Governor Hochul (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)
It is the time of year when calls for charity intensify in number and volume and various ‘neediest funds’ and targeted events like Giving Tuesday seek to capitalize on holiday sentiments. Yet among the many righteous causes, little is said about one group of people in dire need – the more than 2 million people incarcerated across the country.
The American crisis of mass incarceration is by now universally recognized as the number of people behind bars has grown by 700% since 1970. The myriad causes for the explosion reveal that there is much for the country to reckon with as jails and prisons are overwhelmingly and disproportionately filled with Black and brown people.
Yet it is not enough to merely recognize the existence of mass incarceration or even to try and identify all its many causes. The failure to take decisive corrective action regarding the manifestation of mass incarceration – the more than 2 million human beings behind bars – must, and can, be addressed, and gubernatorial clemency is an immediately available way to begin to repair the harm.
Notably, as it is typically tied to the holidays, support for clemency rings loudly in faith and the need to recognize and value redemption. Some years ago, Pope Francis’s call for the Jubilee Year of Mercy emphasized forgiveness and reconciliation. More recently, when speaking to prison staff and chaplains, he declared that we should “[N]ever deprive one of the right to start over.”
And countless people in New York prisons merit the opportunity, if not the right, to start over.
The calls for racial justice that motivated cries to “say their names” hope that when individuals and media say and print the names of people of color who have been victimized by the criminal legal system – from policing through sentencing – it will compel people to ask questions and take decisive remedial action. In that spirit, here are but some of the people facing the prospect of death by incarceration here in New York. For them, and countless others, clemency is the only road to freedom.
Paul Leon, Craig Jackson, Ramon Henriquez, Julian Castillo, Rodney Chandler, Robert Webster, Lamar Sanchez, and Frank Pruitt were all sentenced to life terms when they were teenagers, some barely 16 years old. By now, they have served decades behind bars and have grown into mature, thoughtful, and compassionate adults.
Stanley Bellamy, Lance Sessoms, and Jose Medina are among the many elders in prison who have already been incarcerated for close to 40 years. They spend their days serving as counselors and mentors to young people inside and outside prison. Many elders, like Jose Medina, are also gravely ill and at severe risk from COVID-19 and its variants.
Bruce Bryant and David Sell are just two of the people in prison who have somehow managed to achieve remarkable things. They have created anti-gang and anti-violence programs, written op-eds and law review articles, collaborated with social justice organizations like Children of Promise, and have even given impactful TED talks about the children of incarcerated parents.
Joe Gordon, Kassan Messiah, Robert Webster, and Bruce Bryant have powerful claims of innocence. Kassan Messiah, a Black man, was convicted of killing a white man by an all-white jury after the prosecution removed every juror of color. Bruce Bryant’s appointed lawyer was suffering from PTSD from an unrelated event, and the trial prosecutor is now in prison for attempting to bribe a witness in a subsequent case.
Darryl Powell and Roger Cole are just two of the thousands of people in prison serving draconian sentences because of the so-called “trial tax” – they rejected a plea offer, pursued their constitutional right to trial, and then were punished for not pleading guilty. Darryl Powell was offered a plea of 9 to 18 years. He is now serving life without parole. Roger Cole was offered a pretrial plea of 20 years to life. He was ultimately sentenced to 125 years to life.
Bryon Russ, Sheldon Johnson, David Irons, Roger Cole, and Randy Jamison are among the many people serving life or de facto life sentences for drug or robbery cases; sentences unheard of in any other western, industrialized country.
Kim Brown is one among many women serving massive sentences who have garnered widespread support for their release from people inside and outside prison.
In similar fashion to charitable giving focused on the end of the year, Governors tend to dole out clemency — this awesome measure of mercy to commute prison sentences — in the spirit of the holidays. As soon as December rolls around, countless people in prison and their families hope and pray that their pleas for clemency will finally be granted. Yet while clemency is a readily available mechanism to redress mass incarceration, few Governors have been willing to wield that power to any significant degree. If past is prologue, many people behind bars will suffer crushing disappointment and struggle to regain and hold on to this slender reed of hope for next year.
For several years, former Governor Andrew Cuomo promised robust use of his clemency power, and as a result applications began to pour in. That promise was never realized and instead became a cruel source of false hope. Governor Hochul now has the chance to right that wrong.
Recognizing and addressing the needs of the needy should not be limited to a few weeks at the end of the year, and the plight of those languishing behind bars similarly demands ongoing attention. However, the urgent moral need to decarcerate demands that Governors with unfettered clemency power act now on the thousands of applications pending in their offices. After all, what better way to celebrate the spirit of the holidays and the aspirations for the new year than by reuniting people with their families.
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Steven Zeidman is a professor at CUNY Law School. On Twitter @SteveZeidman.
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Fighting addiction and overdose in NYC (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)
In recent weeks, news broke that according to provisional figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses within a 12-month period ending in April 2021. For the first time in history, overdose deaths in the United States have exceeded 100,000 in a year, a value greater than the toll of car crashes and gun fatalities combined during the same period.
Unfortunately, New York City residents are a common victim to this crisis: every four hours, someone dies of a drug overdose in New York City. We are in the midst of a national health threat. The United States has unequivocally lost its longest war, the 50-year-long “war on drugs.”
While the war on drugs campaign was exceedingly effective at perpetuating institutionalized racism and decimating communities of color, America's streets are flooded with more potent and dangerous drugs than ever before—primarily methamphetamines and the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The belief that trillions of tax dollars spent on harsh law enforcement action, coercive suppression of production, and criminalization of drug use, possession, and supply would lead to a diminished market for controlled drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and cannabis has been total deception.
The war on drugs was waged largely in the name of public safety, not public health. The “safety,” however, of the substance user who was sick and suffering was never centered in this war. Instead of making people safer, punitive drug policies have stimulated violence, instability, and mental, emotional, and physical pain.
Nearly half of the inmates in federal prison are held on drug charges, sending a message to individuals who struggle with addiction that they are inherently bad, and that having a substance use disorder is criminal. This, in turn, perpetuates shame and stigma, and hinders the substance user from making the courageous step to ask for help.
