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NYCHA Prepares to Implement Smoking Ban


de blasio anti smoking presser 2020

(photo via the Mayor's Office)


Following the announcement of a nationwide smoking ban in public housing residences last year, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been preparing to implement the controversial federal policy across its more than 320 developments that house approximately half-a-million residents.

“Smoke-Free NYCHA” involves updating resident leases with language that prohibits smoking, running an awareness campaign to inform residents about the new ban as well as the harms of secondhand smoke, and crafting an enforcement plan for repeat offenders. According to the city's health department, NYCHA residents "smoke at higher rates than other New Yorkers, and suffer from higher rates of chronic disease including heart disease, diabetes, and asthma."

Required by the federal government to have a smoke-free policy in place by July 2018, NYCHA has encountered skepticism and criticism from its residents. Moreover, while anti-smoking advocates applaud the new federal policy and NYCHA’s efforts to implement it, they worry that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration will fail to provide the necessary financial resources to support meaningful tobacco cessation efforts across NYCHA campuses.

De Blasio has expressed support for the ban and has backed other anti-smoking measures, including a recent legislative package he signed into law, aimed at reducing smoking in New York City writ large. The mayor has also invested heavily in NYCHA overall, though City Hall has not yet made competely clear what it will do to support implementation of the NYCHA smoking ban, while the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is working with NYCHA stakeholders to prepare for implementation of the smoking ban.

In late November of 2016, shortly before the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) declared that all public housing authorities were required to prohibit smoking within their campuses. "Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, healthy home free from harmful second-hand cigarette smoke," said then HUD Secretary Julian Castro in a press release. "HUD's smoke-free rule is a reflection of our commitment to using housing as a platform to create healthy communities.”     

Upon learning of the new policy, NYCHA, the largest public housing authority in the United States, began to ready its residents and staff. Given that City Council Member Donovan Richards had previously proposed banning smoking in city-funded housing, and earlier experience regulating smoking in its developments, the agency was not unprepared. “We certainly ramped up our planning and collaboration as soon as we heard the rule was being made final, but we already had a foundation of work before that time,” said Andrea Mata, Director of Health Initiatives at NYCHA, in an interview with Gotham Gazette.

She explained that, in 2012, NYCHA began working with the New York City Department of Health (DOH) on a pilot project at 830 Amsterdam, a single building development on the Upper West Side, to create a “resident-led and initiated strategy” to reduce secondhand smoke exposure. After three years, the project culminated with representatives of 85 percent of all units voluntarily signing a pledge to not smoke within the building.

Upon announcement of the federal ban, NYCHA sought to build on the 830 Amsterdam pilot as well as pull from earlier examples of public housing authorities implementing smoking bans within their developments, including those of Philadelphia and Albany.

NYCHA began by reaching out to residents and experts to develop a comprehensive policy. Representatives engaged the Resident Advisory Board, a collection of public housing leaders, conducted community meetings across the city, and are now beginning to brief all local Resident Associations in the five boroughs. They also consulted organizations like the New York University School of Medicine as well as the American Cancer Society for feedback.

In addition to ongoing community engagement, the housing authority is also preparing to update resident leases with language that stipulates adherence to the smoking ban. According to NYCHA’s plan for 2018 released mid-October, the agency will begin informing residents of changes to their lease in early 2018, who will then have the opportunity to comment on the new clause. After revisions, they will mail residents an updated lease.

Finally, NYCHA is in the midst of developing an enforcement process to ensure residents comply. “At this point we don’t have a final policy that we can share, but we’d imagine that it would have a few points of escalation,” explained Sideya Sherman, Executive Vice President for Community Engagement and Partnerships at NYCHA, in an interview with Gotham Gazette.

A policy of “graduated enforcement,” it will begin with warnings, then interventions, continuing to escalate until NYCHA staff announces a “commencement of termination of tenancy proceedings,” said NYCHA spokesperson Jasmine Blake to Gotham Gazette of the outline of the enforcement plan.

The possibility of eviction for offenders has been a point of contention, as has an alleged lack of information about the smoke-free rule being provided by NYCHA to residents. “I think it’s a horrible policy,” said Charlene Nimmons, resident of Wyckoff Gardens and president of the Wyckoff Gardens Resident Association from 2003 to 2015, in a phone call. “There’s this privileged rule and law being forced down upon public housing residents.”

