Westchester County Executive George Latimer (photo: Don Pollard/Governor's Office)

June 28, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Westchester County Executive George Latimer on 'The Suburbs'

Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a Democrat, joined the show to discuss what's happening in his county, suburban politics north of New York City, differences between Westchester and Long Island, and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

A potential site for housing (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)

For months, Governor Kathy Hochul and members of the Legislature have reiterated that housing is one of the state’s most pressing crises. However, throughout the 2023 Albany calendar — state budget season followed by the post-budget legislative session that ended earlier this month — they have struggled to agree on much beyond that. The Democratic governor just beginning her first full term in the role and the Democratic supermajorities in the two legislative houses did not agree on a package of substantial legislative action that might address the state’s massive housing challenges.

New York State has been slow to develop new housing, especially in New York City and its suburbs, where demand soars. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rents sank briefly, and due to moratorium measures passed by the state that ran until January 2022, eviction rates also decreased. Now, however, both have risen sharply again. Over half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened, according to the Population Reference Bureau, and tens of thousands are homeless.

Earlier this year, Hochul set forth a plan to build more than 800,000 units of new housing over the next decade, including by imposing mandatory growth targets for all local communities with a variety of mechanisms to help meet them. But the proposal was met with opposition in the Legislature, where there was more focus on tenant protections and some openness to efforts to further encourage but not require housing growth.

After no deal was reached in the state budget passed a month late in early May, negotiations continued to sputter through the weeks of legislative session to follow. As that session neared its mid-June end, the two legislative leaders said they had the framework of an agreement on a package of housing proposals, but they did not vote on it or even publish many details, claiming Hochul stood in their way.

“Unfortunately, it was clear that we could not come to an agreement with the governor on this plan,” said State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie in a joint statement. “It takes all three parties — the Senate, the Assembly and the governor — in order to enact legislation into law.”

In the June 8 statement, the leaders said that “the Legislature was able to work toward an agreement on historic rent protections as well as a massive and transformational housing program,” and listed about a dozen housing policies that were part of the framework.

Hochul, in response, said through a spokesperson that the Assembly and Senate were blaming her for “their own failure to act” and appeared to challenge the two houses to produce an actual bill and vote it through.

Inaction has spurred a great deal of frustration and finger-pointing, along with some resolve. Hochul has pledged to announce executive action on housing in the near-term and to continue to work for more support for her New York Housing Compact, while many legislators have said they will continue to pursue policies to address the multi-faceted housing crisis.

In recent interviews on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast, two key State Senators from New York City — Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Senate’s housing committee, and Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the controversial Good Cause Eviction bill that was a key part of negotiations — deconstructed the Albany session and discussed the future of state housing policy.

What Happened
Kavanagh and Salazar both expressed deep frustration and disappointment with the outcome of the Albany year. Both senators were also supportive of a grand bargain that would incorporate many of Hochul’s ideas as well as the Legislature’s priorities, including Good Cause Eviction, but not enough of their colleagues felt similarly in order to make such a deal possible.

Kavanagh stressed that the Senate and Assembly had the votes to pass the package of housing policies listed in the legislative leaders’ June 8 statement, but, believing Hochul would veto it based on a threat to do so, decided against advancing that confrontation.

“The critical thing is that we manage these negotiations, including the relationship between the two houses and the governor, in a manner that gets us to success,” Kavanagh said.

Salazar recognized that the two leaders were forced to make a difficult decision on short notice but said she still wished they had opted to vote through the package. “Whether the governor would ultimately decide to veto it or try to negotiate chapter amendments or sign the bill, we still have a responsibility as a legislature to act,” she said. “It was deeply disappointing and shocking to learn that it just wasn’t going to happen.”

The package outlined by legislators included few of the pieces of Hochul’s Housing Compact, which found limited support in either house, and instead focused on more support and protection for tenants, some incentives for housing development, and a number of other specific planks.

It contained a compromise version of Salazar’s Good Cause Eviction legislation, an extension of the 421-a tax break to incentivize some construction of affordable rental housing, the Housing Access Voucher Program, efforts to encourage conversions of commercial space to residential, and more.

Salazar supports elements of Hochul’s Housing Compact, including mandatory growth targets and transit-oriented development, but acknowledged that the majority of legislators do not. “We wouldn’t have been able to arrive at the two-way agreement that we did at the end of this session if the mandates from the governor’s Housing Compact — basically any version of them — had been in this bill,” she said.

Kavanagh likewise supports growth targets but knew that policy diminishing local land use control would be met with fierce legislative resistance. Still, he was disappointed that the Legislature failed to reach a consensus that ensured localities were “doing their part,” he said.

Even though no package made it to Hochul’s desk this month, Kavanagh added, the negotiations were not all for nothing. “This is, I think, the halting and strange way Albany makes progress,” he said. “I do think that the template that we’ve laid out will be part of whatever fruitful negotiations we have in the future.”

Good Cause Eviction
Hochul opposes Good Cause Eviction, which aims to protect tenants in unregulated housing, but it remains unclear if she would support a version of it in order to win her Housing Compact — a question that does not appear to have ever been on the table given the Legislature’s opposition to the Compact’s central planks.

Good Cause Eviction would prohibit landlords from evicting tenants except in “good cause” cases like failure to pay rent, or other instances of lease violation, and would set limits on annual rent increases.

Many tenants have been hit with rent increases of 25%, Salazar said, though in extreme cases, that number has exceeded 500% — surges she described as “unethical [but] completely legal.”

“It is absolutely unaffordable for the vast majority of New Yorkers for their expenses to suddenly increase like that, but it’s happening right now,” she said, detailing the original bill that she’s sponsored for several years as well as the compromise version that was part of the package the two legislative houses say they had agreed upon but Hochul would not back.

The bill creates metrics for an “unreasonable” rent increase and a rebuttable presumption in the case that a landlord sought to evict a tenant after increasing rent by such an amount. In both versions of the bill, the cap would hit at whichever is greater of either a 3% rent increase or 1.5 times the percent change in the Consumer Price Index (a measure of inflation). Under the rebuttable presumption, if a landlord were to sue tenants who did not pay such a rent increase, the judge would presume rent to be unreasonable — though the landlord could convince the judge otherwise based on a number of potential factors like expenses.

The original bill applied to the entire state, though the compromise proposal would apply automatically only to New York City while other localities would be able to opt-in to the law and customize their program by adjusting threshold values, Salazar explained on the podcast.

The compromise version of the bill also added that rental buildings would be exempt for their first 15 years after construction, a clause created based on the pushback that Good Cause would disincentivize new rental housing development.

