a new mayor, and a new City Council, we must double down on the fight against food insecurity. We urge all the newly elected leaders to work alongside the human services sector to ensure that no New Yorker goes hungry this year and beyond. 

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Roderick Jones is the Executive Director of Goddard Riverside. Gregory J. Morris is the President and Executive Director of the Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center. On Twitter @GoddardRiv and @IsaacsCenterNYC.

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New York State is Failing at Jail Oversight; Here’s How We Start to Fix It


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Inside Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


In 1894, the framers of New York’s most recent constitution created the State Commission of Correction. With eight members, the Commission was empowered to visit and inspect all penal institutions in New York State and to promote their “humane and efficient administration.”

Clearly, they are failing: New York’s correctional institutions are neither “humane or efficient” today. Rikers Island is a humanitarian crisis. New York City has the best-staffed jail system in the country and spends six times more per incarcerated person than the average in our country’s biggest cities. Despite these resources, 16 people died last year in the custody of New York City’s Department of Correction.

The spread of COVID-19 has been uncontrolled; staff were unable to ensure detainees made it to their court appearances; individuals went weeks without access to their lawyers; violence increased; basic medical needs went unmet; whole housing units and individuals on suicide watch went unsupervised; and incarcerated people were given plastic bags to defecate and urinate in. I witnessed these conditions firsthand when I inspected the facility in September. While this was happening, where was the State Commission of Correction?

The truth is that the SCOC, our state’s correctional watchdog, has abdicated many of its duties. Under the law, the SCOC has the power to inspect any correctional facility in the state and force its compliance with relevant laws and regulations by issuing directives or applying for court orders.

The SCOC is supposed to guarantee the health and safety of all incarcerated people in the state, and close any correctional facility that is unsanitary or unsafe. In a dignified society, unsupervised, crowded cells in the middle of a pandemic without working sewage should be considered unsanitary and unsafe. But despite an increasing death toll and spiraling violence, Rikers Island somehow never made it onto the SCOC’s meeting agendas this past fall.

The SCOC currently has three commissioners, each appointed by the Governor. All three members are former sheriffs or career corrections officers. This composition inevitably creates conflicts of interest between commissioners—people formerly in charge of running jails—and the agencies and institutions they are meant to regulate. Because the law makes the SCOC’s enforcement powers discretionary instead of mandatory, the SCOC is not guilty of ministerial neglect if it chooses inaction.

Meanwhile, the SCOC’s budget has knee-capped its ability to have a meaningful presence at jails and prisons throughout the state. The SCOC has a budget for fewer than 40 staff, while correctional facilities in the state number in the hundreds and the incarcerated population has fluctuated between 47,000 and 77,000 people since 2015. A state comptroller’s audit in 2006 found that the SCOC had stopped inspecting prisons in the 1990s, effectively leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

So long as our state chooses to have prisons and jails, and until we abolish our racist system of mass incarceration, we must guarantee that those institutions are humane and lawful.

The state owes a constitutional duty of care to every person it detains, a duty that includes guaranteeing health and safety. One necessary element of that task is ensuring that the SCOC does its job. That is why I have introduced legislation (A8461) that will add six new commissioners to the SCOC and distribute their appointments among the Legislature, the Attorney General, and the Correctional Association of New York. It would prohibit more than a third of the commissioners from coming from law enforcement backgrounds. Former corrections officials are useful for their rapport with jail staff and their knowledge of how correctional facilities operate, but they should not dominate the commission.

My bill will also make the SCOC’s enforcement duties mandatory instead of discretionary, heighten numerous reporting requirements, and require that the SCOC is funded with 2% of the annual budget of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in order to guarantee that the commission always has a budget sufficient to inspect our sprawling and bloated correctional system.

Finally, I have also introduced legislation (A8497), which clarifies that our state’s human rights law also applies to correctional facilities. It makes no sense to exempt 50,000 of the most vulnerable New Yorkers from the promise of basic human rights or prohibit the Division of Human Rights from investigating claims of discrimination or abuse in taxpayer-funded facilities. If a jail operates in New York, it should follow the laws of New York.

These bills alone won’t fix all the issues in prisons and jails across New York. They will, however, provide a framework for preventing future humanitarian crises from unfolding like the one we’re currently witnessing at Rikers Island. No one should have to endure the horrors we’re currently inflicting on incarcerated New Yorkers, and not one more person should be allowed to perish in our state’s custody. In New York, no detention should be a death sentence.

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Assemblymember Emily Gallagher represents parts of Brooklyn. On Twitter @EmilyAssembly.

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We Need Eric Adams to be the Mayor Who Closes Rikers


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Eric Adams at church (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


Throughout his campaign, Mayor Eric Adams spoke about the dysfunction that plagues our city, stemming from a failure to go ‘upstream’ to address the problems we face. There is no more tragic example of this than Rikers Island, where conditions are so dire that hundreds of incarcerated people have launched a hunger strike.

The moral costs of this stain on our city outweigh even the outrageous financial ones. Our so-called progressive city continues to respond to crime rather than prevent it; to allow freedom to be determined by wealth and racial bias; to tear people away from their communities without due process and subject them to abuse, increasing their chances of future criminal legal system involvement rather than reducing them; and to spend lavishly to do it, at more than $556,000 per incarcerated person per year.

But we can stop. 

