Government Gotham Gazette is an online publication covering New York policy and politics as well as news on public safety, transportation, education, finance and more. https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion 2023-03-28T11:36:07+00:00 Webmaster webmaster@gothamgazette.com Joomla! - Open Source Content Management 3 Ways the Next New York State Budget Must Lift Up Communities of Color 2023-03-28T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-28T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11897-new-york-state-budget-communities-color Valerie White vwhite@gg.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-ways-nny.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p> Economic development with a focus on MWBEs (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As Governor Hochul and lawmakers in Albany work toward a new state budget, meaningful conversations are occurring on a wide range of critical issues from housing to workforce development to sustainability to health care and more. New York has long been at the forefront of advancing consequential progressive policies in these and other areas. But given the current political dynamic and the historic diversity of our state government, we have a tremendous opportunity to leverage this important process to address long-standing inequities that have persisted across New York. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Take housing, for example. We know that New York is in a housing crisis. Governor Hochul has proposed an ambitious plan to create 800,000 new homes across the state over ten years. While some suburban lawmakers have pushed back on the Governor’s Housing Compact, falsely claiming it will be the end of single-family homes, the plan must move forward.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But it also has to go further.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Homeownership has been a critical driver of generational wealth, but that door was closed to Black, Latino, and Asian New Yorkers historically. To help close the racial wealth gap, the state must restore funding for the Homeownership Protection Program (HOPP) and introduce other mechanisms to grow and protect homeownership, particularly among New Yorkers of color. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We also can’t forget about our existing affordable housing stock. That means replacing the expired J-51 program with a viable alternative that will facilitate the preservation of and needed capital improvements to affordable rental homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When it comes to our fragile economic recovery, small businesses – especially minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBEs) – continue to lag behind. New York State has the ability and responsibility to make it easier for minority- and women-owned business enterprises to do business, including by enacting the Governor’s proposal to increase the discretionary purchase threshold for MWBEs to $1.5 million from its current levels of $1 million in New York City and $500,000 across the rest of the state. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Finally, we have seen how low-income New Yorkers and New Yorkers of color continue to be worse-off than their neighbors when it comes to the quality of the air and water in their communities, and when it comes to health outcomes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In recent months, New York State Homes and Community Renewal announced the Climate Friendly Homes Fund (CFHF), which will invest $250 million to electrify at least 10,000 units of multifamily housing in economically disadvantaged communities. This is a historic step, and one New York should expand upon. For the sake of future generations of New Yorkers, it is imperative the state identify and implement other promising opportunities to make our communities more sustainable. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This month is vitally important in terms of determining who we are as a state and where we are going in the future. As the leader of a non-profit organization that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to create affordable housing, help New Yorkers buy their first homes, support small businesses, and expand sustainability measures in communities from New York City to Buffalo, I know what it will take to achieve all we’ve talked about. But it is so important that we succeed, and I am confident we can get it done together. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Valerie White is the Senior Executive Director of LISC NY. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/LISC_NYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@LISC_NYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-ways-nny.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p> Economic development with a focus on MWBEs (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As Governor Hochul and lawmakers in Albany work toward a new state budget, meaningful conversations are occurring on a wide range of critical issues from housing to workforce development to sustainability to health care and more. New York has long been at the forefront of advancing consequential progressive policies in these and other areas. But given the current political dynamic and the historic diversity of our state government, we have a tremendous opportunity to leverage this important process to address long-standing inequities that have persisted across New York. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Take housing, for example. We know that New York is in a housing crisis. Governor Hochul has proposed an ambitious plan to create 800,000 new homes across the state over ten years. While some suburban lawmakers have pushed back on the Governor’s Housing Compact, falsely claiming it will be the end of single-family homes, the plan must move forward.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But it also has to go further.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Homeownership has been a critical driver of generational wealth, but that door was closed to Black, Latino, and Asian New Yorkers historically. To help close the racial wealth gap, the state must restore funding for the Homeownership Protection Program (HOPP) and introduce other mechanisms to grow and protect homeownership, particularly among New Yorkers of color. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We also can’t forget about our existing affordable housing stock. That means replacing the expired J-51 program with a viable alternative that will facilitate the preservation of and needed capital improvements to affordable rental homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When it comes to our fragile economic recovery, small businesses – especially minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBEs) – continue to lag behind. New York State has the ability and responsibility to make it easier for minority- and women-owned business enterprises to do business, including by enacting the Governor’s proposal to increase the discretionary purchase threshold for MWBEs to $1.5 million from its current levels of $1 million in New York City and $500,000 across the rest of the state. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Finally, we have seen how low-income New Yorkers and New Yorkers of color continue to be worse-off than their neighbors when it comes to the quality of the air and water in their communities, and when it comes to health outcomes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In recent months, New York State Homes and Community Renewal announced the Climate Friendly Homes Fund (CFHF), which will invest $250 million to electrify at least 10,000 units of multifamily housing in economically disadvantaged communities. This is a historic step, and one New York should expand upon. For the sake of future generations of New Yorkers, it is imperative the state identify and implement other promising opportunities to make our communities more sustainable. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This month is vitally important in terms of determining who we are as a state and where we are going in the future. As the leader of a non-profit organization that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to create affordable housing, help New Yorkers buy their first homes, support small businesses, and expand sustainability measures in communities from New York City to Buffalo, I know what it will take to achieve all we’ve talked about. But it is so important that we succeed, and I am confident we can get it done together. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Valerie White is the Senior Executive Director of LISC NY. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/LISC_NYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@LISC_NYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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New York’s Child Tax Credit Choice 2023-03-28T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-28T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11904-new-york-child-tax-credit-state-budget Daniel Hemel dhemel@gg.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/child-tax-credit.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Gov. Hochul in the classroom (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When does childhood begin? For at least a half-century, that question has been one of the most contentious in American politics, with participants in debates over abortion and reproductive rights variously arguing that conception, viability, birth, or any number of other milestones marks the point at which a fetus becomes a child entitled to the full protection of the law.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But pretty much everyone agrees that whenever childhood begins, it’s well before age 4.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yet under New York law, children under the age of 4 are categorically ineligible for the state child tax credit, making New York the only state in the nation with a child credit that excludes infants and toddlers. Both the State Senate and Assembly endorsed proposals this month that would fix that flaw, but Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget for fiscal year 2024 maintains the exclusion of New York’s youngest children from the credit, which maxes out at $330 per year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the governor and Legislature race to finalize the fiscal year 2024 budget by the April 1 deadline, Hochul and state lawmakers face a choice: Will they seize the opportunity to extend the full child credit to New York’s youngest and poorest kids? Or will infants and toddlers lose out once again to well-heeled industry groups in the Albany budget scrum?</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The exclusion of infants and toddlers dates back to 2006, when New York lawmakers first enacted a state credit for families with kids in the 4-to-16 age range. No one has offered a plausible rationale — other than cost saving — for the exclusion. Social science research </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/202211/long-term-effects-aid-children-low-income-families" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">indicates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that early childhood is the period in which material deprivation is most harmful to a child’s long-term development — and thus the life stage at which low-income families are most in need of financial support.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York’s child credit has another curious feature: low-income families with kids ages 4 through 16 receive a smaller amount than middle- and upper-middle-income families with children in that age range. As a result of this “phase-in” — which the Senate and Assembly proposals would leave in place — a family with two children must earn at least $16,333 to receive the full credit. The neediest families — those with no income — receive only $100 per eligible child.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University </span><a href="https://otda.ny.gov/news/meetings/attachments/2023-01-12-CPRAC-Reforming-Child-Credit.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">estimates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that extending the credit to children under four and eliminating the phase-in feature would cost $270 million to $320 million per year. That’s a drop in the bucket relative to Hochul’s $227 billion budget plan — well less than 0.2% of the total.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the short-term, that investment would make a meaningful dent in New York’s childhood poverty problem, lifting roughly 40,000 kids — and their families — above the poverty threshold, as defined by the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And in the long-term, as the Columbia researchers showed, child tax credits for low-income families yield benefits to society that far exceed the costs. Kids whose families receive credits and similar cash transfers are more likely to </span><a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2356444" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">finish college</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and less likely to </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w26942" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">end up in prison</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Their </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">lifetime earnings</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> rise as well.