CM Brooks-Powers, left, with MTA CEO Lieber (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)
This week President Biden visited New York to celebrate a major milestone.
More than a decade after Superstorm Sandy badly damaged the century-old train tunnels between New Jersey and New York, we’re finally advancing the repair and expansion work needed.
New funding streams made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are finally fast-tracking this essential project that will double the number of people able to move on trains beneath the Hudson River.
Federal funding for projects like this has historically been far too rare. Until recently, most federal transportation spending has overwhelmingly prioritized a narrow focus on expanding roads and highways. While these are important, the funding imbalance often neglected public transportation and the many millions of riders who rely on it.
This is beginning to change. The new law takes a bigger and broader view of what counts as infrastructure. This includes $89.9 billion in funding for public transit over the next five years; $7.5 billion to build out a national electric vehicle charging network; and $50 billion to make our infrastructure resilient.
As Chair of the New York City Council Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, I'm especially excited about what's happening and determined to ensure we make the most of it. Here are three specific opportunity areas where increased federal funding can jump-start long-delayed transportation infrastructure work in New York City:
Fully accessible subways before 2055.
Much of our subway infrastructure was built a century ago, long before federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act were put on the books. Right now, approximately three out of every four subway stations are inaccessible to New Yorkers with disabilities, older adults, families with strollers, and many more who may need an elevator, ramp, or escalator. The MTA has a plan on the table to get 95% of our stations accessible by 2055. This isn’t soon enough! Dedicated federal funding can help us reach our goal sooner.
Significant street safety infrastructure for dangerous roadways.
Over the past year nearly half of all pedestrian fatalities occurred on the most dangerous 7% of streets in New York City. We’ve identified these “Vision Zero” priority corridors here in New York and targeted federal funding can accelerate our efforts to reach our goal of zero deaths on city streets.
In fact, on February 14 the City Council will hold a hearing dedicated to street safety infrastructure in New York City.
We know President Biden originally proposed $20 billion for a national “Street Safety For All” initiative which was whittled down to just $5 billion in the final infrastructure law. This is an area where we need to grow, not shrink our funding commitments.
Resilient transportation infrastructure everywhere.
In the face of climate change, we know we can’t wait for the next extreme weather event to hit before taking action. We know where streets flood during heavy rains and federal help is needed particularly in areas like Brookville Boulevard in Southeast Queens where overlapping city, state, and federal jurisdictions require every level of government at the table. The science tells us to prepare for a twenty-fold increase in seasonal coastal flooding in New York City and we need to be ready.
We look forward to welcoming the Biden Administration to New York again soon to build the transportation infrastructure New Yorkers need for the future!
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City Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers is Majority Whip and Chair of the Council’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. On Twitter @CMBrooksPowers.
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A crime briefing at 1 Police Plaza (photo: Benny Polatseck/Mayoral Photography Office)
When thousands of New Yorkers went to see Drake at the Apollo last weekend, the last thing they wanted was to see the NYPD recording them, but that’s just what happened on Saturday as they emerged from the historic theater into the view of officers’ smartphones. The episode sparked questions from celebrities and everyday New Yorkers alike, wondering just why the NYPD was filming and what exactly they planned to do with the data. In the words of CBS’ Gayle King: “I didn’t see them videotaping after Harry Styles.”
In the end, the NYPD revealed that the filming was part of a self-congratulatory PSA put out by the department to depict its crowd control work as some sort of heroic feat, while conveniently omitting that Drake’s second show on Sunday got so raucous that one man fell from the balcony in an unintended crowd surfing episode. Yet even once the final video was published, social media commentators were quick to ask even more questions, such as “So....what happened to the raw footage?”
The public concern shouldn’t come as a surprise. Black artists have faced systematic NYPD surveillance for decades. In the ‘90s, they were called the “hip-hop police.” Now, they operate euphemistically as the Enterprise Operations Unit. But no matter what the unit is called, the truth is that Black artists and concertgoers face suspicion and surveillance simply for trying to listen to and perform the music that they love.
For some it may seem like no big deal to have your image hijacked for a policing PSA, but the incident highlights just how little attention the NYPD pays to New Yorkers’ privacy rights. No company could have legally filmed concertgoers for an ad without their notice or consent, so what gives the police the right to use attendees’ images? The department may act like it’s above the law, but ultimately it has to ask for permission to film just like everyone else.
Of course, the NYPD has the ability to track New Yorkers like no one else. Tens of thousands of cameras crisscross the city, with new surveillance devices being rolled out by the day. Within hours of launching the Drake PSA, officers unveiled their new prototype “robocop” cruiser, with 360-degree camera standard. More and more cameras are capturing all of our lives, but still with almost zero rules controlling who the NYPD can watch and when, and what happens with the footage.
And the cameras are only becoming more powerful, with facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric surveillance turning our own bodies into tracking devices. A camera system that can simply record what we do is invasive on its own, but when combined with these ever-more-powerful forms of artificial intelligence, the threat is chilling.
With the technology becoming more and more powerful, and police surveillance budgets ballooning, the need for new legislation comes clearly into focus. Right now, it’s the NYPD that largely decides what surveillance equipment to buy and how to use it. But there are forms of mass surveillance that it clearly can’t be trusted to wield.