New York City’s incarceration rates have been reduced in response to decades of grassroots organizing, but we have a long way to go. Rikers Island is still full of people who have been failed by our society, time and again. Just look at the obituaries of people who died in the hellish conditions on Rikers over the past year. Among them were people who struggled with bipolar disorder, addiction, schizophrenia, homelessness, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and job loss. In addition to their individual challenges, they were all Black and brown men, growing up in a society that has starved our communities of resources and then punished us in our struggle to survive.  

Growing up in Brooklyn, I saw this firsthand. In the 1970s, New York faced a fiscal crisis. Education, health, and social services were placed on the city’s budget chopping block, disproportionately impacting already neglected communities like Brownsville, East New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The criminalization and incarceration of people of color intensified in the ‘80s. By this time, all my older brothers were impacted by the criminal legal system.

In the early ‘90s, at the age of 16, I was sent to Rikers when the daily average incarcerated population reached over 21,000 and more than 100,000 people annually. This was the consequence of austerity guided mostly by a particular ideology and racism rather than fiscal necessity. Since then, the New York City jail population has been reduced by almost 75% and our city is much safer, but much of the same misguided thinking still drives our policy responses - for example, calls for more incarceration when people with prior convictions are arrested. Shouldn’t that show us that the criminal legal system didn’t address the root cause of their behaviors, and we need to do something different? 

Luckily, we have so many examples of what does strengthen our communities and make them safer. This month, the commission on reinvestment in communities impacted by Rikers Island, established by Local Law 193, will issue its first set of recommendations. Mayor Adams has said that he wants to close the pipeline that feeds Rikers, and we could not agree more. We will be sharing a blueprint to do it, developed by a commission packed with both lived experience and technical expertise, of which I’ve been a member.

We will be calling on the new administration to invest in the things that work – youth employment, career training, supportive and affordable housing, quality treatment, mentoring, and more. We look forward to seeing these recommendations included in the mayor’s first Executive Budget. And we know exactly how we can pay for it. 

New York City spends $2.6 billion per year to operate its grossly dysfunctional jails. Decades of corruption have created the shocking reality that New York City runs the most richly staffed jail system in the country (with about five guards for every three incarcerated people - seven times more than the national average ratio), but habitually fails to meet the most basic standards, including providing people in their custody with recreation, bringing them to their court dates, and protecting them from illness, injury, and death.   

Data compiled by the Vera Institute shows that if the New York City Department of Correction’s staff were scaled down by 50% (to match the more than 50% reduction in the jail population since 2014), we could save $1.1 billion each year – money that could be reinvested in all the upstream supports that prevent crime, rather than responding to it.

When the number of people in New York City jails is reduced to below 3,300 – as required by the plan to close the Rikers jail complex — and DOC’s budget is reduced proportionately, we can unlock $1.8 billion each year to invest in housing, education, healthcare, job creation, and more. Just by reinstituting a hiring freeze for DOC and limiting overtime, New York City can save and reinvest hundreds of millions in the next year.

To fully recoup and redirect the funds wasted on the bloated DOC budget, we’ll need a plan to significantly reduce the DOC workforce. This will undoubtedly require leadership, but to resist or delay doing it would be to double down on dysfunction.  

It’s not only incarcerated people who are miserable on Rikers Island. Guards often talk about how much they dislike their jobs, and that it may even have negatively affected their health and their family. But they stay because it’s the best salary and benefits they can get without an advanced degree or other training. Why wouldn’t we prepare this workforce of mostly Black and brown people for new careers that move our city forward, instead of leaving them to cling to jobs that depend on the failed approaches that we know we must leave behind? 

A broad coalition of advocates across the city has worked hard to expose the absurdity of Rikers Island and bring about a plan for its closure. We look forward to working with the new administration to realize the entirety of that vision, and truly turn the page on Rikers Island and everything it represents. 

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Darren Mack is Co-Director of Freedom Agenda, one of the organizations leading the Campaign to Close Rikers. On Twitter @iamdarrenmack.

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22 Ways To See The City


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NYC's 'Open Culture' (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


Words have the power to change how we see things and how we think. In life we are often fish who don’t know what water is, going through the motions in our default state, unaware of the environment around us. But every now and then we stumble upon a realization that changes our entire view – seeing water for the first time.

Over these past couple turbulent and transformative years, I’ve been among many who have been seeing the world anew, and I’ve been collecting these ideas, these lenses, that allow for a new way of seeing our city. Some of these truths have direct lineage, but most of them have wedged in my brain from conversations in real life and journeys through books, magazines, and the internet – which is a long way of saying that none of these are my ideas alone. I’ve collected them to share in hopes of offering a new perspective for seeing our city, and I welcome any missed provenance as we continue the conversation on social media and in other venues.

As we’re embarking on the next chapter of our city’s history, join me in seeing this wonderful place in a new way: 

1. You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic
Found from Twitter to billboards, this single sentence is the most powerful mind-altering phrase in transforming how we see ourselves and accepting our responsibility in the system. Congestion isn’t caused by others, it is caused by us – “we” not “them.” Change begins when we realize we have the power to act – by choosing individual alternatives and demanding structural change – not just be acted upon.

2. Cities are loud because cars (and trucks) are loud
When the world shut down in the spring of 2020, a previously unheard quiet blanketed New York and cities around the globe – it was the lack of roaring engines, thumping tires, and screaming horns. I’ve long been amazed by the din of Manhattan that can be heard across the East River on my walks in Long Island City.