Salazar said, though, that it is “demonstrably false” to assume the expansion of tenant protections to unregulated renters would decrease development. California and New Jersey have implemented variations of the bill, and no evidence points to a decline in the construction of new housing as a consequence, she said.

“I would say it’s a really significant compromise, not one that I wanted to make, but that I knew was necessary,” Salazar said of the version of the bill in the agreement the legislative leaders said was in place but opposed by Hochul. “If I thought that this was the best version of Good Cause, then I would have made that the bill in the first place, so I won’t pretend that I like it. But it was something that I and everyone I’m accountable to — who have been fighting for this for years now — were ready to accept and live with.”

Salazar emphasized the bill’s importance in any housing package, arguing that building more housing or making housing more affordable without protecting the tenants who live there would fail to solve the crisis the state faces.

“What will help people the most immediately is providing protections from unjust evictions and unreasonable rent increases through Good Cause,” she added.

Kavanagh stressed how significantly the bill’s supporters compromised in order to ensure it made it into the package. “For all our talks about Good Cause Eviction legislation, it’s not something that has moved through either house in the last couple of years,” he said.

He added that he believes concerns about Good Cause halting new construction were in part “a function of a very effective, well-funded public relations operation by the real estate industry.”

Other Policies
The legislative compromise package also contained the Housing Access Voucher Program, which Kavanagh is the lead sponsor of in the Senate and seeks to establish a statewide rental subsidy for individuals experiencing homelessness or severe housing instability.

“Even if we get production right and dramatically increase supply, that’s a very long-term process,” Kavanagh said. “We need an immediate solution to that, and it has become a very broad consensus — not just in the Legislature, but across the spectrum — that [a housing voucher program] is necessary.”

In their joint statement, the leaders also mentioned the inclusion of “a local affordable housing plan,” but did not elaborate on what that meant. Asked on the podcast, Kavanagh said it would require every locality to assess their own housing needs and put forth a public plan explaining how they expected those needs to be met.

Beyond the failed package, Kavanagh stressed that some housing bills were passed: the renewal of J-51, which provides tax breaks to landlords undertaking renovations of low-cost housing; the allocation of almost $400 million more into the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP); the addition of $40 million for the Homeowner Protection Program; and a few other items.

What’s Next
While looking ahead to another budget and legislative session next year in which she wants to win major housing policies, Hochul has repeatedly stated a vow to take executive action in the near-term to address the housing crisis. There are a number of potential steps she may take, including the use of state-owned land, but the governor has also acknowledged that fixing the state’s housing supply shortage will need to be done with the Legislature.

Kavanagh said that though he supports action from Hochul, the solution would ultimately require consensus with the Senate and Assembly. “At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to solve these problems without legislative and budgetary action,” he said.

Salazar voiced skepticism about the governor’s pledge, explaining that she didn’t believe Hochul fought as hard as she could for many of her Compact’s unpopular policies in negotiations about the state budget. “[To] take executive action to impose those things just seems kind of inconsistent and maybe a political risk that I wouldn’t expect her to take,” she said.

“But I’m definitely interested to see the governor demonstrate that she wants to take action on creating more housing,” Salazar added.

She also said she plans to advocate for a special session in Albany later this year. “We have the opportunity to do this — and really the responsibility to do it — and ultimately, if it wasn’t done by the time session ended, then my perspective is that we still have that responsibility,” Salazar said. “It would really be a shame at this point … if we fail to act and act soon.”

LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Senate Housing Chair Brian Kavanagh on State Negotiations & What Comes Next

LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Senator Julia Salazar on State Housing Policy & Good Cause Eviction Negotiations

Ben Max contributed to this story.

Senator Julia Salazar, center (photo: NYS Senate Media Services)

June 13, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Senator Julia Salazar on State Housing Policy & Good Cause Eviction Negotiations

State Senator Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat and democratic socialist, joined the show to discuss state housing policy negotiations, the Legislature's failure to pass a housing plan, and her ongoing push for Good Cause Eviction legislation.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

State Senator Brian Kavanagh (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)

June 14, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Senate Housing Chair Brian Kavanagh on State Negotiations & What Comes Next

State Senator Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Senate housing committee, joined the show to discuss the lack of a state housing policy deal during the 2023 legislative session and what comes next.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Inside the State Senate (photo: NYS Senate Media Services)

In the final days of the legislative session in Albany last week, the State Senate passed a bill that would expand healthcare access to hundreds of thousands of low-income New Yorkers regardless of their immigration status. But the State Assembly ran out of time and adjourned without taking up the bill and now faces pressure to approve it when it returns to address unfinished business on June 20 and 21. 

On Thursday, the Senate approved the “Coverage for All” legislation, sponsored by State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat and chair of the Senate’s health committee. The bill, which immigrant advocates have been pursuing for years, would expand health care access to more than 240,000 undocumented immigrants in the state, allowing them to enroll in New York State’s Essential Plan that gives low-income New Yorkers access to health insurance. 

“The Assembly is expected to return to Albany so we're counting on the broad support we've received from our legislative colleagues to pass this bill on the floor as we did in the Senate,” Rivera said in a statement to Gotham Gazette.

“We are actively working to both educate our Assembly members and count votes to ensure that if it hits the floor, it'll be supported,” said Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, a Queens Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill, in a phone interview. The bill has already been approved by the Assembly’s health committee and is now in front of the ways and means committee, and needs to make it to the full Assembly floor, where it has 63 co-sponsors in the 150-seat chamber. “It's gonna take some work certainly, but I'm feeling really optimistic,” González-Rojas said. 

Since last year, the bill has gained momentum after Governor Kathy Hochul said she would ask the federal government for permission to use federal funds to expand healthcare to undocumented immigrants. At the time, the governor advanced a proposal in the state budget to extend Medicaid coverage to undocumented seniors above the age of 65, while promising to seek federal approval for the broader healthcare expansion. Regardless of immigration status, the state also covers health care for children under 18 and for pregnant people, including for a year after they give birth. 

But the governor reneged on that pledge when she released her budget proposal this year, and waited till May to request a waiver from federal officials to expand income eligibility for the Essential Plan to New Yorkers making up to 250% of the federal poverty level, up from 200%. Undocumented immigrants were not included in that request. State legislators, however, made their own separate request seeking a waiver under Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act to expand access to all undocumented immigrants as well. 

In a June 6 letter, Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, informed Senator Rivera that New York could request a Section 1332 waiver to use federal funds to expand healthcare access to the undocumented, similar to what Washington and Colorado have already done in the last year. The Senate passed its bill two days later. 

