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In the Face of Anti-Asian Violence, We Want Budget Justice


(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

A remembrance for Michelle Alyssa Go (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Over Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed from the Times Square subway platform to her death. This tragedy follows a year that saw a 361% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes and came less than two weeks after Mayor Adams announced his plans to increase police presence in the subway system. Much like the federal response to the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, where money poured into local police departments under the guise of fighting anti-Asian hate crimes, we are once again seeing our government prioritize turning to the police to solve issues of public safety. 

Around the country, Asian Americans have grappled with what community safety might look like amid a pandemic, a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and calls to defund the police. But in response to tragic and awful incidents of violence against Asian Americans, as Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigration Coalition correctly argues, “we can’t police our way out of this.”

Not only is throwing more police at the problem of anti-Asian violence incongruous after sustained uprisings against police brutality, but it also does little to prevent this violence. The root of anti-Asian violence is not individual acts of hate or even so-called “random attacks,” but rather white supremacy and austerity that seeds systemic violence. Instead of expanding policing, New York City must turn its attention to budget justice.

In addition to divesting from the police, the road to justice requires direct democracy on how and where to spend public dollars. Direct democratic initiatives like participatory budgeting (PB) can help us articulate concrete, tractable policy demands for community safety for all New Yorkers.

Through PB, everyday residents, rather than elected representatives, decide how public dollars are spent. Gathering online and in person, residents connect with one another, weigh community needs, and develop new projects.

This year, for example, the New York City Civic Engagement Commission, with leadership, brainstorming, and decision-making from young people ages 9 to 24, invested $100,000 in youth organizations to make the city safer. Past projects funded through other PB programs include innovative bystander/“upstander” training for those hoping to safely intervene when they witness harassment or violence. In City Council District 39, residents voted to fund self-defense workshops for Bangladeshi and Muslim women. They did so as a true statement of racial solidarity; neighbors helping neighbors get what they need.

In 2019, we saw a record breaking 33 City Council members participate in PB to bring direct democracy to their districts. However, due to COVID-19, funding and participation was cut short in 2020 and the project was shelved when our communities needed help the most. But thankfully, vocal advocacy has renewed this vital form of community engagement and this year 15 Council members are running PB.

The connection between budget justice and racial justice is not a new idea. During the summer of 2020, Occupy City Hall to Defund NYPD camped out in front of City Hall for more than a month, asking for at least $1 billion to be cut from the police budget and invested back into communities. The Movement For Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, has also articulated direct democratic community control, and specifically PB, as central to anti-racist work.

New York City must combine participatory budgeting with calls to defund the police, to satisfy both the need to divest and invest parts of the budget justice equation. During summer 2020, a group of Brooklyn City Council candidates, including myself, wrote about how to use the power of City Council to defund the police, arguing that community control of public budgets includes the expansion and much-needed reform of participatory budgeting as well as removing police from social services and the school system. Only through investing in the services that heal our communities and address austerity can we create the conditions for real public safety.

In Council District 39 (represented by one of the authors), the Participatory Budgeting District Committee is currently leading its 11th cycle. It joins 14 other Council districts in implementing PB this year, despite difficult pandemic conditions. Whereas electoral politics typically engage with well-resourced constituents, PB can engage traditionally marginalized ones, including non-citizens, undocumented immigrants, and youth. In many districts, PB has successfully and intentionally centered marginalized voices and transferred power to women of color in meetings – often through simple, thoughtful acts like repeated invitations, childcare provision, and having appropriate snacks on hand.

Impressively, research coordinated by the Community Development Project shows that one-quarter of PB participants in New York City reported being ineligible to vote in regular elections, and that Asian American participation in PB was almost three times higher than in regular local elections.

Participatory budgeting needs more resources and thoughtful implementation to be successful. At its best, PB enables us to fund and practice new forms of critical care and racial solidarity. But without an explicit focus on equity and training for city workers as well as participants, PB can be set up to fail. Well-resourced groups can dominate the process, and innovative project proposals can be dismissed as “unrealistic” or discarded because of technicalities rather than substance.