3. Streets that are open to cars are closed to people
Language shapes how we see the world. New York’s fantastic (though uneven) “Open Streets” program has shown that making a street people-first doesn’t mean we’re “closing” it, but rather the opposite.

4. Parking is the greatest form privatizing public space
Many community leaders have long been weary of the increasing privatization of the public realm. When the public spins off responsibility for schools, libraries, prisons, parks, or social services, we’re often all worse for wear. In a city with 3 million on-street parking spaces, we can see how we’ve given over a gigantic swath of our public space to the storage of private property.   

5. Building more housing is a necessary component of a more affordable city
Though more supply is not alone a sufficient condition for an affordable future, we still need other programs and policies to help, New York City simply needs to build a lot more housing. In the last census, we learned that the city’s’s population grew by 629,000 over the last decade. But in the same period, we only built fewer than 200,000 housing units. The laws of economic gravity apply to housing, and when we don’t have enough, prices will rise. When the city becomes more unaffordable, it also becomes more inaccessible and less sustainable as more and more of us are pushed further into transit deserts.

6. You know a transit system is working when people don't run for it.
While we’ve all scurried to catch an incoming subway or bus at some point, if you’ve spent any time in Penn Station or Grand Central, you know the sight of business-attire middle distance runners sweating it out to catch the last train to Ronkonkoma. When you know the next train is ten minutes away, you get to the platform when you get there. When the next departure isn’t for 30 minutes, that time table starts to run your life. After all, as author and transit planner Jarrett Walker says, “frequency is freedom.” 

7. If you want to save the environment, move to a city
The classic image of living sustainably often involves an idyllic mountain stream or rural countryside. However, the true environmentalists are those living in the more concrete jungle. Cities cover just 3% of the global land surface area, but they house 58% of the world’s population. And the carbon footprint of urbanites in dense cities is about 50% below average – while suburbanites double the mean.

8. Garbage is more than just a waste issue
The most uniquely New York landscape feature isn’t our skyline or our waterfront – it’s the oozing, undulating mountain range of trash piled each day outside of our homes and offices. We produce 12,000 tons of waste daily, and much of it ends up stacked six or seven feet high on our curbs. This is a problem for obvious reasons: it’s ugly, it smells, and it attracts all sorts of critters we’d rather not move in next door. But it’s also a mobility issue on our sidewalks, making it impossible for New Yorkers with wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers to safely navigate our city.

9. Places to sit create places to be
A year ago, the new Moynihan Station opened to much fanfare…until visitors realized that there was no place to sit. When we don’t allow people places to be still, we create spaces that don’t belong to people. “Hostile architecture,” those spikes and railing designed to deter homeless people from sitting or sleeping, beyond the cost to those in need, enact a hard toll on everybody as we’re constantly pushed away.

10. People need to use the bathroom
Access to safe and clean bathroom facilities is a human rights issue, a gender equality issue, and an equal justice issue. In our city of 8.5 million people and 302 square miles, we have just 1,103 public restrooms – and a grand total of just two that are open 24/7. New York was home to one of the first public bathrooms in the United States, opened in Astor Place in 1869, but in the century and a half since the city has made severely inadequate progress in providing this basic human need. It’s not as sexy as a shiny new bridge or tower, but we’ll likely get more benefit out of a public restroom than nearly any other infrastructure project. 

11. Induced demand works for cars, but it also works for biking and walking
The foundational, paradoxical truth of transportation planning is that more lanes actually invite more traffic. But while we often think of induced demand as an argument against highway widening, it’s also a helpful tool when we flip it on its head to think about the transportation modes we want to incentivize: walking, biking, and mass transit. Better infrastructure, like the new Brooklyn Bridge bike lane rescued from cars, and protected bike lanes across the city, make biking more accessible and attractive to more people.

12. We are all pedestrians at some point
It doesn’t matter if you drive, bike, ride, scoot, or hang-glide for your commute. At some point in our journey through the world we are all pedestrians, we all step out of the train or the car and make our way on our sidewalks and staircases for the last feet of our travels. We should all care about creating an accessible, excellent pedestrian experience.

13. Bike lanes can move more people than car lanes
Transportation is first and foremost about moving people. While a car lane can carry 1,600 people per hour, a bike lane can handle nearly four times as many, up to 7,500 an hour. But why stop there? Sidewalks (as anybody who has been in midtown over the holidays can attest) can handle 9,000 travelers an hour, and dedicated on-street busways can move over 25,000 in that same period. Even with perfect traffic conditions, cars are just kinda slow.

14. Business owners care about parking because they park (and are asked about parking)
We notice what we repeatedly experience. If you are a restaurant owner who drives to work every day with a carful of supplies, you feel the headache of having to park each day. You notice when the phone rings and a guest asks if you have parking. You don’t notice the invisible, quiet things, like the lack of secure bike parking or the guests that don’t call asking if the trains are delayed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

15. People spend thousands of dollars and hours on planes to travel and visit walkable cities
From Disney to Florence, from all-inclusive beach resorts to Paris, most of the bucket-list-worthy vacations that Americans dream of are to dense, walkable environments. We’ll travel around the world and pay for expensive hotels just for the chance to live a lifestyle that we can’t get in all but a few communities in our own country. (By some estimates, Disney World’s Monorail is actually one of the top ten transit systems by ridership in the United States.)

