Health care workers during covid (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Last month, Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered remarks at Riverside Church on the inequities in the Trump administration's COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan. He admirably stated that we must prioritize fairness and equity. Communities like many in the Bronx that have suffered the most because of this virus must not be left behind. But that commitment to leaving no community behind must also be applied to addressing the underlying issues that led to disproportionately negative outcomes for impoverished communities of color impacted by the virus.
Governor Cuomo was right when he stated, ”Covid low tide in America also showed us the deep inequality in our country and the systemic discrimination in this nation. The truth is covid killed Black people in this country at twice the rate of white people. The truth is covid killed Hispanic people at 1.5 times the rate of white people. Those are ugly facts. The covid infection rate was 2.5 times higher among Black and Hispanic people and the hospitalization rate for Black and Hispanic patients was over three times higher compared to white patients.”
This accurately describes our experience at SBH Health System (SBH). For the community we represent, a return to "normal" would be both a disaster and an affront, as it would not address the life and death issues being further exposed by this "low tide" moment in America. According to the New York City Department of Health's COVID-19 database, more than 90% of Bronx residents who have died from COVID-19 had preventable underlying health conditions.
A recent study by Gibenga Ogedegbe, et al also supported the fact that Black and Hispanic populations were more likely to test positive for COVID-19, and although their in-hospital mortality rate was not higher than white patients, “the structural determinants pervasive in Black and Hispanic communities, including inequality in housing, access to care, differential employment opportunities and poverty…explain the disproportionately higher out of hospital deaths due to COVID-19 infections in these populations.”
Moving forward, we know that access to affordable and accessible quality community health care will be a primary factor in addressing the systemic health-care inequities in New York. Without coordinated patient-centered care, it will not be possible to ensure appropriate care continuity. Coordination is key to prevent redundancies and lost opportunities across the entire health-care delivery system, from vaccinations to highly-specialized procedures.
This means primary care clinicians and specialists, ambulatory surgery centers, specialized procedural centers, hospitals, and post-acute care facilities must seamlessly interact on behalf of the patient. We began to see the immediate benefit of this coordination during the height of the pandemic last spring, when hospital systems and others developed collaborative relationships with each other, in concert with public health officials to effect rapid responses to the crisis.
We also know that health and wellness depends not only on healthcare delivery, but also on those social determinants of health that interfere with that delivery. New York must immediately adopt policies that embrace and demand value-based health care. This must include a continued and renewed financial commitment to move health-care delivery from a volume- and profit-driven model to a value-based model that encourages providers and payers to collaborate and focus on programs aimed at improving the health, wellness, and resilience of all communities.
As part of this program, we must preserve the safety net by investing in community-based anchor institutions such as SBH, which has consistently exhibited a commitment to broad-based Bronx community partnerships aimed at improving the lives of the residents of the Bronx.
Our Affordable Housing and Wellness Center Development, in part supported by New York State, is an example of this willingness, and we are proud that we have created opportunities for hundreds of families by investing in safe, clean, affordable, and permanent housing, including for those who were formerly homeless. But it’s not enough.
The Bronx continues to rank 62nd of 62 New York counties in terms of health and wellness, according to the RWD Community Health Rankings. Housing, physical, and food insecurities; education, income, technological, and health-care disparities -- many of them further revealed by the impacts of covid -- must be addressed to ensure that the next pandemic doesn't wipe out the rest of our community.
The moment is now to right the wrongs of previous generations and put our communities on a different trajectory. We have a real opportunity and responsibility to address once and for all the structural inequities that have contributed to the overwhelming losses experienced in our community. New York can serve as a model for the rest of the country about who we are and who we must be, and in the process create a “new normal” that guarantees opportunity and fairness for all New Yorkers.
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David Perlstein, MD MBA FAAP, is President and CEO of SBH Health System. On Twitter @SBHBronx.
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Mayor de Blasio at school (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Mayor de Blasio's mishandling of the public school pandemic response has led to calls to reform or replace mayoral control of New York City schools.
Almost six years ago, I wrote in these pages advocating the case for mayoral control based on the still-valid theory that quality education depends on maximum funding based on the Mayor's control of the city budget and the need for political accountability to drive instructional improvement. In this way, mayoral control is consistent with the system of elected school board members in districts across the country where elected officials determine the schools' budget and financing, negotiate union contracts, and appoint a Superintendent (our Chancellor). Here, all of those powers reside with the Mayor. Merging fiscal and operational control, once separate provinces of the Mayor and Board of Education, is key to efficient and effective school governance.
But strains on this system, apparent earlier, have become open wounds under Bill de Blasio. He has concentrated power in City Hall rather than delegating decision-making to the educators housed steps away at Department of Education headquarters in the Tweed Courthouse. While the Police Commissioner is allowed a high degree of professional determination over law enforcement, DOE operations under a feckless Chancellor have become an extension of City Hall, with high-level staffers lacking education backgrounds routinely assigned by the Mayor's Office to the Chancellor’s.
