(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
In recent years, New York City has racked up a series of impressive gains within the systems that prepare our youth for work and careers. The question is whether this progress will be enough for the city’s youth to navigate a rapidly changing labor market and achieve steady work and economic security.
While the economic expansion of recent years has swept many young adults into the workforce, most of these new workers are not on pathways to upward mobility. Part of that is the nature of the jobs, almost all of which are part-time, low-paying, or both. But another factor is work readiness -- employers do not feel students are generally well-prepared for the world of work. One recent survey found that while 96 percent of college academic officers felt their institutions effectively prepare students for the workforce, only 11 percent of business leaders agreed.
With education and skills requirements for high-paying positions continuing to rise, and automation potentially pushing low-skilled workers even further toward the economic margins, there’s a real chance things could get significantly worse. In fact, recent research estimates that one in every three jobs in New York City could become mostly or totally automated, with lower- and middle-income jobs at greatest risk. The workers in those jobs are overwhelmingly women and people of color.
To address these challenges and help New York City’s youth prepare for steady work and economic security, Mayor de Blasio has launched CareerReady NYC. This initiative prioritizes and connects the raw ingredients of career success: academic attainment, work experience, time management, critical thinking, communications, and teamwork. By linking up the subsystems of public education, youth employment, and postsecondary education, we can improve the odds for young people who might not have the strong family or community support networks to make meaning from unconnected academic and work experiences.
Developed over a two-year period by leaders from city government, the public school system, CUNY, employers, philanthropy, and community-based organizations, CareerReady NYC reflects two core truths. First, “school” and “work” are vital and complementary inputs to growing up, and should be supported as such. Second, when it comes to the success of our youth, everyone has skin in the game, and everyone needs to pitch in on their behalf.
The good news: there’s a lot of success to build upon. High school graduation and college readiness rates are the highest yet recorded. CUNY has rededicated itself to student success, with substantial investments in programs such as ASAP (Accelerated Success in Associate Programs) that are helping students to complete degrees. The Summer Youth Employment Program, a mainstay of life in the five boroughs since 1963, is putting more than twice as many young New Yorkers to work in 2019 as it did just six years ago. Finally, New York City is blessed with the strongest and most generous philanthropic partners of any city in America.
With all that in mind, the city is making a pledge through CareerReady NYC to begin to manage these programs to reflect the reality that they serve the same young people, and work toward providing more and better career guidance in school and work experiences outside of it. Our hope is that the Department of Education and CUNY will continue to embrace the goal of career readiness for their students, prioritizing career awareness, career exploration, and work-based learning.
We’re calling upon employers to participate by hosting student site visits, serving as guest speakers, providing financial support, taking interns, and ultimately hiring well-prepared graduates.
Finally, we’re asking private funders and service providers to sustain their support of youth development through resources, sharing best practices, and feeding back insights from the field to continuously improve programs and policy.
Over the years, far-sighted civic leaders in and out of government have taken concerted action to stabilize New York City’s finances, dramatically improve public safety, expand infrastructure to support a growing population, and address the ramifications of climate change.
The young people of New York deserve a similarly visionary approach to how we help them prepare for success in the world of work. This investment will pay off in both economic and moral terms: a broader-based and more sustainable prosperity, and a community in which we live up to our professed values of equal opportunity for all.
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Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives J. Phillip Thompson is responsible for spearheading a diverse collection of priority initiatives for New York City.
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(photo: William Alatriste New York City Council)
Billy Joel’s dystopian vision for New York City, laid out in the very upbeat but equally terrifying “Miami 2017,” is coming true. The lights have indeed gone out on Broadway. Perhaps the only difference is that Queens won’t stay.
This is New York City in 2019: a near 100-degree heat wave shut down power for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, who then trudged through flooded streets once the high temperatures gave way to torrential rain.
One thing became clear as climate change brought its greatest hits to the Big Apple: we are nowhere near ready for the next big storm.
