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Opinion

Albany Can Give New York City More Power to Fix the Housing Crisis


Housing in focus (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


State lawmakers clearly understand that New York faces an emergency-level housing crisis and have acted accordingly: adopting a five-year housing plan to invest $25 billion in affordable and supportive housing across the state. But the job is not over, there are several important housing bills under consideration that would help New York City fight the housing crisis.

In the final days of the state legislative session, Albany has a chance to help the city help itself by giving it new authority and without spending another dime this year.

Perhaps the most pressing housing issue in New York City is the living conditions at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). NYCHA public housing needs $40 billion in repairs and while there was optimism last summer that the president’s Build Back Better bill would provide needed funding, there is now little hope of the federal government coming to the rescue. 

There are more than 535,000 New York residents living in 177,500 NYCHA apartments, and we cannot afford to lose a single unit without exacerbating our grave housing crisis. Fortunately, there is legislation in Albany that would give NYCHA new tools to raise capital, while leaving public housing in the hands of the public, where it belongs. 

The proposed legislation would create a public trust to raise the additional funding and allow procurement capabilities that NYCHA doesn’t have for contracting repairs. Most importantly, the new plan puts tenants in the driver’s seat. The current bill allows tenants to vote on whether their properties are involved with the preservation trust. The unacceptable conditions residents live with every day should give extra resolve for lawmakers to approve the creation of a Public Housing Preservation Trust that unlocks new financing for NYCHA while preserving tenant protection and public control.

At the same time, the state can also give the city tools to improve, preserve, or convert affordable housing in the private market. There are several ways it can do so.

First, the state must allow New York City to modernize its housing programs for the 21st century by updating outdated lending authority. The proposed Affordability Plus legislation would allow the city to align their housing programs with market lending term periods and provide more flexibility on loan amounts and income requirements. This will help streamline many of the affordable housing finance programs. The legislation would also help to make affordable homeownership and community land trusts for housing possible. Currently, state law prevents the city from lending to the types of community ownership projects that many support in the city; outside of city-owned land. 

The city can also add more affordable housing through legal and safe conversions. We now know that a good portion of the hotels that shuttered during the COVID-19 crisis are occupied by tourists again, but many are still in financial trouble. These properties can and should be converted into affordable units, which can be done far more quickly than building new construction and provide relief in a matter of months. But the conversion process is over-regulated and therefore cost-prohibitive. The state must amend the law to allow hotel conversions while retaining their existing Certificates of Occupancy.

Lastly, the state can help New York City take action on legalizing basements to improve safety and compliance in each borough. State legislative action will allow the city to fast-track solutions that have been stalled due to the complexities of the building and zoning codes. Following the devastating eleven drownings in basements during Hurricane Ida, there is renewed urgency to legalize basements that can be made safe and to enforce dangerous noncompliance.

These are common-sense solutions to complex problems, and they are uncontroversial: housing leaders in and out of City Hall agree that they would make a difference and are asking Albany to implement them. That means the only impediment is advancing these bills in Albany in the final days of legislative session. During a crisis of this magnitude, we need all hands on deck to solve a housing crisis and we have no time to waste.

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Rachel Fee is Executive Director of the New York Housing Conference. On Twitter @RachelFee4NY & @TheNYHC.

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New York Needs to Ban Hybrid Voting Machines Before They Make Our Elections Worse


The ExpressVote XL 'hybrid' (photo: ExpressVote XL)


New York needs to ban hybrid voting machines before they start being used, and the opportunity is here.

Using these hybrid machines — where voters both mark and cast their ballot — is not good for voters, will not help election administration, and run the risk that voters will lose faith that their votes are counted accurately.

There is a bill before the State Legislature (SS309B/A1115C) that needs to pass now — there is no time to lose, our current machines are already overdue for replacement and the NYCBOE (as well as other county BOEs throughout the state) are wanting to replace them with these hybrid machines. And the 2022 legislative session in Albany is scheduled to end this week.