Cameras are one thing, but it’s long past time to unplug the NYPD’s facial recognition program. The software, which scans thousands of New Yorkers a year, is primed to wrongly put New Yorkers behind bars and increase bias. And with a growing cohort of New Yorkers speaking out against the ways the technology is used (both by police and private companies like Madison Square Garden Entertainment), lawmakers must act to stop the abuses.
Facial recognition is just one of the many forms of mass surveillance that New Yorkers fear, and that’s why we worked with lawmakers to introduce a ten-part package of statewide bills to “Ban Big Brother” and make New York a surveillance sanctuary state. But while momentum for these statewide initiatives is growing, the New York City Council must act too. Council Members have called for facial recognition legislation for years now, only to be blocked by both the speaker and central staff. This must be the year when the legislation moves forward, at least giving lawmakers the chance to have an open and honest debate about the tech that continues to spread across our city.
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Albert Fox Cahn is the Founder and Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based civil rights and privacy group, a TED fellow, and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Will Owen is the Communications Director at S.T.O.P. On Twitter @StopSpyingNY.
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Gov. Hochul signs legislation (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)
Everyone wants to feel secure in their own home, but for survivors of domestic violence, safety is an absolute necessity.
At New Destiny Housing, we have spent nearly two decades building supportive housing for domestic violence survivors, striving to provide the security and support services that our families need to remain safe from violence and begin to rebuild their lives.
But the chronic underfunding of the contract on which our oldest five buildings rely, the New York State Supportive Housing Program (NYSSHP), has left us choosing between case management or security, and hoping that donations can make up for the shortfall.
NYSSHP was created in the 1980s, as the state’s first supportive housing program, funding social service providers to offer onsite counseling, job training, financial counseling, and community rebuilding programs for individuals and families who had lost everything. But funding levels have hardly changed in 30 years, providing just under $2,700 a year for single adults, and $3,700 for families with children.
By contrast, the state’s more recent supportive housing program, Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative (ESSHI), funds up to $25,000 per unit, and even that is insufficient to meet today’s operating and service costs.
Governor Kathy Hochul clearly recognizes the importance of supportive housing as one of the most powerful tools at the state’s disposal to address the myriad challenges the most vulnerable New Yorkers face. Last year, she funded the next five years of the state’s 20,000-unit ESSHI commitment.
The Governor has proposed a plan to address the affordable housing and homelessness crises and build much-needed new units across the state. But we can’t keep funding new housing at the expense of leaving our vulnerable families without the most basic of services to stay safe from violence and recover from their trauma. This year we need the Governor to support our old NYSSHP-funded buildings in her Executive Budget proposal.
The Governor has repeatedly made clear that she is deeply devoted to supporting the survivors of domestic violence and has a unique insight into the many challenges survivors face. She has publicly shared the painful story of her grandmother’s domestic abuse, and how that spurred her mother to open a transitional domestic violence abuse shelter in her native Western New York, the Kathleen Mary House.
Those experiences also informed Governor Hochul’s own activism, leading her to a life of service, and, more recently, to enact legislation that significantly enhanced housing resources for survivors across the state. She knows better than anyone the dangers that families who have escaped domestic violence face from their abusers — dangers that are especially keen in the time immediately after they leave to try to start a new life.
Statistics show that the most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is after she has made the decision to leave. Seventy-five percent of domestic violence-related homicides occur upon a survivor’s separation from their abuser.
That is why security is paramount at supportive housing programs like ours that focus on domestic violence survivors, but also our sister providers that house runaway homeless youth, homeless veterans, and other vulnerable populations. There are 20,000 households supported by NYSSHP programs all over the state, 10,000 of which depend solely on NYSSHP funding.
The families we serve, who have been through the double trauma of homelessness and abuse, deserve better, as do all the tenants in existing NYSSHP-funded buildings located across New York. If the state fails to invest in these services and bring them into line with ESHHI rates, we will lose units as fast as we build them, if not faster, and the state will merely tread water in its quest to end homelessness.
We very much hope that the soon-to-be-released Executive Budget includes a major boost for NYSSHP funding to protect the thousands of individuals and families who depend on it for stability – and, in our case, for their very lives.
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Nicole Branca is executive director of New Destiny Housing, a New York City nonprofit founded in 1994 to provide housing and services to one of the City’s most vulnerable homeless populations – victims of domestic violence and their children. On Twitter @NewDestinyOrg.
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Classical Charter Schools
A random number in a lottery is chosen, and a parent breathes a sigh of relief. But I’m not talking about the New York Lottery – I’m talking about our education system.
It’s no secret that schools in some of New York City’s poorest districts aren’t getting the job done for students. That’s why public charter schools were created in the first place, and the results for families have been promising.
But as demand from families for seats in charter schools has grown, we’re running out of space. Charters run a randomized lottery for admission, and for schools that receive more applications than available seats that means being forced to turn students away. The reality is that charter leaders want to be able to serve more students, but the charter cap – a state statutory limit on the number of charter schools – has kept new schools from opening their doors.
