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Max Politics Podcast: UFT President Mike Mulgrew on Contract Negotiations, Charter Schools, & More


UFT President Michael Mulgrew (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


February 28, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: UFT President Mike Mulgrew on Contract Negotiations, Charter Schools, & More

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), joined the show to discuss his union's contract negotiations with the city, the governor's charter school expansion proposal, and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.


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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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Despite Growing Need, City Struggles to Fill and Expand Programs Dedicated to Combating Youth Unemployment


Mayor Adams at a youth employment event (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


The New York City Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) is struggling to fill and expand career programs dedicated to unemployed, out-of-school youth, despite a dramatic increase in their numbers during the pandemic.

According to a recent report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, unemployment among city residents aged 16 to 24 hit 17.9% in October 2022, a nearly 8 point increase from pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Those rates remain disproportionately high for people of color, with young adult unemployment among Asian New Yorkers more than doubling to 23.3%, surpassing the rate among Black youth. Unemployment was particularly high among young men 16-24, more than four times greater than the city's overall unemployment rate.

The comptroller's report put a magnifying glass over a population for which Mayor Eric Adams' concerns around economic recovery, underserved youth, and gun violence overlap. DYCD operates a number of job readiness and placement programs for youth, including two geared specifically toward out-of-school and out-of-work young adults (OSOW youth). Officials say such models can greatly improve chances of receiving a good paying job with an opportunity for advancement.

But while the numbers show the need is great, New York City government has had a difficult time recruiting participants to its programs. At a City Council oversight hearing on Monday, representatives for DYCD said they were laboring to fill the 2,300 available slots in their out-of-school and out-of-work programs let alone expand them, as members of the City Council suggested.

"While we know that the data does show that there's a significant need for opportunities for these populations, we also have seen on the ground that it's extremely challenging to recruit, engage and retain these young people," said Valerie Mulligan, DYCD's Deputy Commissioner of Youth Workforce Connect.

"Right now, we're focused on fully enrolling the slots that we do have, which is very challenging, and ensuring that the programs are successfully meeting the needs of youth that we're trying to reach," she testified to members of the Council's youth services and small business committees. The two committees were holding an oversight hearing and considering relevant legislation that would expand the city's Summer Youth Employment Program, particularly across city agencies.

There were an estimated 70,000-plus unemployed young people between 16 and 24 in New York City as of October, close to double pre-pandemic levels, according to the comptroller's report.

While DYCD is not the only agency focused on youth employment, it operates two of the only programs specifically targeting out-of-school and out-of-work young people, one of the most vulnerable and hardest to reach communities in the city.

One program, Advance & Earn, has two cohorts of 450 participants each that fill up every year, while the other program, Train & Earn, is not full yet, "but we're almost there," Mulligan said. Both programs offer job training, high school equivalency, and credentialing for out-of-school and out-of-work 16-24-year-olds. In February, DYCD opened a new Advance & Earn site in the Bronx, the borough with the highest unemployment and poverty rates.

But DYCD is not looking at expanding the number of slots, Mulligan said when asked about the high demand reflected in the city's unemployment data. "We're trying to balance making sure that the programs that we do have are really high quality, are really responsive to the needs of the young people that are in them, and that are attractive to young people."

The response didn't satisfy Council Member Althea Stevens, a Bronx Democrat and chair of the youth services committee, who co-chaired the hearing with the small business committee chair, Council Member Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat. "If we see these numbers rising, and you're saying now that the program isn't full, there's a disconnect," Stevens said, pressing for more information about how the agency was evaluating its program successes and needs.

"We're looking at how to make our programs as appealing to young people as possible, including considering what wages we pay through our programs, what types of trainings," Mulligan said.

She said part of the problem was that the pandemic created labor shortages that pushed traditionally minimum wage jobs to pay more, incentivizing young people to take short-term offers over more permanent career pathways in well-paying sectors. The economic instability and parallel housing insecurities exacerbated by the pandemic have made it harder to forgo immediate jobs for the time it takes to complete a DYCD program, she added.