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So why has the governor rebuffed proposals to expand the state credit thus far?</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hochul hasn’t said she opposes the extension of the credit to infants and toddlers, and she hasn’t defended the phase-in feature that prevents low-income families from claiming the full amount. Instead, she has decided that other tax and spending items take priority — such as her proposal to increase the state’s film and television tax credit by </span><a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/kathy-hochul-new-york-film-tax-credit-increase-700-million-1235509626/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$380 million</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that the governor is putting film and TV producers before infants and toddlers. For the price tag of her film and TV tax incentive plan, she could extend the child credit to the youngest New Yorkers, eliminate the income phase-in, and still have tens of millions of dollars to spare.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unfortunately, infants and toddlers can’t hire high-priced lobbyists to do their bidding in Albany. And low-income families lack the political power that industries like film and television wield.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hopefully, the governor will decide that even if the political benefits are small, there is a compelling moral case for extending the child credit to low-income families with young children. If she decides instead that favored industries should take priority over low-income families, she might not face significant political blowback. But she will have to face her conscience.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***<br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Daniel Hemel is a law professor at New York University. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/danieljhemel" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@danieljhemel</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/child-tax-credit.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Gov. Hochul in the classroom (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When does childhood begin? For at least a half-century, that question has been one of the most contentious in American politics, with participants in debates over abortion and reproductive rights variously arguing that conception, viability, birth, or any number of other milestones marks the point at which a fetus becomes a child entitled to the full protection of the law.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But pretty much everyone agrees that whenever childhood begins, it’s well before age 4.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yet under New York law, children under the age of 4 are categorically ineligible for the state child tax credit, making New York the only state in the nation with a child credit that excludes infants and toddlers. Both the State Senate and Assembly endorsed proposals this month that would fix that flaw, but Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget for fiscal year 2024 maintains the exclusion of New York’s youngest children from the credit, which maxes out at $330 per year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the governor and Legislature race to finalize the fiscal year 2024 budget by the April 1 deadline, Hochul and state lawmakers face a choice: Will they seize the opportunity to extend the full child credit to New York’s youngest and poorest kids? Or will infants and toddlers lose out once again to well-heeled industry groups in the Albany budget scrum?</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The exclusion of infants and toddlers dates back to 2006, when New York lawmakers first enacted a state credit for families with kids in the 4-to-16 age range. No one has offered a plausible rationale — other than cost saving — for the exclusion. Social science research </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/202211/long-term-effects-aid-children-low-income-families" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">indicates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that early childhood is the period in which material deprivation is most harmful to a child’s long-term development — and thus the life stage at which low-income families are most in need of financial support.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York’s child credit has another curious feature: low-income families with kids ages 4 through 16 receive a smaller amount than middle- and upper-middle-income families with children in that age range. As a result of this “phase-in” — which the Senate and Assembly proposals would leave in place — a family with two children must earn at least $16,333 to receive the full credit. The neediest families — those with no income — receive only $100 per eligible child.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University </span><a href="https://otda.ny.gov/news/meetings/attachments/2023-01-12-CPRAC-Reforming-Child-Credit.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">estimates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that extending the credit to children under four and eliminating the phase-in feature would cost $270 million to $320 million per year. That’s a drop in the bucket relative to Hochul’s $227 billion budget plan — well less than 0.2% of the total.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the short-term, that investment would make a meaningful dent in New York’s childhood poverty problem, lifting roughly 40,000 kids — and their families — above the poverty threshold, as defined by the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And in the long-term, as the Columbia researchers showed, child tax credits for low-income families yield benefits to society that far exceed the costs. Kids whose families receive credits and similar cash transfers are more likely to </span><a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2356444" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">finish college</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and less likely to </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w26942" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">end up in prison</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Their </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">lifetime earnings</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> rise as well.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So why has the governor rebuffed proposals to expand the state credit thus far?