We can’t accept a status quo where a lottery number determines a child’s future. That’s why it’s time to lift the cap. Governor Hochul has the chance to do just that by including a cap lift in her budget proposal this week.
The choices elected leaders make when it comes to policy can be complicated, but when it comes to education, it’s simple – when you see something works, scale it.
The one thing standing in the way of that for New York City students? The charter school cap. For me, lifting the cap is personal.
I was a kid who, to put it lightly, did not do well in school, and was never instilled with the love for learning that students need to succeed. After high school, I became a truck driver, and quickly realized that it wasn’t the right path for me. So, I kept working and enrolled in night school, ultimately earning a college degree. That’s when I fell in love with education for the first time – and it changed my life.
A decade later, that spark for education never left, so I quit my job in banking and became a New York City teaching fellow. That’s where I got a firsthand look at the problems facing our students, and saw some of the same issues that I encountered myself. I knew we could do so much more, so I took my experience in education and the business world, and founded my own school network, Classical Charter Schools.
In 2022, 90% of students at our schools passed the state’s math test, and 88% passed English Language Arts (ELA) – double the rates of students across New York State, and triple the district average in the South Bronx. Our commitment goes beyond test scores. Our students learn how to become well-rounded adults by exploring their passions, building character, and learning how to navigate interpersonal relationships.
We listen to families. We work to ensure that our teachers and deans look like the communities they serve. We know what works, and fix what doesn’t. We want to do more. But the hard truth is that we remain forced to turn away thousands of families who apply to our schools every year because we simply don’t have enough seats.
It’s not just our network of schools – public charters across New York City are offering working class families something that for far too long has only been available to the wealthy: a choice in where to send their kids to school. In fact, three charters (including Classical) were the only schools across the city to make the U.S. Education Department’s list of ‘Blue Ribbon Schools’ last year. We did this by demonstrating that we go “above and beyond to keep students healthy and safe while meeting their academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs.” This isn’t just an award – it’s a point of pride for our students who know that they can learn every day in a safe, supportive, and invigorating environment.
From community nonprofit leaders and educators who are ready to bring their passion to life by starting a school for the first time to innovative charter networks that have been serving students for years, we all have one goal in mind: to provide a high-quality public education to as many students as possible.
But until the charter cap is lifted, more of these great schools can’t open and I can’t provide more seats to students and families who want them. What do we have to gain by shutting the door on New Yorkers with the experience and vision to support and educate our kids?
The decisions that lawmakers make in Albany are a reflection of our values. This session, our leaders can show New Yorkers that they value giving families a choice in their children’s education. Governor Hochul has expressed support for lifting the charter school cap; she can move toward making it happen by taking the next big step of including it in her Executive Budget.
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Lester Long is Founder and Executive Director of Classical Charter Schools, four high-performing elementary and middle schools in the South Bronx.
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Neighborhood wine and liquor shop in Midtown Manhattan (photo: Claudia Cowley)
Get used to seeing more vacant retail space in a neighborhood near you. Like small hardware stores and other mom-and-pop businesses that have disappeared over the years, with the proliferation of big box retailers, small liquor stores will be forced to close too under legislative initiatives underway in New York, and the rest of the country.
It has taken decades of careful regulation in the liquor industry to create a system that safeguards communities, prohibits the sale of liquor to minors, and establishes a multi-layered sales and distribution network that employs thousands of people in good-paying and in many instances at the wholesaler and distribution level, these are union jobs.
Now, intensive lobbying efforts led by deep-pocketed self-interests are threatening to destroy that tightly regulated system and put a lot of people out of work.
Stores like Walmart and Amazon’s Whole Foods are among multi-billion-dollar corporations now seeking the right to sell wine and liquor across the state.
While New York’s 3,500 small retailers and liquor store owners are allowed only one single license, multi-billion-dollar supermarket chain and big box store owners want to rewrite the rules and laws to allow them to take over and dominate wine and liquor sales.
Small businesses can’t compete with their tremendous buying power or advertising clout. Small shop owners would be crushed as the whales take over and cannibalize a market that has been very well served by local mom-and-pop liquor retailers for decades.
This past November, states including Colorado experienced a very hostile and public battle over many of these same rules and laws governing the retail sale of wine and liquor. It is the reason why one Maryland-based big box liquor retailer spent over $13 million to propel a voter referendum, taking place over 1,600 miles away from their corporate headquarters.
While the average U.S. grocery store is 38,000 square feet, their appetites are more aggressive than Ms. Pacman.
One study determined that Whole Foods, controlled by billionaire Jeff Bezos and his Amazon.com, had been evaluating further expansion into former Sears department store locations, which should illustrate the enormity of their ambitions.
At $138 billion in annual sales, national supermarket powerhouse Kroger controls 16 different supermarket chains, and is acquiring even more, while planning Kroger Marketplaces twice the size of the traditional supermarket at 120,000 square feet.
How would it even be possible for any local wine and liquor store to compete against that?
Or how about Amazon being enabled to deliver bottles of vodka direct from their regional warehouse to your doorstep? If our State Legislature allows this type of thing to pass, it could be the end of the line for thousands of local stores and the average of ten jobs each store contributes to communities across the state.