Providers in those programs recruit participants through social media, traditional advertising, and local organizations that serve the same target communities. DYCD facilitates those community-based partnerships, assists in program design, and enlists participants and graduates in peer-to-peer engagement, officials said Monday. DYCD is also preparing a request for proposals for an additional training program under the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, they said.

DYCD representatives at the hearing could not provide details on the agency's spending on outreach and recruitment to fill program vacancies. "I think it's really important that we get that information," said Menin. "I just have to say this should be top line information that the agency has at a hearing like this, we're talking about how these programs work or don't work."

In 2021, the city's Disconnected Youth Task Force, empaneled by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson to examine the issue of out-of-school out-of-work youth, recommended the city target career pathways in high growth sectors, setting job planning benchmarks across the city's agency- and school-based programs, and appointing a single agency or position responsible for programming focused on this population. Mayor Adams has made workforce development and wrap-around youth support priorities of his first year-plus in office but implementation is still to be seen.

DYCD funding shrank in Mayor Adams’ January preliminary budget to $943 million, from $1.1 billion in the current fiscal year (FY2023), with more City Council discretionary dollars expected to be added when the budget is adopted, according to a DYCD spokesperson. Adams included an additional $1.1 million for the Train & Earn program, bringing total funding for it in the preliminary budget to $17.5 million. Another $3.5 million is included as a baseline for Advance & Earn with additional funding expected to be added later in the budget cycle, the spokesperson said. The program received $13.5 million in the current fiscal year. Adams’ preliminary budget will soon be the subject of weeks of City Council hearings and the two sides will negotiate a new city budget over the coming months before they must agree on a spending plan by the July 1 start of the new fiscal year.

According to Stevens, a former community organizer and service provider, a key factor dictating the success of a jobs program is ongoing engagement after the participant’s stint ends. According to DYCD, officials monitor providers' follow-up work but do not require standard approaches across programs — the follow-up can take many forms. "We really do encourage our providers to really work very diligently and ensuring that they're providing very supportive services to our young people during that follow-up period," Mulligan said.

But Stevens pointed out that there was "no real expectation" from DYCD of what form follow-up efforts should take. "That might be a problem," she said.

DYCD's most well-known jobs program, the much larger Summer Youth Employment Program, is also lauded as an entryway into career pathways, though it is geared more toward high school students and less focused on ongoing employment. Adams and the City Council expanded the program last year from 75,000 slots to 100,000, with a budget of $207.4 million, according to a DYCD spokesperson. Adams' preliminary budget for next fiscal year has $195.9 million for the program, with more funding expected to be added at the adoption of the budget, the spokesperson said.

"We must warn that many of the OSOW population continue to struggle to matriculate into SYEP opportunities," said Amanda Rosenblum, vice president of JobsFirstNYC, a workforce development consulting and advocacy group, before the Council committees Monday. "Additionally, the expansion of SYEP isn’t enough to support the economic mobility of young adults. Young Adults may develop basic professional skills through SYEP but it hasn’t historically changed their workforce outcomes."

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Preservation Trust and Beyond: Report Assesses NYCHA's Progress and Challenges in Executing 'Blueprint for Change'


A NYCHA building in Queens (photo: Governor's Office)


In July 2020, the New York City Housing Authority published “A Blueprint for Change” to address decades of organizational mismanagement, financial instability, and repeated crises that were affecting the health and wellbeing of the city’s roughly 500,000 public housing residents. Last year, NYCHA achieved one of the crucial steps from that plan as the state Legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul approved, with urging by NYCHA and city government, the creation of a new Public Housing Preservation Trust that will help raise billions of dollars for the distressed authority, where hundreds of buildings need immense capital repairs. 

Now, a new report from the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) analyzed NYCHA’s stabilization plan, particularly the Preservation Trust, and the hurdles the authority continues to face as it attempts to claw its way to sure footing and a state of good repair. 

Though the report points to promising potential for the Trust and the benefits it can deliver for NYCHA developments, it makes a stark assessment of the agency in charge — a public authority under the control of the mayor but regulated by the federal government and funded by all three levels of government.

