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Census Response Rates Vary Widely Among City's Latino Communities


Census rally Brooklyn

Census march in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


This story has also been published in Spanish - find that version here. Esta historia también ha sido publicada en español, encuéntrala aquí.

The once-a-decade Census count, nearing its scheduled conclusion, has had to contend with quite a lot in New York City. A once-in-a-century pandemic torched the carefully laid out outreach plans and unleashed cascading social and economic effects, threatening the accuracy of numbers that are used at every level of government and the private sector for planning, allocation of funds, and both state and federal government representation. The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to muddy the waters and depress participation in low-income and immigrant strongholds, having tried and failed to both add a citizenship question to the form and exclude undocumented immigrants from the Congressional apportionment count.

Throughout New York City, which as of September 21 had a 2020 Census self-response rate of 60.2 percent (four points under its ultimate 2010 self-response rate), these challenging conditions have been varyingly deterministic in areas with major Latino populations, which by-and-large were hit the hardest by the coronavirus and have deep-seated fear of a clearly hostile federal bureaucracy. According to the Census Bureau’s own data, derived from its American Community Survey and other sources, the city’s population of 8.34 million was, as of last year, 29 percent Hispanic or Latino, about 2.4 million individuals described as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin.”

An analysis prepared by SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute of Government looking at areas with undercounts unsurprisingly found that being Hispanic, of limited English proficiency, a renter, foreign born, and with no internet, among other characteristics, were risk factors for being undercounted in the Census. The particularities of the Trump administration’s unique focus on immigration only added to the likelihood that communities with a high number of foreign-born residents, as is the case with many of New York City’s Latino populations, would not feel comfortable participating in the count.

As shown in mapping done by the CUNY Graduate Center's Urban Research Center, some areas, such the large Dominican and Puerto Rican communities in the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, have had strong response rates, with almost every single census tract in those neighborhoods outperforming the city average, and several see self-response rates above 70%. Others, like the Mexican and Ecuadorian enclaves in Sunset Park, Brooklyn have lagged, with only a couple tracts even reaching the city average, and most falling to percentages in the mid-to-low fifties or even forties. Overall, the lowest-participating predominantly Latino neighborhoods also include Corona and North Corona, Queens, and Cypress Hills and East New York, Brooklyn, while the highest-participation rates also include Jackson Heights, Queens, the Lower East Side and Alphabet City, Manhattan, and Morris Heights, in the Bronx.

As census enumerators fan out across the city in the final stage of the count to knock on doors and encourage participation, it’s essential to examine what has gone right and wrong in these areas, how efforts by city government and local organizations to drive participation have fared, and what could shift in the final weeks. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who put significant city resources into the Census this year, has been stressing participation at his near-daily briefings and knocking on a few doors himself, while his team has targeted many communities with lackluster participation, including Corona, Jamaica, East New York, and Canarsie. The city’s key goals, de Blasio has said, are to lift self-response percentages as high as possible, while matching the national response rate, which was 66.2 percent as of September 21. While the Trump administration tried to shorten the covid-extended 2020 Census timeline so it would conclude at the end of September, on September 24 a judge ruled that it must continue through October as previously announced. 

According to data provided by the city’s census office, of 398 neighborhoods estimated to be primarily (over 50 percent) Latino, the Census response rates as of September 15 were on average 58 percent, just under the city’s total self-response rate of about 60 percent. Broken down by census tract, the numbers vary wildly, though, with notable differences even among tracts that, on the surface level, seem somewhat similar. In one stark example, there are census tracts with completion percentages in the low forties in parts of Corona, Queens, among the lowest in Latino-heavy areas. The adjacent neighborhood of Jackson Heights, however, has some tracts that are among the highest-performing, with rates in the mid-seventies.

Julie Menin, the director of the city’s census office, said that the city was on a good track, particularly in light of its unfortunate place as the epicenter of a global pandemic. “In 2010, the city was 14 points behind the national self-response rate. Right now, we’re six points behind the national response rate. And we keep closing the gap more and more every week,” she said. Menin acknowledged that it had been difficult to reach some Latino communities, faulting the Trump administration for the various obstacles it has thrown in the way, but said that the city had been working creatively to address the issues by, for example, using absentee ballot data to hyper-target efforts at under-performing areas and hiring a dedicated outreach staff.