When local merchants on Main Street close, those jobs often disappear forever. Think about how Home Depot killed so many local hardware stores, and Barnes and Noble killed so many local bookstores. Now even Barnes and Noble can no longer compete against the might of Amazon.
And history shows that when local competition is wiped out, the big box retailers are then free to raise prices or narrow your selection.
Many small, local liquor store owners, who are second or third generation owners or immigrants, settled in their community to achieve or continue their American Dream of owning and operating a local business. Neighborhood wine and liquor store owners know their patrons, and are established parts of their communities.
Imagine asking the forklift operator at Sam's Club or BJ’s Wholesale to recommend a good chardonnay!
We need to stand up for local people willing to start a business. We have to support our local merchants. America is a nation of entrepreneurs. We cannot make everything big box and mega corporation. The Walmartization of America diminishes the importance of local businesses, costs jobs, and hurts communities, and it’s up to all public officials to acknowledge the positive outcome that years of thoughtful regulation, planning, and fair play have created for this industry.
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Michael Correra is Executive Director of the Metro Package Store Association representing 3,500 local wine and liquor retailers across New York State and whose members are fighting a battle for survival vs deep pocketed supermarket and big box retailers.
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At the polls (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
New York’s final state legislative race of 2022 was decided in 2023, but it didn’t have to be that way.
After months of litigation, Queens Democrat Stacey Pheffer Amato beat out her Republican challenger by 15 votes to hold onto Assembly District 23. The incumbent made up ground after initially trailing by three votes because of curable absentee ballots, which are ballots with small defects that New York law allows voters to fix (or “cure,” in election parlance).
New York passed a ballot cure law in 2020, in recognition that no citizen should have their vote tossed because of a minor administrative error. This cycle, that law was crucial in determining a representative for 135,000 New Yorkers and helping Democrats maintain a narrow Assembly supermajority.
But what happened in AD23 doesn’t represent a success story for our ballot cure law—and that’s not just because the city Board of Elections (BOE) failed to notify 94 Queens voters of their opportunity to cure as required by the law, the latest in a long line of BOE boondoggles.
I managed national Democrats’ 2022 ballot cure efforts in New York as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Voter Protection Director for the northeast. From that front-row seat, I saw that even when properly implemented our ballot cure protocols have many defects of their own.
To start, New York calls too many absentee ballots “defective” that should simply be counted, including many of the ballots subject to litigation in AD23. If we handled them more appropriately, Pheffer Amato could have been declared the winner in November, avoiding months of expense and stress for the courts, campaigns, and voters.
Moreover, New York’s process for curing defective ballots is needlessly confusing and complicated—especially compared to other states, which too often lead the Empire State on inclusive and efficient election administration.
Getting ballot cure right is a big deal. These laws affect tens of thousands of votes and can decide races up and down the ballot. In 2020, New Yorkers cast 20,000 absentee ballots that were defective but curable—and only cured 8,000 of them. Meanwhile, Anthony Brindisi lost his reelection to Congress by just 109 votes, less than 1% of the number of curable but unfixed absentees. (Sadly, Democratic losses in competitive House races this cycle were much bigger than the number of curable ballots.)
Unsealed Inner Envelope Rejections
What ballots do we needlessly reject in New York? First, 60 absentees in AD23 were deemed defective because the inner envelope holding the ballot was judged by the city’s BOE to be “unsealed” when it arrived. The ballots were thus rejected even though those inner envelopes, intended to keep the voter's ballot private, arrived inside sealed outer envelopes—and though all other required steps had been taken by the voter.
The rules around how to complete and return ballots are designed to ensure that each ballot was duly cast by the voter who requested it. Giving the voter a chance to fix a mistake makes sense when they’ve clearly made a mistake, like forgetting to sign the envelope confirming whose ballot is inside.
To the contrary, when the BOE finds the inner envelope unsealed upon arrival, they cannot be sure the inner envelope was unsealed upon mailing. We spoke to multiple voters this fall whose ballots were judged defective due to unsealed inner envelopes who insisted, incensed and unsettled, that they sealed their inner envelopes before returning them.
Our communication with counties suggested some of these envelopes had “peel and seal” strips; these may have been looser than a licked seal and come undone in transit. As such, a BOE cannot be sure that in these cases there was any lapse, even a minor and immaterial one, on the part of the voter. (Another possibility is that these envelopes confused voters, especially older voters, who may have licked them rather than peeling.)
In any case, when a ballot is placed in an inner envelope, that envelope is signed by the voter, and then that envelope is placed in a sealed return envelope, any doubt about whether that voter has intended to cast the ballot as completed is next to nil.
In some counties, “unsealed inner envelope” was a leading cause of ballot rejections. Given the lack of certainty that this issue even represents a defect—and certainly not one we can be sure is the fault of the voter—these ballots should simply be counted in the first instance if the outer envelope is sealed and all other provisions are met.
Signature Match Rejections
New York also has a “signature match” provision in our absentee ballot laws. When a ballot is returned, the BOE compares the signature on the inner envelope with a signature on file. If the BOE deems them not to match, the ballot is rejected unless cured.