Education in the city has become the political pawn of a single individual, unchecked by other governmental structures. This is at least partly because the DOE is not technically a mayoral agency, subject to normal checks and balances by the City Council and Comptroller, but a quasi-independent authority subject to State Education Department regulation. The Mayor's theoretically indirect control stems from his appointment power of the Chancellor and a majority of the Board of Education, re-named by Mayor Bloomberg the Panel on Educational Policy. But de Blasio and, before him, Bloomberg, have redesigned this appointive power to assert autocracy. The City Council has no direct authority over the DOE, relegated to passing reporting requirements rather than statutory controls.
What’s to be done?
Other Models' Weaknesses
I believe there is a better way for mayoral control to work, using a strategic management approach to maintain its budgetary and accountability advantages while delegating instructional policies to educators at Tweed, in the districts, and to parents through parent associations and Community Education Councils. But this opportunity to remake mayoral control may never have been possible and likely has been permanently lost to the closely-held paradigm embedded over the last 20 years by Bloomberg and de Blasio.
The oft-proposed reform of eliminating the Panel for Educational Policy’s mayoral majority with more members with fixed terms appointed by the Borough Presidents, Council, and others is a cure likely worse than the disease. Most recently promoted by teachers' union President Michael Mulgrew, the model is much like the old seven-member Board of Education, which had five members appointed by the Borough Presidents and only two by the Mayor. That system was abandoned in 2001 in favor of mayoral control, an apt testament to its failure to produce either adequate funding or educational quality. In addition, the members' fixed terms allowed them to become independent political actors, without accountability even to their appointing officials.
Replacing an appointed board with an elected body of similar size mirrors many of these same problems through its lack of budgetary and collective bargaining independence, with the additional wild cards of one-person-one-vote seat allocation and the likelihood that our heated education culture wars would produce a volatile mix of political factions, a frequent and paralyzing phenomenon in other districts with resulting operational and educational dysfunction.
Moving further backward in the city's school governance history, community control remains a fervent wish among some, promising a degree of local self-determination never fulfilled after the teacher strikes of 1968. But the demise of community control demonstrates its impracticality. We are one city and bound educationally whether by union contracts, city funding, and most of all the need for city-wide solutions to issues of equity and diversity. Balkanizing control among our still-existing community school districts is a dream at odds with political and fiscal realities.
With these alternatives failing historical and theoretical tests, the key to improving New York City school governance may be hiding in plain sight. As education historian David Tyack pointed out in his classic analysis, there is no "one best system" to solve our educational problems. Each era produces the governance that best fits the circumstances of its time, fitting into its unique socio-political framework.
City Control
When, in 1989, the United States Supreme Court declared the old Board of Estimate unconstitutional, Borough Presidents' budgetary powers were eliminated in favor of the more representative City Council which, until then, had been a mostly vestigial body. In response, the city's elite, distrustful of the newly-empowered Council members, wrote the 1990 City Charter revision to create a strong Mayor system. We live with that system today.
But the Council now is a mature body, having secured public respect over three decades by responsibly exercising its Charter mandates. Perhaps it made sense in 2001, when mayoral control was established, to cut out the largely untested Council from a stronger role in school governance. But today, the measure of the Council has been taken and it has developed a strong reputation for educational advocacy and policy acuity, as well as a culture of consensus that might keep it from the culture wars and procedural paralysis of a less representative, non-mayoral-majority Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). The past two Council Speakers have shown respect for their limited role in education by appointing able Education Committee Chairs who, in turn, held the Mayor to close account through public hearings and greater data-based transparency.
It may be time to reward this record and improve New York City school governance by recasting mayoral control as city control, aligning educational governance with other city services. There are important advantages to this concept, perhaps most importantly to give a powerful voice to individual community interests now lacking in the Mayor's hegemony over the Department of Education or through a slightly enlarged PEP. This check on mayoral power might be the missing ingredient in attenuating executive political interests not by watering them down, as with the Mulgrew plan, but on the constitutional model, balancing executive power with legislative constraints.
The State Education Law establishing mayoral control is already largely consistent with replacing the ineffectual PEP with an independent City Council acting as the Board of Education. Section 2590-g, "Powers and Duties of the City Board," clearly states that "except as otherwise provided by law, the board shall exercise no executive power and perform no executive or administrative functions." Thus, the Council stays in its policy lane, leaving executive functions to the Chancellor and the rest of the DOE in line with separation of powers principles.
Some tweaks and more substantive revisions will of course be needed. For example, the City, not the Council, should be the employer of record for DOE personnel under Education Law § 2590-g (2). As I have suggested elsewhere, the Council should be able to hold hearings before rendering advice and consent over mayoral nominees for Chancellor after a more transparent search process. But how wonderful to put the Education Committee in charge of vetting DOE proposals for "standards, policies, and objectives proposed by the chancellor directly related to educational achievement and student performance"; "regulations proposed by the chancellor"; and "all school closures or significant changes in school utilization," including charter school co-locations under Education Law § 2590-g (1)(a, c, h, respectively). These, as well as other oversight functions, are deserving of greater public scrutiny than possible under unilateral mayoral control.
Advantages and Dangers of 'City Control'
This shared governance largely maintains the related education funding and accountability advantages of mayoral control. Voters would now hold local City Council members responsible, in addition to the Mayor, for fully funding schools. The Mayor could no more pawn off responsibility for education than he or she might try to disown police, fire, or other city agencies subject to similar Council powers. At the same time, with a Chancellor and major policies requiring Council approval, that body could no longer serve as mere gadfly but would have to take ownership of the success or failure of our public schools. By its approving the Chancellor's appointment, Council members would have skin in the game when questioning educational policies, perhaps leading to less adversarial hearings of less heat, more light.