Yes, we need to replace the ballot scanners we currently use. They were purchased in 2010 and are long past their reasonable lifespan. But we do not need to replace them with machines that will make the voting experience and elections worse, especially in New York City. At a time when our democracy feels very fragile, we cannot and should not spend tens of millions of dollars on machines that are less secure, will create longer lines for voters, and where voters will not feel confident their ballot is counted properly.

We need to prioritize the voter. Taxpayer funds should be spent on election equipment that makes elections better, not worse. 

Hybrid voting machines like the ones being considered in New York are direct-recording ballot-marking devices and tabulators. This means voters never touch their ballots themselves. The voter uses a touchscreen to make their choices and the machine records their votes. The manufacturer says voters will have an opportunity to “review” their selections, but in reality, voters will look at a receipt-like display on the machine’s screen. This display will show the names of candidates the voter selected, but the machine bases its tabulation on the barcode printed next to the name. New Yorkers read hundreds of languages, but  “barcode” isn’t one of them. This is a smoke and mirrors approach to a voter-verified paper audit trail, the gold standard in elections

One of the biggest security flaws in hybrid voting machines is not hacking, but that we might not have the ability to determine voter intent to do a manual audit, which is required by state election law. The “ballots” from the hybrid machines are printed on thermal paper, which is not easily preserved. This type of paper needs to be preserved in ways that our current paper ballots are not - and it is still unclear how or if this can be done.

We don’t know if a race is within the manual recount margin until at least two weeks after Election Day, as absentee ballots, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 7 days after (plus takes a few days to verify the postmark and signature and we now have a process to allow voters to add a missing signature. It’s unclear if the hybrid machine “ballots” will be legible to be recounted after this amount of time.

Additionally, multiple people have to touch the ballot many times during the manual audit - to pick it up, to show it to observers, and put it back. We can’t be sure the thermal paper -- the only kind used by the machines under consideration by the New York City Board of Elections and other election boards, the ES&S ExpressVote XL -- can handle this. We need ballots that can stand up to repeated recounting so voters are assured the machines work as intended. The alternative creates a potential nightmare for democracy and a crushing blow to trust in our elections.

New York has complicated elections and bottlenecks do occur. Yes, a non-working scanner slows down the process, but non-working hybrid machines would grind the voting process to a complete halt. With these hybrid machines, voters will have to wait for an available machine to both complete their ballot and cast it. Bottlenecks also occur when 1) machines go down and require a technician to fix; 2) voters need a lot of time to vote; 3) it’s a peak voting time; and 4) there are elections with highly-contested races. Bottlenecks make time-starved voters especially frustrated and more likely to leave and never cast their vote at all. The hybrid voting machines could exacerbate these bottlenecks at each point.

Then there is the capacity of the hybrid voting machines, which will cause further delays for voters in high turnout elections. Our current ballot bins that receive the scanned ballots need to be swapped out every 2,500 ballot pages, a process that takes about 10 minutes (and the scanners rarely - if ever - get to that amount of ballots). In contrast, hybrid voting machines require the printer hopper to be replaced after every 250 votes. While the cartridge is being replaced, the machine is out of service, causing yet more delays to voters. Why would we want machines that are designed to go out of service at the exact time that they are being used the most? 

The manufacturer’s response is to point to Philadelphia, which uses similar hybrid voting machines. But there’s no comparison when you look at the numbers. Philadelphia has 1.1 million registered voters across 1,703 divisions (the equivalent of New York City election districts). In the 2020 general election, about 749,000 people voted, about 50% of whom voted via Pennsylvania’s absentee/mail-in/early voting process, so only about 375,000 voters actually used the hybrid voting machines. Each machine on average serviced about 125 voters. Virtually no machine serviced more than 250 voters, which is the point at which the paper hopper would need to be swapped by an on-call technician, per Philadelphia procedure. 