It is unconscionable that New York, a state with Democratic legislative supermajorities, has a signature match provision. This process is known to be subjective junk science, likely to disenfranchise already marginalized voters. It has even been ruled illegal by courts in redder states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
In our ballot cure efforts last year, we saw high variability in counties’ rates of signature mismatch rejection—proof of the capriciousness of the assessment. New York should wholly eliminate the signature match provision.
Needless Variability in How and When to Cure
Beyond eliminating widely used but needless rejection reasons, the Legislature can improve the cure statute by streamlining how voters fix their ballots.
New York voters cure defective absentee ballots by submitting a signed form to their BOE. The state is unique in making the deadline for the return of that form variable: it is due either the day before Election Day or seven business days after the county issues a voter’s cure notice, whichever is later.
Did you follow that? This math is confusing, and it gives both voters and BOEs one more complexity to track. New York should follow other states’ lead in setting one clear date on which all forms are due—say, 14 days after Election Day, allowing everyone time to process cures for all otherwise valid ballots, including those that arrive post-election.
What’s more, New York’s process involves rare variability in how voters can submit cures. Voters who requested their ballot with a “wet signature” can return their form by email or fax; those who requested their ballot electronically must submit their form with a wet signature in person or by mail.
Again, this is needless complexity, especially troubling when voters don’t remember how they requested their ballot. New York should join other states in allowing all voters to cure by email or fax—or even by phone, as is allowed in Maine, where I was the state Voter Protection Director advocating for the institution of its first cure process in 2020.
Our ballot cure work at the DCCC meant thousands of calls, texts, and knocks on voters’ doors, providing an unparalleled view into the emotional distress and logistical hoop-jumping citizens experience when told their ballots have minor issues preventing them from counting. When each voter has different rules about when and how to return their cure forms, it is astronomically more difficult to guide them through the steps necessary to exercise this fundamental right.
New York’s Legislature is continually tweaking our ballot access laws to make voting easier. Laws recently passed will ensure ballots accidentally cast at the wrong polling place but the right county will be counted; ban the misleading practice of allowing parties to use “independent” in their name; and extend the voter registration deadline from 25 days before Election Day to ten, the latest constitutionally allowed. The State Senate started its 2023 session with a suite of bills meant to make our elections freer and fairer.
It’s time now to also cure our cure process. We should eliminate rejection reasons that don’t reflect a true voter defect and just count those ballots instead. And we should eliminate complexities regarding when and how to submit cure forms that make New York’s process uniquely hard to understand and undertake.
Casting a vote should be simple—and so should curing one.
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Ryder Kessler has led multiple voter protection teams for Democrats, most recently as Northeast Regional Voter Protection Director for the DCCC. He was a 2022 candidate for New York State Assembly in District 66. On Twitter @ryderkessler.
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Justice Hector LaSalle (photo: NYSBA)
The New York State Senate’s Wednesday rejection of Justice Hector LaSalle’s nomination for Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, is yet another example of how Latinos continuously get shafted. We can no longer say such dismissal is the fault of conservatives rather than progressives: lack of advancement for Latinos has truly become a nonpartisan affair. The shafting is equal opportunity, with Latinos consistently on the receiving end.
Like Governor Hochul’s last major nominations—first the selection of Brian Benjamin and then, after Benjamin’s resignation amid corruption charges, Antonio Delgado for lieutenant governor—the rollout of this pick has been riddled with problems from the outset.
The Delgado and LaSalle choices apparently recognized that Latinos are a group to be reckoned with. Yet, serious Hochul blunders plagued both selections.
Delgado has a Latino sounding name but is not actually Latino, much to the disappointment of Latinos across New York who have long clamored for representation at the highest levels of state government. LaSalle’s nomination — which could have made him the first Latino Chief Judge in state history — resulted in a backlash from many progressive and some moderate elected officials and groups, as well as some labor unions. Hochul’s inability to communicate with key stakeholders before a public announcement that she was going to nominate LaSalle is partly, though not entirely, to blame for this defeat.
There is no guarantee that another Latino candidate will be nominated, especially if the previous list of candidates presented by the state’s Commission on Judicial Nomination is any indication.
The contentious battle spurred by this nomination has further exposed a shift that is occurring in Latino politics in New York: there is a crop of Latinos that were part of the early (and current) struggles for Latino representation at all levels of government and there is a newer generation of Latino leaders that see ideological fidelity as being as important as representation itself, if not more so.
In this LaSalle battle, Luis Miranda and Roberto Ramirez represent the protagonists of the first group, both long-time powerhouse lobbyists and political consultants. Miranda and Ramirez were architects of Fernando Ferrer’s mayoral bids in the mid-2000s, and have more recently worked on Letitia James’ successful run for state attorney general, among other campaigns.
Miranda and Ramirez organized a number of other Latino leaders, many of whom have long struggled for representation. There is Fernando Ferrer himself; Melissa Mark-Viverito, a progressive who made history as the first Latina to serve as speaker of the City Council; and former labor leader Dennis Rivera, among many others. Miranda and company know first-hand the importance of representation and have seen LaSalle’s nomination as a necessary step for a group that has long been ignored, under-valued, and held back.