This is not to say that there aren’t substantial dangers in this as yet-untried arrangement, which would be unique in the nation. The Council can be an ungainly body and its new education responsibilities would require a degree of discipline and timeliness not ordinarily found in large deliberative bodies. Particular burdens would fall on the Education Committee Chair to hold numerous hearings and filter reasoned recommendations to the full Council for approval. Grandstanding is a given and the chance of the Council being captured by dominant political interests is also present, though probably not any greater than is currently the case under mayoral control. Most important, the agility of mayoral control to deliver system change could be stymied by ungainly shared decision-making.
Day-to-day operation of the Department of Education would see little change under this arrangement. After all, the current PEP meets only once per month and while its meetings are long on procedure, there are usually few matters of substance, however important. It will take time for the DOE, the Mayor, and the Council to negotiate such new terrain, balancing oversight against micromanagement, promoting educational quality over political expediency.
After 20 years of mayoral control, a fair test of its advantages and disadvantages can be declared though never finalized. There can be no doubt the current system has staunched the school system's previous unaccountable complacency and its pernicious reciprocal weakness, chronic mayoral underfunding. But severe problems of unilateral control and increased politicization haunt today's education policy-making.
Whether more political involvement will improve the situation is an open question. Traditionally, though, the American way of solving this conundrum is checks and balances between elected executive and legislative branches. No governance structure is determinative of sound education policy, but it may be time to adopt this solution by including the City Council's broad representation of popular interests in schools decision-making.
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David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.
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Covid field site (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
There are many high-stakes questions to be sorted out in the design of the coming covid vaccination distribution program. But there’s one issue that’s not receiving enough attention: How can we design a plan that avoids exacerbating pre-existing racial inequities and instead meaningfully advances equity?
It’s essential that we answer this question — now.
Vaccine distribution will be the most complicated implementation challenge of this pandemic, even more so in Black communities and other communities of color. We need to ensure that every aspect of the program is structured to avoid short-changing these same marginalized communities yet again.
Throughout this pandemic, Black, Latino, and indigenous communities have suffered from inadequate and inequitable resources. Hospitals in low-income areas have been under-staffed and under-supplied. Testing has been far more accessible in affluent communities.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 vaccine trials have followed this same disturbing pattern. Black Americans only made up 8% of the Pfizer trial participants. The Moderna trial fared better at 13%. But both fell short of the portion of COVID-19 fatalities among Black Americans: 19%.
Even more worrisome is the possibility that Black, Latino, and indigenous communities could be underrepresented in the early distribution of the vaccine, further exacerbating the pandemic’s racial health inequities.
There is general agreement that early prioritization should go to health-care workers, followed by residents of congregant settings, and then essential workers more broadly. But the way each of these categories is defined has huge implications for equity.
The health-care worker cohort should, of course, include those who directly provide care to patients, like physicians and nurses. But what about the many other job categories in hospitals? Cleaning staff, translators, cafeteria workers, and security guards all have contact with COVID-19 patients. The same is of course true for home health aides. And all are far more likely to be people of color. Excluding them — or any covid-facing worker in a health-care setting — would be profoundly unfair.
Similar questions arise with the congregant setting cohort. Clearly residents and staff of nursing homes should be included in this group. But what about jails, where rates of infection among detainees and staff have been alarmingly high? Or crowded homeless shelters, which are known to be high-risk for transmission? Here again, excluding groups in these more marginal settings would disadvantage populations that are disproportionately people of color.
There are questions about the essential worker cohort as well, which rightly will almost certainly include people who work in transportation or on essential infrastructure such as wastewater treatment facilities. But what about those who work in supermarkets, laundromats, food delivery, or restaurants? These low-wage workers have been performing essential functions throughout this pandemic while exposed to the public — and are far more likely to be people of color. They must be included as well, for their own sake, and for the general public that depends on their work.
Once vaccination distribution moves to a broader public phase, decisions about the locations in which vaccines are administered also have implications for equity. The default option is to primarily use hospitals and chain pharmacies. But there are fewer of both in low-income areas. To reach the broadest number of Black, Latino, and indigenous people, vaccination programs should be set up in a variety of accessible local settings, including churches, community centers, public housing developments, and schools.
It is also critical that there be no barriers to receiving the vaccine based on an individual's immigraiton status. Preliminary plans from the Trump administration would require patients to present a form of ID that is a proxy for citizenship in order to be registered in the vaccination database. This would have disastrous consequences, and cannot be a standard that is used in New York.
And then there is what may be the biggest challenge of all: building confidence in the vaccine among communities that have a century-long history of abuse, exploitation, and neglect by the medical system, in particular around vaccines. Communities of color still experience discrimination and bias in health-care settings today.
To overcome the trust gap, there must be total transparency about COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy, and side effects. Additionally, there must be a well-funded, culturally-responsive, multilingual outreach campaign to share this critical information with Black, Latino, and other communities of color. Local community organizations must be mobilized for on-the-ground outreach, at a scale that is more robust than the campaign to promote participation in the Census.