The creative and impactful community projects highlighted above only came about when PB was expanded to potentially include short-term projects alongside long-term infrastructure. Participatory Budgeting is inherently political, and should be explicitly tied to budget justice and racial equity goals, such as those coordinated by the city’s Racial Justice Commission. With citywide participatory budgeting’s future now in limbo because Mayor de Blasio never adequately funded it, the new mayor and new Council speaker must resuscitate PB, with these priorities in mind. For the long-term safety of all New Yorkers, we can’t afford not to.

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City Council Member Shahana Hanif represents District 39, including the neighborhoods of Borough Park, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Kensington, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace. Professor Celina Su is the Marilyn Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. On Twitter @celinasu and @ShahanaFromBK.

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Housing Courts Must Change: Every Tenant Should Have Right to Counsel as Eviction Moratorium Lifts


(photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)

New York housing (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


New York City’s Right to Counsel (RTC) has proven to be successful at stopping evictions and protecting tenants’ rights. Evictions in New York City have plummeted, landlords are suing tenants less, and almost everyone who fights their eviction with an RTC attorney stays in their homes. This has been especially true during the pandemic. Amidst ever-changing laws and complicated government relief programs and administrative orders, RTC has been critical.

And it’s now even more critical with the expiration of the state’s eviction protections.

When the RTC law first passed, almost no tenants had attorneys when facing eviction in court. This meant that in order to get to a place where all income-eligible tenants had RTC (about 65-80% of tenants in court at the time), legal services organizations needed time to hire, train, and support the new attorneys, paralegals, and support staff.

In the last four years, New York City went from less than 100 tenant attorneys to over 600. In addition, the city’s Office of Civil Justice (OCJ) needed time to set up the infrastructure, coordinate with the state-run courts to implement this first-in-the-nation, new legal right. For all of these reasons and more, RTC had a five-year phase-in plan, giving the city until July 2022 to fully implement RTC for all eligible New York City tenants. However, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this timeline could no longer be justified.

The pandemic has devastated our city in so many ways. More than 400,000 New York City households are unable to pay rent, owing over $1 billion in rent. While the state’s rent relief program has helped, it is not enough. And it won’t keep tenants out of court. The rent relief program and myriad of other laws passed by the State Legislature created a confusing set of rights that landlords will surely take advantage of, as they have across the country. Tenants deserve to have their rights defended, making Right to Counsel so incredibly critical at this moment.

Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the city recognized that it could no longer move some cases forward with an attorney and others without – everyone deserves representation in court regardless of income. While this shift in implementation happened in part because so few cases were moving forward thanks to the various eviction moratoria, it was the right response morally. Our bill, recently made into law, made this model permanent, speeding up the full implementation of RTC by more than a year.

While the income restrictions haven’t been lifted under the law (this is something our statewide RTC bill would do), New York City has granted a blanket income waiver to all cases allowing legal services providers to represent tenants regardless of income.

This is an amazing victory for tenants. But, how will it work?

If there wasn’t enough legal capacity for all income eligible tenants before the pandemic, how will there be enough now given the unprecedented number of families we expect landlords will sue as soon as the eviction protections lift? How can we ensure legal services providers won’t enforce the income restrictions themselves, as a way to protect their capacity? How can we ensure that legal services aren’t overwhelmed with cases and that tenants get the thorough and zealous defense they deserve? After all, as our eviction crisis monitor shows, the neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19 are also being targeted for evictions. It would be unconscionable if these mostly Black and brown tenants could not get the representation they deserve. 

The answer is simple: Move only the cases where tenants are represented forward and adjourn all the rest until the legal services organizations have capacity to take more cases.

These adjournments happen in other courts, like family court, where there is a Right to Counsel. There is a legal basis for judges to grant repeat adjournments for the assignment of counsel and due process requires it, plus judges have a broad discretion to adjourn cases as they see fit. Thanks to New York State’s Housing Stability Tenant Protection Act, housing court judges have much greater ability to adjourn cases. 

The legal arguments for multiple and prolonged adjournments for the purposes of Right to Counsel assignment, both in terms of New York City’s Right to Counsel law and also as a matter of due process, are clear.  