The war on drugs failed to understand human behavior, as well as the power and root causes of addiction. Substance users experience extreme and unbearable shame and trauma daily at the hands of their addiction. Shame is a persistent companion for a substance user, yet it is isolating and causes a profound sense of separation. Shame is debilitating, traumatizing, and causes chronic feelings of self-doubt, inferiority, hopelessness, inadequacy, and worthlessness. It can become a barrier to seeking and accepting help, as one feels they are not worthy of help and attention or love and support. Shame can drive a person’s sense of self into hiding, and also feed compulsive behaviors as a way to escape pain and feelings of worthlessness. Shame perpetuates the cycle of addiction and can become its own prison.
With this in mind, how can we as a society help to make meaningful changes in the lives of those who struggle with addiction? The opposite of addiction is not recovery — it is connection. When policies cause people to feel shamed, othered, outcasted, criminalized, or punished, those who are suffering from addiction will not feel empowered to connect to treatment providers, community support networks, resources, loving family members, spiritual advisors, friends, or themselves.
As we look forward, we need interventions that step away from shame and stigma and instead lean into connection, compassion, and understanding. Safe injection sites do exactly this and will be vital in the fight against overdose deaths.
As noted by the American Medical Assocation, safe injection sites save lives. Research indicates that safe injection sites reduce the amount and frequency of drug use, public injecting, drug trafficking and crime (in areas where the facilities are located), HIV and HEP C high risk behavior, and overdose/overdose deaths.
In 2020, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that there had been no overdose deaths at an unsanctioned supervised injection site (at an undisclosed location in the United States) from 2014 to 2019. Likewise, the National Institute of Health acknowledged that while more rigorous research on overdose prevention sites needs to be done, drug use supervision and overdose management have the potential to provide health benefits to those at-risk and bring "economic advantages to the larger community.
Perhaps most importantly, safe injection sites are official health-care settings that are non-judgmental and do not stigmatize drug use or drug users. Individuals are treated like human beings and accepted for who they are, regardless of where they are in their recovery process.
For many substance users a visit to a safe injection site may be their first time interacting with compassionate and caring health-care providers, who inspire them to connect or reconnect with society and substance use treatment services. For every addict who is able to summon the courage to ask for help and seek treatment, there are thousands who silently struggle in isolation and shame, never accessing help. While opponents of safe injection sites argue that public funds are better spent on addiction treatment and that safe injection sites encourage continued drug use, I counter that safe injection sites meet many substance users where they are and provide a powerful entry point into the recovery process.
To the parents who fear safe injection sites in their neighborhoods will be harmful to children, I would challenge you to teach your children not to turn their heads when they see pain and suffering, especially in the form of mental illness and substance use disorders. Rather, model and explain how to be compassionate and empathic towards those who are sick and suffering. Talk to your children about substance use and let them know that you are a safe person to have hard conversations with about drugs and alcohol. There is no doubt that your children will see drugs and alcohol at social events in middle school, high school, and college. Not teaching them about the dangers of substance use and arming them with social and emotional coping skills will put them at risk of experimentation and addiction but seeing or living near safe injection sites will not.
As a substance use treatment provider and as someone who is in recovery from addiction, I would love to see every individual suffering with a substance use disorder embrace abstinence and become freed from the shackles of addiction. I want to see those with substance use disorders enter detoxes, rehabs, and long-term treatment and realize the new freedom and happiness that comes with abstinence. However, recovery is a journey—not a destination—and we need to respect that every individual is entitled to their own unique journey. For many, visiting a safe injection site will be the first step in their recovery journey.
We must remember that every individual who walks into a safe injection site is saying that they love themselves just a little more than they love a substance, that they value their life, and that they do not want to die. For someone addicted to substances this is monumental. From there, we need to love and embrace the user until they are capable of loving and embracing themselves on their own, as our government simultaneously establishes policies and institutions that are truly understanding of the initial issue.
Our country needs to connect with and deliver compassionate services to the 21 million Americans struggling with a substance use disorder in this country, if we ever intend to combat addiction and its root causes.
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Amanda Fialk, PhD, LCSW (She/Her/Hers or They/Them) is a licensed clinical social worker and Partner and Chief Clinical Officer at The Dorm, a young adult mental health treatment community based in NYC & DC. On Twitter @AmandaFialkPhD.
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Senate Majority Leader Schumer (photo: @SenSchumer)
We volunteered for thousands of hours in 2020 to elect Democrats during a pandemic. After work, on weekends, we knocked on doors, made calls, fundraised and donated.
Now a year later, many are asking, what was the point?
Our democracy, planet and people are in crisis. Democracy experts are warning this is our last chance to prevent full on fascism in America. Republicans have already laid the groundwork to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections; Without intervention by Senate Democrats they will succeed and a white supremacist, authoritarian regime will seize power indefinitely. Add to that we’re confronting a continuing pandemic and a global climate crisis— working people are suffering and it will only get worse.
It is past time for the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and Build Back Better package. When Indivisible Nation BK met with Schumer last spring, he told us “failure is not an option” when it comes to securing voting rights, but he has failed. He also told us he would get Build Back Better done by Christmas and ensure it had the strongest possible climate and care provisions, but in that, too, he has failed.
While millions of Americans, including us, are going to work this week during an unprecedented COVID variant surge, Senate Schumer just allowed Senate Democrats to go on vacation without getting a single thing done for the American people.
January is too late. Not only is he risking losing the momentum advocates have built for these crucial bills as Omicron gets worse and consumes more and more attention, resources and energy, but by waiting till January he risks the security of the upcoming midterms and is allowing the child tax credit, which millions of families are depending on, to expire.
Adjourning the Senate now sends a pernicious message that there is no point in showing up to vote for Democrats: They don’t keep their promises and instead go on vacation while the world and our democracy burn. As activists, we spent countless hours urging people to vote in 2020, but we simply cannot out-organize voter suppression, gerrymandering and election rigging during a deadly pandemic-again- when Senate Democrats– or the President– won’t meet us halfway and at least try to address the many monumental problems we face.