The federal government will be imminently rolling out guidelines on key aspects of the vaccination distribution process. But it will be up to state and local governments to tailor these plans to the needs of their local communities.
It is critical that here in New York City, and across the country, we design a fair and equitable vaccination program that ensures that no one is left behind. Lives depend on it.
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Dr. Uché Blackstock is a Board-certified emergency medicine physician, the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and a Yahoo! News Medical Contributor. New York City Council Member Mark D. Levine represents parts of Manhattan and is chair of the Council’s Health Committee. On Twitter @uche_blackstock and @MarkLevineNYC.
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An activist at a City Council hearing (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
Word from European countries that they will be killing millions of minks because of coronavirus outbreaks jumping from animals to humans on farms is shockingly upsetting.
But the real offense here is that the minks were being farmed to be killed anyway for the fur industry and that atrocity doesn’t really garner headlines anymore.
By now the world is aware that zoonotic diseases – diseases that spread from animals to humans such as COVID-19, Ebola, HIV, H1N1, Mad Cow Disease and Avian flu – have caused millions of deaths worldwide and yet humans continue to treat animals as a means to a human goal and not sentient beings worthy of their own rights to live their natural lives undisturbed.
The origin of the COVID-19 outbreak last winter has been linked to wild animal meat markets in China where bats and other wildlife such as pangolins were stacked together in cages waiting to be bought by patrons and consumed. Trade in wildlife is a primary contributor to zoonotic disease outbreaks, as is habitat destruction that expels wildlife from their natural ecosystems and overdevelopment.
Denmark is the world’s largest exporter of mink furs. But the responsibility for the slaughter doesn’t end with that country. There are mink farms in other countries as well as in the U.S., where the coronavirus has killed more than 15,000 mink.
But again, these minks were doomed anyway, fodder for the trade in their pelts to feed a fur industry that should be shuttered for good.
The way forward to prevent more zoonotic diseases and the needless killing of millions of animals is to take concrete steps to end the exploitation.
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Denmark’s leading fur auction house, Kopenhagen Fur, announced that due to the loss of minks for production it would shut its doors in a few years. The coronavirus was just one more nail in the coffin of an industry that was already on its way out. Many major fashion houses, retailers, and designers have already spurned fur, including Coach, Kors, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Versace, Calvin Klein, Macy’s, and Nordstrom.
And yet, the New York City Council is sitting on a bill that would end the sale of fur in the city. Council Speaker Corey Johnson introduced the bill in 2018 and spoke forcefully for its passage at a health committee hearing but the bill stalled when it was met with opposition from the fur industry and some religious groups.
Declining to pass the bill sends a message to the world that the caging and killing of mink will continue and that humans will aid and abet commerce and trade that causes needless animal suffering and fosters pandemics such as COVID-19, which has already killed more than 250,000 U.S. residents. It’s time to pass the bill and ban the sale of fur in New York City.
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Priscilla Feral is the president of Friends of Animals, an international, nonprofit animal advocacy organization incorporated in New York in 1957. On Twitter @foaorg.
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Construction workers at work (photo: Edward Reed/Mayoral office)
New York City is on a long road for recovery from COVID-19. Many of us have a family member, friend, neighbor, or co-worker who has been directly infected with this horrible disease. Because of our tragic experience, New Yorkers recognize better than people from any place across the globe the importance of masks, social distancing, and handwashing, and we have transitioned from the epicenter to become one of the safest places in the country.
But while we have taken many necessary steps to combat the spread of COVID-19, the tragic loss of life has coincided with a demoralizing loss of livelihood. As a new federal administration prepares for the next four years, we need to focus on reviving our economy. Close to one million New Yorkers are out of work and the Partnership for the City of New York predicts that as many 75,000 small businesses may never reopen. Those are our neighbors, friends, and loved ones. Many are wondering how they’ll pay the rent or mortgage, get health care, or put food on the table.
At times of deep unemployment, infrastructure projects often provide an economic stimulus that can make a big difference in our neighborhoods. One of those projects is right here in Queens.
NRG plans to upgrade the technology at the Astoria Generating Station to make it much cleaner and much more efficient, providing an economic and environmental boost to a neighborhood that needs both. These are well-paying jobs with benefits. Many employees live in Astoria, supporting local businesses and helping to create even more jobs. They pay taxes and support community groups year-round.
This is one of the plants the state relies on to provide extra power when electricity demand surges. For example, if the plant hadn’t been activated during August’s tropical storm that resulted in massive blackouts across New York, hundreds of thousands more city residents could have lost power. Much of what took place in California is the direct result of shutting down power plants before there is adequate power generation to replace them.
That’s why NRG plans to replace these 50-year-old turbines with cleaner technology that will reduce peak air emission rates by 99% per hour. The project will create 175 new good-paying union jobs at a prevailing wage and with full benefits.
Many unions and labor organizations – including the 100,000-member Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York that I lead – are proud members of Climate Jobs NY. We’re dedicated to projects that meet the state’s aggressive commitment to addressing climate change, which this plan will do. The technology that our members will be installing in Astoria is fully convertible to hydrogen fuel in the future, giving New York State even greater opportunities to achieve its zero-carbon emission goals.