A resident of Fort Greene’s Ingersoll Houses also expressed frustration in comments to DNAinfo earlier this year. “How can they kick you out for something that’s just like a disease, basically?” said Curtis Flemister. “It’s not like you can say, 'I’m just not going to do it if I’m going to get kicked out.'”

“I have not received and have not had any information about it,” said Geraldine Lamb, president of the Bronx’s Castle Hill Resident Association, in an interview with Gotham Gazette.

When the public housing smoking ban was first proposed, in 2015, de Blasio said that “the goal is a good one,” but that there would be “a lot to work through” in terms of implementation. NYCHA Chair and CEO Shola Olatoye has also expressed concern about enforcement, wanting it to be “resident-led” as opposed to involving the NYPD.

On Monday, City Hall spokesperson Melissa Grace said in a statement, “This administration is dedicated to creating healthy living environments for all New Yorkers, and NYCHA and the City Department of Health are working closely with our public housing residents, advocates and the federal government as this ban takes effect.”

According to the Department of Health (DOHMH), there is a position within its Center for Health Equity that is dedicated to supporting NYCHA's Health Initiatives Unit. Since the start of this year, NYCHA and DOHMH have spoken with more than 1,200 NYCHA residents at community meetings and other activities, and will continue to engage residents to craft the smoke-free NYCHA policy. The process is being led by an advisory group of NYCHA residents, academics, healthcare practitioners, and representatives of community organizations. The group is drafting a set of priorities to help guide implementation of the ban, according to DOHMH, including principles related to education, cessation support, communication, and enforcement.

In December, DOHMH will be launching new efforts to help NYCHA residents connect to smoking cessation resources and to "help them address the longstanding injustices brought by tobacco companies who target low-income communities and communities of color." According to DOHMH, "NYCHA residents have made their priorities clear: they want to live in smoke-free environments, but the implementation of Smoke-free Public Housing must be resident-led, include resources and support from NYCHA and DOHMH, and focused on celebrating success."

City Council Member Ritchie Torres, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Public Housing and grew up in NYCHA, expressed reservations in a Monday interview with Gotham Gazette. “I agree with the sentiment,” Torres said of the smoking ban. “I agree with investing in more programs to curb smoking. But, I disagree with a coercive approach.”

Torres said that while he may not chair the committee next year when a new class of the City Council is seated and new positions assigned (Torres is running to be the speaker of the Council), “We should have a hearing ahead of implementation.”

Despite criticism from residents and skepticism from high-ranking city officials, anti-smoking advocates are impressed with NYCHA’s efforts so far. “They are doing a lot,” affirmed Michael Davoli, Director of New York Metro Government Relations at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “They have a concrete plan.”

However, Davoli questioned the mayor’s and governor’s financial commitment to financing the distribution of effective tobacco cessation services to NYCHA residents, like written materials and nicotine replacement therapy (NRTs). “The question is, is the money going to be put into it to really provide NYCHA the resources to provide smoking cessation,” said Davoli. “This is an opportunity for the mayor and the governor to really help these people quit once and for all.”

When pressed for more information on how much funding the mayor will provide the authority, NYCHA did not provide specifics. “We are working with the Office of the Mayor throughout this process to further support his tobacco and smoking control policies,” said Blake.

Although the amount of money City Hall is willing to commit is unclear, the city’s current efforts against smoking support NYCHA’s. In April of this year, the Health Department launched a media campaign to educate New Yorkers “on the dangers of secondhand smoke at home and encouraging them to make their home smoke-free.” The press release announcing the effort says it “is aligned with the recent smoke-free rule passed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development” that will require NYCHA to go smoke-free.

“We certainly don’t have lots of financial resources and so we’re leveraging our partners to make sure we’re that connecting residents to appropriate services,” explained NYCHA’s Sherman, possibly in reference to NYCHA’s budget woes. “But we certainly are putting our best foot forward to taking a multi-faceted approach to implementing this policy.”

***
by Ben Weiss, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

Election Post-Mortem with Nicole Malliotakis’ Campaign Manager


malliotakis with people and banner

Nicole Malliotakis and company (photo: @NMalliotakis)


“I targeted 750,000 votes,” said Leticia Remauro, campaign manager for Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis’ mayoral bid, “and broke them up into about 26 Assembly Districts we needed to target.”

“To win as a Republican in New York City, you have to win Queens, Staten Island, and the Upper East Side,” Remauro told Gotham Gazette in an election post-mortem interview, with the intensity of the campaign still evident.