Senator Schumer is in charge of his caucus. He sets the schedule. When we’re facing multiple emergencies- as we are, we at the least expect him to stay at work and keep trying to save our Democracy, our planet and help working people.
And so our message to him is: Go back to D.C. to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and Build Back Better—or resign.
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Liat Olenick, Brice Gaillard, Lisa Raymond Tolan, Rachel Batson, and Sara Danver are board members of Indivisible Nation BK. On Twitter @bkindivisible.
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Development rendering (image: NYC mayor's office)
Over the past several years, our cityscape has continued to transform before our eyes. Gentrification and displacement have pushed deeper into working class communities, while shiny new towers throughout the five boroughs remain out of reach. At the forefront of this reality is the way our government makes planning and land use decisions. They shape what our city looks like. And equally as important — they shape what communities are served.
The fact is, the way we plan is broken, and far too many are unhappy with how the system works.
Yet despite numerous attempts, systemic change to land use and planning has proven hard to come by. This doesn’t need to be the case. We know what’s wrong. We know what needs to change. We know who can make the change we all need.
Currently New York City takes a scattered, ad hoc approach to planning — a neighborhood by neighborhood process, untethered from any larger analysis of citywide and local needs or collaborative vision.
This approach replicates and exacerbates existing inequity, causing displacement and exclusion, with each community left to respond with whatever resources and power they can muster.
It has brought us neighborhood rezonings that, until these final months of the de Blasio administration, were solely situated in low-income communities of color, forcing neighborhoods like East New York or along Jerome Avenue in the Bronx to trade new, mostly market-rate density, in exchange for long overdue community investments.
It has disregarded thoughtful, community-created plans like those crafted by Bushwick and Chinatown residents, simply because they didn’t meet the city’s hidden targets for those neighborhoods.
And it allows whiter and wealthier communities power to say no to more affordable housing.
As a city we must pivot to a different model — one that creates a fairer distribution of resources and development, one that empowers communities to create and move forward their own plans, and ensures all neighborhoods are helping to advance racial and economic equity.
This is why we have long advocated for comprehensive, long-term planning in New York City. While the details of how comprehensive planning would work in our city are not set in stone (nor should they be), its broad outline and goals remain the same.
Comprehensive planning requires the city to holistically look at its current and future needs, alongside existing disparities across neighborhoods and groups. The city then sets transparent goals for how to address these needs and disparities in an equitable fashion.
Most crucially the community (and not developers) creates their own plans to help guide their future. This builds community power and power for their elected officials to fight for those visions moving forward.
Our city will move forward with new leadership — from the City Council to Borough Presidents, the next Mayor, and more — in a matter of days.
This new landscape is an opportunity to reinforce equity-centered, community-based planning as the best way to build consensus for land use decisions that prioritize the needs of New Yorkers.
By aligning our spatial planning with our city budget, the next administration can ensure that growth and investment are working to facilitate a more just and equitable city.
Comprehensive planning is the most efficient strategy to tackle our biggest and longest-standing challenges like housing choice and affordability, climate resilience, and equitable access to opportunity.
We need to redefine what it means to thrive as a city, without leaving any of our neighbors behind. Comprehensive planning is the key to seeing the city as it is, and as it could be.
Such solutions require leadership, and the next administration and City Council must agree this is a problem within their power to fix.
Through new legislation, directives to city agencies, budget priorities, and changes to the City Charter, New York City can chart a course towards comprehensive planning and a brighter future for all.
Imagine what could be possible if we had a real plan.
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Chris Walters is Land Use Policy Coordinator at Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a member organization of the Thriving Communities Coalition. On Twitter @ANHDNYC & @thrivingccnyc.
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Farah Louis, the author (middle, in green) with Adrienne Adams (second from left) & others (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
While tackling the global COVID-19 pandemic, New York City experienced a historic moment this year. We didn’t just break the proverbial glass ceiling; we demolished barriers that were created to leave marginalized communities out for generations. The next New York City Council is on track to be the most diverse in the city’s history, including the first Muslim woman; the first openly gay Black women; seven foreign-born New Yorkers; the largest LGBTQ+ delegation; and a high number of electeds who identify as people of color. For the first time ever, City Hall will have a majority of 31 women serving in the legislative body.
In our city, from health care to home care, whether managing restaurants or grocery stores, women are leading the way. Women make up the majority of workers on the frontline in the fight against COVID-19, and by supporting the very people who have shown up, risked their lives and, in some cases lost their lives during our darkest hour, we can improve the city. Many of their important issues were sidelined when the covid crisis began, and if the goal of the New York City Council in the next session is to fully reopen and revitalize New York City, and make it better than it was before the pandemic, these issues must take center stage.
There can be no recovery without centering women during our next legislative session – because every issue essentially is a women's issue.
We should begin at the beginning: the maternal mortality and morbidity debacle. Birthing-people in New York City are dying. Their pain is ignored. Their lives, along with the lives of their children, are at risk. The City of New York has not adequately invested in the necessary infrastructure or programs to protect them. Black and Brown mothers, in particular, have endured structural racism in health care for decades. There is a national and local history of substandard care, disregard, disrespect, and unfair treatment.
Black women are two to three times more likely to die from complications during their pregnancy. I witnessed this firsthand in my district. According to a report by the NYC Health Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, East Flatbush is one of three New York City neighborhoods with the highest rate of infant mortality and maternal complications in the city, resulting primarily from racial disparities in health care.
The solutions exist and they are coming from the most knowledgeable advocates, close to the issue: midwives, doulas, and birth advocates. Tackling these issues first will have widespread benefits because health issues that are specific to women’s bodies impact our entire city. Tackling these issues with a co-governance lens will lead to substantial change and a better start for our families.
Supporting women cannot only revolve around the act of birth, of course. We need to invest in mental health resources to deal with postpartum depression, as well as long-term mental health needs for all women. Women are the primary caregiver in most homes, while also working, and living through the harsh realities of pandemic life, as well as other challenges that existed well before COVID-19.