“Perhaps the largest risk to the success of the Trust, and the other strategies around management reforms and reorganization outlined in the Blueprint, is NYCHA itself,” reads the report from IBO, an independent city agency. “The authority may struggle as an organization to implement the changes outlined in the plan—particularly the Trust, which is a complex and untested model that will take many years to implement. However, keeping the status quo is not a viable option for NYCHA or its residents.”

NYCHA had an estimated $40 billion in capital needs over five years for maintenance and repairs across its 175,000 apartments at the time the blueprint was released, with those needs growing by a projected $1 billion each year.

The authority had already found funding for new management and repairs at 62,000 apartments through the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) program, which brings public housing developments under private management so they can receive federal funding from the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program.

That left another 110,000 apartments that needed $18 billion in repairs, and NYCHA had only secured about $3.3 billion in capital funding at the time. The authority also estimated that it would need another roughly $7 billion for other improvements to community centers and green spaces, among other things, for a total of $25 billion.  

It is important to note that since 2019 NYCHA has also been under a federal monitor as part of an agreement between the de Blasio administration, NYCHA, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to improve the authority’s performance and address pressing infrastructure issues. That agreement was the result of a lead paint scandal, on top of many years of mismanagement, other scandals, disrepair, deficits, and dangerous conditions.

Mayor Eric Adams, a first-term Democrat, integrated NYCHA into his own housing plan, in a change from past administrations that had focused on it as a separate issue. And winning state approval for the Preservation Trust, which de Blasio had first sought, was the initial major step in moving the plan forward. Besides the Trust and PACT, the mayor’s housing plan contains no other major planks to bring in billions for capital repairs, but he has also stressed the importance of funding from the federal government.

The new Preservation Trust – which is a separate public entity that will receive long-term ground leases from NYCHA – will be able to access federal Tenant Protection Vouchers (TPVs), essentially doubling the federal subsidies that NYCHA currently receives. The Trust will then be able to issue bonds to raise billions of dollars for capital repairs.

Under the state legislation that created the trust, NYCHA is limited to turning over only 25,000 apartment units to the Trust – which will help the Trust raise about $3.4 billion for repairs. If all 110,000 apartments that aren’t under the PACT program eventually fall under the Trust, it could raise as much as $15 billion.

Recently departed NYCHA CEO and Chair Gregory Russ indicated in July 2022 that tenant votes on conversions to the Trust could be held early this year and that the process of financing developments would then begin by the end of this year or early 2024. In December, NYCHA published the final voting procedures for the Trust after a four-month engagement process.

“With the NYCHA Public Housing Preservation Trust, NYCHA residents finally have the power to determine the future of their homes,” Mayor Adams said in a statement at the time. “After decades of disinvestment in NYCHA that has led to crumbling buildings and deteriorating infrastructure, the Trust will unlock billions of dollars for desperately needed repairs.” Adams has repeatedly cited the Trust as one of his top accomplishments of his first year in office.

The IBO report points to many roadblocks to the success of the Trust, however. As it notes, NYCHA will require tenant approval before a development can be transferred to the Trust.

“To implement the Trust, NYCHA will need to earn the backing of residents in many developments, and whether residents will support transferring their developments to the Trust remains to be seen,” the report reads, pointing out that the Trust is an “untested” model and that there was some tenant opposition when the issue came up in Albany. “NYCHA has struggled with public engagement in the past, and mistrust and skepticism among NYCHA residents for the authority may make it difficult to obtain buy-in,” the report states. 

The Trust also needs more federal funding to work. Even with Democratic President Joe Biden at the helm, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate, they did not approve new funding for NYCHA despite trillions in spending on other infrastructure. The prospect of additional funding may now prove particularly difficult with a divided Congress after Republicans flipped control of the House in the midterms last year, though Democrats are nonetheless seeking public housing help. In January, U.S. Reps. Nydia Velazquez and Dan Goldman re-introduced the Public Housing Emergency Response Act, with co-sponsorship by other Democratic members of the city’s congressional delegation, which would provide $70 billion for public housing repairs across the country, including $32 billion dedicated to NYCHA. 