The newer group of Latino leaders recognize the importance of representation but seemingly not at the expense of certain ideological affinities. Among the newer generation of leaders are State Senators Jessica Ramos, Gustavo Rivera, Julia Salazar, and recently-elected Kristen Gonzalez, who would all have had a vote in LaSalle’s nomination had it passed committee. Ramos and Luis Sepulveda were the two Latino senators on the Senate judiciary committee; Ramos voted against LaSalle; Sepulveda was a staunch supporter.
The current divide among Latinos immersed in political affairs in New York is clearly largely ideological. It is yet another obstacle to Latino progress, empowerment, and representation. Latinos have seemingly always had difficulties maintaining the necessary level of unity for more progress to ensue. This was the case even when Puerto Ricans were the dominant Latino group in the city. One can think of the Herman Badillo versus Ramon Velez battles, and other intra-Puerto Rican squabbles that hindered the Puerto Rican quest for fairness and representation.
Yet as Latino groups increased in numbers over the years, among them our Dominican and Mexican sisters and brothers, the rifts that some predicted never fully materialized. There has been genuine support for leaders who trace their origins to places other than Puerto Rico. For example, Puerto Rican Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez’s early support of Antonio Reynoso, a Dominican who represented a City Council district (and is now Brooklyn Borough President) that had an overwhelming number of Puerto Rican voters. Then there’s her support of Carlos Menchaca, a Mexican who represented a district with a large number (though now decreasing) of Puerto Ricans. Notably, Velazquez has been another prominent progressive Latina in support of Justice LaSalle.
There is also former Assemblyman Jose Rivera, who was one of the pioneering Puerto Rican political leaders who supported a number of Dominican candidates at a time when Dominicans were just beginning to increase in large numbers in the Bronx. Rivera’s support for now-Assemblymember Yudelka Tapia when she ran for school board (when New York City had school boards) and his support for Nelson Castro’s bid for State Assembly are indications of this.
Of course, there were and are exceptions to the work of these extraordinary leaders. But the rifts in their time were not overly detrimental to the Latino cause, even if more advancement would have been possible through more unity.
There is no obvious remedy to bridge the ideological divide that has engulfed Latino politics in New York. What does appear certain is that Latinos will continue to impede their own progress, and in consequence, make the job even easier for those who are already resisting their empowerment and advancement.
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Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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Housing (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
If Mayor Eric Adams wants to solve New York City's housing crisis, he must challenge some of the city's most powerful players: landlords. The absurd demands that landlords place on renters is one major part of New York City’s housing crisis that simply does not get enough attention. The standards many landlords use to confirm whether prospective tenants qualify for housing need massive reform and are often as much of a concern – and barrier – as rental prices.
Ambiguous or absent laws governing the apartment application process are detrimental to New Yorkers and to solving the housing crisis. If most landlords continue to require a perfect financial profile and massive down payments for renters, there will always be a large population of New Yorkers unable to meet the demands of the application process.
The unwritten rules for New York City's housing applications are in desperate need of regulation: landlords typically require tenants to make 40 times the rent, have a minimum credit score of 700, and provide upfront payments of first month's rent and a security deposit — while also paying an exorbitant broker fee that is pushed onto tenants by landlords.
Tenants typically need several thousand dollars upfront to rent an apartment, sometimes approaching what could be a down payment on homeownership. The paperwork required for renting an apartment is comparable to buying a home. Landlords demand an employment verification letter, recommendations from past landlords, three months of full bank statements, a year or more of tax returns, three pay stubs, among a list of other documents. The current housing application process is unsuitable to lower-income New Yorkers because they usually lack the documents and resources to compete with a wealthier applicant’s financial profile.
As long as tenants continue to jump through hoops to obey property owners' demands and legislation doesn’t help minimize invasive requirements and protect tenants' privacy, landlords will continue to have no incentive to stop considering working and lower-class New Yorkers a threat to their status quo.
The average rent in New York City is about $3,000 per month. Using landlords’ 40 times the rent income standard, New Yorkers need to make about $120,000 per year to qualify for average rental housing. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers’ don’t earn that much — the 2020 Census reported the median household income in New York City at $67,046. Income requirements prohibit an enormous population from participating in the whole rental housing market, even when they can afford it. With high income and extensive documentation requirements put in place by so many landlords, it is impossible for many New Yorkers to not feel pushed out of most of the rental market.
Wealthier applicants exclusively benefit from the current housing rental application process and many hardworking New Yorkers and seniors don’t get the decent housing they need and deserve. Landlords are seemingly looking to find ways to discourage lower-income tenants from applying for housing and for reasons to reject them if they do — the application requirements for many apartments are nearly impossible for lower-income residents to meet. It becomes disturbingly worse once you factor in the high broker fees that are pushed on to tenants.
Broker fees in New York City are typically 15% of the annual rent, which means tenants must fork over several thousand dollars on top of the first month's rent and security deposit. Landlords hire real estate brokers to aid their rental process, yet they somehow evade the price of this service and make the tenant responsible for the bill.