Cases have already slowed down during the pandemic, and there was no great collapse. There is no reason to return to the fast-paced, high-volume courts of the past. They were unjust then, and they would be a death sentence now, especially as COVID-19 cases recently surged across New York City due to the Omicron variant. As we have done over the past two years, slowing down the court system is the only moral response. 

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Corinthia A. Carter is the president of Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA 2320), which represents the more than 600 secretaries, paralegals, receptionists, process servers, social workers, attorneys, and other non-management staff of Legal Services NYC and Mobilization for Justice. Beverly Rivers is a tenant leader with the Flatbush Tenant Coalition, a member-led group of tenant associations in Flatbush, East Flatbush, and South Crown Heights working collectively to build tenant power.

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Feed The Hungry: How New York Must Work with the Human Services Sector to End Food Insecurity


Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

Emergency food distribution (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


A new year marks the beginning of a new chapter for New York City. With Eric Adams officially sworn in as New York City's 110th mayor, a refreshed City Council and historic new City Council Speaker, 2022 offers a new opportunity to turn the tide on one of the most pressing issues facing New Yorkers: food insecurity.

Right Now, 1.5 million New Yorkers are struggling to put food on the table. The human services sector has long been on the frontlines of battling food insecurity, particularly through ongoing and annual food drives. While food drives are necessary to feed the hungry, they are a short-term solution to a pervasive problem that has plagued New Yorkers for generations, made even worse by a global pandemic. To holistically address this crisis, New York City leaders must work alongside and adequately fund the human services sector. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the human services workforce answered the call to make sure that no New Yorker went home hungry, even when some workers themselves were struggling to put food on the table. To help address the growing nutritional needs of New Yorkers, human services organizations across our city worked to mitigate record-breaking levels of food insecurity. Our two organizations alone prepared and delivered over 1,500 meals every day to vulnerable residents throughout the pandemic. At the height of the pandemic, about 14% of adult residents reported that their household was experiencing food insecurity.

The pandemic exposed long-standing structural flaws and existing systemic issues. Not only did it exacerbate the everyday issues facing so many New Yorkers, it showed that government functions best when it partners with community-based organizations to deliver services. GetFoodNYC, a program that was launched with a laudable goal—providing food for people impacted by COVID-19—struggled to succeed at first. Meals went missing and some arrived spoiled. It was human service organizations that filled in the gaps and lent their expertise to deliver meals to communities in need.

The $103 billion budget is the largest in our city’s history, including the hundreds of millions in public funding spent annually to feed vulnerable New Yorkers. Much of this is contracted out to the nonprofit sector, with little strategic partnership between the city and nonprofits on how to best utilize their combined resources to meet the needs of New Yorkers. Along with the addition of new federal and state pandemic funding, a review of citywide expenditures related to food acquisition, preparation, and distribution is long overdue and could revolutionize the way New York City addresses hunger.

The human services sector has proven time and time again that we have an intrinsic role in meeting the most pressing needs of New Yorkers. An estimated 1.4 million New Yorkers rely on human services food programs, pantries, and soup kitchens. To continue their essential role in combating food insecurity throughout the pandemic and ensuring that the workforce is adequately paid, advocates called on the city to commit $48 million in order to establish a 3% cost of living adjustment for human service workers. Our leaders responded by cutting this request by half

With historic underfunding, our organizations have joined together in a strategic partnership that will allow us to better serve New Yorkers. But we can’t do it alone. At this pivotal moment in our city’s history, our next leaders must do more to ensure that human services are included in disaster planning, pay our workforce equitably, and transform the human services program procurement system. What we do now will define how we recover and address food insecurity for generations to come.

As we settle into the new year, a new mayor, and a new City Council, we must double down on the fight against food insecurity. We urge all the newly elected leaders to work alongside the human services sector to ensure that no New Yorker goes hungry this year and beyond. 

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Roderick Jones is the Executive Director of Goddard Riverside. Gregory J. Morris is the President and Executive Director of the Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center. On Twitter @GoddardRiv and @IsaacsCenterNYC.

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