Conversations with community groups and officials around the city point to a few key factors that have played a role in self-response rates in the city’s Latino communities, including the robustness and organization of local groups, socio-economic and cultural differences among neighborhoods, the prevalence of irregular housing situations, access to technology, and the effectiveness of the city’s interventions.

For example, while the sort of complicated and informal living arrangements characteristic to dense urban areas and New York City in particular have often been discussed as a point of difficulty for Census Bureau officials planning their enumeration strategies, it can often also be an impediment to people responding once they’ve been reached.

“There were a lot of and still are a lot of questions about who fills it out, who do they include on the Census, will it flag something for the landlord or the management?” said Anna Dioguardi Mayano, director of community building at Queens Community House, which was a recipient of city funding through the Complete Count Fund. “Yes, there's a lot of fear about revealing immigration status. But sometimes even more so, there’s fear about revealing these housing situations, that they fear could cause problems for them, or just confusion.” If, for example, two families and a single person all share an apartment, are they all supposed to respond, or just one family in the household? How many people are in their “household”? (Every person in a household must be counted, one person can fill out the Census for the household.)

Others have remained uncertain about their eligibility and how the count intersects with their immigration status -- there are an estimated 520,000 undocumented immigrants residing in New York City, all of whom should be counted in the Census. Federal policy can often be filtered down to the city’s Latino populations in an extensive game of telephone, with details getting lost or warped along the way. The specter of the citizenship question has been misshapen into the frustratingly persistent myth that only U.S. citizens are expected to participate in the count at all, in addition to the related concerns that the information given can be used for immigration enforcement purposes.

“I was just in a development right now, where I was speaking to mostly Latinos, a large Dominican community there, and a large Chinese speaking community, and many of them had not filled out the Census. We asked them why, and they said because they’re not citizens,” said City Council Member Carlina Rivera, who represents a section of Manhattan including the Lower East Side and the East Village and is co-chair of the Council’s census task force.

Menin said that the city had responded to these issues with “super targeted ads. The great thing about a lot of our ads, particularly the digital ads, is we can switch them out really quickly. So we can see which ads are resonating.” For example, an ad campaign dubbed “Doubled Up” attempted to assuage doubts about irregular housing situations by running messages like “Live in the basement? Yes, the census is for you,” in languages including Spanish, Bangla, Nepali, Russian, and Urdu. These types of messages are optimally conveyed by trusted local messengers, requiring a confluence of city and community efforts for best outcomes.

Aside from the concern that individual information will be passed on to immigration enforcement, some are worried that the general neighborhood data could still be used for that purpose, particularly by an administration that hasn’t been shy about threatening raids. Lorena Kourousias, the executive director of the Sunset Park-based Mixteca Organization, said she had spoken to several local residents who had said some version of “If I answer, if we all answer, then they are going to know that all the Mexicans live on this block.” (The information by law cannot be shared with ICE, and the public data is not granular enough to be used for enforcement.)

Then there is the problem of isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic shut the city down in almost every respect, and while a lot of Latino communities were hit especially hard by the virus partly as a result of not being able to isolate and having to continue going to work in person, the more social type of community activity died down. All of the forums and door-knocking and days of action that had been planned were rendered impossible almost overnight. The organizing moved online, but this approach has had varying degrees of effectiveness, though it eventually resumed to a limited extent in person.

“We went really hard on social media. But we are aware that many of the community members that didn't respond [to the Census] are not even on social media, and those communities were left out,” said Kourousias. It takes trusted community voices for people to accept that it is safe to fill out the Census, and people are more used to having those interactions in person.

Antonio Alarcón, census coordinator at the large immigration and social services organization Make the Road (another CCF recipient), recounted talking to a group of people waiting in line for food distribution. For some of those who said they hadn’t filled out the Census, “it was because they had lost access to the internet during [the pandemic]. Others were like ‘well, I don't have access to a computer at home,’ or ‘I don't know how to use a computer.” The Census doesn’t require the internet to complete (paper surveys and talking to enumerators are other options), but for someone who is not going anywhere but work (or anywhere at all) and who isn’t using the web, the avenues for outreach are limited.