Black and brown communities, in particular, have been disproportionately affected by health disparities, the loss of loved ones, and housing instability. We must ensure that New Yorkers have comprehensive, immediate, culturally competent, and accessible mental health care. Investing in programs that make mental health services accessible to all is a necessary step to reopening New York City fully, and it must begin with the people who did not have access during this crisis.
Our focus cannot purely be on survival; we must push for an agenda that allows women to thrive. Two hindering problems to solve include pay parity and accessible and affordable child care. The pay gap between American men and women is one of the greatest injustices this country has battled for decades. Women across the nation bear the consequences of being paid a fraction of the compensation that their male counterparts are paid — for the same work. For too many Black women, the workplace is yet another arena in which they must wrestle with discrimination and inequality. Our families depend on our livelihoods to remain afloat. These discriminatory pay practices can — and must — change.
This must be supplemented by investments in child care that will allow women to realize these gains directly. No longer should working mothers need to choose between supporting their family and raising children. Women live at the intersection of sexism and racism. Our lives are defined by fighting institutional and entrenched conditions that hinder our career development and advancement. This inexcusable reality is unacceptable. COVID-19 has magnified these disparities and shows that we need to create equitable workplace conditions for all women.
This is our time.
In state government, we have our first female Governor of New York and Black women serving as the Senate Majority Leader and Attorney General. In City Hall, we have a majority of incoming members identifying as women.
This is our time.
We have an opportunity to elect the first Black woman as Speaker of the City Council. And, what better time than now to demolish the old school, backroom, boys club politics!
We can make room for a new wave of leadership, a women’s wave of leadership, that will make vital issues our priorities in 2022.
This. Is. Our. Time.
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City Council Member Farah Louis represents parts of Brooklyn. On Twitter @FarahNLouis.
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A push for better birthing options (photo via NYSALM)
This op-ed is adapted from a public letter being sent to Governor Kathy Hochul by birth practitioners, advocates, educators, and leaders and reflects a petition already signed by more than 1,000 New Yorkers in support of the Midwifery Birth Center Bill.
Midwifery birth centers provide high-value, evidence-based, patient-centered care that has been proven to result in positive health outcomes, cost savings, and health equity—and could be essential to advancing birth equity in New York, a state that faces a maternal mortality and morbidity crisis.
So why are midwifery birth centers nearly impossible to open?
Byzantine and burdensome state regulations and obstacles from the Department of Health have meant that no midwifery birth centers have been able to be licensed in New York State, leaving families without the care options they deserve.
The good news: There is a step within reach that could change this. The bad news: There's only a few weeks left for Governor Kathy Hochul to act.
The New York State Senate and Assembly have unanimously passed the Midwifery Birth Center Bill (A.259a/S.1414a) to address exactly these challenges—but now the governor must call for the bill and sign it into law by December 31 or it’s back to square one.
As midwives who have worked in public and private health settings in New York, we've personally seen the value midwifery care can add to birthing families—and we've seen the frustrations that come from not having more birth center options. We're fortunate to have leaders in the State Legislature who understand the health and economic benefits of this avenue—including Assembly Health Chair Richard Gottfried, the longest-serving member of the Legislature, and Senate Health Chair Gustavo Rivera. Now we need to make sure Governor Hochul sees and seizes this opportunity.
To get technical for a moment, the Midwifery Birth Center bill allows accreditation by an unbiased national entity, such as the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers (CABC), to satisfy the Certificate of Need requirements for opening a facility—which is one of the major obstacles to opening such centers in New York. Adopting the guidelines from a nationally recognized accrediting organization, as is done in many other states, will protect and serve childbearing families in New York. National birth center accreditation is evidence-based, efficient, transparent, affordable, and tailored to birth centers. Accreditation reviews all aspects of the birth center, including business financial operations, regulatory compliance, facility design, staff competency, collaboration for transfer, perinatal outcome data, and client experience. It is the gold standard of any state's birth center licensure process. This bill will make sure this gold standard is applied in New York State as well.
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Whitney Hall, LM, CM, is a Midwife and President of NYS Birth Center Association. Casey Selzer, LM, CNM, is a Midwife and former Co-Chair of NYC Midwives.
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Protecting NYC from climate change (photo: Paige Polk/Mayoral Photography Office)
Climate change seriously upped its impact this year in New York City. Hurricane Ida produced historic rainfall and flooding, which triggered flash flood warnings across all five boroughs for the first time ever and caused at least 13 fatalities in the city itself.
In protecting our communities from the consequences of climate change, an important piece of the solution that needs improvement is access to and engagement with user-friendly, hyper-local climate data. This would allow policy-makers and New Yorkers to understand how to better address impacts to their own communities.
Recently, the City Council voted to create a citywide climate resiliency plan, which strives to ensure preparedness for extreme weather across New York City. From the limited information that is publicly available, it appears to take a “top-down” approach, i.e., city agencies will be responsible for its development, implementation, and oversight. While it is possible that it will work to expand direct community engagement in the process, those details are not currently highlighted.
A lesser discussed aspect of climate resilience is the importance of social infrastructure, namely the people, places and institutions that allow communities to respond to climate change. When extreme events upheave daily life, the stronger the local relationships one maintains with their community, the greater their ability to recover. Importantly, incoming Mayor Eric Adams’ citywide resiliency plan includes the idea of a neighborhood-specific needs assessment.
There are a number of reasons that it is imperative to consider climate resilience from the “bottom-up,” communitywide level, in addition to the focus on citywide planning initiatives. While a portion of the $15 billion in federal funds administered by the city post-Sandy did go to small business and workforce funding, money to build resilience through efforts that better connect people within communities was largely absent. Measures such as generating plans to identify and support vulnerable neighbors likely could have alleviated some of the impacts of stormwater flooding experienced during Hurricane Ida.
Community-focused efforts strive to marry climate justice and social resilience. They work to generally implement effective, quick to install, and/or inexpensive hyperlocal measures. These may include maintaining secular and nonsecular spaces for people to discuss local climate information and educating communities about how they can improve their climate decision making through interactive games. They help highlight nuanced neighborhood needs and recognize that residents are important sources of knowledge about the places where they live.