16. People love college because it was the last time they were in a walkable community
There is a romanticization of the traditional “as seen on TV” American college experience, complete with pick-up games on the quad to parties at fraternities. Part of this is the glow of youth, but part of it is because living on a college campus was the last time that many people lived without the need of a car, within walking distance of their friends and studies/work, as well as stumbling distance from the bar. (Those of us that went to CUNY truly understood the assignment.)

17. Amsterdam wasn't always Amsterdam. No place is intrinsically more or less friendly to being people-friendlier.
Cities can and do change. Amsterdam had more than 3,300 traffic deaths in 1971, but today an estimated 38% of all trips in the city are made by bike. The argument that we are not city X, therefore we can’t have thing Y, simply doesn’t hold any water. Political will, smart design, and sufficient investment can transform any city. Hot or cold, coastal or mountainous, rich or poor, all places can become more oriented towards people. 

18. An advanced city is not one where poor people use cars, but rather one where the rich use public transportation
Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, made this observation in his wonderful 2013 TED Talk. The subway has long been our city’s great equalizer, where millionaires and movie stars rub shoulders (and backs, arms, bags…) with first generation immigrants and high school students. The fact that we’ve only opened five new subway stops in the two decades of this millennium  – after 467 in the first century-and-change of the system’s history – shows that we’re in danger of letting this promise slip away.

19. A place can either be easy to drive to or worth going to
As the old joke goes, “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” A city is either easy to drive in, with ample, wide lanes, generous speed limits, and plentiful parking, or it is an urban area worth visiting with dense, walkable, vibrant communities. It’s zero sum: parking comes at the cost of people.

20. Electric cars are better, but are still cars
There’s often a lot of absolutism in the discourse about electric and autonomous vehicles – either they solve everything or do nothing. The truth is somewhere in the middle: these are tools that will make cities safer, healthier, and more efficient, but they are not a replacement for fast and reliable mass transit. The real change will come when autonomous vehicles move beyond the current five-seats-and-a-streering-wheel paradigm of just serving as an upgrade to existing cars.

21. Cities are for the living
We’re fortunate to have inherited a tremendous legacy here in New York City – beautiful landmarks, vibrant neighborhoods, and an unmatched cultural history make us a truly world-class city. But, who are we to say that this is the final, complete state of the city? If we drew the line at the last century marker we wouldn’t have the High Line or Gantry Plaza. If we stopped a hundred years before that we lose the Empire State Building and Grand Central Terminal. And if we go another leap, there would be no Central Park or Brooklyn Bridge. Our common inheritance is incredible and we should adamantly keep the parts that make our city great, but we must remember that this place exists for those who are here today, and those who will come tomorrow.

22. A better city is possible if we want it
In 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, former New Yorkers John Lennon and Yoko Ono bought a Times Square billboard with a Christmas greeting: “War is over! If you want it.” Just as peace is possible, so too is a better future for our city – we just have to want it and do the hard work towards it. The future is ours to shape, and the next chapter is waiting for us to write it. With a new generation of city leadership taking the reins, the time to build that great future is today.

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Ben Guttmann is a marketing executive, member of Queens Community Board 2, host of Queens Tech Night, and adjunct lecturer at Baruch College. On Twitter @guttmann.

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Low Voter Turnout in NYC Elections is a Problem, and It Can Be Solved


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Voters voting (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


Approximately 23% of registered voters turned out for the 2021 New York City general election. This appallingly low number actually understates the extent of the challenge to political legitimacy because the outcome of all but a few races for City Council and Borough President were determined in the Democratic primary in June. In that election, approximately 25% of registered voters cast a ballot.

Since registered Democrats constitute roughly 70% of all registered voters, that means that virtually all city offices, including all three citywide offices, were filled based on the votes of 17.5% of registered voters; the winner in a citwyide race might thus have received as little as 9% of the votes of all registered voters.

This pattern is typical of past elections as well, with only a handful of notable exceptions in the race for Mayor in which there was a viable Republican candidate. Indeed, in 2013, the last time there was a mayoral election with no incumbent running, 24% of registered Democrats voted in the primary and only 24% of registered voters turned out for the general election.

There are differing opinions about what is to be done to improve voter participation in New York City, and whether these tragically low numbers are even a problem at all. In a recent New York magazine column, “Why Low Voter Turnout Isn’t the Problem Everyone Says It Is,” NY1 anchor Errol Louis, whose work and voice I deeply appreciate, argued that many recent attempts to expand voting have been made, yet for municipal elections turnout remains low and that’s OK because it is those who care enough to vote who are participating.

 “It’s possible that only 20 percent of New York voters are paying attention, educating themselves and taking time to vote on matters of importance,” Mr. Louis writes, and “If the majority are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to cast a ballot, so be it.”

 While in some ways Mr. Louis’ arguments are appealing, there are important reasons why some citizens do not vote, including poverty, distrust, and pessimism about the possibilities of change, not to mention ongoing laws that make it harder to vote than it should be. It is our collective responsibility to do everything we can to encourage greater participation rather than passively accept low voter turnout.

Mr. Louis contends that low voter turnout has different roots from what is often supposed and rightly points out that some of the prior efforts to increase turnout have not really made much of a dent in the problem. But there are two changes that could make a big difference, and I urge Mr. Louis and others who care about New York political participation to consider them more fully.

First, Mr. Louis aptly notes that the most important reason for low voter turnout is the fact that New York City elections are held in odd-numbered years. In New York City, and throughout the country, voter turnout in odd-numbered years, when there are no state or federal elections to stimulate political interest and activity, is significantly lower.