New York City government responded to the challenges of covid by modifying the structure of its grants program to allow for contracts to be extended and incorporate other ways to reach the isolated. “The grantees were not supposed to use money on advertisements. And one of the things that they did right after covid hit and we went to quarantine was allow the partners to switch dollars over to advertisements,” said Juan Rosa, Northeast Director of Civic Engagement for the NALEO Education Fund. He pointed to the Casita María Center For Arts & Education in the Bronx, which was running some Census-related commercials on Univisión.

Yet not everyone feels that the city’s census officials have responded creatively enough to changing data and circumstances on the ground. Haydée Zambrana, founder of the Corona-based Latin Women in Action, said her organization had sought but not received CCF funding in the initial application period, but officials should have reevaluated as it became clear that some areas, like Corona, were both hard hit by the pandemic and lagging in response rates.

“I'm still helping, I'm still working, I'm still talking to whoever I can. I'm calling out to my people, sending texts and whatnot, and I'm not getting paid,” Zambrana said, and suggested that allocations directly targeting small outlets instead of flashy ad spends would have been more effective. “We have so many channels, so many little newspapers, and if they would have paid them four hundred bucks each... they would have gotten somewhere. The message would have gone home.”

Menin said it was the right call to establish the grantees early on. “We had our contracts in December, so many of our organizations did work on the ground in January and February, and that work is now really paying off. Because if we would have waited to do the grants until the Census starts, then you're always behind the eight ball,” she said, and pointed out that the city wasn’t only working with CCF grantees. “We partner with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other groups that are not our grantees. We're partnering with thousands of houses of worship, we partner with labor unions, we partner with community boards, civic organizations, elected officials.”

To an extent, every Latino community around the city deals with issues around irregular housing, immigration, lack of internet access, and the ravages of the pandemic. The level of coordination and reach by the existing ecosystem of community organizations, as well as differences among these communities, is key to how Census participation plays out.

In Washington Heights and Inwood, areas that also saw a robust response rate in the 2010 Census, community organizations of different stripes made sure to establish complementary processes, and integrate Census messaging into both their regular operations and programs specifically responsive to the health crisis. “It's just been a big partnership in the community, which helps us obviously reach more people, because if it's someone that we don't personally know as a client, then one of those [other] organizations might know them and we can tap them that way,” said María Guzmán-Colón, special projects manager at the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation.

Rosa, of NALEO, took on the role of coordinating among the various groups in those neighborhoods. “We brought people together. We had joint email threads keeping each other abreast,” he said. “Various parts and various constituencies in the community were being covered.”

Existing community groups’ strengths with particular constituencies were sometimes enough to overcome steep obstacles. On the Lower East Side, tracts along the East River with large NYCHA developments housing many older, lower-income Latino residents—exactly the sort of demographic the research shows is harder to reach and less likely to respond to the Census in large numbers—have been performing quite well, with some tracts reaching response rates in the mid-to-high 70s. The secret to success was that, according to Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) senior manager Marielle Villar Martiney, the organization called every senior in its database, which it had spent years building.

“We will start with, ‘are you facing eviction? Are you sick? Do you need help with food? Have you filled out your Census?’ That has been really successful because, while the Census is incredibly important, when you're struggling to put food on your table, the Census can seem far away,” she said. It was the same in northern Manhattan, where Guzmán-Colón said NMIC would assist community members with various pressing issues and then separately follow up about the Census, with trust already built.

The notion of an all-hands approach has worked on the Lower East Side, too. “The Lower East Side has always been like a really organized community and we have two district leaders that are super active,” said Andrea Gordillo, the director of development for the Clemente Soto Vélez Center. The center did not receive any Census funding and wasn’t running specific Census programs per se, but still got involved with the broader community push. “We all sort of work together in informal ways. We have different informal networks,” Gordillo said.