When community information is not sufficiently utilized, there can be unintended consequences. For example, green infrastructure projects to divert stormwater from Jamaica Bay in New York City through government projects were concentrated in the northern and eastern parts of Brooklyn. Such a focus level left many residents in adjacent neighborhoods with flood reduction projects still in the “design phase” when Hurricane Ida hit.
New York State went down the path of community resilience once but didn’t fully see it through. The New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program was launched after Hurricane Sandy to fund proposals submitted by planning committees, each representing a small piece of the state. Reporting by The City said that many of these proposals remain unfunded, hampering the ability of the state to cope with climate impacts since that time.
So how do we support neighborhood-based resiliency efforts in New York City? One of the puzzle pieces relates to the information an interested member of the public, but not a climate expert per se, could extract about neighborhoods across the city.
In our efforts to address this topic, we found two overarching themes.
First, while each neighborhood faces a unique set of climate-related issues, different neighborhoods often face similar challenges that can help direct citywide planning when looked at from a “bottom-up” approach. As mentioned by community members who took part in a 2020 climate outreach initiative, better information sharing across districts and neighborhoods would also help geographically separated communities support each other’s planning efforts.
Second, the city does have a variety of sources that contain climate change-connected data. However, the information is spread across a seeming maze of locations that is often incomplete, hard to access and compare, and/or difficult to visualize. While these can be common challenges for state and federal level data too, they seem more pronounced at the local, community-wide level.
Efforts to include stakeholder engagement with city data do exist, for example, in the recent Stormwater Resiliency Plan. However, there does not appear to be a concerted citywide effort to connect the various aspects of the climate picture together for New York City’s communities. Bringing in people with expertise in research and analysis to serve as community liaisons, translating city data to the public, could greatly help accelerate that process.
To its credit, NYC Emergency Management produced a valuable, digitized resource in 2019, the NYC Hazard Mitigation – Community Risk Assessment Dashboard. It provides information searchable by addresses and neighborhoods, on a handful of climate-related issues. However, since it broadly focuses on hazards, it requires an additional effort to cross-reference the information with other sources to gain a clearer climate-based picture of a neighborhood. It also does not appear to promote information sharing within and across neighborhoods, or collect knowledge embedded in communities.
Other ideas are also underway to seed information sharing, such as the Climate Knowledge Exchange under the Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency. While this is more focused on broadening stakeholder input to set research priorities, it represents an important effort in New York City to integrate and support community-led planning efforts.
Improving citywide access to data does require some additional “top-down” work on the government side. That said, a relatively small investment in improving the data quality and the ability to meaningfully engage with it could go a long way toward growing a more sustainable “bottom-up” resiliency.
While limiting greenhouse gas emissions is a global problem that needs global solutions, the impacts will be felt locally, by communities. Providing all New Yorkers, especially those in underserved communities, with the climate-related information they need, will create not just more resilient communities, but also a more collectively resilient New York City.
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Vaishali Talwar holds an M.Phil. in Physiology and Neuroscience and is a member of Science for New York (Sci4NY), an effort that aims to have policy makers and scientists work more closely together through project-based interaction in NYC. Nancy Holt, Ph.D., leads Sci4NY. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry and has worked on climate change issues at various levels of government, including at the U.S. Department of State. On Twitter @Sci4NY.
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Teen voter registration (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Twenty-five million people under the age of 30 voted in the 2020 presidential election. That’s the highest it has ever been, both in raw numbers and percentage of eligible voters. As one of the largest voter blocs in the country, politicians want and need as much of the “Gen Z'' vote as they can get. So naturally, politicians are thinking, where can we find the youth?
On social media, of course.
Yet, as New York City’s 2021 election cycle has drawn to a close, local candidates have been struggling to use social media to connect with this impactful group of voters, who we know vote at far lower rates in local elections than national ones. As a 15-year-old, future voter, and New York City native, I have a few thoughts on how candidates should be better utilizing these communication tools.
According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans under 30 use some form of social media, making it the most important medium for connecting with young voters. It’s also a useful tool for reaching a wider array of people. About half of Latino and Black Americans are on Instagram in particular, according to the Pew study.
The ultimate endgame for all politicians is to get as many votes as possible. How they allocate their resources determines their priorities. Over the course of the 2021 election cycle, New York City candidates spent over $47 million on television ads and an additional $27.3 million on all mailings, campaign literature, and print advertising, according to the latest data from the city’s Campaign Finance Board.
While it’s harder to track spending on social media, if candidates invested a quarter of what they spent on traditional media on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok, they would be far better off connecting with young voters*. While it can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be expensive at all. Duolingo, the popular language learning app, is dominating TikTok (@duolingo) with its weird, wacky, and low-budget content that doesn’t even reference its language learning app. And, it’s working: this year alone they managed to increase profit by 106%.
Throughout history, successful public figures have mastered the communication tools of their time. Benjamin Franklin distributed pamphlets of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to inspire support for the revolution. Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats through radio. Dwight Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use televised campaign ads. And John F. Kennedy charmed Americans through his performance (and use of stage makeup) in the televised debates. In the modern era, politicians must learn to use social media.
In 2008, Barack Obama tapped into social media to reach the White House. Donald Trump was the first president to have his own personal Twitter account. (While Obama did have a Twitter account while running and during his time in office, it’s been carefully managed by his team.) Trump was his authentic, unfiltered self on Twitter and used the platform to gain and direct a massive following before he was kicked off the platform due to the risk of further incitement of violence.
Nowadays, we see a lot of politicians on Twitter, some trying to copy Trump’s model while others use it far more carefully. The politician most widely-recognized as being on the cutting edge of social media is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC came out of nowhere to win her New York congressional seat in 2018 and become the youngest member of Congress. Her saviness on social media has played an instrumental role in her rise. In fact, she was so successful at connecting with people through social media, she was asked to lead a seminar on how to use Twitter for fellow members of Congress.