Indeed, voter turnout for New York state elections is roughly twice as high as for New York City elections. There is a long, complex history to the change of city elections from even-numbered to odd-numbered years. At least part of the reason was the desire of Republicans and reformers to depress voter turnout and thereby weaken the Democratic machine. The upshot is that the city’s election calendar is now set in the New York State Constitution. However, that does not mean it can’t be changed.

To be sure, there is likely to be opposition, especially from city elected officials and their supporters who are accustomed to the current system. Nevertheless, there is a potential trade-off for them — an extra year in office. The simplest way to transition to even-numbered year elections would be to amend the State Constitution to that effect and to reschedule the 2025 City elections to 2026. Whatever disadvantage some might see in such a postponement is more than counterbalanced by the certain increase in political participation that it will achieve for many elections to come.

The second major obstacle to greater voter turnout is the system of closed party primaries. Given the fact that 70% of registered voters in New York City are Democrats, the results of nearly all municipal elections are determined in the Democratic primaries, from which 1.08 million independents and 566,000 Republicans are excluded.

A proposal to create an open primary was placed on the ballot by a New York City Charter Revision Commission in 2003, but it was rejected by the voters in a low-turnout, off-year election. Mr. Louis and others oppose open primaries (often called non-partisan primaries) on the ground that political party labels are useful and party activity lies at the core of politics. That criticism misses the mark.

In an open primary as conceived by the 2003 Charter revision proposal, candidates run with party labels and political parties get to organize and support candidates as usual. The State of California has had such a system for a number of years now, and it has not diminished the role of parties in any noticeable way. What it does accomplish is to increase voter turnout and ensure that the general election is as competitive as it can be (often between two Democrats).

Those opposed to open primaries point to two features. First, voters of all parties get to vote in the primary and thus have a say in who the final two candidates will be even though those candidates may be of a different party from many of the voters. For example, in New York City, where the final two candidates will often be two Democrats, independents and Republicans will get to participate in the selection of the (likely) two Democratic finalists. This seems entirely reasonable.

The purpose of an electoral system is not to further the interests of political parties or to privilege the votes of their members but to establish the best way to determine the will of a majority of the voters. The current primary system fails to do this; an open primary would be a significant improvement.

Second, open primaries do not guarantee that candidates of all parties will appear on the ballot in the general election. The candidates in that election will be the top two vote-getters in the open primary, which in New York City will often both be Democrats. This is as it should be. There is no reason why all political parties should be guaranteed ballot access in the general election if they cannot garner enough support to finish within the top two places in an open primary, especially where, as here in New York City, the result is usually an uncompetitive general election that produces low voter interest and turnout.

There is, moreover, an alternative approach that has the advantage of keeping candidates of all eligible parties in the running right up to the general election but that also ensures that the general election will be competitive and interesting right up to the end. Let’s abolish the primary system altogether. Now that we have ranked-choice voting in New York City, there is really no reason to limit the field in the general election to two major candidates.

Candidates from all parties, as well as independents, who qualify for the ballot, could compete throughout the election cycle while the system of ranked-choice voting ensures that the winner has the support of a majority of the voters.

It might be objected that the large number of candidates might confuse the voters. However, there was a large number of candidates in the Democratic primary this past June, and the election went off smoothly and produced the most diverse array of elected officials in the city’s history. Would it really have made a difference if a few Republican or third-party candidates had been added to the mix?

Moreover, unlike the calendar for New York City elections, the establishment of an open general election without a primary does not require either a state constitutional amendment or indeed any action by the State Legislature; like an open primary, it is within the home rule power of the City Council or a Charter Revision Commission.

In sum, if we are serious about increasing voter turnout and the competitiveness of our municipal elections, we should (1) move the elections to even-numbered years and (2) establish open primary elections or abolish primary elections, leaving it to ranked-choice voting to produce winning candidates with majority support in a wide open general election.

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Frederick P. Schaffer is a director of Citizens Union Foundation and co-chair of Citizens Union’s Policy Committee.

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The Dangerous Persistence of Plastic, and What New York City Needs To Do About It


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Garbage (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


Our trashy story begins with a wartime question: after mass-producing aluminum, steel, and plastics for the military to fight Nazis, what happens when the war is over? What if, instead of reverting to peacetime manufacturing, America could charge ahead, simultaneously creating and fulfilling a civilian “need?”

The rest is advertising history. Over the course of a few decades, but seemingly overnight, a country with a working system of reusables, and return-and-refill products, was reimagined by deceptive marketing. Single-use items were branded as convenient and inexpensive, regardless of their hefty monetary and earthly costs. The phrase “toss-away prices” was thrown around to draw consumers away from reusable items. Enter the era of disposability.

Today, we are drowning in plastics. The non-profit Beyond Plastics has estimated that in three years, there will be one pound of plastic in the ocean for every three pounds of fish. More than just an environmental eye-sore, our trash poses a threat to our well-being. Large, bulk plastics break down into tiny fragments, called microplastics, that are inhalable and ingestible.

Two articles, one from November and another published last week, provide some of the most striking evidence yet that microplastics harm human health. The first indicates that at environmentally relevant concentrations, microplastics cause cell death, an immune response, and damage cell membranes. The second reveals a link between microplastics in the gastrointestinal tract and inflammatory bowel disease.