Considering we’re quickly approaching the seventh anniversary of Sandy’s decimation to Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, that’s downright shameful. The City of New York needs to move into high gear for both short- and long-term solutions that protect every single neighborhood from the effects of climate change, because this is a public safety crisis.
Don’t believe it? Clearly you haven’t seen the footage of a straphanger at the Court Square station who was nearly swept onto the tracks by downpours. Twitter is filled with cellphone video of Brooklyn’s 4th Avenue flooded by water from the Gowanus Canal, which is a Superfund site. Or maybe you haven’t heard of instant New York legend Daphne Youree, who got out of her car near Exit 25 on the Long Island Expressway and used an orange traffic cone to clear a clogged drain to alleviate flash flooding.
These sound like a new version of the stories our parents told of the bad old days in the 1970s, when the Fiscal Crisis turned New York City into a living performance of Mad Max. But, as skyscrapers for the ultra-rich keep cropping up along 57th Street, we can’t shrug at the fact that half of New York City’s 10 wettest years have come since 2003.
If another Sandy-caliber storm struck today — though we hope it doesn’t — New York would be brought to a grinding halt based on what we’ve seen in the last week. Temperatures caused some 53,000 customers to lose power last weekend, as Con Ed pulled the plug on parts of Brooklyn and Queens, apparently so the grid wouldn’t be further strained. Even after the heat broke, on Tuesday, almost 3,000 customers were still without power and they were overwhelmingly in the outer boroughs.
Add a hurricane’s storm surge to the mix and our electrical grid would crumble.
Con Edison has failed its duties as a public utility throughout the heatwave, which begs the question: how would they perform if a big storm hit tomorrow? The men and women who worked in the heat should be commended for getting power back up, but they shouldn’t also be responsible for communicating that to those suddenly cleaning out their refrigerators. That’s their bosses’ job — one they didn’t do well enough. All the while, they’re asking New Yorkers for a collective $695 million rate hike.
Meanwhile, New York City’s streets are starting to look like Venice. You’d think that, after the Rockaways, Broad Channel, and Southern Brooklyn went under water in Sandy, we’d be in better shape. The 500,000 New Yorkers who live along our shores have little more than some sandbags despite scientific models showing that sea levels will rise a foot over the next 30 years.
In the short term, we have to promote more green infrastructure. Bioswales, which are sidewalk gardens, absorb up to 75 percent of stormwater. The Climate Mobilization Act paved the way for green roofs atop newly constructed buildings, which can retain 95 percent of rainwater dropped in summer months. And we have to make serious investments in infrastructure that might not always seem exciting, such as sewers.
But we also have to make sure our kids don’t have to deal with the mess we were too scared to clean up. Earlier this year we introduced a bill requiring New York City to create a five-borough resiliency plan.
Lower Manhattan is great, but asking Congress for $10 billion to protect a single business district when JFK Airport could be underwater by 2100 seems fiscally irresponsible. Failing to protect every neighborhood from Riverdale to Rockaway helps stave off tens of thousands of climate refugees the National Climate Assessment warned of when the seas come to claim our coasts.
We look forward to holding a hearing on this bill in October ahead of Sandy’s anniversary, so we can get to work on doing the long-term resiliency work. In the meantime, our city agencies need to mobilize, assess what’s causing rampant flooding throughout the city, and fix the problems immediately. Lastly, we need to make sure our threats against Con Edison have teeth and give the utility an ultimatum: give us the resilient, renewable grid we deserve or we’ll come for your power lines.
The status quo is quickly sinking under the floodwaters, and New Yorkers are taking notice. Just like we’ve put our foot down to demand reliable service from the MTA, we need to take a stand on infrastructure. Because being late for work is one thing — being unprepared for a storm is fatal.
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Costa Constantinides represents western Queens in the City Council and chairs the Committee on Environmental Protection; Justin Brannan represents southern Brooklyn in the City Council and chairs the Committee on Resiliency and Waterfronts. On Twitter @Costa4NY & @JustinBrannan.