</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hochul hasn’t said she opposes the extension of the credit to infants and toddlers, and she hasn’t defended the phase-in feature that prevents low-income families from claiming the full amount. Instead, she has decided that other tax and spending items take priority — such as her proposal to increase the state’s film and television tax credit by </span><a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/kathy-hochul-new-york-film-tax-credit-increase-700-million-1235509626/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$380 million</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that the governor is putting film and TV producers before infants and toddlers. For the price tag of her film and TV tax incentive plan, she could extend the child credit to the youngest New Yorkers, eliminate the income phase-in, and still have tens of millions of dollars to spare.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unfortunately, infants and toddlers can’t hire high-priced lobbyists to do their bidding in Albany. And low-income families lack the political power that industries like film and television wield.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hopefully, the governor will decide that even if the political benefits are small, there is a compelling moral case for extending the child credit to low-income families with young children. If she decides instead that favored industries should take priority over low-income families, she might not face significant political blowback. But she will have to face her conscience.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***<br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Daniel Hemel is a law professor at New York University. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/danieljhemel" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@danieljhemel</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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Albany: Keep the Cameras Rolling, Expand the New York Film Credit 2023-03-27T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-27T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11903-new-york-film-tv-tax-credit-budget Flo Mitchell-Brown fmbrown@gg.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/albany-cameras-rolling.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>At the shoot (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Working in this industry for over two decades, I’ve seen what it takes for a viral television show or blockbuster film to be made. While people normally consider the creatives of the film industry — actors, writers, and producers — there are thousands of jobs, just like mine, behind the scenes that help small and large-scale productions go off without a hitch. While the film industry itself employs tens of thousands of people in New York, the larger, parallel ecosystem that helps these glamorous productions run like a well-oiled machine, employs even more. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Part of what has helped build film and TV production into a multi-billion-dollar industry in New York is the New York Film Tax Credit program, which incentivizes production companies to invest in New York by choosing to film here. Over the past few decades, this program has been critical in creating quality jobs for New Yorkers, jobs that are largely unionized, high paying, and many do not require a four-year degree. That’s why it’s absolutely critical that state government in Albany pass Governor Hochul’s film tax credit expansion, as it will help to support tens of thousands of high-quality jobs that New Yorkers need. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Research from the </span><a href="https://www.nypa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mitchell-Moss-Study.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York Production Alliance</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and NYU Wagner’s Rubin Center for Transportation Policy and Management highlights how directly the economic impacts of New York’s film industry have been tied to the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit program.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prior to the credit’s introduction in 2004, New York struggled to keep up with competition from other states and countries offering lower costs for film production. But from 2004-2018, statewide wage-and-salary employment in film and TV production rose by 52.3%, resulting in an increase of 17,000 jobs. With an increased demand for such roles as the sector has grown in the state, Governor Hochul’s tax credit plan also allocates funds to maintain and expand the high-quality workforce we have here in New York, including career development programs to make film sets reflect the diversity of New York.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Additionally, the enactment of the tax credit helped to pave the way for increased investment in production facilities, both old and new. This has resulted in the creation of over 6,000 jobs (both direct and indirect) in 2019-2022 alone. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As these tax credits offset the higher costs of these productions, they also result in direct investment in the communities in which they film. This supports the hundreds of small businesses and jobs that exist in order to keep the productions up and running. From restaurants that cater meals to supplies to build sets, there are many necessities for the film industry to execute projects.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve seen how resilient the New York City film industry is in the darkest days our city has lived through. While many industries in 2008 saw a downturn, film went up over 50%. While Hurricane Sandy temporarily halted production and live audience filming, the industry came back stronger than ever less than a week after it made landfall. Most recently, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept people apart for months, film came back earlier than a number of other industries, thanks to the implementation of extensive health and safety protocols. But, none of this happened overnight, and it is attributed to thousands of New Yorkers across the film industry that supported one another, bringing entertainment to those around the country and the world. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">State leaders: let’s not let the curtain go down on an industry that has brought such economic and cultural value to our state.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Flo Mitchell-Brown is the Head of Industry Engagement at Extreme Reach and the chair of the New York Production Alliance. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/NYPAnys" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@NYPAnys</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/albany-cameras-rolling.