“With clear guidance from the federal government that we can utilize 1332 waiver funding to expand health coverage to eligible undocumented New Yorkers at no cost to the state, passing Coverage for All through the Legislature is essential,” Rivera said in his statement. “We will continue to fight to make sure New Yorkers living in the shadows can access healthcare beyond the emergency room when they need it because every New Yorker deserves guaranteed care.”

Proponents of the bill have repeatedly emphasized that it will not cost the state any additional dollars and in fact save the state money. The state’s Essential Plan, which covers New Yorkers between the ages of 19 and 65, already has a $9 billion surplus and, in fact, the bill is projected to save between $400 to $500 million each year that is spent through the emergency Medicaid program in providing healthcare to undocumented immigrants for services like emergency room visits. 

It’s “not just fiscally smart, but also obviously the right thing to do,” González-Rojas said, “to make sure that everyone can enroll in health insurance and get some preventative care before having to wait till their symptoms are so escalated, we’re spending so much more in emergency medical costs.” The bill does require the state health commissioner to request a 1332 waiver from the federal government, so its implementation would hinge on the delivery and response of that request.

A spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment. 

The governor has, however, raised concerns about the fiscal impact of the proposal and expressed concern that it could exceed projections if enrollment is higher than expected. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

At a June 13 news conference, Hochul reiterated those concerns, saying the Essential Plan's surplus funds amount to about $2.2 billion "which will be gone in a very short time." "The costs accrued to the state for the implementation [of Coverage for All] would be in the first few years $6 billion, upwards of $13 billion. So that is the context in which a proposal like that will have to be reviewed," she said. "If the federal government wishes to give us more to complement that, supplement that, give us $13 billion, that makes it a lot easier on the state. But I have to look at everything holistically and the impact on our state finances before I make a decision."

“Whatever her concerns were should now be appeased by the federal government’s response,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of New York Immigration Coalition, which is part of the Coverage for All advocacy coalition.

“As we just saw coming out of a global pandemic, we're only as healthy as our neighbors are. So making sure that everyone has access to health insurance and the ability to purchase health insurance is critical,” Awawdeh said. “It was critical before COVID and it’s even more critical now as we continue to try to recover from the pandemic.”

Republicans in the Legislature have opposed expanding health care access to undocumented immigrants. “The people coming in don't live here, they aren't citizens and the people who are here are going in the other direction,” State Senator Rob Ortt, the Republican minority leader, told NY1 last month.

While advocates wait for Assembly members to return to Albany in the coming weeks, they are keeping up the pressure. Arline Cruz, director of health programs at Make the Road New York, another coalition member, said the group sent a letter to the Assembly over the weekend and plans to hold a rally at the State Capitol this week. 

“We are hopeful. We are positive,” she said. “We're hoping that Carl Heastie will see how the Senate has taken the lead and try and follow the same footsteps.”

Note - this article has been updated to note that the Coverage for All bill has not passed the Assembly ways and means committee. 

Note - this article has been updated with comments from Governor Hochul.

Senate Deputy Leader Gianaris at the polls (photo: @SenGianaris)

In the final days of the 2023 session, the State Legislature passed a last-minute bill to bring a new form of universal mail-in voting to New York, relying on a novel interpretation of the state constitution that has so far required an "excuse" for absentee voting.

The "New York Early Mail Voter Act" would bring New York as close as possible to universal, no-excuse absentee voting (or its equivalent) without amending the state constitution by allowing all voters to mail-in a ballot during the nine days of early voting that prefaces every primary and general election, beginning in 2024. Because mailed ballots would be accepted through election day, the bill would essentially open a parallel vote-by-mail system to New York's existing absentee ballot system, which would also remain on the books.

The latest version of the substantial, 41-page bill was introduced in the last week of the legislative session and quickly passed by the State Senate's Democratic majority. On Friday, the last full day of the legislative session, the bill had gained momentum in the Democrat-controlled Assembly, having moved from the Ways And Means Committee to the Rules Committee, before passing on the floor late in the evening.

Governor Kathy Hochul has not said whether or not she will sign it. In a Saturday email, a spokesperson for the governor said she will review the bill.

Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris of Queens and Assembly Member Karines Reyes of the Bronx, two Democrats and the bill's prime sponsors, said the act will make voting easier and help boost New Yorkers’ anemic voter turnout. Republicans raised alarms that the bill simply exploited a potential loophole in the state constitution and promised a legal challenge. Good government groups, which have pushed for other ways to expand voting by mail, have largely stayed silent on the new bill, with some expressing support and others skepticism about the rushed and opaque process of passing it.

The New York State Constitution allows registered voters to request and cast an absentee ballot if they meet any of a list of excuses including illness, incarceration, being out of town, and others. At the onset of the pandemic, leaders in Albany, first through executive order by Governor Andrew Cuomo and later by temporary state law, expanded the definition of illness to include the risk of spreading a disease like COVID-19. That provision expired at the end of 2022.

"Voting is a fundamental right and the easier we make it to vote, the healthier our democracy will be,” Gianaris said in a statement Thursday. “I am proud the State Senate passed this bill and continues to build on its important work of expanding access to the ballot box for all New Yorkers."

In 2021, Democrats and reform advocates were handed a stunning defeat when voters rejected a state constitutional amendment to create no-excuse absentee voting that had been approved by two successive classes of the Legislature and championed for years by good government groups.

Republicans condemned the Early Mail Voter Act as a "workaround" of the state constitution and the will of New Yorkers who voted down the amendment, which was defeated after a robust opposition campaign by conservatives and virtually no effort by Democrats to garner public support.

"This bill looks an awful lot like…the constitutional amendment that was defeated overwhelmingly by voters in 2021, which would give essentially no-excuse absentee balloting," said Senator George Borello, a Western New York Republican, in the Tuesday debate on the Senate floor that lasted just three minutes before the bill was passed with nearly full Democratic support. "Isn't this the same thing, or why aren't you just proposing another amendment?"

"No, you are mistaken…,” Gianaris responded. “The referendum was relevant to the absentee ballot process. This bill relates to a form of early voting.”

Article 2 Section 2 of the state constitution outlines the procedures and requirements of absentee voting, including the excuses. According to Alexander Marion, Gianaris' spokesperson, the bill rests its legal rationale on a passage in Article 2 Section 7 that appears to allow voting methods to be set by law: "All elections by the citizens…shall be by ballot, or by such other method as may be prescribed by law, provided that secrecy in voting be preserved," it reads.

If it becomes law, a legal challenge could be next.