Whether she’s cooking pasta on Instagram Live, conducting a makeup tutorial on Facebook, responding to Ted Cruz on Twitter, or live-streaming a video game session on Twitch, AOC is always looking for new ways to break the fourth wall and connect with people on social media. Of course, she’s not cooking up pasta in front of the world just because she has a killer recipe she wants to share. She’s sharing her ideas while building a two-part story combining the visuals (cooking, gaming, etc.) and her voice (policies, big ideas, opinions). She’s being real and human, breaking the barrier of awkwardness that often arises when people talk to politicians.
Her approach is similar to the TikToker Dylan Lemay (@dylanlemay). Lemay gained millions of followers on TikTok while working at an ice cream shop. While his videos show him scooping ice cream and decorating cakes, his voice-overs share stories about what he did that day with his friends, and his plans for later. This is often referred to as “multi-narrative storytelling,” and it’s the same approach AOC is using in her social media content to discuss public policy.
Unfortunately, these inventive new ways of using social media for political purposes mostly haven't reached New York City’s local elections -- despite being the nation's cultural capital and home of countless social media agencies and influencers (soon to include Lemay, who is moving to New York City to start his own ice cream shop).
Based on my own analysis of the New York City mayoral candidates’ social media channels, few if any are using social media to efficiently target young voters. Many are sharing longform, highly-edited essays in Twitter threads spanning multiple tweets, which ruins the allure of Twitter’s short form and personable style. On Instagram, candidates mostly posted pictures of their travels around the city, meeting and talking with voters. Rarely did they try to engage directly with voters through social media (commenting, responding to questions directly, interacting in other ways), missing out on the potentially pivotal group of voters under 30.
Most candidates running for mayor never even attempted to create a TikTok account, despite the platform’s growing popularity over Facebook and Instagram and a global audience of over 1 billion users. We know this is a viable way to help win elections because it has happened before — on November 2, two 19-year-olds from Connecticut won their local elections through the power of social media.
There are some local candidates who shine above the rest in their social media performance. For example, Brooklyn City Council Member-Elect Chi Ossé developed his online following through his leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement. The 23-year-old has expanded his audience by being genuine on Twitter and interactive with voters on Instagram, which helped lead to his win on Election Day. His staff also consists of fellow underrepresented New Yorkers around the same age. I would love to see Ossé take on TikTok as well.
That’s among my suggestions for all New York City politicians, who collectively can do a lot to improve their social media game:
First, use TikTok. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s what’s now and next, so you better use it. With TikTok just surpassing YouTube in watch-hours per month, it’s an important medium for appealing to a younger audience. Warm up with repurposed content from other platforms if you are feeling skeptical. The more you use it, the more comfortable you will get with the platform's unique and ever-changing trends. Be silly, embarrass yourself, let loose, show yourself. TikTok is the place to be.
Next, be authentic. Twitter and Instagram aren’t just advertising platforms. Be yourself. Write your own tweets. Not everything has to be reviewed by a team of 10 people. If you have an idea, share it. Have a picture you like? Post it on your IG story. This will help candidates appear more relatable and in-touch with regular people.
Next, try using multi-narrative storytelling. Introduce seemingly unrelated narratives into the same content and trust that your audience will understand and actually enjoy the content.
Don’t forget, interact! One-way social media communication is boring. Social media was created for people to have conversations with each other, and that’s what most people use it for. Respond to comments. Comment on other people’s content. Carefully, have a debate with someone in their DMs — I can promise you they’ll remember it.**
Next, be genuine. You don’t have to be so uptight and calculating. Voters aren’t dumb, they can tell. If you put on the camera and lose the makeup and all the other showmanship you might have, you will appear more genuine. Voters are always looking for more genuine candidates.
Lastly, get more youth on your team. Who’s better at appealing to young voters than other young voters? Many young New Yorkers are leading the fight against climate change, gun violence, and so much more. You can work with young voices to guide your decisions in the world of social media. Many young people know what they are doing, and you should trust that many would love to help you with your campaign.
With another round of City Council elections throughout the city just around the corner in 2023, now is the time for anyone considering running for one of these seats to break ground on their social media strategy, and start thinking big about how they can inspire young New Yorkers to support their candidacy and vote. In doing so, our elected officials will be more in touch with young voters and more responsive to their needs.
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Nikita Chernin is a sophomore at New Dorp High School and a NYC Votes Youth Ambassador in Staten Island. The views expressed here are his own. On Twitter @N6chernin.
*While a lot of campaigns use the Facebook ad tools to advertise to voters, the people they target are usually of an older demographic. Facebook does skew more towards the older generations in its user-base so while politicians do advertise there, it’s not seen by youth as much.
**A word of caution. There are boundaries that people have. Be careful to not cross them, as crossing people’s personal boundaries usually results in problems. Always use your brain and exercise caution when talking to voters in private — and expect that anything you say privately will become public at some point.
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NYC Department of Information Information Technology and Telecommunications Github profile
New York City’s civic technology community has for many years been calling on city government to establish a Digital Service Organization (DSO). DSOs are technology groups organized within government agenies that use open source software to create their own technology solutions instead of buying proprietary services from vendors like IBM, ESRI, and Microsoft. The DSO organizational model is about 10 years old and has been adopted by cities (eg Boston), regions (eg Ontario) and national governments (eg 18F) all over the world with great success.
Inexplicably, New York City has failed to organize a DSO of its own. So while governments all over the world have operational DSOs with dozens, even hundreds, of staff effectively building and deploying modern websites and apps, and rebuilding critical technical infrastructure to modernize service delivery, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer, with less than a month left in the de Blasio administration, just put up its first job postings seeking “founding member[s] of the NYC Digital Service!”