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>At the shoot (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Working in this industry for over two decades, I’ve seen what it takes for a viral television show or blockbuster film to be made. While people normally consider the creatives of the film industry — actors, writers, and producers — there are thousands of jobs, just like mine, behind the scenes that help small and large-scale productions go off without a hitch. While the film industry itself employs tens of thousands of people in New York, the larger, parallel ecosystem that helps these glamorous productions run like a well-oiled machine, employs even more. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Part of what has helped build film and TV production into a multi-billion-dollar industry in New York is the New York Film Tax Credit program, which incentivizes production companies to invest in New York by choosing to film here. Over the past few decades, this program has been critical in creating quality jobs for New Yorkers, jobs that are largely unionized, high paying, and many do not require a four-year degree. That’s why it’s absolutely critical that state government in Albany pass Governor Hochul’s film tax credit expansion, as it will help to support tens of thousands of high-quality jobs that New Yorkers need. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Research from the </span><a href="https://www.nypa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mitchell-Moss-Study.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York Production Alliance</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and NYU Wagner’s Rubin Center for Transportation Policy and Management highlights how directly the economic impacts of New York’s film industry have been tied to the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit program.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prior to the credit’s introduction in 2004, New York struggled to keep up with competition from other states and countries offering lower costs for film production. But from 2004-2018, statewide wage-and-salary employment in film and TV production rose by 52.3%, resulting in an increase of 17,000 jobs. With an increased demand for such roles as the sector has grown in the state, Governor Hochul’s tax credit plan also allocates funds to maintain and expand the high-quality workforce we have here in New York, including career development programs to make film sets reflect the diversity of New York.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Additionally, the enactment of the tax credit helped to pave the way for increased investment in production facilities, both old and new. This has resulted in the creation of over 6,000 jobs (both direct and indirect) in 2019-2022 alone. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As these tax credits offset the higher costs of these productions, they also result in direct investment in the communities in which they film. This supports the hundreds of small businesses and jobs that exist in order to keep the productions up and running. From restaurants that cater meals to supplies to build sets, there are many necessities for the film industry to execute projects.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve seen how resilient the New York City film industry is in the darkest days our city has lived through. While many industries in 2008 saw a downturn, film went up over 50%. While Hurricane Sandy temporarily halted production and live audience filming, the industry came back stronger than ever less than a week after it made landfall. Most recently, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept people apart for months, film came back earlier than a number of other industries, thanks to the implementation of extensive health and safety protocols. But, none of this happened overnight, and it is attributed to thousands of New Yorkers across the film industry that supported one another, bringing entertainment to those around the country and the world. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">State leaders: let’s not let the curtain go down on an industry that has brought such economic and cultural value to our state.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Flo Mitchell-Brown is the Head of Industry Engagement at Extreme Reach and the chair of the New York Production Alliance. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/NYPAnys" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@NYPAnys</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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He Won Key New York Environmental Battles That Reverberate Today: Celebrating Al Butzel 2023-03-25T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-25T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11901-environment-climate-al-butzel-westway-storm-king Michael Gerrard & Charles Komanoff mauthors@gothamgazette.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/4-help-env.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Al Butzel at City Hall in 2009 (photo: Tracy Collins <a href="https://www.instagram.com/threecee/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@threecee</a>)</p> <hr /> <p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A towering figure in New York environmental law for the past half-century, Albert K. Butzel is relocating to Seattle to be closer to family. Al and his wife Brenda depart this weekend. We worked alongside Al over the years and offer our reflections on his enormous impact below.</span></i></p> <p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">First, Charles Komanoff, a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Then, attorney Michael Gerrard, </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.</span></i></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><b>From Charles:<br /></b><b><i><br /></i></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">I met Al nearly 50 years ago. It was late 1973, a fraught but exciting time. My stint as energy analyst at New York City’s Environmental Protection Administration (as the Department of Environmental Protection was then called) was coming to a close, with the technicolor mayoral torch of John Lindsay passing to the stolid clutches of mayor-elect Abe Beame.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I had a secret to share with Al, concerning a contested power project Con Edison had been trying for a decade to build in the Hudson Highlands 50 miles north of mid-Manhattan. Al was attorney for the gentry who had won the landmark 1965 “Scenic Hudson” decision granting citizens legal standing to defend natural or historic places. Con Ed had subsequently modified its design to mitigate the project’s intrusion on Storm King Mountain. After years of stasis, ground-breaking was imminent. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lindsay’s environmental agency was overseeing the permitting. Along with an attorney there, Ken Semmel, I had devised an ingenious alternative, pairing combustion turbines with heat-recovering generators making both electricity and steam. Our configuration might actually compete with the Con Ed plan on cost, efficiency, and reliability. Around Thanksgiving, City Hall cleared the agency to send Con Ed our plan for comment. It was time to open a public channel.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I contacted Al. Meeting was a bit like looking in a mirror. We were probably both surprised at the other’s relative youth. I was 26 but looked closer to 20. Al, in his mid-30s, was just as skinny and still boyish. He was rumpled, easy-going, and affable. He spoke with a lilt, sometimes laughing at his own words, but he was steely and, at the end of the day, no-nonsense.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I described our concept. Al quickly grasped that our plan appeared to beat Con Edison at its own game. It would burn less oil, make less pollution, be buildable in stages, and, sited in Manhattan and the Bronx, be more reliable. It may have been Al who deduced that municipal tax revenues from our plan could neutralize criticism that we were advancing the economic interests of wealthy landowners.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That day launched a collaboration lasting half-a-dozen years. In short order, Al arranged for me to present my Storm King alternative to a Washington audience that included Westchester member of Congress and conservationist Dick Ottinger — and to leak our analysis to New York Times reporter Pete Kihss, who cornered Con Ed into preparing a response. When no deep flaws emerged, our plan gained the support of the state attorney general, in mid-1974.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">From then to 1980, the Storm King project died a slow death, its demise multiply determined. New York’s near-bankruptcy, cratering power demand, Con Ed’s 1977 transmission-caused blackout, fears of larval striped bass destruction from Storm King’s massive water pumps, all played a part. Ken’s and my labors possibly rate an historical footnote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Al’s work on Storm King as litigator and strategist was a different matter. For years after the “Scenic Hudson” decision, when Con Ed still had economic muscle to push the project forward, he kept the utility off-balance. His unflagging confidence gave Hudson River defenders faith we could prevail. Al always insisted that a better solution lay in store that wouldn’t mar the Hudson Highlands. He was right.</span></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><b><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/storm-king-hwy-mountain-from.jpg" width="450" /><br /></b>Storm King Mountain (photo: Charles Komanoff)</p> <p><b>***<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It wasn’t long before the two of us took up an even bigger issue, nuclear power. The Long Island Lighting Company was juggling two reactor ventures on Suffolk County’s north shore. Shoreham had a construction permit from the federal Atomic Energy Commission, but Jamesport, a much larger project 20 miles east, still faced public hearings. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It was 1975, four years before anti-nuke activism would be turbocharged by the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania. Oil-dependent, tech-rich Long Island was hospitable to nukes. Ann Carl, a biologist from the north shore village of Lloyd Harbor, had other ideas. Channeling dissidents like Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, Ann considered nuclear power expensive and unnecessary and wanted Lilco to prioritize energy conservation and efficiency before Jamesport. She hired Al, and Al retained me.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It didn’t take us long to apply what we had learned from our Con Ed work. Knowing that Storm King depended on cheap, surplus nuclear electricity to overcome power lost from pushing Hudson River water uphill to a reservoir each night, we peered behind the atomic curtain. Rather quickly, we saw that the nuclear power industry, a juggernaut from the outside, was reeling from cascading regulatory changes and delays that piled up carrying costs. On paper, spiraling oil prices validated more nuclear power from plants like Jamesport. In real life, the combination of costly oil-fired power and the struggle to build two reactors at once pushed up Lilco’s electric rates, driving down demand and drying up financing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These critiques, obvious in hindsight, were heretical at the time. Al never shied from them. I’ll say he was a born contrarian, a lover of undisturbed nature, and a spoiler for a good fight. Riding into battle with Al, you had the edge. There seemed no argument he couldn’t win, no trap he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit. Not just the smartest guy in the room, he was the most effective. </span></p> <p><b>***<br /></b><b>From Michael:</b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />When I graduated from law school in 1978 I joined the boutique environmental law firm Berle, Butzel &amp; Kass. It mostly represented community groups fighting projects that threatened to worsen local pollution. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Along with Peter Berle, who would later become state environmental commissioner, Al taught me how to try a case. Two were particularly memorable. The first concerned a proposed U.S. Postal Service vehicle maintenance garage in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Al was the lead lawyer, and he contended that the Postal Service's environmental impact assessment was inadequate because, among other things, it failed to consider an alternative site that had been proposed by a young, flamboyant real estate developer named Donald Trump. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The federal judge hearing the case stopped Al's argument at that point and said, at some length, that Trump was a blowhard who had never really built anything and never would, and his proposals should not be taken seriously. Al stood there stoically while the judge lashed into him, and then proceeded calmly to try the case. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The other, far weightier case concerned Westway. For close to a decade, Al was the lead lawyer fighting this proposed underground interstate highway along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side, which opponents branded “a massive real estate development project masquerading as a highway.