These jobs would come at a crucial time during this historic economic downturn. Right now, one in eight working-age adults in Queens is out of a job. If a second COVID-19 wave moves into New York City this winter, our economy is likely to take another hit.
In addition to the full-time jobs created at the work site, the project will create an additional 1,000 jobs—stemming from increased business at local restaurants, shops, and other businesses. In all, according to an independent economic study, the project stands to inject more than $325 million into the local economy, a crucial lifeline for countless small businesses that are struggling to get by.
Approving this project should be a no-brainer for the state. The new technology is available now, is better for the environment and helps the state meet its climate goals. It creates good-paying union jobs and supports the local economy in an area hit hard by the pandemic. It’s important that everyone understands what this project will bring, because we can’t continue to let some activists disrupt crucial opportunities to add jobs because of their narrow definition for what the borough and its people need.
And essentially, upgrading the Astoria plant ensures that New York City has reliable power at a time when demand is increasing. For all these benefits, the project doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. NRG is fully funding these improvements.
For all these reasons, let’s make sure the Astoria Replacement Project moves forward to help our communities. We can’t turn our backs on Queens.
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Gary LaBarbera is president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, an organization comprising local affiliates of 15 national and international unions representing 100,000 working men and women in New York City. On Twitter @NYCBldgTrades.
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Small donations can power campaigns (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
We’ve never seen this many candidates before. There are more than 300 declared candidates for New York City Council running in 2021, along with more than 50 running for positions like Borough President, City Comptroller, and Mayor. There are 51 City Council districts, so on average, voters will have six or more choices for their ranked-choice vote just for their local Council member in the June primaries. These unprecedented numbers demonstrate an unqualified success for the city’s campaign matching funds program that has recently been improved to lower contribution limits and increase public matching dollars.
In the middle of a global pandemic and widespread economic distress, matching funds are more important than ever. Here’s how the matching-funds program works. For every dollar up to $175 a New York City resident donates to a political campaign, the city adds eight dollars up to a total of $1,400 per contribution. There are strings attached for candidates. Candidates who opt-in must participate in debates, abide by a spending cap, and open their spending to increased scrutiny. Executed as intended, it’s a strong and balanced system benefiting smaller donors, candidates, and the public.
When the program was initially implemented in 1989 and altered several times, most recently through significant amendments in 2019, no one could have imagined the dual pandemic and economic crises that New York City would be facing for the 2021 city elections. New York State has no such program currently but will make one available for the 2024 elections. It’s a good thing the city has this program in place right now.
Still about seven months before the June primaries, there are already 50 more Council candidates than in all of either 2017 or 2013, the last two city government election cycles. And if this year follows historical rates of matchable contributions, the New York City Campaign Finance Board will pay out millions in its initial December 15 public funds payment on their way to tens of millions of dollars this cycle.
These public fund payments are crucial. They provide salaries for campaign workers and rent for office space. A candidate might have just a few thousand dollars in the bank right now, but can be owed tens of thousands more under this system. With New York City’s latest unemployment rate at over 13% and office vacancy rates at nearly 9%, these funds are a lifeline for campaigns and those who depend on them to be able to pay their bills and survive. And, of course, the funds pay for the distribution of important information via pamphlets, mailers, and digital advertisements that define and distinguish the candidates while informing the public. Community organizers have worked hard and hustled to raise funds from their neighbors. These public funds allow campaigns to swing into high gear.
Above all, each campaign represents a choice for voters as well as someone’s dream to serve their community. This program expands both. This year, in Manhattan, there were 14 candidates for seven contested state legislative races in the Democratic primary. Eleven seats saw incumbents run unopposed. For 2021, enabled by the matching funds program, there are already 54 announced candidates for City Council across ten races in the borough. All but one district has multiple candidates. Even more candidates are likely to announce. It’s clear that the availability of these public matching funds is enabling hundreds of New Yorkers to run for office and create more competitive elections.
The city’s matching funds program has already been proven to work. In the 2019 Public Advocate special election, small-dollar contributions went from about 25% of all funds raised to more than 66%, according to data from City Council Member Ben Kallos of Manhattan. That race drew 17 candidates, a harbinger of what was to come for 2021. New York City’s matching funds program means more candidates, better campaigns, and greater choices for voters at the ballot box.
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Martin Rather is the Co-Founder of The November Group, a NY Political Compliance Firm. On Facebook.
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Housing on the line (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor’s Office)
On the eve of the pandemic, I gathered with my neighbors outside their building in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx to sound an alarm. For those tenants, it wouldn’t be true to say that “crisis had hit home.” They had been steeped in crisis for some time.
For three decades, the landlord of 2201-2205 Davidson Avenue had racked up a $12.6 million debt in unpaid property taxes while the tenants lived with the unlivable: black mold that crept over lead-painted walls, rats that chewed through clothes and stoves, leaks that never stopped, elevators and hot water that hardly ran. Then, the investors that took over the building issued over a dozen eviction notices to tenants on rent strike.
At the press conference, tenants unfurled a banner from the fire escape that read: “We are ready to take control. NYC, are you ready?” It was February. By March, COVID-19 hit our city like a tsunami, plunging us deeper into housing, health, and economic crises. With winter upon us and COVID-19 cases on the rise again, tenants are bracing for our government to lift eviction bans come January.