By contrast, Brooklyn alone has about 1.5 million registered voters, of whom about 920,000 voted in the 2020 general election on the scanners. Each of the current type of scanners served, on average, under 250 voters, but this is an average, so many of Brooklyn’s poll sites had scanners with MORE than 250 voters per machine. Remember those long lines during early voting? Wait times would have been even longer had hybrid voting machines been in use. The Philadelphia experience is not at all comparable to the NYC experience. 

Hybrid voting machines are bad for voters, bad for the voting process itself, and bad for increasing trust in our elections. New York must ban these machines and actually work on making voting easier for all eligible voters. 

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Judith Hertzberg, Jan Combopiano, Julie Kerr, and Erica Cohen are co-founders of Brooklyn Voters Alliance, an all-volunteer, non-partisan organization that works to protect and expand voting rights in New York State. On Twitter @BKVoters.

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Finally Compensating New York's Wrongfully Convicted


Cleaning up at Rikers (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The United States is the world’s largest jailor. As a result of our criminal justice system, we regularly put innocent people behind bars. Conservative estimates say 20,000 people are currently in jail or prison throughout the nation for crimes they did not commit.

Wrongful convictions can occur for many reasons: police and prosecutors fail to turn over exonerating evidence; police threaten and intimidate vulnerable people who falsely confess; eyewitnesses mistake innocent people for actual culprits; defense lawyers ineffectively represent innocent defendants; and, prosecutors prejudice juries with improper arguments. 

We often hear the adage “it is better to allow 10 guilty people to go free than to convict one innocent person,” but DNA evidence and revelations of police and prosecutorial misconduct far too often reveal that is not a reflection of how our system of criminal justice actually works.

When our system convicts the innocent, it fails us all. The least lawmakers can do is ensure victims of flawed prosecutions, once exonerated, are justly compensated — even though no amount of money can get their lives back.

Take the case of David Bryant. He was 17 years old in 1975 when an eight-year-old girl in his neighborhood was raped and killed with a knife. The crime scene was a blood-soaked stairwell where an officer had seen David months earlier. On this basis alone, hours after the murder, David was roused from bed by police and taken in for questioning. Officers brutally interrogated David for 10 hours. All in the name of getting a confession, they knocked David to the floor several times, repeatedly screamed at him, and left him, a minor, alone and without food for the duration. Exhausted and starving, David finally told his interrogator what he wanted to hear. He confessed. 

David was convicted at trial where the primary evidence was his “confession,” which he denied making voluntarily and was evidently made to simply end his inappropriate interrogation. The other evidence was manufactured by officers who intimidated other kids to provide false information about what David did the day of the murder. And, at trial, his lawyer never had his blood type compared with the blood type of the murderer.

After 43 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, David is finally free. New blood evidence exonerated him. After reading about David’s case in a newspaper in 2013, the only witness who at trial linked him to the young girl came forward to describe how cops had intimidated him to lie at David’s trial.

Shockingly, under New York’s unjust conviction statute, David cannot be monetarily compensated. It is overwhelmingly clear that David was innocent, railroaded into a confession, and falsely convicted at just 17 years of age. However, our current flawed law disqualifies David for compensation on the technical ground his lawyer provided deficient representation by not presenting the blood evidence which would have cleared him. Under the current law, this disqualifies him from compensation and is considered a “technical” basis for reversing his conviction.

The law also does not recognize situations where an innocent person has their conviction vacated because of the government’s failure to turn over evidence which favors the defendant.

This is wrong. Therefore, along with Assemblymember Dan Quart, I am proposing amendments to our unjust conviction statute that will fix this injustice by allowing for fair compensation whenever any exonerated person can prove by “clear and convincing evidence” that they are innocent. 

This is the least we can do to redress wrongful conviction travesties is to ensure adequate financial compensation.

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State Senator Brad Hoylman represents parts of Manhattan. On Twitter @bradhoylman.

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