While some absentee and other ballots are still being counted, Malliotakis, the Republican challenger to incumbent Democrat Bill de Blasio, received just under 304,000 votes, to de Blasio’s 726,000 and change. (Malliotakis also appeared on the Conservative and “Dump de Blasio” ballot lines, while the mayor also appeared on the Working Families Party line.)

The campaign did win convincingly in Malliotakis’ home borough of Staten Island, she got 74 percent of the vote there, and did very well on the Upper East Side, while Queens was more of a mixed bag, as de Blasio won 64 percent of the vote in the borough.

In the interview, Remauro explained the long odds the Malliotakis campaign faced from the get-go, and what needed to happen for her to pull off the upset that did not transpire. She admitted no mistakes in how the campaign was run -- “I don’t think that we could have run a better campaign.” -- but did express a few regrets, and she pointed the finger at several causes of the loss.

“The reason de Blasio has been reelected has a lot do with Eric Ulrich,” Remauro said, referring to the Republican City Council member from Queens who endorsed Bo Dietl, an independent mayoral candidate who tried to run in the Democratic, then Republican primaries, but was unsuccessful in both efforts and ran on his own ballot line. Dietl raised and spent over $1 million in the race, participated in the two televised debates alongside de Blasio and Malliotakis, was the subject of a good amount of media coverage, and ultimately received 1 percent of the vote (about 10,600 votes).

Other factors Remauro pointed to included Dietl’s inclusion in the televised debates (“Bo Dietl turned those debates into an entertainment circus. I believe voters were cheated”); the rain that came down around rush hour on Election Day and she believes led some people to stay home (“Had that rain decided not to let go as people were just coming home from work you would’ve seen a higher number”); how the news media covered Malliotakis’ candidacy and the race in general; and the presence of President Donald Trump atop the Republican Party. “He caused a lot of hurt to a lot of candidates and there’s nothing anyone could have done about that,” Remauro said of Trump.

When asked about mistakes or things she wishes the campaign had done differently, Remauro said, “I would have liked to have had more money sooner. If I could turn back time it would have been good to get into the race in February, not in May or June, when we really got into it.” With more money sooner and thus public matching funds earlier, “get on the air sooner, done more mail than we did, spend earlier.”

“A young Assemblywoman from Staten Island running in a 7-to-1 Democrat city” against an incumbent, Remauro explained of the tough odds. “We had Paul Massey who had taken millions out of New York City, real estate money...and we suffered for that,” she added, referring to the real estate executive who had been the Republican mayoral frontrunner until Malliotakis got in the race and who dropped out after their first side-by-side debate a few weeks later.

“She had every disadvantage that you could imagine, and she still managed to capture a higher vote total and a higher vote percentage than Joe Lhota,” Remauro said, referring to the 2013 Republican mayoral nominee. She also explained that Lhota was more well-known and connected than Malliotakis at the times of their mayoral campaigns, explaining, for example, that he had been a deputy mayor and MTA chair, and that he was well-connected in Manhattan and had been endorsed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Remauro, who runs The Von Agency, a public relations firm, noted that she has known Malliotakis since the Assembly member was in college, and always thought highly of her.

As for Council Member Ulrich, who at one point flirted with his own mayoral bid, and “fractured” GOP support in Queens, Remauro gave Ulrich credit given that he won his reelection handily, but expressed frustration and confusion about why he continued to back Dietl. Ulrich maintained throughout the campaign that of any candidate in the race, Dietl had the best chance to defeat de Blasio in the general election. “If he had embraced her he could have been working with a Republican mayor,” Remauro said of Ulrich and Malliotakis.

Remauro said that support for Massey, then Dietl from some leaders in Queens held Malliotakis’ campaign back (Ulrich supported Dietl throughout the campaign). While Remauro said that many district leaders and other GOP officials in Queens were helpful, “we always had to overcome the Dietl factor.”

“She was out there repeatedly, but it’s difficult to be able to get in deep in a borough unless you have the support from the district leaders in that borough and the people who are organizing in the borough, and that never manifested itself,” Remauro said. Not getting Ulrich and a few others on board “was a killer,” she added.