My Bronx community in City Council District 14 is ground zero, with the highest rate of evictions in the city prior to the moratorium. We didn’t know it back in February, but the Davidson Avenue tenants’ message was pointing us towards what an equitable and just recovery requires: a path to community ownership to secure our future.
We know that the pandemic has shot unemployment rates to levels unseen since the Great Depression. When the Depression had reached its peak in the 1930s, landlords delivered hundreds of thousands of eviction notices to tenants unable to pay rent across the city. In response, Bronx residents mobilized for rent strikes and eviction blockades to prevent their neighbors from being thrown out on the streets. Similarly today, evictions are on the rise in the face of mass unemployment.
So I took to the streets with hundreds of tenants from across the city to end evictions and demand rent relief. Unwilling to stand idly by when millions of New Yorkers stand to lose our homes, in October we barricaded Broadway with furniture until police came to forcibly remove us. While we are clear in our demands of legislators to cancel rent and deliver a homes guarantee for our state, there are specific ways city officials must show leadership for a just recovery.
Now more than ever, we need short-term fixes, including an immediate extension of eviction moratorium and expansion of Right to Counsel in housing cases across the city, and long-term structural changes that democratize and decommodify housing.
We know this is possible during a crisis. We need only look to how our people commanded the government and banks to respond when our city nearly went bankrupt in the 1970s.
Planned shrinkage and racist redlining practices diverted investment and critical services away from poor and working class communities of color, and the Bronx was burning with landlord arson and abandonment. But our people organized to hold their landlords, government, and banks accountable and rebuilt our communities from the ground up. The city sold public land to our communities for cheap so they could launch cooperative and non-profit housing companies, and tenants passed legislation for rent stabilization to safeguard affordability.
I recently fought alongside a statewide coalition of tenant organizations to defend those laws and remove loopholes that landlords exploited to displace our people. When we won, we believed that it was our time to dream big again. Learning from history, now is the time to invest in real collective ownership over where we live — in transfer of land and supportive infrastructure to sustain it for the long haul.
Crisis brings into sharp focus inequities that were already present. It also presents an opportunity to come to new conclusions, to write new futures. We each have a choice to make about how we will show leadership in this moment. Our government could choose austerity and cutbacks that reinforce a system in service of wealth and power for the few. Or we can reach for solutions that put our people at the center and invest in long-term sustainability.
So what could real community ownership look like today in New York City? When Davidson Avenue tenants proclaimed to the world that they were ready to take control, they acknowledged that landlords, courts, banks, and their government had failed them. Instead, they would be prepared to own and govern the buildings they live in, collectively advancing a vision to steward land and stabilize our communities.
The City Council must support grassroots-led efforts for community ownership and social housing. Last month, as part of a city-wide movement, I joined Bronx residents at a town hall with Bronx Council members focused on resisting displacement, preserving long-term housing affordability, and establishing self-determination through transfering publicly-owned land to the Bronx Community Land Trust. Land in our city should not be a commodity. It is our urban commons — something we all need to share in order to survive and to live with dignity. We’re on the precipice of the biggest homelessness crisis that the city has seen in decades. But we can’t be evicted if we own where we live.
“How do we live like this?” a nine-year-old boy asked when he took the mic at that press conference. I felt his question in my bones. By age 12, my family had moved from one dilapidated building to the next, never finding the security we deserved, never able to afford better on my mother’s salary as a home health aide. It’s the kind of experience that will lead you to read a speech with shaking hands in the freezing cold before a row of cameras. It will fuel you to fight with your community so that no family ever has to feel that powerless. It will move you to run for public office to push these aspirations in the City Council.
By dropping that banner, my fellow Bronxites were issuing a call across the city to everyday people — poor and working class, Black and brown, immigrant and worker, queer and gender-nonconforming, elder and youth. Our people are calling for emergency actions and long-term solutions. It is time for our representatives to get on the same page. Instead of putting bandaids over deep-rooted inequities, let’s guarantee our people’s shelter, health and wellbeing. Let’s make sure we all have the freedom to thrive.
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Adolfo Abreu is a candidate for New York City Council in District 14, in the Bronx. On Twitter @Adolfo4Council.
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Mayor de Blasio at Elmhurst Hospital (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
A study recently released by New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection had a grim finding: as the pandemic overwhelmed the city last spring, 30% of patients hospitalized because of COVID-19 ended up dying. The findings confirmed the images New Yorkers grew accustomed to seeing — mobile morgues and patients struggling to survive in hallways.
The problem was particularly acute in my home borough of Queens, where there are only 1.8 hospital beds per 1,000 residents as compared to five beds for every 1,000 residents in Manhattan. Elmhurst Hospital and Northwell Forest Hills became national symbols of the seriousness of covid, with Elmhurst experiencing 13 deaths within a 24-hour period at the height of the pandemic while Northwell Forest Hills experienced 17 deaths within a 24-hour period. This is totally unacceptable.
Even in Manhattan, the situation became so dire that a field hospital in Central Park was erected. Dying New Yorkers were routed to tents to receive care during the cold evenings of early spring.