From the outside, it certainly looks like the administration and its CTO want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to claim they “founded” New York City’s DSO without having to ruffle any feathers by operationalizing it. And DSOs ruffle a lot of feathers. This is something the administration and CTO know well because when diligent civil servants within city agencies organized DSO-style units on their own, these units were mostly ignored by the city’s technology leadership and left to fend for themselves against legions of bureaucrats uninterested in implementing DSO-style reforms. Here are a few examples:
The Mayor’s Office of Economic Oppportunity’s Benefits and Screening API team have done a tremendous job putting together a solution for automating the screening of people for city benefits. Their pioneering work delivered a functional technical solution, but a system without users isn’t very useful. They need city agencies to work with them to both document screening criteria and to use their screening tools.
Without support from top leadership pressuring agencies to work with them to implement their system, what could’ve been a massively successful program to modernize how the city delivers benefits has turned into an incremental step in the right direction. And that direction leads right to Eric Adam’s “MyCity” app concept, which he mentioned frequently during his successful campaign for mayor.
The story of Planning Labs at the New York City Department of City Planning is another good example of this administration’s failed technology leadership. Planning Labs was created within City Planning explicitly as a DSO. In its two years of operation, its members built about a dozen innovative and popular apps such as the ZoLa land use map system and Population Fact Finder statistical research tool.
But its success and aggressive DSO-style approach to IT reform drew the ire of the NYC technology bureaucracy, who’d prefer to sign multimillion dollar contracts with Microsoft than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars organizing their own software teams. And so…NYC Planning Labs still exists but hasn’t released a new open source product in nearly two years and none of the original team members work for the city anymore.
To understand why the city technology bureaucracy fears DSOs so much you have to understand that the current crop of technology leadership, not just in New York City but in governments all over the world, are, generally speaking, not engineers and product managers but business people and public administrators. The way they’re trained to produce technology is through procurement processes, not by building it. This approach used to make sense.
Twenty years ago software was a lot harder to make than it is today so governments needed to hire specialized software development firms to make it. But not any more. Now there are open source components for virtually everything. DSOs knit them together to create solutions. Often they do this with flexible teams of five or six people: two software developers, two graphic/content/experience designers, and two project/product managers.
The fact that it’s never been easier to create complex information management systems to make government services delivery faster, better, and cheaper is great news. But it's also scary for the old guard technology establishment and their young acolytes. They don't know how to organize productive software development teams and would much prefer to outsource this work to the giant corporations that, very likely, they used to work for and/or, very likely, they plan to work for again after their government service is over. Why would they, as a city employee, want to spend their time organizing software teams for the government when they could spend it organizing lucrative contracts for potential future employers?
Plus, building software within the city government is hard! The city’s arcane civil service designations make it difficult to hire competent software developers and pay them competitive rates. The city’s archaic IT infrastructure, from its slow internet, to its firewalls, to its government-issued computers, makes it hard for development teams to use the best tools for their work. That’s why leadership is essential for pushing through the type of coordinated reform New York City needs to modernize its technology infrastructure and service delivery. We need the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) to update civil service roles, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to update network configurations and hardware, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other agencies to update their contracting practices, and so much more.
Without leadership driving reform, most people follow the path of least resistance and business as usual continues. During good times that simply means more of the same waste, inefficiency, and poor service quality that so many New Yorkers now expect from their municipal government. But during bad times, it means wholesale embarassment.
Most of us remember TurboVax, a website made by an unaffiliated volunteer software developer working in the spirit of mutual aid. That site did what the city’s CTO, DoITT, DOHMH, Health + Hospitals, Emergency Management, and others, with a combined budget of tens of billions of dollars, couldn’t: create an online map showing people where they could get vaccinated. The New York Times headline: “N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50”. If that story couldn’t wake up the administration’s technology leadership to the reality of their failure, nothing could.
Had the city had a DSO, I have no doubt they’d have had a website up before the vaccine was out, and they’d probably have solved a hundred other problems as well: from rebuilding the famously terrible DOBNow system, to improving the usability of the city’s decade old central website (nyc.gov), to unifying user logins among city websites, giving New Yorkers the upgraded civic engagement experience that we, in a sense, voted for during the last referendum cycle, making benefits easier to access and so much more.
The good thing about being behind is that you can catch up by utilizing the best practices established by others instead of having to invent those best practices yourself. As such, the incoming Adams administration is in a perfect position to upgrade the city. There are tons of DSO alumni they can hire, Playbooks they can follow, and even established federal partnership pathways designed explicitly to support DSO-powered reform.
And the de Blasio administration gets to say they started it all!
I guess everyone wins.
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Devin Balkind is a civic technologist. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.
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The authors at a press conference related to the BQE
For years, residents, motorists, and headlines have screamed about the crumbling triple-cantilever on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Repair plans have been delayed, presented, and rejected. We are not moving forward fast enough to repair the triple-cantilever or to envision and build a coherent 21st Century solution for the entire BQE corridor.
We can fix the BQE—and we must—but we can’t do it overnight. We need a solution that’s future-focused and environmentally-sustainable along the entire I-278 corridor in Brooklyn. The BQE connects over a dozen neighborhoods throughout western Brooklyn, and it’s a key link in the Interstate highway system serving the entire tri-state metropolitan area and beyond. It will take a multi-pronged effort by many people and agencies at the city, state, and federal levels.
Let’s start with a good first step. Governor Kathy Hochul can get the ball rolling by signing our “Weigh In Motion” (WIM) bill A2316/S2740. The WIM bill would reduce the number of overweight trucks on the BQE by allowing New York City to issue violations electronically to trucks exceeding the legal weight limits. Overweight trucks are a significant factor in the deterioration of the triple-cantilevered portion of the BQE around Brooklyn Heights. Removing them from the BQE will extend its lifetime and allow us time to plan for a fix. This bill is red-alert critical and is currently on the governor’s desk.
To keep illegally heavy trucks off the crumbling triple-cantilever requires the installation of electronic sensors throughout the corridor to capture the offenders before they actually enter onto the triple-cantilever. Law enforcement simply cannot stop and remove enough trucks from the roadway to adequately discourage overweight trucks. More law enforcement agents won’t do the trick. In this very dense street environment, there just isn’t enough physical space to do it. And installing the sensors throughout the corridor will mean that trucks can’t avoid enforcement by exiting to local streets and then quickly reentering just beyond the sensors, ensuring that this approach is unlikely to divert overweight trucks to other routes through our neighborhoods.