"There are open constitutional questions about this novel approach that are likely to be heavily scrutinized by the appellate judges heading into the 2024 elections," said Jarret Berg, an election lawyer and co-founder of the nonprofit Voter Early New York, which has pushed early voting and many other election reforms to expand ballot access. "It's unfortunate that the lawmakers in both houses failed to hold a single public hearing or briefing to discuss the proposal, and the alternatives."

A constitutional challenge may be complicated by another bill passed Friday in the Senate and after midnight in the Assembly. That bill would require constitutional challenges to election law to go through courts in one of just four counties — New York (Manhattan), Westchester, Albany, and Erie; an effort by Democrats to combat conservative forum-shopping in election law cases. (The bill was introduced earlier this year after Republicans in 2022 brought a successful challenge against the Democratic Legislature's new legislative district lines before a Republican judge in rural Steuben County.) It, too, may be subject to a legal challenge.

This year, election reformers had largely backed a different change to mail-in voting that would have reinstated the pandemic-era definition of illness. A bill sponsored by Senator Nathalia Fernandez and Assembly Member Jeffrey Dinowitz, both Bronx Democrats, and supported by the Let New York Vote coalition, a large group of labor and advocacy organizations, would have done that.

The Early Mail Voter Act moved swiftly through the Legislature this week, having been revised and introduced on Monday June 5 in the Senate and Tuesday in the Assembly. It advanced without going through the election committees in either house.

Common Cause New York, an election watchdog and one of the leaders of the Let New York Vote advocacy coalition, called the legislation a "hugely important pro-voter reform" in a statement shortly before it passed the Assembly on Friday.

"Allowing New Yorkers to vote by mail increases voter turnout in harder to reach populations, including young people and voters of color," read the statement, which pointed to the 2020 elections, when 1.7 million New Yorkers mailed ballots for president after the pandemic expansion of absentee voting. "[N]ot only is this absolutely legal under our constitution, but the right thing to do."

For Republicans, the issue was not the process as much as a longstanding opposition to expanding voting methods.

"We saw what's happened in the past when [universal absentee voting] overwhelms the system here," Borello said on the Senate floor Thursday, claiming without evidence that some mail-in ballots may go uncounted under a no-excuse mail-in system. "I continue to say the most important thing in New York State and across the nation is not that everybody votes – because at the end of the day this is the United States and you can still choose not to vote – so circumventing the system and overwhelming the system to ensure that we have all of these people that may be able to vote by mail or may not could prevent those people that have to vote by mail…from actually having their ballot count."

Battery Park City (photo: @Ingfbruno via WikiCommons)

The state budget approved last month gave the Battery Park City Authority the ability to raise an additional $1 billion in funding for resiliency projects that will protect the southern tip of Manhattan from the worsening effects of the climate crisis.

The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) is a state entity originally created in 1968 to develop and improve the neighborhoods on the west side of Lower Manhattan. It is responsible for maintaining and upgrading the physical landscape of the 92 acres under its purview, home to nearly 17,000 residents, which also involves major infrastructure plans that will be beneficial to adjacent areas while advancing city and state resiliency and sustainability goals.

As a state authority, the BPCA can issue bonds to raise funds for infrastructure projects, and this year’s state budget increased its bonding capacity to $1.5 billion, a sizable increase from the prior $500 million. The ability to raise additional funds will help the BPCA carry out the second phase of major resiliency projects planned for Battery Park City. Though the neighborhood was spared the worst effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, there was nonetheless extensive damage worth tens of millions of dollars to the historic Pier A Harbor House in the south, the BPC Ball Fields, and Asphalt Green Community Center in the north.

“This bonding authority is a critical next step in advancing our resiliency efforts to help protect Battery Park City as well as do our part to help protect Lower Manhattan,” said B.J. Jones, president and CEO of BPCA. “Given the climate crisis and the unfortunate fact that coastal storms are getting more severe and more frequent, we have to do more, given our duty to maintain the neighborhood.”

The Authority has already begun construction on the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project (SBPCR), which will build an “integrated coastal flood risk management system from the Museum of Jewish Heritage, through Wagner Park, across Pier A Plaza, and along the northern border of the Historic Battery.” The project is meant to limit the risk of coastal flooding, protect open spaces and aboveground and belowground infrastructure. The $221 million undertaking is meant to be completed in early 2025.

Like other significant coastal resiliency projects, aspects of that project have seen some controversy. The project will demolish and rebuild Wagner Park, a waterfront space built three decades ago, in order to raise it by ten feet and install flood protections. Local residents have opposed that plan and even unsuccessfully sued to prevent it, while proposing an alternate design that would keep the park open with minimal disruption and build a flood protection wall behind the park.

The BPCA’s next big venture is the North/West Battery Park City Resiliency Project (NWBPCR), which is still in the initial design phase and will extend similar resiliency protections to the remaining parts of Battery Park City. The project can now be adequately funded with the BPCA’s ability to issue more bonds, and is intended to be completed by 2027. As the design process continues, the authority will have a clearer projection of its costs, Jones said, but “make no mistake, an incredibly significant investment will be necessary to the tune of at least about a billion dollars.”

"This funding is absolutely critical in New York's efforts to build a resilient and sustainable city for generations to come, as it will ensure that Lower Manhattan is protected and fortified against a changing climate and more-frequently occurring extreme weather events," said Gary LaBarbera, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, in a statement. The Trades Council was instrumental in lobbying for state approval of the additional bonding authority, a contribution that Jones also acknowledged.

"The Building Trades remains committed to supporting this project and other green infrastructure initiatives throughout the city, as they not only improve the lives of all New Yorkers, but create thousands of good paying, family sustaining careers in the unionized construction industry,” LaBarbera said.

BPCA’s plans are part of the larger multibillion-dollar Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR) Project, which involves various initiatives by the city, state, and federal governments to protect Lower Manhattan from rising sea levels and devastating storm surges like the ones the city experienced during Hurricane Sandy.

While BPCA coordinates closely with the city, its ability to finance its own projects also eases pressure on the city budget. “We obviously have to work with them to make sure that what we're doing aligns with what they're doing elsewhere around Lower Manhattan because we're a link in that much larger chain of coastal protection,” Jones said, “but yeah, because of our ability to issue bonds, we can finance this capital work and that does help us as well as the city in getting these projects underway.”

Once these major projects are completed over the next several years, Jones said the BPCA can look to future climate initiatives such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the neighborhood, reducing waste and conserving water. “I kind of describe our climate adaptation efforts as like playing offense and defense,” he said. “And so with these coastal flood protection measures, we're playing defense, but we also have to think long term in terms of sustainability, which is playing offense.”