This temporary facility was built by anti-LGBTQ activist Rev. Franklin Graham. It added insult to injury for a city that was failing to take care of its own. And it was especially difficult to stomach for New Yorkers who lived through one of the city’s other major health crises, the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
For me, it was a horrifying and unexpected combination of my work as a Queens-based LGBTQ organizer and health-care activist. It made plain that it is impossible to separate the medical from the social and the scientific from the political.
In fact, during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York, I watched a generation of friends and neighbors die because of the indifference of too many people in power. One of my closest friends who guided me through the difficult coming out process ultimately died from complications with AIDS.
We were unprepared for the breadth of the crisis then, just as we were for this pandemic. But just because covid wasn’t expected, that doesn’t mean New York had to lose well over 20,000 lives and counting.
In Queens alone, ten hospitals have been shuttered over the past 20 years as a giveaway to the real estate industry. A similar dynamic unfolded in Manhattan with St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was one of the few facilities to treat individuals with HIV and AIDS with dignity.
The thinking was that the city had excess capacity and more focus should be on preventing the root causes of hospitalizations. The hospital property could then be repurposed by real estate developers. This was a big mistake.
And while focusing on preventative medicine is laudable, the city also failed on that count. Black and Hispanic residents, as well as vulnerable older New Yorkers of all races and ethnicities, were the most impacted by this virus.
One of the main reasons I’m running for New York City Council is to pass legislation to add hospital capacity and implement health-care impact assessments for every zoning and land use proposal that needs Council approval. We need to understand how new development impacts health-care access before some large projects are built.
That work will also entail creating a Hospital Capacity Task Force to rebuild health-care facilities throughout our city, with a focus on central and southeast Queens. We must ensure that whatever capital allocations are made, that they are dedicated to building additional hospital beds in an expedited fashion so that all communities are safer in the future with nearby access to world-class emergency care.
With covid cases on the rise and hospitals again facing a possible shortage of beds, we must use this moment to reflect on what we want the city’s health-care system to look like in the future. Hospital beds may not be something the average New Yorker thinks about on a daily basis, but with the inevitable future public health emergencies ahead, we can’t let our own policy decisions be our biggest impediment to recovery. For many of us, it is a matter of life and death.
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Lynn Schulman is a Democratic candidate for the New York City Council in Queens’ District 29. On Twitter @schulman2021.
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Seeking an end to domestic violence and protecting survivors (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
Three women tragically lost their lives in New York City over the course of one week due to domestic violence. Thousands of women and children remain in danger. Many are faced with the devastating choice of staying with an abuser or losing their home.
Domestic violence was the leading driver of homelessness in New York prior to the pandemic, and it’s only become a greater threat since. One of the still-unfolding consequences of New York’s stay-at-home order in March is its dramatic impact on victims of domestic violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledge that the very measures that are necessary to curb the spread of COVID-19 can contribute to a spike in domestic violence.
Social distancing and shutdowns mean more time at home, and in New York City, that is likely to mean 24/7 contact with your abuser in a relatively small living space. When the victim is a child, school closures have made that violence harder to see.
The last eight months have taught us that we are unlikely to know the true toll of this pandemic for many years. But here are some things we know right now: Families with children make up over 70% of the city’s larger shelter system population and many more are at risk of losing their home in the year ahead. Despite this, only one in four victims of domestic violence can safely find space in a domestic violence shelter. The majority instead stay in the regular family shelters which in which they often fear for their safety.
For the past eight months, those enduring domestic violence have faced the added barrier of considering whether or not going into shelter during a pandemic is more dangerous than the escalating abuse in the home.
This pandemic has catapulted the conversation on housing as the front line of defense for health and safety. It has underscored how critical permanent, affordable housing is to keeping vulnerable families who have survived domestic violence from becoming homeless a second time in a crisis. These families are coping with trauma, rebuilding their financial security, may lack external supports and familial networks, and are typically headed by a single parent.
When New York City went into lockdown last spring, Linda, a single mother of two and a survivor of domestic violence, lost her job as a cashier. Fortunately, her immediate fears about how to pay the next month’s rent were addressed by her case manager at New Destiny, a nonprofit that provides housing and services for survivors of domestic violence, who helped her maintain her housing by applying for unemployment benefits and arranging to have her rent subsidy level adjusted to cover the rent. Linda has this housing and support thanks to a federal subsidy.
Unfortunately, most families with children who enter the shelter system are stuck in shelter for over a year before they find a suitable apartment. One of the reasons for this is that the primary rental subsidies availability to domestic violence survivors and other homeless families are at a rate significantly below market value and nearly $500 per month below what federal Section 8 pays, putting survivors at a significant disadvantage securing an apartment for their family. These programs also place arbitrary time limits on the subsidy that can force women and children to endure the trauma of losing a home and returning to a shelter for a second time. While it is illegal for landlords to discriminate based on the source of rental income, it remains a pervasive issue.
A proposal currently in committee at the New York City Council would level the playing field and set local housing subsidies for domestic violence survivors using the same fair market rents and length of time as federal Section 8 rental subsidies administered through the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). We must pass it.
On December 31, when the eviction moratorium ends, advocates for those experiencing or at risk of homelessness anticipate an unprecedented influx of families and single adults into the already overburdened shelter system. City officials must do everything they can to mitigate a tidal wave of family homelessness, and ensuring survivors have access to affordable, supportive housing is a key part of that process.