It’s a simple enough methodology, but it works. “We have really tried to figure out how to replicate that in some of the areas that don't have those natural tenants associations or civic associations that have been doing work to bring those numbers up,” said Melva Miller, the chief executive of the business group Association for a Better New York, where she has run its 2020 Census efforts.

That’s easier said than done, though, and the going was much easier for areas where a well-developed network already existed. Take the Jackson Heights/Corona dichotomy; whereas the discrepancy could seem puzzling on paper, most people Gotham Gazette spoke with seemed unsurprised. “Jackson Heights as a neighborhood is just organized, period, and organized in a different way than some of the surrounding neighborhoods that were also really hard hit [by covid],” said Queens Community House’s Mayano. “There's always been kind of a coordinated network of organizations that have their niche, to reach the most marginalized in the community without overlapping.”

While there’s often a tendency to reduce Latino communities to a monolith, they clearly are not, and both socio-economic and cultural distinctions play a role. “The community in Corona or in Sunset Park, are more people that rent a room, they live in crowded apartments, and they don't want others to know that,” said Kourousias. “If you want to live in Williamsburg or Park Slope, the rents are higher than in Sunset Park. So the community may also be Latino, but the access to their economic resources are lower.”

Things may be shifting as the city continues its gradual process of opening back up and the sort of in-person organizing originally planned has resumed in some form. In early September, GOLES and other groups marched around the Lower East Side and the East Village with a drum line, handing out Census awareness flyers to passersby. Mixteca will be setting up tables outside of reopened Mexican and Latin food restaurants, and has hired some indigenous language speakers to walk people through filling out the Census survey. The Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation held a day of action.

“I think there's really been an uptick in numbers in some of those lagging neighborhoods once we were able to start to do in-person events, mixing Census outreach with PPE distribution and food distribution, being able to bring activities outdoors, to provide information about school reopening, and other essential services,” said ABNY’s Miller.

After some delays, the state government also this year distributed millions of dollars in dedicated Census funding, which can be used to drive a big last-mile in-person outreach operation. At the Lower East Side Census march, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said, “only recently, we took our money from the governor and we gave it out quickly to thirty groups in Manhattan,” including some of those represented at the march.

The September 24 court ruling, which the Trump administration is likely to appeal, could give the city and the community organizations further runway to drive responses with an in-person strategy.

Menin said that New York, in the context of other large urban areas, has in recent weeks seen the greatest jumpthe greatest jump in self-response rates as a result of resuming in-person outreach. “That's what we needed, that we weren't able to do when the census began. And that's why we wish we had October, because we need it. You know, to cut the census sort by one month, it's unconscionable,” she said. Somewhat ironically, large chunks of wealthier Manhattan neighborhoods along Central Park and downtown have had very poor response rates, presumably in part due to well-off inhabitants skipping town during the pandemic.

People like Zambrana, of the Corona group Latin Women in Action, have their work cut out. She’s delivering a consistent message: “If you don't want your voice to be taken away, you have to fill out the Census. And it is not for me, it's for you and your family and the future of your children.”

[This story has also been published in Spanish - find that version here. Esta historia también ha sido publicada en español, encuéntrala aquí.]

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by Felipe De La Hoz, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

This article has been updated to reflect the 9/24/20 court ruling to re-extend the 2020 Census count through October.

Scott Stringer is Putting Affordable Housing at the Center of His Mayoral Pitch — What's His Vision?


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Comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer (photo: @scottmstringer)


When he officially launched his campaign for mayor earlier this month, Comptroller Scott Stringer took square aim at what he called “the gentrification industrial complex” that he says has flourished in New York City despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s years-long effort to stem the tide of housing unaffordability. Stringer, a two-term Democrat, has for years examined, audited, and criticized various aspects of the mayor’s housing program, arguing it is not aptly designed to help those most in need of affordable housing, and is promising that if he’s elected mayor he will pursue a swift policy change to help house the poorest New Yorkers, finally make the city more affordable, and significantly reduce homelessness.