In 2020 legislation was enacted that protected tenants from being responsible for the landlords’ broker fees. But, after the efforts of a powerful real estate lobbying group, the decision was quickly reversed the following year. The brokers do the leg work for the landlords, often listing the property, filtering through applicants, showcasing the property, collecting fees, and essentially ensuring that there is a smooth application and leasing process for the landlord and tenant. Yes, it is true that brokers need to be paid for their work, but the question is, should the tenant be responsible?
To expand access to housing, reduce homelessness, and create a new standard of living for many New Yorkers, new rental application regulations must be established. This includes laws prohibiting property owners from charging tenants for their broker fees, laws related to preventing the disqualification of tenants based on their financial profile, and laws to limit how much landlords can require from tenants.
Additionally, New York should examine its affordable housing policies and increase eligibility for income-restricted housing to mostly benefit long-time residents of the community where new housing is built. This would require increasing the 50% threshold for community district residents in affordable housing lotteries and increasing the length of time that a resident must live in New York City to be eligible for affordable housing.
Meanwhile, the development of new affordable housing is often prolonged and dysfunctional, and officials are simply not ensuring we are building anywhere near enough of it.
But while more needs to be done on affordable housing development and the lottery process, it is essential that New York leaders take steps as soon as possible to regulate the tenant application process.
Smart and fair regulations will transform the New York City housing market by creating more opportunity for lower-income New Yorkers to qualify for quality housing. As Mayor Adams pursues more housing development on a large scale, he must be willing to sacrifice some of his popularity with developers and property owners by making the rental market fairer by removing income restrictions set by landlords and abolishing the precedent that landlords’ broker fees are the tenant’s responsibility. And the City Council should work with him or take the lead on this effort to create a fairer housing market.
New York City apartments are in high demand and rental prices reflect the market, but New Yorkers are being excluded from much of that market even when they can afford the rent. It’s time for that to change. It is time for the Mayor, New York City Council, Governor, and State Legislature to take this on in 2023.
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Khiteriara Brown is the Founder and Director of Millennial Channel. Khiteriara is a xenophile, world affairs commentator, and philanthropist. She has a master’s in Chinese translation from New York University, a master’s in political management from George Washington University, and a bachelor’s in history from the University of Alabama. On Twitter @millennialchannl
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City Council Member Sandra Ung, the author
During a New York City Council hearing last month, a person affiliated with a local nonprofit group stated that Asians aren’t real New Yorkers, saying “it’s not their neighborhood, because they’re from China, they’re from Hong Kong. We’re from New York.”
While this incident has largely disappeared from the public discourse, it brought to the surface a pernicious stereotype about Asian New Yorkers as we come off another year when hate crimes against the AAPI community continue to be a far-too-common occurrence.
Like many immigrants, my family came to the United States after escaping tragedy. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge began persecuting and killing thousands of people during what would be known as the Cambodian genocide. The government eventually murdered or disappeared nearly 300,000 Chinese Cambodians, including my mother’s sisters and parents.
The United States took us in and we became proud Americans. We rebuilt our lives in New York City and have called Queens home ever since. I was educated in American schools, grew up around other American kids and culture, and always thought of myself as American. Like many AAPIs, this is the only home that I know.
Despite the welcome and our deep roots here, there was an uglier side to growing up in America as an Asian immigrant. Throughout my childhood, I often received one of two common pieces of “advice”: that I should learn English and that I should go back to my own country. And despite attending school here for most of my life, graduating from Columbia Law School and working for Congress, individuals continue to “compliment” me on how well I speak English.
When statements like these were made, very rarely did anyone denounce them or start a discussion about how they affected me. I just accepted it as part of growing up an immigrant — an Asian American immigrant — in the United States.
Words like these and those said in Council Chambers have real consequences. Casting Asian Americans as foreigners rationalizes the continued treatment of Asians as belonging to a nebulous group of outsiders who don’t have the same rights or value as other Americans. Like Islamophobia, homophobia, or anti-Black racism, this “othering” serves as a tool to legitimize both exclusion and violence.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I began to realize that my experiences with racism weren’t just part of growing up an immigrant in America, it was part of a larger issue that prejudice against the AAPI community is not only overlooked, but in too many instances tolerated.
While perusing soda bottles in a store one day, a woman began screaming at me to stop touching everything because the virus came from me. Her visceral anger stemmed from the belief that I was spreading covid because I was Asian. I looked around for help because I was worried I was about to be physically attacked, but as usual there wasn’t any help to be found.
This isn’t a new threat for Asian Americans.
While the recent rise in hatred targeting Asians may be attributable to a president who threw around words like “kung flu” and the “China virus,” attempts to cast Asians as foreign is an age-old trope repeatedly utilized in attempts to justify both violence and racist government policies. The pandemic bigotry and the recent rise in violence is just the newest incarnation of a form of racism that has pervaded the United States since its founding.
When an economic downturn tightened the labor market in the 1870s, many political figures and the press scapegoated Asians, who they claimed were unassimilable. Asian workers were blamed for putting downward pressure on wages for white workers. Efforts to brand Asians as foreigners culminated in the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when at least 28 Chinese miners were murdered.