Housing focus (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

Affordable housing construction in New York has declined significantly in the last few years in the wake of COVID-19 through a combination of factors including higher interest rates, inflation and supply chain instability resulting from the overall disruption of the pandemic. But a key factor that real estate developers, city and state government officials, and many housing advocates cite is the expiration of the state’s 421-a property tax exemption for the construction of affordable housing as part of larger rental housing developments. With no replacement in sight as the State Legislature’s 2023 session nears its early June end, they say the city’s affordable housing goals will remain far out of reach.

In fact, very little new rental housing is being constructed in New York City overall, whether it includes affordable, rent-restricted units or not. Mayor Eric Adams and other city officials are sounding the alarm, and asking the Legislature to act on some housing development policies before they break for the rest of the year as of June 8.

While Governor Kathy Hochul attempted to pass a sweeping plan to mandate and boost new housing production in the state budget, the Legislature did not agree to the program, known as the New York Housing Compact. It included several New York City-focused planks, like both designing a replacement for the expired 421-a program and an extension of the time period for which 421-a eligible projects would be allowed to receive the tax break — which is necessary, proponents say, in order to ensure tens of thousands of units in the pipeline are indeed built.

As New York City faces dire overlapping crises of affordability, homelessness, and housing supply, the numbers are indeed alarming.

In the 2022 New York City fiscal year, which ended July 1 of this year, construction began on only 16,428 units of affordable housing, down from ​​29,388 in the previous year and from 30,311 the year before that, according to the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report. The report also covered the first four months of the 2023 fiscal year, from July through October, and showed 2,359 units added to the pipeline in that time.

Even before these recent declines, New York City was not coming close to keeping up with demand for new housing. The city grew by about 630,000 residents between the 2010 and 2020 Census, adding nearly a million jobs in that time but only about 294,000 housing units between 2011 and 2021. There are more than 2.27 million rental units in the city, a number that has only grown by about 100,000 since 2011.

In 2021, about 53% of renter households — just under 1 million households — were rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income towards rent, according to the city’s latest housing survey, while 32%, or nearly 600,000 households, were severely rent-burdened, paying more than half their income to rent (the analysis doesn’t include residents of public housing or those who used housing vouchers).

The decline in new construction has continued and, in monthly reports on construction and foundation permit applications for multi-family residential buildings, the Real Estate Board of New York has regularly raised the flag about the city’s housing production landscape. In its latest report from May 18, REBNY pointed out a continuing “trend of negligible filings” for foundation permits, which began to decline after the state’s 421-a tax credit expired in June of last year.

In advance of that expiration, permits had surged. “In the first six months of the year [2022] there were 440 filings for 31,750 units. After the expiration of 421a in June, only 186 filings, accounting for 12,005 units followed,” the report notes.

Without 421-a, experts say that there will be far fewer rental housing units being built, including very little affordable housing, and nowhere near enough to meet Mayor Adams’ “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 new units over ten years.

“A tax benefit here is critical for mixed-income, multifamily development in New York City,” said Dan Garodnick, director of the Department of City Planning. “It's how we get affordable housing in higher income areas.”

The 421-a incentive encourages developers to add income-restricted units to housing that is built as-of-right, which requires no rezoning approvals or other subsidies from the city. But it also underpins the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) policy, a progressive victory under Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council in 2016 that is triggered when developers seek upzoning approvals from the city for new and expanded housing. MIH requires that with such rezonings, certain percentages of the overall units must be rent-restricted at certain income levels — and without use of precious city affordable housing subsidies.

“This is an important program that gets us affordable housing in its own right and also enables the success of our mandatory affordable housing programs, and without it, we will have significant challenges to get the units that we need,” Garodnick said.

In neighborhoods with higher real estate prices, developers and other experts say that the 421-a tax benefit is essential to make up for revenue lost to income-restricted units, which is also covered via the higher rents charged in the market-rate units. In other parts of the city, there are often challenges, they say, in getting affordable housing built without additional city subsidies.

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing was also applied by the past administration in broad neighborhood rezonings, several of which are being pursued by the Adams administration as well, along with initiatives to speed up private developer applications. The administration is also moving ahead with three citywide zoning text amendments, including one most focused on housing growth that the Department of City Planning is expected to unveil and begin the approval process for in 2024.

Garodnick expects to see a “significant dropoff” on already declining housing permit applications if the State Legislature fails to act on 421-a. “There is broad recognition of the problem here,” he said. “The mayor has set forward to define it. He has charged us with putting out ambitious targets and plans to achieve them. And we need the tools to be able to effectuate them and those tools, in many cases, live in the State Capitol.”

On Tuesday, officials from the Adams administration joined lawmakers, labor and civil rights leaders, and housing advocates to call on the Legislature for the passage of measures to address the urgent housing crisis and, by extension, the burgeoning migrant asylum-seeker crisis. “We are in a perfect storm of housing crises that threatens to devastate the people of our city and state unless immediate action is taken this year,” said Deputy Mayor for Economic and Workforce Development Maria Torres-Springer, in a statement. A former city housing commissioner, Torres-Springer is adding housing to her portfolio with the departure of Adams’ chief housing officer, Jessica Katz — both were among the city leaders in Albany on Tuesday. “We cannot wait another year for legislators to come back to Albany,” Torres-Springer added. “We must pass this common-sense agenda now so that we have the tools to build and prosper.”

But, the Legislature does not seem poised to create a 421-a replacement any time soon, and may not even agree to the extension that Hochul proposed for already-permitted projects.

Last year, Governor Hochul proposed replacing 421-a with a new 485-w program with modifications, including deeper affordability requirements. But she later withdrew the proposal in the wake of opposition from the Legislature. Ahead of this year’s state budget battle, she punted the issue of replacing 421-a to lawmakers while proposing, at minimum, a four-year extension of the deadline for building completions to receive 421-a benefits from 2026 to 2030. The Legislature, however, rejected both as almost all housing policies were ultimately excised from the budget deal.

In an interview in early May on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast, Basha Gerhards, REBNY’s senior vice president of planning, said it is “wishful thinking” to wait for the housing market to adjust to the absence of 421–a, considering the time and effort involved in building development. “This is not a process that starts up very quickly or overnight and you do need public policy interventions or public policy support to make sure that that pipeline continues,” she said.

In lieu of a replacement program, developers and construction union leaders say that the Legislature should at least approve a stopgap measure by extending the 421-a deadline in the few remaining weeks of the post-budget legislative session. REBNY has estimated that without that measure, about 33,000 apartments will not be built.