In January, Stringer released a housing plan that set him in contrast with de Blasio, earned him high praise from progressive leaders and organizations, and is now a lynchpin of his mayoral platform. The plan would be “a fundamental shift in the city’s approach to our housing crisis,” Stringer said at the announcement. “A plan that refocuses our resources where the crisis is most acute.” But there remain major open questions about the plan. Funding it would require action from the state Legislature, and at a time when both city and state tax revenues are down drastically. His push for both new mandates on affordable housing in new building projects and greater use of discretionary subsidies by the city could give pause to real estate developers and slow the pace of construction.

And Stringer has yet to answer key questions about what his approach to development as mayor would really be, including whether he would pursue large city-backed rezonings to encourage housing development in wealthier neighborhoods or how he would otherwise advance the housing desegregation that he has declared a goal.

While a representative of Stringer’s campaign told Gotham Gazette that Stringer wants to increase density across the city and that he supports upzonings in wealthier communities to do so, Stringer has not made either point central to his housing pitch. Nor has he pointed to any specific city neighborhoods he thinks are ripe for zoning changes to allow for larger buildings. He has so far only talked about mandating more affordable housing where building is set to occur within current zoning restrictions, thereby increasing costs for developers without increasing their potential earnings from more market-rate units that can subsidize the affordable ones, the key equation in de Blasio's plan.

Asked for examples of neighborhoods Stringer believes should be upzoned for more housing density, his campaign did not provide a response. Stringer was not made available for an interview for this story. But after this article originally published and discussion about Stringer's housing vision took off on social media, Stringer tweeted that "Upzonings are an important tool to create housing; we also need an as-of-right requirement," and, in response to housing advocates pointing to a proposal to upzone Soho for more housing, "I agree. Upzoning makes sense in Soho."

“When I'm mayor, we're going to end the crushing cycle of speculation, eviction and displacement,” Stringer said at his campaign launch. “No more giving away the store to developers. No more unaffordable affordable housing. We will put an end to the gentrification industrial complex, and end policies that perpetuate a cycle of segregation in our neighborhoods and in our schools...Together we will put the city's approach on a fundamentally new trajectory to build the housing we need in a city for everyone.”

[Read: Promising 'Leadership at City Hall,' Scott Stringer Officially Launches 2021 Mayoral Campaign]

At the campaign launch in Inwood, Stringer pointed to his housing plan and referenced its centerpiece, “universal affordable housing,” which would mandate aggressive affordability caps for 25% of the housing in any new development with ten or more units -- including those built as-of-right, meaning no new zoning changes in need of city approval. Universal affordable housing would replace the current Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program, a product of the de Blasio administration that has its fair share of critics, including Stringer, who don’t believe it goes far enough in mandating affordability and point out that it only applies to development in rezoned areas.

Universal affordable housing would require that all affordable housing created under it would cap rents so that those making an average of 60% of Area Median Income (about $58,000 a year for a family of three), or two parents making minimum wage and raising a child, would not pay more than 30% of their income in rent. Though some have raised questions about its constitutionality, as a potential government “taking” of private property, similar citywide policies have been implemented in San Jose, California in 2010 and Portland, Oregon in 2017. San Jose’s inclusionary housing policy was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to take the case in 2016, letting the law stand (though leaving open the possibility of another challenge).

According to Stringer’s office, if universal affordable housing had been applied at the start of 2014, when de Blasio became mayor, it would have led to the construction of 25,000 additional affordable units by the end of 2019 over what de Blasio’s plan has produced.

Besides universal affordable housing, Stringer’s housing plan would also deepen the city’s investment in housing for extremely and very low-income households, shifting funds from supplementing rents for moderate- and middle-income households; create a New York City Land Bank to fund 100% permanently affordable housing on about 1,000 vacant city-owned properties (though that number of potentially-useful lots has long been disputed by city housing officials); end the 421-a affordable housing tax subsidy that is supposed to incentivize affordable units in wealthier areas and replace it with discretionary subsidies; and expand homeownership through various initiatives.

Stringer regularly talks about the need for a real focus on comprehensive “community-based planning,” arguing that the de Blasio administration has been too top-down and promising that if he’s elected mayor communities will have more input. He has not explained what that will look like or how it will be anything but a barrier to more housing being built, whether in wealthier neighborhoods or elsewhere.