Overloaded trucks also cause increased carbon emissions, harming the public’s health and advancing climate change. We all need to care about this.
In August, the city released a plan to extend the life of the BQE cantilever for another 20 years to allow for the time necessary to envision a long-term solution for the entire BQE corridor that reduces reliance on polluting long-haul freight trucks and transitions more freight to waterways and rail. Their plan includes getting overweight trucks off the BQE. This will allow us time to examine solutions (including tunnel alternatives) and prioritize climate for a just and sustainable transition from fossil fuels.
In this era of rapidly advancing climate change, we need smart and environmentally-just surface transportation infrastructure. For too long, the state has not been an active partner in this pressing project and it’s time for that to change. Governor Hochul’s signature on this critical legislation cannot come soon enough.
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New York State Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon represents District 52 in Brooklyn and New York State Senator Brian Kavanagh represents District 26 spanning parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. On Twitter @JoAnneSimonBK52 & @BrianKavanaghNY.
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Finding homes for everyone (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)
On October 29, the New York City Department of Social Services sent a letter to Brooklyn Community Board 11 providing notification of a planned homeless shelter to be built in Bensonhurst. The facility would be for 75 families with children, with priority given to those “who have roots in this community and this area of Brooklyn more broadly.”
Brooklyn CB11 and neighboring CB10 encompass Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Dyker Heights, and Bay Ridge. These community districts are the only two in the borough without a single shelter bed, despite averaging nearly 300 individuals in the shelter system at any given time whose last permanent address was in these districts.
The city’s current plan to create community-based shelters in all 59 community districts is logical, compassionate, and promises the most potential for helping people return to stable housing. For decades, most shelters have been clustered in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas where it was cheapest to build and operate them. Not only has this allowed some neighborhoods to avoid doing their fair share to address a problem that exists in their own communities, but it has serious negative consequences for those experiencing homelessness, especially families.
Federal statute guarantees students living in a homeless shelter the right to remain in the school they were attending before they became homeless, which is invaluable to children whose living situation is unstable. Students living in homeless shelters missed nearly one in every four days of school on average last winter and spring and had an attendance rate about 10% lower than students with permanent housing. Families experiencing homelessness in communities with no shelters often must choose between entering a shelter that is inordinately far from their school or remaining homeless so they can be close to their school.
Assemblymember William Colton, whose district office is across the street from the site of the planned family shelter in Bensonhurst, posted a press release on his Assembly webpage on November 1, saying that he “alerts the community that the city is planning to build another homeless shelter at 137 Kings Highway in Brooklyn.” During the November 9 CB11 monthly meeting, Colton announced the planned shelter, stating, “It also has some problems in terms of, again, the location. It is in a very residential area.” Along with the fact that shelters are, quite obviously, “residential,” families with children who are lacking permanent housing in his district are human beings who deserve shelter in their communities, not to be warehoused in non-residential areas.
Ten months earlier, during Brooklyn CB11’s January meeting, while addressing a different proposal for a single men’s shelter in another part of the district, Chair William Guarinello referenced Bensonhurst’s 1,200 families that are in temporary housing and said that the community board felt that facility “should have more been a family shelter if you were going to try to serve our homeless in our community.”
Schools in Brooklyn CB11 and CB10 are in school districts 21 and 20. For the 2019-2020 school year — the last before the pandemic — 6% of all district 21 students and 5.5% of all district 20 students, totaling 5,172 students who experienced homelessness within the past year. The Department of Education’s economic need index takes into account students’ financial hardship, including if they've lived in temporary housing the past four years. Data shows 73.1% of district 21 students meet this criteria and 74.6% of district 20 students, up about 12% since 2017.
On November 15, at the Community Education Council District 21 (CEC21) monthly meeting, a resolution to oppose the planned homeless shelter for families with children in Bensonhurst was put forth. As a member of the council, I was able to offer thoughts after it was introduced. I focused on the fact that we have families and students experiencing homelessness in our district, but we do not currently have the ability to help them here, in our community. I stated the statistics as they relate to our district and how the lack of shelter beds in our part of Brooklyn presents our most vulnerable families with additional obstacles to getting back on their feet. Our council voted against considering the resolution that evening.
On November 21, News12 filed a report from the site of the planned Bensonhurst shelter, stating that they “were supposed to meet one-on-one with Assemblyman William Colton,” but 50 people happened to show up to voice their frustration. Colton had directly messaged and emailed people earlier that day, advising that he had “been contacted by Channel 12 News to interview [him] and residents about this proposal” and welcoming people to come. Colton told the reporter that he “found out about the building of the shelter a week ago,” when he had learned of it three weeks earlier.
These are minor discrepancies, but presenting this false narrative inflames the conversation. The CEC21 resolution opposing the shelter stated that constituents “vehemently object to the building of the homeless shelter,” at a time when there had been no reporting on it and news of the shelter was only known to the small number of people who had attended the CB11 meeting six days earlier. It also stated that “community leaders have publicly denounced this project,” when Colton was (and still is) the only local leader to have publicly spoken out in opposition.
It is fair and reasonable for any shelter to be evaluated and given proper consideration, but the neighborhoods of CB11 and CB10 have need for shelters and opposing every proposed facility outright is unproductive. Devoting one’s efforts to denying families with children a place to get back on their feet in their own community is shameful.
The week after Thanksgiving, a community outreach non-profit I serve as a board member and volunteer for was contacted by another organization to see if we could assist families who were left homeless by a fire in their apartment building. One family – a single parent with several children – was given the opportunity to enter a shelter. The facility was in East New York, over an hour away by public transportation from their children’s District 20 schools. They chose to stay in their community, close to their schools, without stable living accommodations, 10 minutes from the site of the planned Bensonhurst family shelter.
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Jay Brown is an engineer who serves as a member of Brooklyn Community Board 11 and the New York City Department of Education District 21 Community Education Council. On Twitter @JayBrownNYC.
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