“This is the reality of the market and housing is not being built in communities that need housing because of the Legislature's failure to act on it, to be quite honest,” said Carlo Scissura, President & CEO of the New York Building Congress, in an interview. Without the deadline being extended, Scissura and others say that projects that would have otherwise been built, will be abandoned.

“COVID changed everything. Inflation changed everything. Interest rates are through the roof. Money is not as easy to get anymore…You add all these things and then you don't have a new 421-a program, you just get to the point where you say, ‘Sadly, we are going to be way behind other cities in the U.S. and the world on building much-needed housing,’” he said.

Howard Slatkin, executive director of the nonprofit policy group Citizens Housing and Planning Council, pointed out that as-of-right buildings that have already begun construction could be completed before 2030 but without the 421-a program. “That housing is all going to be market-rate. All those affordable units just go ‘poof,’ which is really a terrible outcome” said Slatkin, recently a top official at the Department of City Planning.

For buildings where Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is required, without 421-a developers will either be stuck or have to seek some other type of relief to make their projects successful, Slatkin said. “Without the tax exemption. It's not clear how they would ever be able to afford to complete those buildings,” he said.

“If the Legislature can enable the units that have started to complete…it's kind of like well, they've stored a few nuts for the winter,” he continued. “But if those buildings can't complete, then it's a double-whammy, because there's nothing new in the pipeline to replace it. The squirrel doesn't have any nuts stored for the winter and we might not make it through that winter.”

The tax exemption also ensures that buildings can otherwise be entirely privately financed, which means that public dollars set aside for affordable housing subsidies don’t have to be used. “It's additive to all the other stuff the city builds,” Slatkin said, referring to ways in which the city’s housing agencies fund affordable housing development.

As Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee and Rachel Fee of the New York Housing Conference (NYHC) noted in a recent op-ed for City Limits, the expiration of the 421-a program threatens to undermine the development of new mixed-income rental housing across the city, including in areas of the city rezoned to spur such development. They pointed to the particular example of Gowanus, Brooklyn, where a massive rezoning was approved by the city in November 2021.

The Gowanus plan, more than a decade in the making, “would, in many ways, be for naught without the Legislature taking action to extend the 421-a completion deadline before June 8. Now is not the time, after years of community discussion and a lengthy public review, to throw up yet another roadblock,” they wrote.

On Wednesday, NYHC released a policy brief pointing out that in the 2022 calendar year, New York City produced ​​only 14,766 units of affordable housing, including both new construction and preservation, which was 48% lower than the 28,366 units produced on average over the previous five years. “Inaction in Albany will mean a decline in affordable housing production in NYC,” said Fee, NYCH’s executive director, in a statement. “Without tax incentives for rental housing, affordable housing will only be built in low-income communities and high-income neighborhoods will be off the hook to produce any affordable housing.”

The 421-a replacement was just one of many programs that the governor, mayor, and others had advocated for in the lead up to the state budget, stressing the urgency of the housing crisis. Among other measures that would have been particularly helpful for the city was a proposed replacement for the J-51 tax credit for building renovations in exchange for conversions to affordable housing, lifting the city’s floor-area ratio (FAR) cap, and establishing a regulatory structure for easier conversions of office buildings to housing and for basement and cellar apartments. None were included in the budget, but they are the specific items on the city’s wish-list for the end of the legislative session.

“We are in a crisis that could have been eased by the Legislature and unfortunately, we're back to where we were a year ago or two years ago and nothing is moving,” said Scissura.

In a news conference on Wednesday in Albany, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said that the 421-a deadline extension is part of the ongoing debate in the remaining days of the session.

“We’ve always, and continue to be very, very focused on housing and affordable housing…It's a matter of trying to do a number of things, not just one,” she said, noting that the Legislature is also pursuing tenant protection bills that the governor has opposed. “Certainly, the 421-a extension would always be part of a broader conversation,” she added.

“I think that part of the challenge is that there’s things that developers want, I think there’s things that tenants want. I think it’s difficult,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters on Wednesday about the potential for a 421-a deadline extension. “These things are all kind of connected. I don’t know if it’s going to be easy to pull off.”

Spokespeople for Senate housing chair Brian Kavanagh and Assembly housing chair Linda Rosenthal did not respond to requests for comment.

The 421-a program has proved to be controversial and significant opposition to renewing it has grown in the last few years, particularly among progressive lawmakers and housing activists. As New York City Comptroller Brad Lander pointed out in a March 2022 report, the program cost the city about $1.77 billion in foregone revenue and created income-restricted apartments that were largely unaffordable to most New Yorkers — numbers that led to Hochul’s proposed revision, which some said was still not enough. Instead of replacing the flawed program, Lander said the state should reform the city’s inequitable property tax system, therefore obviating the need for another tax credit.

“With the expiration of 421-a, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a fair and affordable property tax system that eliminates disparities between homeowners in different neighborhoods, facilitates new rental housing development, and focuses scarce public subsidies on genuinely affordable housing,” Lander, a Democrat, said in a statement in June 2022.

A year later, after the expiration of 421-a, there has been no movement on broader property tax reform and housing construction has slowed to a crawl.

“The housing crisis facing New York will not be solved with a silver bullet,” Lander said in a new statement on Wednesday. “We need to better target housing subsidies to affordability, increase supply of housing for all incomes, reform our inequitable property tax system, and protect tenants from displacement. Simply renewing 421a without addressing the issues of affordability will not successfully meet the housing needs of New Yorkers.”

Others say that while holistic solutions are needed, at the very least 421-a should be extended for existing projects and replaced to help spur new ones.

“The property tax system in New York City is broken, inequitable, regressive, and frankly, idiotic. And everyone knows that but no one's willing to fix it,” said Andrew Fine, policy director of Open New York, a pro-housing-growth advocacy group. But, in the absence of any reforms to that system, “we do need 421-a to get housing built, and particularly affordable housing in high-cost areas where agencies like [the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development] and [the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal] are unlikely to fund affordable housing.”

“421-a has been an important bandaid on the broken system for decades, and it should be tweaked and fixed over time. But most importantly, the property tax system as a whole needs to be fixed,” he added.

Even those who have criticized 421-a believe that some sort of replacement or other tax credit may be necessary. “We as a city and as a state, we're giving away all of these funds in the form of a tax expenditure, but we're not getting enough in return in order to address the housing crisis, especially for those who are feeling the pain the most,” said City Council Member Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings. She pointed out that building applications surged and then dipped in a similar manner when 421-a was previously allowed to expire in 2015 and only replaced in 2017.