According to an assistant comptroller in Stringer’s office, which produced the housing plan in January, the main flaw in de Blasio’s housing approach has been the targeting of low-income communities of color for major upzonings that allow more density. Instead of encouraging development in those areas and spurring or accelerating gentrification, the mayor should target parts of the city where construction is already occurring, the official said. De Blasio has argued that he has pursued neighborhood plans where there is ample room to build, where force of gentrification could be harnessed or stemmed, and where local elected officials are interested in working on rezonings.

And rather than focus on a quantitative target of 300,000 rent-restricted units over 12 years, the mayor should be looking at the outcomes for affordability, according to Stringer. His plan does not contain a goal of total units or a timeline.

In response to Gotham Gazette inquiries about various aspects of the housing plan, Cameron Hellerman, a spokesperson for Stringer’s campaign, provided a statement about universal affordable housing and how it would work. It said, in part: “This means real affordable housing in every neighborhood with new construction, no exceptions. The problem with Mayor de Blasio's approach is that the ‘affordable’ housing in his rezonings is not affordable and completely out of reach for the people who built up the low income neighborhoods he targeted. Universal Affordable Housing would bring an affordable housing revolution that delivers housing to the New Yorkers who need it most. With a mounting homelessness crisis made worse by the devastation of the pandemic, we simply can't afford not to implement this plan."

De Blasio’s 300,000-unit housing program, which mostly focuses on preservation rather than new construction, has shifted several times as the mayor has responded to constant and ongoing criticism about being too focused on the middle class as opposed to those who are working class, poor, and homeless. As of June 30, his administration has preserved 114,934 units and funded the construction of 50,656 units of rent-restricted housing. Of those, a total of 72,396 are targeted at extremely low- and very low-income families, which fall below the 50% Area Median Income threshold. More than 60,000 New Yorkers are in Department of Homeless Services shelters, while tens of thousands more live in other shelters, on the streets, or doubled up with friends or relatives.

The city’s fortunes have changed since the release of both de Blasio’s most recent version of his plan and Stringer’s plan. Just before the coronavirus outbreak hit, de Blasio was promising another iteration of his housing plan, with more focus on those with limited means.

While Stringer talked about the impacts of the pandemic at his campaign launch, he did not say anything about them altering his housing plan. The pandemic has pushed the economy into a recession and city revenues have plummeted, forcing de Blasio to pare back his own affordable housing program.

Stringer’s plan, which envisions a net increase of $600 million in city investment for affordable housing, in part through phasing out the 421-a affordable housing tax credit, eliminating the Mortgage Recording Tax, and reforming the Real Property Transfer Tax, may no longer be feasible.

Stringer’s proposal is a rebuke of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, a broadly popular policy proven controversial based on the particulars of how it was designed by the de Blasio administration and City Council before its passage in 2016. As part of the mayor’s 300,000-unit affordable housing program, MIH requires developers to build permanent rent-restricted housing in new developments at various income bands when they receive rezoning permission to build bigger. MIH is, however, a small part of the overall housing plan and, by the end of 2019, about 2,100 affordable units had been created through the program, according to a City Limits report.

Under the current approach, the de Blasio administration has pursued neighborhood rezonings in select areas across the city to encourage more density, build new market-rate and affordable units, and modernize and invest in communities. While several neighborhood rezoning plans have moved through the process and been approved, others that de Blasio had targeted have not moved or been stalled, and the mayor has not made neighborhood rezonings a priority for years now.

When Stringer released his plan, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development publicly criticised it, saying, in part, "Comptroller Stringer's proposals would actually worsen New York City's housing crisis. They'd make it next to impossible to build new buildings and lock countless hard-working families out of homes they could actually afford.”

Housing advocates, however, have broadly critiqued the city’s existing program and how MIH has been implemented. They note that the administration has mostly targeted low-income communities of color like East New York and East Harlem for rezonings, therefore encouraging real estate speculation and expediting the currents of gentrification that can price current residents out of their neighborhoods. De Blasio argues that his plan leverages forces of gentrification that would only worsen without city intervention and that it helps build desperately needed new housing for a variety of income levels. But advocates and some elected officials, including Stringer, say too much new housing that is being created continues to be unaffordable to those who need it most.

