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Opinion

The Decimation of Roe Makes the Need for Affordable Housing More Urgent Than Ever


An abortion rights rally in New York (photo: Mike Groll/Governor's Office)


The Supreme Court’s horrific decision to overturn Roe is not only a severe blow to women’s autonomy over their bodies, it is a powerful reminder that addressing the real impacts of sexism and gender inequality is not on the national agenda as much as it should be.

Right now, women — especially women already living paycheck to paycheck — are at serious risk of falling off the economic cliff, resulting in dire consequences not just for them, but for their families and communities. For most people, including women, housing is their single biggest expense. And it’s increasing.

That is why with the economy slowing, inflation rising, and the pay equity gap exacerbated by covid, developing housing that is affordable and sustainable is more important than ever.

Women are paid less than men. Way less. White women fair best, making roughly 79 cents for every dollar a white man makes. Women of color make even less. Black women earn just 63 cents for every dollar white men earn, and Latinas fare even worse, making just half of what white men make.

Women are also increasingly likely to be the sole or primary breadwinner in their families. And the economic impact of covid has disproportionately hit women, either by forcing them out of the workforce because of caretaking duties or by putting women out of work in industries like teaching and healthcare, where women are overrepresented. This is on top of the fact that women-headed households are already having more trouble making rent.

Now, the Supreme Court has added forced childbearing to this already financially toxic sea. Women will be forced to spend hard-won savings or borrow money to travel for abortion. They will lose jobs because they have to be absent from work as they seek care. Others will be forced to have children they can’t afford.

All these things together mean women are at great risk of losing their housing.

To help mitigate the growing economic challenges women face, we need more housing that is affordable. That means two things need to happen, and they need to happen quickly.

First, we need new housing models. “Affordable housing” is often defined as housing that a) costs less than one-third of someone’s gross income and b) is available only for families who earn well below the median income of a geographically defined area. Avoiding “rent burden” is a good financial metric, and it is also fair to target lower- and moderate-income families in jurisdictions where the cost of market-rate housing would make them rent-burdened.

But that’s far too narrow of a definition of affordability. Housing isn’t “affordable” if it requires a mean and expensive two-hour commute or saying ‘no’ to a new job because it’s too difficult to get to and moving’s not on the table. It’s not “affordable” if it means forcing a child to change schools or moving to a neighborhood that feels unsafe.

For decades, the prevailing policy and financing approach has been to segregate market-rate housing from affordable housing. In practice, it means wealthier people generally find housing that meets that financial metric — and that also preserves their quality of life. We haven’t given those with fewer financial resources those same options.

Beyond that fairness issue, dividing families on the basis of income is one of the things that exacerbates social inequities, leading to significant differences in economic, education, and health outcomes. 

It’s time to do it differently. We need a true mixed-income housing approach that brings people together and gives them the same access to quality schools, healthcare, economic opportunity, and social infrastructure.

Second, we need private investors to be a larger part of the solution and invest in these different models. 

Providing affordable housing can’t just be the job of the public sector. We need private investors to understand the financial and social benefits of mixed-income housing and for the public sector to establish policies and programs that incentivize and reward investors to think outside the box. 

By forging true public-private partnerships that are predictable but flexible, we can increase housing production and provide more affordable homes to the people who need them.

The need for housing that is safe and affordable for women is only going to grow. We know from experience that to address women’s needs, women have to be at the table. Gender does matter. So let’s make a concerted effort to direct capital and opportunities to firms that are run by women — whether that’s architects, developers, or in my case, real estate fund managers. Let’s give them a chance to do it differently and do it better.

To be clear: Building housing that works for women isn’t the answer to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The answer to that is to keep fighting until those rights are restored. 

In the meantime we have to do everything we can to make sure women have the support they need to stay afloat economically in stable, affordable housing.

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Alicia Glen is a national housing expert and the former deputy mayor for housing and economic development for New York City. She is the founder and managing principal of MSquared, a women-owned real estate development and impact investing platform building mixed-income housing that is affordable. On Twitter @AliciaGlen.

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The Latest Education Budget Fiasco Shows We Must Scrap New York’s School Funding Formula


Mayor Adams, Chancellor Banks, and students (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


The Trojan Horse called “Fair Student Funding” that allocates $10 billion of city funds to our 1,700 public schools needs to be scrapped. The attractively alliterative system inadequately funds the real needs of schools and, according to an unreleased 2021 Fair Student Funding Task Force study, funnels “additional resources to high schools with “higher achievers” who are disproportionately whiter and wealthier than the overall school population. It concludes “this is not an equitable funding system.”

Fair Student Funding is at the heart of the current school budget crisis, with the mayor mired in debate with an abulic City Council and a lawsuit that may allay his $215 million cut to city schools but fails to address the long-term problems of declining student enrollment and erosion of federal pandemic relief funding.

Fair Student Funding (FSF) was also central to temporary rejection of FSF-based school allocations by the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), a usually docile mayor-controlled body, when it mutinied over the system’s inadequacies and inequities. In a hasty compromise in exchange for the PEP’s approval, Schools Chancellor David Banks agreed to look into FSF’s weighting of student needs including, for example, providing additional funds for students in temporary housing and foster care.

But nibbling around the edges of how FSF arbitrarily weights student-based expenses does nothing to get at the root problem of what Banks himself calls “this mess.”