Sanchez is not opposed to a new program but insists that it needs to come with deeper affordability levels and income restrictions that will be accessible to low-income New Yorkers. “I think that's the bottom line,” she said. In the meantime, she said the Adams administration should be more creative with the resources at its disposal and put more capital dollars towards housing development — an area where the mayor has not lived up to his campaign promises.

Cea Weaver, co-founder of the Housing Justice for All advocacy coalition that focuses on tenant protections, said the 421-a program is, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it encourages land speculation, drives up property prices, and then necessitates its own application. “I don't think that we need 421-a to subsidize unaffordable housing,” she said, noting that most of the housing built under the program remains out of reach for low-income families.

But, she conceded, “I do think that with land values as high as they are, some sort of tax incentive is necessary maybe to build new housing.” She said there are other tax benefits that could increase production. She cited, for instance, the 420-c program, which provides property tax exemptions to non-profit developers that create low-income housing in partnership with private firms.

“I think that there's still a lot of options for production if the city is willing to subsidize and support the not-for-profit development community in building housing,” she said. “421-a is not the only game in town.”

Note - This article has been updated to correct the accuracy of numbers on housing production from a New York Housing Conference policy brief.

Ground-breaking (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

May 19, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Top City & State Housing Officials on the NYS Budget Impasse and What Comes Next, with Jessica Katz & RuthAnne Visnauskas

At the annual NYSAFAH affordable housing conference in Manhattan, Max Politics host Ben Max of Gotham Gazette moderated a discussion with New York City Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz and New York State Housing Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas about the state budget failure on housing and what comes next at the state and city levels.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, a first-term Democrat, is running for reelection this year and is facing a challenge from two candidates in the June 27 Democratic primary. Katz eked out a victory in the Democratic primary in 2019 and went on to overwhelmingly win the general election, giving Queens a new district attorney for the first time in almost 30 years as she succeeded the late District Attorney Richard Brown.

Katz says she has been a “steady hand during very turbulent times,” shepherding the district attorney’s office through the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and the simultaneous overhaul of state criminal justice laws, specifically reforms to bail and discovery statutes. Her opponents include George Grasso, a retired Queens Supreme Court judge, who believes she hasn’t been tough enough on crime, and Devian Daniels, a public defender who has filed petitions to get on the ballot but does not otherwise seem to be running a campaign.

This year’s New York City primary elections are fast approaching, with early voting and absentee balloting set to begin mid-June. On the ballot this year are races for Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island District Attorney, which occur every four years, certain judicial positions, and all 51 seats of the City Council, elections occurring just two years after the last round as happens once a decade after the Census and redistricting. Incumbents, almost all of them Democrats, are running for reelection in virtually every contest this year. Few races are expected to be competitive and turnout will likely be low even for New York City’s paltry standards.

District Attorney is a massively powerful law enforcement position, the borough’s lead prosecutor tasked with upholding state law and partnering with officials at all three levels of government.

The 2019 Democratic primary for Queens DA was a nail-biter till the end. On election night in June, Tiffany Cabán, a democratic socialist public defender who is now a City Council member, declared victory, hoping to usher in an era of progressive policy with a focus on public safety through alternatives to incarceration. But there were votes that had yet to be counted and more than a month later, Katz emerged on top with a margin of just 60 votes. She went on to win the general election with 74% of the vote against Joe Murray, a registered Democrat who ran on the Republican Party line.

There has been little attention paid to district attorney races in the city this year, and Katz appears the favorite to win the Democratic primary. She has the advantages of incumbency, including name recognition, deeper campaign coffers, and endorsements from unions and fellow Queens elected officials. And she has run her office with few major controversies, trying to both crack down on violent crime and modestly reform prosecutorial practices to build stronger relationships with the community.

“I think she's a winner. I don't see where the race is,” said one Queens Democratic consultant, who wished to remain anonymous and is unaffiliated with any candidate in the race, of Katz. “She’s had no bad publicity. I don't see what she's done that people would want to vote against her for. She's very noncontroversial.”

Though Katz is not as progressive as her counterparts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which she has faced some criticism for, progressive advocates that rallied around Cabán in 2019 have not targeted her in this year’s primary.

“If it's between Katz and Grasso, I think regardless of the outcome, it's bad news for Queens voters who want to see decarceration,” said Keli Young, civil rights campaign coordinator for VOCAL-NY, a progressive advocacy group. “Grasso is positioning himself to the right of Katz…and DA Katz is a carceral DA. The best that can come out of a prosecutor's office is a commitment to harm reduction and that's not what we're seeing.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, have argued that Katz and other Democratic DAs have not been tough enough on crime, too often downgrade crimes, and have not locked up enough people pre-trial.

One of the biggest challenges for Katz has been an uptick in crime across Queens. The pandemic saw increases in crime nationally and in the city, including a spike in gun violence. While crime has trended downwards citywide, Queens continues to struggle. For policing jurisdictional purposes, the borough is split into Queens North and Queens South, each covering eight police precincts. According to the latest NYPD data, through May 14 Queens North has witnessed an 8% increase in major index crimes compared to the same period last year, and a nearly 63% increase compared to the same period in 2021. Queens South, on the other hand, has seen a 1.86% decrease through May 7 this year but a 38.6% increase compared to 2021.

Though murders and gun violence have fallen, the recent uptick has been driven by increases in other crimes including assaults, robberies, burglaries, and car thefts.

The winner of the Democratic primary is likely to face attorney Michael Mossa in the general election. According to City & State, Mossa has been endorsed by the Queens Republican and Conservative parties, though he has yet to launch a campaign committee.

Melinda Katz
Katz has previously served in the City Council and the state Assembly, and she was the two-term borough president of Queens when she ran for DA in 2019. At the time, DA Brown, who had been in office for 28 years, had already announced that he would not run for another term. He passed away before he could finish his last year in office.

Katz, a licensed attorney for 30 years, won a crowded primary, with establishment support and despite having no prior prosecutorial experience. After sailing through the general election, she took office in January 2020, just months before the pandemic ravaged the city and at the same time that a slate of criminal justice reforms approved by the State Legislature took effect.

Besides an uptick in crime, the pandemic forced court closures and the criminal justice system slowed to a crawl. On top of that, many prosecutors across the state complained about the state criminal justice reforms. New bail laws, which eliminated bail for most low-level offenses, were hampering their ability to keep criminals off the street, prosecutors claimed, while expanded discovery requirements were straining their resources amid an exodus of attorneys towards the private sector, leading to a massive increase in case dismissals.

“Since day one on the job, I've been doing the work,” Katz said in a phone interview. “The bail laws changed on day one, the discovery laws changed on day one. In my third month of being the district attorney of this county, the world shut down because of COVID. But we still had work to do and we do it every single day.”