Stringer’s plan, on the other hand, has support from some of the most prominent housing advocacy groups in the city, including Community Voices Heard, Community Service Society, New York Communities for Change, The Legal Aid Society, and Churches United for Fair Housing.

“It's a million times better than de Blasio’s plan, which prioritized affordable housing that was unaffordable to communities,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, in a phone interview.

“What the next administration really needs to work on is, it's not just about building quote-unquote affordable housing,” he added. “It's about really housing the New Yorkers who need it the most, which are homeless people and people on the verge of homelessness.”

Part of Stringer’s proposal involves increasing operating housing subsidies awarded by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by about $125 million each year and increasing capital investment by $375 million each year. But with the phasing out of the 421-a subsidy, which costs about $1.6 billion in property tax revenue annually according to estimates from Stringer’s office, under Stringer’s plan the city will have sufficient funds for the added investments. 

Westin said the city already has enough resources, but they’re not applied where they’re needed. “There's billions and billions in resources right now that is at HPD, that is at [Economic Development Corporation], that is just being misappropriated to build the gentrification plan that de Blasio is putting forward right now,” he said. “It could just be repurposed...into funding the lowest income housing.” If the city houses homeless people, it’ll also spend less on the shelter system, he pointed out.

Sean Campion, senior research associate at nonprofit watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, recently authored a report that found that New York’s housing stock growth has not kept pace with job creation, exacerbating the housing crisis. Policy decisions over the years have created uneven levels of allowable density, massive areas with low-density zoning, hard-to-develop vacant lots, and a scarcity of as-of-right development sites. Stringer’s plan seeks to correct some of those issues, but could run up against hurdles, Campion said in an interview.

“[Stringer] called for both more capital and targeting capital better at deep levels of affordability. There's obviously less of that to go around,” he said, pointing to the city’s budget crunch. Even if a Stringer administration kept funding flat, it would mean fewer units get built at deeper affordability. “That trade off is still there. But obviously in a more constrained environment, that's more difficult to do.”

Operational funding will be the bigger challenge, Campion noted, as the city’s revenues have nosedived with big budget gaps expected next year. Stringer has proposed raising those funds by replacing the “regressive and inequitable” mortgage recording tax with a “more progressive” Real Property Transfer Tax, changes that would together raise about $400 million in revenue each year. Those tax amendments, along with 421-a’s expiration, would require approval from the state Legislature.

“Given the budget shortfall plus the declines in just the number of real estate transfers in general, particularly on the commercial side, that could put a dent in that in the short-term,” Campion said.

Though CBC has not taken a position on Stringer’s universal affordable housing proposal, Campion did address the idea to do away with 421-a and provide subsidies on a discretionary basis. “Making it discretionary would probably depress housing production,” he said. “There are a lot of faults [with 421-a]. It can be better targeted, it’s expensive. But because it’s as-of-right, developers know what the program is, and they know what they're getting into when they're buying land, running projects.”

“One of the benefits of development in New York City in general is that you can build things as-of-right without discretionary approvals, but we still need 421-a to make the economics work because the tax on multi-family development is so high...Making the tax incentives discretionary effectively makes all development discretionary,” he added.

[Read: Experts Examine Challenges and Solutions to Building Affordable Housing in New York]

One area of general agreement among advocates and fiscal watchdogs is that additional capital investment will both help create more housing and spur job growth by encouraging construction.

“I don't see the pandemic at all at odds with an ambitious housing preservation and production program the way that Stringer lays out,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for the Housing Justice For All coalition. Weaver too noted flaws in how the city has used Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is really a public policy that's designed for a hot market,” she said, noting that de Blasio’s years in office have been accompanied by robust real estate growth (until covid). MIH, she said, is designed to work best in neighborhoods with higher land values, where developers would be able to recoup their investments without needing public subsidies while still building affordable units. “De Blasio, that's not how he used it. The way that he decided to do it was to use it in low land value areas of the city,” she said.