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(photo: New York City Department of Transportation)
New Yorkers across the city have reason to celebrate, with the news that the Citi Bike network is expanding to the Bronx and deeper into Brooklyn and Queens -- bringing the benefits of bike share to every corner of Manhattan and extending its reach into neighborhoods like Morrisania, Flatbush, and Jackson Heights.
Citi Bike’s expansion into more communities of color not only represents a huge opportunity for improving New Yorkers’ lives; it will help set the tone for cities across the country and the world.
It’s important that we get this right, scaling Citi Bike’s existing equity programs alongside this massive infrastructural investment.
Through my work with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the nation’s first community development corporation (CDC) focused on promoting the economic futures of black families in Central Brooklyn, I’ve been on the front lines of encouraging ridership and promoting a feeling of system ownership among black and Latinx residents.
We’ve hosted bike rides, worked with the city Department of Transportation to give away helmets, promoted low-cost memberships, and cultivated community champions; with our seat at the table, we have pushed for policies to benefit communities of color, like changing pricing for SNAP recipients and ensuring that youth have access to Citi Bike.
We adapted as we learned, and we’ve had real results. Ridership in Bed Stuy is growing faster than systemwide since we signed on as a Citi Bike partner. One year ago, we joined Citi Bike and Healthfirst in launching Reduced Fare Bike Share. More than 3,400 low-income New Yorkers have signed up for Citi Bike for only $5 a month.
Here’s what we’ve learned -- I hope it provides guidance in Citi Bike’s new phase of expansion:
First, community engagement must be real and consistent.
There are complex reasons that ridership is lower in majority-minority neighborhoods than others, at least in part due to the suspicion that the system isn’t meant for everyone.
As Restoration’s partnership with Citi Bike has proven, real impact comes with grassroots organizing and consistent community presence. Citi Bike and Healthfirst’s newly-announced $300,000 Community Grant Program for local nonprofits in the expansion zone will go a long way; there must be a sustained commitment to these partnerships long after that seed money has run out.
Second, there must be parallel investments in protected bike lanes.
Expanding Citi Bike is a great first step, but equal commitment to protected bike lanes in these new neighborhoods is crucial to encouraging ridership from a diverse array of residents.
Studies have shown that female ridership, for example, is boosted by a feeling of security on a bike, and that bike safety is achieved in numbers.
Bike safety is a compounding phenomenon: the more comprehensive the infrastructure is, the more people will ride; the more people ride, the safer the roads become.
Third, the fight for transit equity does not stand alone.
We must remember that advocacy around transportation equity is part of a larger effort to stem the tide of historic disinvestment across many facets of life in communities of color.
The City and its partner Citi Bike have an opportunity to model what equitable infrastructure investment looks like; not just what resources are where and when, but who is at the table when those decisions are made.
We must be aware of the unintended consequences of our decisions, and ensure that our investment in communities doesn’t equal the displacement of longtime residents.
As Citi Bike expands, I’ve already seen a real effort to address these challenges, to scale what’s working and to correct what isn’t.
Expansion of collaborative efforts like the Better Bike Share Partnership, authentic community engagement and support, and affordable pricing will help guarantee that equity goals are met. They will undergird all efforts to ensure that bike adoption in new neighborhoods is top-of-mind and that infrastructure investment is responsible.
It wasn’t long ago that many in communities like Bed Stuy bemoaned Citi Bike’s arrival. Just a few years later, New Yorkers stood on the steps of City Hall to demand bikeshare quicker and that it reach further.
It was one of the quickest changes in public approval maybe ever, and speaks to the system’s overwhelming success in not only getting people where they need to go, but doing it in a way that people enjoy.
I believe we’re close to realizing a system that meaningfully supplants car ownership and is cemented as part of the public transit infrastructure across the boroughs.
With a thought-out, comprehensive plan for bike equity, Citi Bike can meaningfully support communities across the city, bringing new access to former transit deserts, opening up economic opportunity for diverse commercial hubs, making our communities greener and healthier, and showcasing to the world what a truly equitable, integrated transportation system can look like.
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Tracey Capers is Executive Vice President of Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.
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