Katz touted several initiatives she has taken in office to target gun violence, human trafficking, domestic violence, drugs, and gangs. She created a Violent Criminal Enterprises Bureau to tackle drug crimes, a Cold Case Unit, a Bureau of Housing and Worker Protection that recovered lost wages and prosecuted deed theft, set up the office’s first ever Conviction Integrity Unit, which vacated 99 wrongful convictions so far, a Community Partnerships Division to strengthen ties with her constituents, and even appointed an immigration specialist to serve the immigrants who make up nearly half of the borough’s population of 2.3 million people.

Though Katz advocated for eliminating cash bail, she has also said that the state should set a “dangerousness standard” for judges to consider when deciding to set bail or remand a defendant. She was supportive of the successful effort by Governor Kathy Hochul in this year’s state budget to tighten bail laws once again, in order to give judges more discretion for pre-trial detention, and also said that discovery laws need to be “fairer” and focused on turning over material evidence rather than strict timelines.

A looming concern for the city’s prosecutors is the impending closure of the Rikers Island jail complex by 2027. Katz has supported the plan, which involves replacing Rikers with four borough-based jails, including one in Kew Gardens, Queens, after reducing the city’s jail population to about 3,300. But she has previously criticized how the plan unfolded, taking issue with the apparent lack of community input and the original proposed size of the Queens facility. The facility has since been shrunk from nearly 1,500 beds to 886, including 126 beds for all the women in Department of Correction custody.

“I think that my job is to keep this borough safe and send…individuals to jail when it's appropriate to do that. I do believe, however, that the city of New York is a first class city. It is, I believe, the best city in the world, and we should be able to have a top notch, first-rate, healthy humanitarian detention center,” she said.

“What happens with the county jails, I can't let that deter me from what my charge is, and my charge is to prosecute drivers of crime and to make sure that communities are well represented by my office,” she said, referring broadly to the Rikers closure plan.

Katz also believes that the plan may be unachievable by the deadline set by law, since the average daily jail population has climbed to nearly 6,000. “I'm not sure they can accomplish it by 2027 but that's not my charge,” she said (Mayor Eric Adams himself has said that the city needs to craft a “Plan B” but none has yet been offered and the City Council has shot down such a suggestion).

One of the biggest accomplishments Katz boasts is tackling guns and gang violence in the borough. In March, for example, her office indicted 33 gang members in connection with 23 separate shootings, as a result of a three-year investigation.

“We have to tackle the gun violence but you can't prosecute your way out of that…A balanced approach to drivers of crime versus keeping people out of the system is, I think, an important combination of what I do,” she said, arguing that her office has built better relationships between law enforcement and the people of Queens.

“I don't think you can be a good prosecutor unless you have communication and partnerships with the community,” she added.

Katz is well-positioned for the primary, with a campaign account that holds more than $1.2 million. She’s also been endorsed by U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, who chairs the Queens Democratic Party, Queens U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, Borough President Donovan Richards, several local City Council members, and a slate of unions including 32BJ SEIU, RWDSU, Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, 1199 SEIU, and others.

George Grasso
Grasso was previously a long-time NYPD official and became a judge in 2010. In August 2022, he retired from the position of administrative judge for criminal matters for the Queens Supreme Court in order to run against Katz in this year’s election.

As an attorney, Grasso prosecuted cases of NYPD misconduct before becoming the Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters and Chief Legal Counsel in 1997, followed by his elevation to First Deputy Police Commissioner in 2002.

On the bench, he boasts of creating the “CourtStat” system, which helped reduce case processing times citywide. He formulated Project Reset, a pre-court diversion program, and implemented programs that allowed teenagers to have their criminal cases dismissed. He also served on former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Behavioral Health Task Force, helping to craft the city’s first Citywide Supervised Release Program.

In 2016, Grasso became the Supervising Judge of Bronx Criminal Court. He partnered with Bronx DA Darcel Clark to establish the Overdose Avoidance and Recovery Court to help defendants with substance abuse disorders receive treatment and have their criminal charges dismissed.

As the administrative judge in Queens, he led a Citywide Gun Initiative to quickly process gun violence cases, and he also helped create a diversion program for felony gun possession cases involving individuals between the ages of 18 and 24.

Grasso is running to the right of Katz, pledging to be tough on crime on a platform that closely mirrors Katz’s own policies. He has promised to tackle quality-of-life offenses through community-based intervention, crack down on repeat offenders, go after gun violence, hate crimes, domestic violence, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and child and elder abuse. He has pledged to fully support the conviction integrity unit and has also supported restorative justice programs and treatment services for those suffering from substance abuse disorders.

“I think we are in a very, very tough spot right now, not only in Queens but in New York City and frankly, throughout New York State,” Grasso said in a phone interview.

He had particularly harsh criticism for the Democrat-led Legislature and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, for creating a “politically driven crime wave” when they ushered in criminal justice reforms in 2020, which “swept out the entire concept of quality of life enforcement.” He too has stressed the need for a “dangerousness” standard for judges to consider in pre-trial proceedings.

He also had a pointed critique of Katz, who he believes has failed to address the quality of life crimes that escalate to larger, more violent crimes. “You Google ‘Melinda Katz and quality of life’, the only thing you're gonna see is George Grasso questioning why she never talks about it,” he said.

Rather than insisting on locking more people up, Grasso has said he supports the plan to reduce the jail population and close Rikers. “I believe in helping people. I believe in minimizing the Rikers population,” he said. “In the world I would like to live in, we would have state-of-the-art, 21st century, borough-based jails.”

But he has cast doubt on the “artificially low” jail population target of 3,300. “No expert, including me, believes that’s a rational number,” he said. “We need a Plan B right now,” he said, “because the current plan…I am stating unequivocally I believe this plan is not working."

He also suggested that Rikers could be converted into a satellite facility for Bellevue Hospital, to provide treatment to those with serious mental illnesses. Additionally, he said he would create a new mental health bureau at the DA’s office.

Grasso has been endorsed by the Uniformed Fire Officers Association and former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. He has just over $230,000, low in comparison to Katz’s fundraising.

Though he’s running in the Democratic primary, Grasso has made no secret of appealing to Republicans and has also decided to run as an independent candidate in the general should he lose to Katz in June.

“I'm not only considering running on the third party line, I've already taken legal steps to begin the process,” he said, according to a Queens Daily Eagle report. “Not only because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm all in on this. So, I've taken legal steps, I'm going to create a third party line, we're going to call it the public safety line.”

[READ: Clark Faces Challenger in Bronx District Attorney Primary Set for June]