Weaver said the time is ripe for the city to take a greater role in regulating housing by bringing unregulated housing stock, particularly in boroughs other than Manhattan, under rent-regulation as the pandemic suppresses the real estate market. “This downturn means that there are lots of things that you can do to increase the value of the city's capital,” she said, calling on the city to issue bonds for building housing and to bail out struggling landlords and buildings while bringing them under city regulation.

She did note one point of minor disagreement with Stringer’s plan. The comptroller has proposed increasing homeownership partly through creating community land banks and land trusts that can fund the construction of affordable co-ops and condos. “Stringer says that these are mechanisms to create homeownership. They're not. They're mechanisms to create collectively run housing. So I think that's a misnomer and he shouldn't be describing it that way,” Weaver said.

Stringer is among a field of declared and likely candidates for the Democratic mayoral primary set to take place in June of next year and likely to determine the next mayor, given the city's overwhelming voter registration imbalance toward Democrats. All those seeking the mayoralty will be expected to outline how they plan to make the city more affordable, produce more housing, reduce homelessness, and save public housing. Earlier this year, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who has said he intends to run for mayor but has not officially declared his candidacy, released an anti-homelessness plan and said an affordable housing plan was soon to come, but that was put on hold by the pandemic. Former federal housing secretary Shaun Donovan, also seriously exploring a mayoral run, is likely to make housing a centerpiece of his campaign. Former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, who has launched her run for mayor, is talking about housing as "a human right" and hosting an upcoming campaign event focused on the issue. Other declared or exploring Democrats include Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former New York City Veteran Affairs Commissioner Loree Sutton, and Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney and former counsel to Mayor de Blasio.

If victorious, Stringer would need political will and alliances to implement some of the necessary policies. Phasing out 421-a will require state action as will reforming the city’s inequitable property tax system, which de Blasio promised and failed to do for years. (Stringer released an analysis of the property tax system in 2018, criticizing the disparate impact it has on working families. “We need to give New Yorkers a break, and turn a regressive tax system into a fair and progressive one,” he said at the time. “We must explore common sense solutions and expand tax relief to level the playing field for working families.” He has not released his own property tax reform plan. Meanwhile, long-delayed efforts by de Blasio to reform the inequitable and antiquated property tax system were stalled before the pandemic and have not been discussed since.)

“While our world has changed radically since the start of the year, New York City still has an affordable housing crisis,” said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), an organization of major developers and land-owners, in a statement. “Though it’s now more critical than ever to provide more units for low-income, hard-hit New Yorkers, there are dramatically fewer resources available to create such housing. Tackling our City’s affordable housing needs will require sensible, data-driven policies and creative partnerships with the private sector to produce new, below market-rate units.”

Eric Kober, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank, said Stringer’s plan “was never workable. It’s certainly not workable in the current economic circumstances. It is even less workable than de Blasio’s MIH program.” He pointed out that it would require diverting already dwindling capital resources away from other needs and towards housing.

Besides discouraging private development, Kober said most developers will try to grandfather in to existing regulations before 421-a expires next in 2022. That rush may be accelerated if developers are wary of Stringer’s plan being implemented, he said. “Even in the wealthiest neighborhoods, where in theory you could cross-subsidize affordable housing with high rents, what’s more likely to happen is that people will rush to build before Stringer’s plan goes into effect,” he said. “So there will be an initial burst of housing and very little housing after that.”

“It would have very deleterious effects on the city and possibly on the economy,” he added.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note: this article has been updated to reflect Stringer's responses to discussion of the piece on social media, including his call for upzonign Soho.

Max & Murphy Podcast: Kathryn Garcia on Trash, Food, & Possibly Running for Mayor


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Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, middle (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


September 16, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Kathryn Garcia on Trash, Food & Possibly Running for Mayor

Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who has been tasked with several other key roles by Mayor Bill de Blasio, is stepping down from her post as she considers jumping into the 2021 Democratic primary for Mayor. She joined the show to discuss her tenure at the Department of Sanitation, her work as interim NYCHA CEO and the "COVID-19 food czar," her approach to management and politics, and what she's thinking about in ehr exploration of a mayoral run.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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