Given this new information, now is the time for action against single-use plastics. After all, the United States made a refillable system before and can do it again. Despite the false advertising, reusable containers were not that bad, especially considering humans are eating the alternative.

So, what can individuals and localities do to reduce the reliance on plastic? Numerous pieces of legislation, including the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act (BFFPPA) nationally, and the “Skip the Stuff” movement locally are making headway. BFFPPA is a comprehensive bill that restricts the amount of plastic produced and puts the responsibility for plastic pollution on manufacturers, reemphasizing the importance of reusable and plastic-free items.

New York City recently passed and enacted a bill commonly known as “Skip the Straw,” which constrains the distribution of straws to be by request only. However, two weeks ago the City Council failed to pass a version of “Skip the Stuff” over what appeared to be a technicality. This bill aims to reduce unnecessary takeout and delivery items – plastic spoons, forks, knives – and would have been an important first step to reducing plastic pollution. These larger single-use items, which often go unused anyway, clog our kitchen drawers and often wind up in the trash, burdening our waste system. Over time, they also break down into microplastics and threaten our wellbeing, making this bill a key step safeguarding our health.

To make the issue more complicated, a major source of microscopic plastic fragments is not from larger, bulk objects covered by “Skip the Stuff” legislation. Microplastics found in the water and air are often plastic microfibers, shed from clothing during washing and normal use. The fibers, made of polyester, a petroleum-based synthetic material, enter our bodies and get stitched inside our tissues. Legislation that requires the installation of filters on washing machines is a major way to reduce this source of pollution. Another way is through informing consumers to wash their polyester items less or elect to buy clothing that is made of natural materials, such as organic cotton or cruelty-free wool.

To help consumers change their lifestyle and purchasing habits, city districts and community groups can make sure there are sustainable options available in all neighborhoods. Organizations like Project Defeat Denial, a group which aims to simplify sustainability for consumers, offers an interactive map detailing sustainable and eco-friendly businesses in New York City, and provides helpful tips to swap out single-use items for reusables. Another way to help consumers make eco-friendly decisions is through consumer-oriented education and better labeling. When combatting plastic microfiber pollution, for example, efforts can be made to more clearly highlight that spandex, elastane, and polyester fabrics are plastic, as well as the health and environmental hazards of this.

Consumer education efforts should be supplemented through the development of city-wide comprehensive plans for making sustainability more accessible. The city needs to build an infrastructure that promotes sustainable consumption. One way to do this is through a concerted effort to increase the number of businesses that sell sustainable or eco-friendly products. As a matter of equity and justice, the city needs to increase these options in all boroughs, something promoted by EcoBronx. By making sustainability equitable, it will become an everyday norm, rather than a luxury. It will also help ensure that the harms of buying unsustainable products, such as those with microplastics or those laden with chemicals like formaldehyde don’t fall disproportionately on lower-income residents.

Plastic is everywhere. There are the persuasive images we all know well that highlight a better side to advertising than the single-use campaign of the 1950s: a bird’s stomach packed with plastic, a turtle strangled by plastic packaging, impoverished nations with coastlines inundated with our country’s waste. These should elicit a response on moral grounds. But here, in New York City, we are not free from plastic either, even if it is less visible.

Microplastics are in the air we breathe; they are in the water we drink; they are in our bodies, prodding our cells — unwelcome invaders that bypass detection. Regardless of what ad men told us in the mid-20th century, there is nothing convenient about plastic.

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Karl Palmquist is a Ph.D. candidate in systems biology, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, co-founder of Project Defeat Denial, and a volunteer leader with the Sierra Club. The views expressed here are his own. On Twitter @karl_palmquist.

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Governor Hochul Must Act Now to Protect Essential Workers


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Gov. Hochul (photo: Darren McGee/ Governor's Office)


Essential workers have been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic for two years, risking their lives to keep the rest of us safe and the economy running. These workers don’t have the option to work from home—they are your grocers, nurses, delivery workers, transit operators, retail workers, and more—and they are most vulnerable to this deadly virus. They are also overwhelmingly people of color, women, and immigrants, enduring dangerous jobs for the benefit of the many.

And now, we look to essential workers as a lifeline once again, as we face the highly contagious Omicron variant and cases surge across New York State.

On January 5, Governor Hochul delivered her first State of the State address. She outlined a pandemic plan that focuses on keeping businesses open, recruiting and retaining more essential workers to address shortages, and “keeping New Yorkers’ lives as normal as possible.”

For this plan to be successful, we must first ensure workers’ health and safety.

In September, Hochul and the state Department of Health took a critical step in the fight against COVID-19, designating the virus as highly contagious and a threat to public health. This allowed the New York Health and Essential Rights Act, or NY HERO Act, to go into effect, standardizing workplace protections against airborne illnesses like COVID-19. It was designed to keep workers, communities, and small businesses safe by providing clear and enforceable protocols on testing, face masks, PPE, social distancing, hand hygiene, disinfection, and air circulation and ventilation, and establishing penalties for noncompliance.

We know that these standards work and are crucial to minimizing the spread of the virus. But without sufficient resources to implement and enforce them, we are once again leaving workers vulnerable at a pivotal time.

New York's vaccination numbers are encouraging, with 82.9% of adults and 71.8% of all residents vaccinated as of early January. But Omicron’s rapid spread has proven that vaccines alone are not enough. According to the CDC, vaccines provide significant protections against severe illness and hospitalization, but vaccinated people can still contract the virus. Masking, distancing, and proper ventilation remain paramount to stopping the spread.