She drew a comparison to the Bronx, the most Democratic borough, where the Republican county party had also endorsed Massey in the early going, but then quickly embraced Malliotakis when her path to the Republican nomination became clear. “We took 16 percent in the Bronx versus Lhota’s 7 percent,” Remauro said. In 2013, Lhota received about 23 percent of the overall vote to de Blasio’s 73 percent. Malliotakis received about 28 percent to de Blasio’s 66.5 percent.

“It was difficult for us to get into Queens the way we got into the Bronx,” Remauro said. She also criticized Dietl’s inclusion in the two debates, which was at the discretion of the lead sponsors, first NY1, then CBS.

“It was always my opinion that Bo Dietl and [Reform Party nominee] Sal Albanese would take votes away from Nicole and indeed we saw that on Staten Island and elsewhere,” Remauro said.

“Press conference after press conference she put out substantive issues,” Remauro said, when asked to elaborate more on comments she made about the media’s treatment of Malliotakis’ candidacy. She listed mental illness, homelessness, education, school safety, property taxes, illegal conversions. “She held at least two press conferences a week where she presented plans, and reporters had other things on their mind, and would ask questions and ask questions until they landed on an answer they enjoyed, and everyone would write about that.”

“Up until that first debate, for whatever reason, she would get at every single press conference a question about the president. Her issues got buried,” Remauro said.

“Shame on some of the reporters, because they could have done their homework. She was out there...Too often reporters are becoming commentators and not just being reporters. And that’s what I’d say to those who say we didn’t have new ideas,” Remauro said.

“Nobody in the fourth estate wanted to talk about rape being up,” she said, touching on one of Malliotakis’ main lines of attack against de Blasio (rape reports are up slightly under de Blasio, which the mayor and NYPD officials have said is likely due to more awareness, encouragement, and willingness to report, something Remauro acknowledged as plausible).

Remauro went on to say that she feels good about the fact that the Malliotakis campaign clearly got de Blasio’s attention and pushed him on issues like sex crimes against women, homelessness, and property taxes that he will have to continue to work to address, possibly collaborating with Malliotakis in some way, she said, referring to a phone call the two had on Wednesday. She praised de Blasio as being “a good guy, a nice guy -- he wants to help the city.”

Other than a potential Assembly reelection bid in 2018, Remauro did not have anything specific to say in terms of what Malliotakis might do next, but said “the world is her oyster.” Malliotakis is “so intelligent, and she has great communication skills -- she can do whatever she wants,” Remauro added.

“If anyone can become the Republican mayor in my lifetime, it would be her,” she said of Malliotakis. “She has a lot of opportunity ahead of her. Her phone has been ringing.”

As for this mayoral bid that just ended, Remauro ultimately noted that Malliotakis “took votes from the mayor...she damaged him.”

“What could we have done differently?” she said, “Nothing. We did exactly what we could do.”

***
by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been corrected to reflect that Joe Lhota does not live in Manhattan, but is well-connected in the borough. Lhota lives in downtown Brooklyn.

Mapping the Mayoral: Where De Blasio and Malliotakis Each Did Well


wnyc map interactive

image: WNYC Data News team map of the 2017 mayoral race


Mayor Bill de Blasio was reelected for a second term on Tuesday with two-thirds of the vote in a low turnout election that saw only about 22 percent of registered New Yorkers cast a ballot for mayor.

There were few surprises across the five boroughs, and voter behavior was largely consistent with the 2013 mayoral election, in which de Blasio beat Republican Joe Lhota, 73 percent to 24 percent. But in certain enclaves of the city, de Blasio’s main challenger, Republican Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, built on Lhota’s vote share and cut into the mayor’s margin of victory. The neighborhood by neighborhood break down of the vote not only tracks similarly to 2013, it also shows racial and ethnic divisions that have been consistent throughout de Blasio’s term. Meanwhile, Malliotakis’ performance was buoyed by her home borough of Staten Island.

De Blasio received 66.16 percent of the vote, with Malliotakis pulling 27.67 percent, according to unofficial election night returns from the Board of Elections (absentee and affidavit ballots are still being counted). In absolute numbers, more New Yorkers voted on Tuesday -- 1.09 million -- than in 2013, when 1.08 million people cast ballots, which was 26 percent of registered voters at the time.