As the IBO report points out, the federal government would have to appropriate almost $500 million for the Tenant Protection Voucher (TPV) program for NYCHA to be able to transfer 25,000 units to the Preservation Trust. For 110,000 units, the required funding rises to $2.2 billion. The federal omnibus spending bill that was approved in December only included about $337 million for the TPV program nationally and though that is more than triple the previous allocations, it falls far below NYCHA’s requirements. On top of that, the city will also need HUD’s cooperation in dedicating TPVs to NYCHA, instead of using formula-based distribution nationally.

“This year’s allocation for the Tenant Protection Voucher program is encouraging, given historical funding levels for the program, but whether NYCHA can obtain all the tenant protection vouchers necessary for the Trust’s implementation will likely remain a source of uncertainty in the years to come,” the IBO report states. 

IBO also pointed out the benefits and risks of the Trust model.  

The pros include the ability to make long-term investments in NYCHA capital projects, decreasing pressure on the city’s budget to contribute to NYCHA, a greater level of public control than the PACT model, a greater voice for residents in the process, streamlined procurement, and easier approval from the federal government. 

The cons seem few. IBO noted that tenants have different rights under the Trust model, and pointed to ongoing concerns from advocates about legal protections. The report also notes that there exists a possibility that the Trust could default on its debts and face foreclosure, and its creditors “could potentially gain leasehold interest in the developments under the Trust, meaning a share in the right to operate the developments.” But the report also states that that is unlikely, that despite defaults the developments will still be owned by NYCHA, and that creditors are more likely to try to restructure the Trust’s debt while barely affecting tenants. 

Overall, the report notes that the city’s plans to transform NYCHA will depend on the ability of current and future officials to implement them, noting that plans from previous administrations have largely been unsuccessful. “All told…NYCHA has 38 Transformation programs it plans to carry out to change the organization, with 21 of these programs in the implementation phase and 7 programs already completed,” the report reads. “It remains to be seen whether NYCHA will successfully implement these changes and in what timeframe.” 

Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, has issued similar warnings about the success of the Trust. “If NYCHA’s current operating practices and policies are imported wholesale to the Trust without changes, its effectiveness will be severely limited,” said Sean Campion, senior research associate at CBC, in testimony before the State Assembly Standing Committee on Housing in December 2020. CBC has warned for years that many thousands of NYCHA buildings and units could soon be more expensive to renovate than the cost of new construction. In fact, two Manhattan NYCHA complexes are now reconsidering the idea of demolition and new construction over repairs, Politico reported this past week.

While the Preservation Trust has yet to begin operating in earnest, the city is continuing the process of PACT conversions. In January, NYCHA announced the selection of developers under the PACT program to address $189.3 million in repairs at 10 buildings in Central and East Harlem. This month, the agency announced two more agreements with developers to provide $85 million in repairs at Metro North Plaza and Gaylord White Houses in East Harlem and $128.5 million in repairs to developments in the Northeast Bronx.

Also in January, Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul announced the first planning phase to replace 335 elevators at 20 NYCHA developments under a $300 million agreement with the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York approved in April last year. 

Besides IBO, the city’s efforts also face scrutiny from Comptroller Brad Lander and the New York City Council. This week, Lander announced that his office – at the recommendation of the Comptroller’s NYCHA resident audit committee – would audit NYCHA’s repair process and eviction rates at RAD/PACT developments.

“Residents are the experts on what is broken in their homes, and their insight is an integral part of the oversight process to ensure that NYCHA is meeting its obligations,” Lander said in a statement announcing the audits. “Problems with the repairs process and concerns about rising evictions rose to the top in our conversations, and our auditors will be diving in on the details to understand what’s happening and what needs improvement.”

Next week, the City Council is set to hold an oversight hearing on air quality in NYCHA apartments while also considering a resolution introduced by Council Member Alexa Avilés, chair of the Council’s public housing committee, which calls on the state to fund its share of NYCHA’s annual capital costs.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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