Governor Hochul’s plan to combat the ongoing pandemic must center the voices and needs of essential workers, who continue to be at the frontlines of this health crisis. New York must invest in educating workers and small businesses about their rights and ensure adequate enforcement.

As we near the start of the third year of this pandemic, Governor Hochul must take a more comprehensive approach by funding the implementation of the HERO Act and expanding education and enforcement across the state. There is no time to wait. Essential workers continue to be the lifeblood of New York, and we cannot afford to fail them.

At the start of her speech, Governor Hochul said, “This is not a moment of despair but a moment of great opportunity. If we make the right choices right now, it will end.” That’s true. Governor Hochul must demonstrate her leadership and act now to protect essential workers, because the pandemic is far from over. 

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Maritza Silva-Farrell is executive director of ALIGN, an advocacy organization that leads the New York Essential Workers Coalition. On Twitter @MaritzaSf & @ALIGNny.

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The Sizable Downside of De Blasio’s Education Record


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Mayor de Blasio at school (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


When he first ran for Mayor, Bill de Blasio portrayed himself as a leader who would make a host  of progressive changes in our schools. He promised to be a far different leader than Michael Bloomberg, who had expanded high-stakes testing, proceeded to grade teachers and schools primarily via test scores, closed dozens of public schools displacing thousands of students, and helped charter schools expand in their place. 

Bloomberg and his schools chancellors had done all this by ignoring community opposition, and despite any tangible evidence that this was the right way to improve education, particularly for disadvantaged students. Though Bloomberg had promised during his campaign to lower New York City schools’ excessive class sizes, they increased sharply during his administration, and by the time he left office he said he would “double the class size” if he could, and that would be “a good deal for the students.”

De Blasio said he would do things differently: to listen to and be responsive to parent and community concerns, de-emphasize test scores, and focus on improving public schools rather than providing space and funding to help charter schools expand. Instead of closing schools, he pledged to increase equity and strengthen learning conditions, including by lowering class sizes.

And yet his record on each of these issues was decidedly mixed. He did attain his primary goal in education – to provide universal, publicly-funded pre-kindergarten to every four-year-old, but in a manner that could have been better achieved, as will be discussed later.

There were some bright spots in the de Blasio record, including the Community Schools initiative, begun in the fall of 2014, in which schools partnered with community-based organizations to provide after-school programs, mental health supports, and other resources. By 2018, more than 200 community schools had been established. An independent study found that in these schools, there were lower rates of chronic absenteeism, more students graduating on time, and in elementary and middle schools, higher math scores and fewer disciplinary referrals.

In the area of parent voice, de Blasio said he would allow parent-led Community Education Councils to cast advisory votes on school closures and charter school co-locations, and that their input would be formally discussed and considered by the Panel on Educational Policy before their votes on these proposals. This did not happen, and school closures and co-locations continued to occur, if not at the same pace as during the Bloomberg era. In fact, de Blasio closed 82 schools during his administration.

De Blasio also pledged to give his appointees on the Panel for Educational Policy two-year terms and would not fire them when they opposed his decisions, as Bloomberg had, and yet he did fire one of his appointees for not voting in lockstep on school closures and co-locations. And during his eight years in office, the PEP remained a largely rubber-stamp body, with his appointees almost never rejecting a spending proposal, contract, or school closure. 

The rapid growth of charter schools continued at the same rate after his election, aided by the fact that he agreed to the charter cap being raised in 2017 in exchange for the renewal of his mayoral control over the public schools. He also helped charters recruit more students, by giving them access to student names and addresses via DOE’s mailing house, despite protests from parents that this violates their family’s privacy. New York City is the only district in the nation that voluntarily helps charters expand in this manner, while the sector’s rapid growth now means that the city spends more than $2.7 billion a year funding charters.  

In addition, the Department of Education overspent on lease payments for 39 charter schools by $21 million in 2019, and despite a state law that requires that public schools receive matching funds for facility upgrades equal to the spending of their co-located charters, the city owed at least $15.5 million in matching funds to 127 public schools between 2014 and 2019. 

Instead of the enhanced efficiency promised by the supporters of mayoral control, the effect has been the opposite: de Blasio micromanaged the DOE, and repeatedly delayed and reversed many critical decisions, including when and how schools would reopen during covid, so much so that this led to even more chaos and uncertain conditions for students and teachers, forced into overcrowded schools during a pandemic, without sufficient staffing or space for social distancing.

New York City schools remain among the most segregated in the nation, in part because of housing patterns but also because most middle and high schools rely on high-stakes exams and other data points to screen and sort students. When he ran for mayor, de Blasio said, “increasing diversity needs to be a strategic initiative by the DoE…I will make sure that all children, regardless of SES [socioeconomic status] & race/ethnicity have access to our city’s selective and specialized high schools.” The enrollment at these highly-selective high schools, based on a single high-stakes exam that has never been analyzed for either racial or gender bias, is primarily white and Asian, while Black and Latino students make up 63% of the overall city student population. 

While state law controls admissions at three of the eight specialized high schools, the mayor controls the admissions at the five other schools, but de Blasio never moved to alter the process at them. In 2017, he appointed a School Diversity Advisory Group that made other proposals, including removing middle school admission screens and replacing gifted classes, admissions to which are based on a high-stakes exam given at age four, with a universal enrichment model. De Blasio rejected the panel’s most significant proposals and only decided to revamp the gifted program during the last few weeks of his eight years in office – making this decision so late it will be quite easy for the new mayor, Eric Adams, to reverse it, as he has said he will do.