A glance at the CUNY mapping service electoral maps from 2013 and 2017 show that de Blasio did not manage to either keep or expand on his vote share in several parts of the city. Some neighborhoods in Staten Island that voted for him in 2013 went deep red on Tuesday to back his Republican challenger. Similarly, parts of southern Brooklyn flipped to Republican, as did a section of northeastern Queens. Locales that were already Republican went further that way to varying degrees.

mayoral election 2013v2017 large

“I think Malliotakis definitely did better in terms of vote share in most places” compared to Lhota, said Steve Romalewski, director of CUNY Graduate Center's mapping service. “The turnout is also higher than average in those areas, compared to the citywide average.”

As expected, Malliotakis’ strongest performance was on Staten Island, her home borough that she represents in the Assembly along with a sliver of Brooklyn. She won both the 50th and 51st Council districts, which cover the central and southern parts of the island. In the 49th Council district, represented by Debi Rose, a Democrat, de Blasio pulled votes along the northern shore. In total, Malliotakis received more than 67,000 votes on the island, while de Blasio got just over 24,000.

In southern Brooklyn, Malliotakis won more neighborhoods across four Council districts than Lhota did in 2013. “She did better there but voter turnout wasn’t that high,” Romalewski pointed out. Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay and Midwood all went for Malliotakis. Notably, although Malliotakis carried most of the areas covering City Council District 43, the competitive open seat in that district went to a Democrat, Justin Brannan. Brannan, a progressive who had worked under de Blasio at the Department of Education, distanced himself from the mayor publicly, though aides to de Blasio helped Brannan on the ground.

Other smaller pockets that skewed Republican were Bergen Beach, Mill Basin and some neighborhoods adjacent to Marine Park.  

Malliotakis also received significant support in Council District 32 in Queens, represented by Eric Ulrich, a moderate who is one of the three Republicans currently in the City Council. Breezy Point, Rockaway Park, Howard Beach, and Lindenwood chose Malliotakis, while the northern part of the district, including Ozone Park, Woodhaven and Richmond Hill, voted for de Blasio. Ulrich won reelection convincingly against a Democratic opponent.

District 30 in Queens saw the closest City Council race and is yet to be called in one candidate’s favor. Incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Crowley may be headed to a loss against challenger Robert Holden, a registered Democrat who lost the primary to Crowley but ran on multiple ballot lines, including Republican and Conservative, in the general. Holden has a 133 vote lead and Crowley has yet to concede the race as other ballots are counted and a potential recount looms. A similar dynamic played out on the mayoral level, with Malliotakis winning most of the district, which covers Glendale, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Woodhaven and Woodside.

Wide swathes of northeastern Queens, including College Point, Whitestone, Bayside and Little Neck, voted for Malliotakis. The neighborhoods fall within Council Member Paul Vallone’s constituency, District 19. Yet Vallone, a moderate Democrat, was comfortably reelected.  

Malliotakis also made inroads in Schuylerville, south of Pelham Bay Park in the East Bronx, in outgoing Council Member James Vacca’s 13th Council District.  

Manhattan voted almost entirely for de Blasio, save for swaths of the 4th Council District on the East Side, where Malliotakis won stretches along Museum Mile, and miniscule pockets in the 5th Council District. District 4 was one of the few Council seats with an open race, and one of only a handful with a Republican candidate running an assertive campaign, in which Democrat Keith Powers defeated Republican Rebecca Harary. [See map below from the WNYC radio Data News team]

“I think de Blasio did more than well enough in pretty much all the areas where people supported him in 2013,” Romalewski noted. The areas Malliotakis won are those with high percentages of white residents, though de Blasio did well in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan home to many white, liberal voters. Throughout the 2013 race and the mayor’s first term he has polled significantly higher among people of color than white people.

De Blasio did best on Tuesday in neighborhoods such as his home area of Park Slope, as well as in areas of central Brooklyn (Crown Heights, Clinton Hill, East Flatbush, and beyond), southeast Queens, the south and north Bronx, and upper Manhattan. These are the areas where his win was by the largest margins.

“The one thing I was surprised about was turnout,” Romalewski said, about the increase in the number of voters, if not the rate of voting. “That’s encouraging. It’s too early to say if it’s a trend but compared to going the other way, it’s good.” On Wednesday, de Blasio declared a “mandate” from the voters and said that a slight increase in overall turnout was indicative of a backlash against President Donald Trump.

“I don’t think you should get too hung up on percentage turnout,” Romalewski said, noting that the increase in the number of registered voters is affected by the Board of Election’s efforts to maintain the voter rolls and it’s hard to decipher truly how many new voters have been added. “I have more faith in looking at total voters as a measure of civic participation.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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