First, Fair Student Funding is based on district-wide assumptions out of touch with school realities. Mayor Adams based his budget reduction on total public school enrollment but individual schools don’t run on these gross totals. The bulk of a school’s budget is salaries and what matters to principals is not overall enrollment but how many teachers and others are needed for a given grade or class. Teachers and paraprofessionals and guidance counselors and others need to be hired based on these sub-groups.

Further, as New York Post reporting showed, when Mayor Adams promised to “fully fund” Fair Student Funding, fingers crossed behind his back, he knew he could save money by decreasing FSF’s per-student allocations by assuming an across-the-board average teacher salary reduction, irrespective of a school’s actual payroll.

Second, FSF only funds about 65% of school needs, so the chancellor’s focus on FSF is a distraction from the larger issue of how overall school budgets are allocated by the central administration.

Check the DOE budget website where no less than five other large, highly-manipulable, opaque streams are listed. Add to this the countless off-budget grants and donations such as those from wealthy parents, which go 100% to their kids’ schools, and we see that the entire scheme of school funding needs an overhaul.

No one trusts the DOE to fix this. Not only is Banks disregarding work already done by the ill-fated 2021 FSF Task Force. He compounded this disregard by designating First Deputy Chancellor Daniel Weisberg to lead the redesign effort. This is classic political rope-a-dope.

Weisberg is too busy to spend much time on the study and he played a leading role in the Bloomberg administration’s original design of FSF under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. He can hardly be expected to kill his darling. Besides, he doesn’t seem to care how expenses are weighted, just minimizing the bottom line.

Testifying before the City Council last month and defending the $215 million cut to schools, Weisberg challenged the Council members to move money around, creating their own “winners and losers,” while he held fast to the widespread, devastating school staffing cuts by his own agency (that the mayor and Council have been negotiating to reverse).

Instead of  Banks’ suggestion of a new commission heavily weighted to administration personnel and interests, we need the non-mayoral PEP members including representatives of the borough presidents, city comptroller, and independent parent members to constitute their own task force using those officials’ staff resources along with the city’s Independent Budget Office to craft a new school allocation system based on professional expertise from across the country.

Banks’ idea of adding volunteer members from the PEP and community is a scam unworthy of someone committed to real change. These people have neither the time nor experience to design a complex budgeting system for the largest school district in the country with a budget in excess of $30 billion. The symbolism is both demeaning and offensive.

In keeping with good public policy and democratic procedures, the PEP will have the legally-mandated last word on approving the new system. But the technical design assuring fiscal equity and adequacy among almost 1 million public school students needs serious and objective expertise under non-mayoral PEP guidance, qualities the administration has yet to demonstrate.

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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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I Started College at 16; Many Other Students Can Too


DOE Chancellor Banks at Bard High School Early College (photo: @BHSEC)


Although prom, soccer games, and spirit weeks are all memorable parts of my high school experience, my favorite time of the year takes place two weeks before the semester ends; course selection. Each semester, 300 students in the 11th and 12th grades refresh their mailboxes, eagerly awaiting the pamphlet filled with all the college courses that will be offered the following semester. 

I attend Bard High School Early College Queens, so in addition to 17 filled notebooks, I will leave with a high school diploma, an associate degree, and 60 transferable college credits - all free of cost. But my biggest takeaway from this unique high school will be my experiences in college classes.

When walking to my seminar class, I always hear the chirping of crickets or hissing of snakes from the animal behavior class in the lab. In my freshman year literature class, my professor changed the final for the class to reflect the civil rights protests that were occurring at the moment. The decision was impactful for many students, especially those of color, and made them feel seen in the classroom. I recently took a course on the Harlem Renaissance and more often than not, the conversations in class would lead to similar discussions about modern day social issues.

Once we complete traditional high school classes in our freshmen and sophomore years, our college courses in junior and senior years do not adhere to standardized curriculum and testing, and professors create their own syllabi, class materials, and assessments. At Bard High School Early College Queens, professors teach both high school and college-level courses, and 97% of the faculty have a doctorate in the area that they teach. Not only does this result in 90-minute conversations about 20 pages in a book, but my teachers are always open to discussion outside designated class times.

The flexible curriculum and an education that is not isolated from the outside world are two of my favorite parts of the early college model, and the ability to have control over courses of study keeps students extremely motivated.

More importantly, early college instills a sense of belonging in students, especially those who are typically underrepresented in academia. Early college plays an active role in making college an expectation rather than an option for all students. Students who are first-generation college goers or from low-income backgrounds stop viewing college as a daunting prospect because their first two years of college are in a familiar environment. At my school in Queens and the Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, 50% of the 1,284 member student population is first generation American and 70% are low-income. 

By the time they graduate and go on to another institution, they have already been exposed to a college environment and have the confidence to continue their studies. In fact, Bard Manhattan and Queens have the highest on-time bachelor’s degree completion for low-income students of all public schools in New York State.

It is no surprise that the early college model has become increasingly common across the country, with similar positive outcomes on graduation rates, college enrollment and degree completion. Taking courses without having to worry about cost or practicality helps reinforce that college is not just for career preparation and networking, but is also a place to learn. The ability to interact with complex topics while still maintaining the innocence of being a teenager and living at home is a privilege that I will be eternally grateful for. 

I never thought I would be ready for college until I realized that I was already in one. I invite New York State and City leaders to make high school more memorable and meaningful at an earlier age by opening more of these schools, and provide thousands more young people the same life-changing opportunity that I am having.

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Aarsha Joshi is a Year 1 student (Junior) at Bard High School Early College Queens and Student Fellow in Public Policy with Bard Early Colleges.

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