De Blasio also promised to improve the transparency of the DOE, by producing fully detailed and itemized breakdowns of the education budget, and ensuring that Freedom of Information requests would be responded to promptly. Neither of these reforms occurred. Instead, the education department’s ever-expanding budget remains unacceptably murky, and the DOE often delays responses to FOIL requests for a year or more. When official documents are finally produced, they are too often nearly completely redacted.  

The de Blasio administration barred advocates from attending agency oversight meetings held by the Office of Management and Budget, a practice allowed during the Bloomberg years, and closed meetings of School Leadership Teams to the public, the latter restriction overturned only when a retired teacher sued, along with Public Advocate Letitia James and Class Size Matters, and won in court.

During his initial campaign for mayor, de Blasio pledged to reduce class sizes significantly and if necessary, raise funding to do so, a critical reform as New York City class sizes are 10% to 30% larger than those in the rest of the state. During one of the debates, he said that "Nothing will help our schools more than reducing class sizes.”  

Once he was elected, however, he reneged on this promise. Though the DOE told the State Education Department that they would lower class sizes in the program for struggling schools known as Renewal, most of these schools continued to have class sizes of 30 students or more. It was no wonder that this initiative was seen as unsuccessful and was terminated after five years at a cost of $773 million.

De Blasio said he would lower class sizes in a more systematic manner in all schools when New York City received the full, equitable state school funding due from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision. Yet when the State Legislature and Governor finally delivered these funds in last spring’s state budget, with a first-year payment of $530 million that is set to increase to $1.3 billion annually, de Blasio rejected the notion that he should use a major portion of these funds for smaller classes.  

He spurned the City Council proposal to spend $250 million in this year’s budget on lowering class sizes, and instead agreed to only a small-scale “pilot” project costing $18 million in a limited number of elementary schools. Instead, the DOE chose to spend millions more on unreliable computerized tests and social-emotional screeners.

Subsequently, when the Council then pushed for a law that would limit class sizes by amending the administrative code to require more space per student, to protect health and safety as well as strengthen academic support, the de Blasio administration called the proposal “disruptive” and with the help of Council Speaker Corey Johnson blocked the measure from ever coming to a vote.

Even de Blasio’s most successful venture in education, expanding early childhood education to tens of  thousands of more children each year, could have been better implemented. Instead of maximizing the use of neighborhood-based Community Based Organizations, the DOE siphoned off many students they customarily served, assigning them to new public school classes, which led to worse overcrowding in 352 elementary schools that enrolled about 236,000 students.

His administration’s preference to place pre-K students in overcrowded public schools made little sense, given two tools used to evaluate their quality: the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale—Revised (ECERS-R) and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). According to these tools, there was no significant difference in the quality of CBO and DOE-run pre-K classes, as judged by their CLASS ratings; while  according to the ECERS rating system, pre-K programs run by CBOs displayed “stronger classroom and organizational quality than school-based programs.”

De Blasio also spent more than $1 billion building stand-alone DOE pre-K centers, some of which remain half empty, including one on the ground floor of a parking garage in Brooklyn that cost $6.5 million in renovation costs for annual classes of about 18 pre-K students.

De Blasio’s single-minded focus on expanding pre-K to the exclusion of so much else was unfortunate, especially given the mixed research on the benefits of pre-K alone. Researchers from Vanderbilt University followed  a thousand randomly-selected, economically-disadvantaged pre-K students through third grade, comparing them to a control group who did not attend pre-K. Not only did students who missed pre-K catch up within a year or two, but the students who attended pre-K had actually fallen behind their peers on several measures of achievement by third grade. 

Indeed, as the researchers wrote, “The idea that a year of pre-K can close the achievement gap for at-risk children is appealing to policymakers, school administrators, businessmen and law enforcement officials, but this kind of magical thinking doesn’t benefit children.” As one of them concluded, more “attention [is] needed to the quality of experiences children have and what happens to them in K-12." Indeed, if students are not provided with favorable classroom conditions as they move through school, all the gains they made in pre-K may melt away. 

During the de Blasio administration, test scores have been flat or declining, as measured on the most reliable exams called the NAEPs, given every two years throughout the country in 4th and 8th grade in English and math. Though test scores cannot tell the full story, they are one of the few quantitative indicators we have to determine progress, and they tend to be more dependable when they are low-stakes, as are the NAEPs.

According to these national assessments, the gap between students of different economic and racial groups has actually widened. When student scores are disaggregated according to race, ethnicity, economic and special education status,  no group made significant gains between 2013 and 2019 (the tests were not administered in 2021 due to covid). To the contrary, Hispanic students and students with disabilities showed a significant drop in fourth grade math scores over this period, and economically disadvantaged students suffered a significant drop in both fourth grade reading and math. Worse yet, Black students exhibited a significant decline in all four categories: fourth grade and eighth grade reading and math.

In the end, many of the promises made by Mayor de Blasio were left unfulfilled -- in education as well as other areas. If New York City students are going to receive the equitable and high-quality public schools they deserve, they will have to wait for another administration to deliver them.

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Leonie Haimson is the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. On Twitter @leoniehaimson.

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