With local officials sounding the alarm about rising coronavirus infection rates, policy-makers must act swiftly to provide a path to housing for victims of domestic violence. The lives and well-being of some of New York City’s most vulnerable women and children depend on it.
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New York City Council Member Stephen Levin represents parts of Brooklyn and is the chair of the Council’s general welfare committee. Nicole Branca is Executive Director of New Destiny Housing, one of New York City’s largest supportive housing providers for domestic violence survivors. On Twitter @StephenLevin33 & @nbranca13 of @newdestinyorg.
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Full casino gaming downstate should be on the table, the author says (photo: governor's office)
Back in 2013, the Hotel Trades Council (HTC) — the union I lead that represents nearly 40,000 hotel, hospitality, and gaming industry workers across New York City and the surrounding suburbs — negotiated a landmark contract that nearly doubled workers’ wages, guaranteed free family health care, and provided retirement security to over three-quarters of employees at Resorts World, the city’s one and only casino. This was the beginning of the pathway out of poverty and into the middle class for thousands of New York families.
More recently, the union was able to negotiate the same agreement for Empire Casino workers in Yonkers after they chose HTC as their bargaining representative. Now, especially as we look into the uncertain future of a post-COVID-19 economy, we have a unique moment to double down on that economic opportunity. By converting to full casino gaming operations in the downstate area we can create thousands of jobs and generate billions of dollars in tax revenue and funding for our education programs at a time when the state faces an unprecedented economic crisis.
The contract between the union and Resorts World New York City raised the median hourly wage for workers from $11 in 2012 to nearly $35 in 2020, a 218% increase, giving our members a median annual salary of almost $73,000 today. It lifted an overwhelming 76% of workers off of government assistance for food and medical care, with enrollment in medical plans jumping 20% due to the union’s cost-free, premium health-care plan. And the large majority of workers — 70% — have said they have more supplemental income to cover bills, rather than living paycheck to paycheck. At Empire Casino, workers’ wages have more than doubled since HTC began representing them in 2019, and they now enjoy a host of additional benefits including real health and retirement benefits.
With 83% of these workers being people of color, there is no question that gaming industry jobs have had a transformative impact on marginalized communities. Nigel Ramsammy, a security guard at Resorts World for seven years, worked two jobs to afford his mortgage and to provide health care for his family before this contract was secured. When his son was diagnosed with cancer, the new union health benefits allowed his son to receive treatment at the best hospital in New York—and his family didn’t have to pay a cent.
Natalie Abreu, kitchen steward at Resorts World, was living in a homeless shelter with her three children. Because of the union deal, her salary more than tripled; she now makes over $33 an hour, lives in a 4-bedroom apartment with her family, and has reliable health-care and retirement benefits.
Thousands of families like Nigel’s and Natalie’s lead completely different lives thanks to these casino jobs. As the city and state continue to battle a deadly pandemic and the worst economic crisis in decades, allowing existing gaming operators to convert to full casino operations can protect thousands of jobs and add thousands more that all come with the best health care and wages in the gaming industry nationwide. Full gaming operations can help create tens of thousands of jobs, including good-paying union construction and gaming jobs, as well as billions of dollars in wages, tax revenue, and funding for state education.
These facilities’ critical roles as good employers have continued well into the COVID-19 pandemic. Both Resorts World and Empire Casino entered into safety protocol agreements with the union that commit them to strict measures intended to keep both workers and casino guests safe during the pandemic. Critically, they also extended health-care benefits for those who remained unemployed due to reduced operations and even gave workers additional income to supplement their unemployment benefits to keep them afloat.
Allowing for full casino licenses downstate will also generate critical revenue for the state as it grapples with covid-induced budget deficits. With a projected shortfall of $14.5 billion, state government may be forced to cut education funding by as much as 20% — a devastating blow to public school systems already facing existential obstacles from the pandemic. By converting existing casinos in Yonkers and Queens to full-fledged operations with live gaming and sports betting, the state would see an immediate and significant boost in licensing fees, new tax revenue, and funding to avoid deeper cuts to education, transportation, and health care.
Not only would full casino gaming help bring us out of the immediate crises, but it would facilitate long-term employment opportunities and bring in a huge share of annual funding for education in hard-hit communities in the Bronx, Queens, Yonkers, and Mt. Vernon. These casinos would be huge benefactors to New York City public schools. Since its inception in 2011, Resorts World NYC has generated over $3 billion to state education, and is the largest taxpayer in the state. During the same period, Empire City Casino in Yonkers contributed $2.66 billion to state education. These numbers could jump far higher.
As someone who has the honor of representing tens of thousands of hard-working hospitality and gaming industry workers who have been among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve seen firsthand how this industry that is so essential to New York’s economic recovery can be better leveraged to help our state and its people during this critical moment.
With full casino gaming in the downstate area , we have an opportunity to help revitalize the tourism sector while creating thousands of secure, high-paying jobs under the best labor contracts in the nation; fund our children’s future through higher tax revenues; and restore a path to the middle class for thousands of New Yorkers.
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Richard Maroko is president of the New York Hotel Trades Council (HTC). On Twitter @NYHTC.
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