The same trope was rolled out shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the United States began forcibly relocating people of Japanese descent into concentration camps. Approximately 80,000 of those interned were actually second or third generation Americans with U.S. citizenship.
Fast-forward to 1982 in Detroit, where Vincent Chin, an American of Chinese descent, was beaten to death by two men motivated by anti-Japanese sentiment caused by the decline of the auto industry. His killers received three years’ probation and a $3,000 fine.
Chin wasn’t seen as an American citizen or an individual, he was a foreigner to be blamed for the ills of this country. As in the murders of Asian Americans in the 1800s, Chin’s killers were essentially excused for their actions.
For Asian Americans, insinuations and outright accusations of being foreigners aren’t just words. We are too often not viewed as equal citizens of this country, so people feel justified setting fire to an elderly AAPI woman, pushing an Asian American woman from a subway platform, or entering City Hall and delivering bigoted remarks.
After the incident before the City Council, some tried to explain away the comments by stating the person who delivered them was reacting to his own history with racism. Once again, many in the AAPI community felt like our pain was being ignored; that our rights and freedoms as American citizens are conditional and that this will never be our home.
As we enter a new year, it is my hope that the conversations around the AAPI community aren’t centered on whether or not we belong here, but rather our indispensable role in this great city.
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City Council Member Sandra Ung represents parts of Queens. On Twitter @CMSandraUng.
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New park investments (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
New York took a big step forward last month when Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams released Making New York Work for Everyone, a plan with 40 commitments meant to steer New York City toward economic growth and livability. The report sets goals and policies for reinvigorating the city’s commercial corridors and fostering vibrancy by addressing commute times, housing, public space, outdoor dining, and more. But even more promising than the individual commitments is the clear acknowledgement that people-centered policy and placemaking is at the heart of New York City’s future.
As members of the Alliance for Public Space Leadership, we’ve been advocating for this exact progress. Our public spaces — parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks — are the lifeblood of this city. But great public spaces have too often been reserved for wealthier neighborhoods, and haven’t been prioritized as essential pieces of a healthy and thriving city for all.
As a coalition, we want government leaders to understand that these public spaces need central investment in the same way as other public services. Currently, there is no holistic management or investment in New York’s public space. Every Open Street, block party, or neighborhood safety initiative is the product of intense volunteer effort, organization, and coordination. It’s inequitable, exclusionary, and burdensome. And within government, city agencies and departments are too often working in isolation. They can’t focus on collaborative problem-solving because our government structure doesn’t allow for it.
That’s why the new report is so promising. For the first time, New York City is acknowledging the need for structural and holistic leadership with a new Director of the Public Realm. This central decision-maker can help envision the city’s public spaces as part of a larger ecosystem — one that impacts physical health, mental wellbeing, sense of community, economic success, and climate resilience.
Our Director of the Public Realm should provide communities with the resources they need to cultivate Open Streets and other street activations, prioritize equitable access to public space in underserved neighborhoods, and provide design leadership to ensure our public space is high-quality and sustainable. This is our chance to build New York City’s first overarching vision for public space.
The 59 ‘New’ New York panelists who wrote this report (and we were glad to meet with during their research phase) have recognized that economic growth doesn’t happen in a bubble. Commerce is connected with place and people, as the recent Streetscapes for Wellness and Streets for Recovery reports have shown. When New Yorkers have safe, reliable, and joyful space in their neighborhoods, they support local business. When curb lanes are used for things other than car storage, bus commutes get shorter and neighborhoods become more livable. When we give communities the tools to build inclusive, communal space in their neighborhoods, everyone benefits.
These aren’t just nice ideas, they’re proven solutions to a better future.
New York City has made a bold step here, but there’s still a long road ahead. We will need everyone’s support and commitment in fulfilling the 40 goals in this report and moving beyond pandemic recovery into a bright, thriving, and equitable future.
Our alliance has joined forces to advocate for shared space and shared goals; we’ve found strength in our numbers. Now, New York City’s leaders at all three levels of government must do the same. To reimagine New York’s business districts — and every district — as vibrant, 24/7 destinations, we’ll need local officials to prioritize people over cars. We’ll need leaders with vision who will catalyze a new future, not a return to the way things were. The siloed status quo is harmful to the wellbeing of our city’s residents, particularly those in underserved communities. It isolates public space in wealthier communities, strips New Yorkers of their ability to create inclusive spaces, and creates dangerous street conditions where thriving public space could be. We must move beyond that. We must think cooperatively about our shared spaces to arrive at shared solutions.
As an alliance, we’re committed to pushing the city forward, helping to illuminate the possibilities and solutions for a brighter future. We’re energized to see the Adams administration commit to do the same. We’re looking forward to working with the city’s first Director of the Public Realm, and all our decision-makers, on the exciting road ahead.
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Elizabeth Goldstein, President, The Municipal Art Society of New York. @MASNYC
Jackson Chabot, Director of Advocacy and Organization, Open Plans. @OpenPlans
Benjamin Prosky, Executive Director, American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York. @AIA_NewYork
Adam Ganser, Executive Director, New Yorkers for Parks. @NY4P
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