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He first contested it on the grounds that it would bring more traffic and therefore air pollution into Manhattan’s congested streets — an argument developed by his expert, Brian Ketcham, the engineer who had devised a plan in the waning days of the Lindsay administration to meet federal clean air standards through a combination of policy carrots and sticks designed to curb motor vehicle traffic.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ketcham’s thesis was an early expression of the paradigm now known as induced traffic, which holds that expanding road capacity temporarily makes driving easier and more efficient, up until the increased traffic volumes cancel the initial boost in vehicle speeds. This argument is today nearly gospel (except among hardened, senior highway officials), but in the 1970s it was no match for the ridicule from the state transportation officials pursuing Westway.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The trial on the induced traffic issue took place before a hearing officer of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in one of the twin towers of the original World Trade Center. The lead lawyer on the other side was Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., a legendary trial lawyer from the even more legendary law firm of Cravath, Swaine &amp; Moore. (Ordinarily the state attorney general’s office would have been representing the state, but the attorney general at the time, Bob Abrams, opposed Westway and made the state hire outside counsel.) The first cross examination I ever conducted was of an expert witness called by Schwarz; that was intimidating, to say the least, but Al coolly coached me through it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the major issues in the case was whether there was enough parking capacity in Manhattan’s commercial garages to hold all the cars Al said would be attracted by the highway; if there weren’t, maybe they wouldn’t come. The official numbers in the city’s records indicated there were enough, but Al didn’t trust them. So Al spent several weeks riding around Manhattan on his bicycle, stopping at every parking garage and writing down the number of spaces it had posted. The other partners in the firm questioned whether this was the best use of a senior lawyer’s time (when I became a senior lawyer myself, I realized that of course it wasn’t), but Al was insistent on getting the numbers right.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The hearing officer (a retired upstate judge) recommended that the permit be granted; the DEC Commissioner (reporting to Governor Hugh Carey, a strong supporter of Westway) signed the permit. Thus ended our traffic case.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Al then pivoted to the aquatic biology he had learned in the Storm King dispute. To Judge Thomas Griesa of the federal district court for the Southern District of New York, who was hearing the lawsuit, he brought fisheries biologists who testified that creating the 220 acres of new landfill to undergird Westway would grievously harm the habitat of the striped bass that spawned upriver before leaving the Hudson to populate New York and New England bays and sounds. Under Al’s questioning, the biologists stressed the potential devastation, highlighting the highway’s appropriation of ten percent of the river’s expanse along Manhattan’s west side.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The biggest question in the trial was whether the Army Corps of Engineers had been intentionally misleading when it said in its environmental impact statement that this stretch of the Hudson River was a “biological wasteland.” From time to time plain brown envelopes containing internal Corps documents would appear under the door of our law firm when we entered in the morning. We never learned who slipped these documents to us; we called the source “deep fish.” But the papers helped us prove that the Corps had indeed been misleading. Judge Griesa pronounced from the bench, “I’ve thrown people into jail for securities fraud for less.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During this time, Al made sure to coordinate his public push to protect the river with appeals from transit advocates led by NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign to use Westway funds to bolster the transit financing that activist MTA Chair Richard Ravitch was cobbling from state and federal funding sources. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After two long trials, Al, our colleague Mitch Bernard, and the Westway opponents prevailed. The massive highway was shelved and eventually replaced by the boulevard-type West Street and the parallel Hudson River Greenway, now the nation’s most heavily used bicycle path. And nearly a billion dollars — a critical infusion at the time — was traded in from the highway project to improve the city’s mass transit.</span></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The two of us owe Al a great deal. More importantly, so do New York’s urban environment, the surrounding natural world, and all who call New York home.</span></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Charles Komanoff is a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Michael Gerrard is an attorney who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.</span></p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/4-help-env.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Al Butzel at City Hall in 2009 (photo: Tracy Collins <a href="https://www.instagram.com/threecee/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@threecee</a>)</p> <hr /> <p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A towering figure in New York environmental law for the past half-century, Albert K. Butzel is relocating to Seattle to be closer to family. Al and his wife Brenda depart this weekend. We worked alongside Al over the years and offer our reflections on his enormous impact below.</span></i></p> <p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">First, Charles Komanoff, a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Then, attorney Michael Gerrard, </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.</span></i></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><b>From Charles:<br /></b><b><i><br /></i></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">I met Al nearly 50 years ago. It was late 1973, a fraught but exciting time. My stint as energy analyst at New York City’s Environmental Protection Administration (as the Department of Environmental Protection was then called) was coming to a close, with the technicolor mayoral torch of John Lindsay passing to the stolid clutches of mayor-elect Abe Beame.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I had a secret to share with Al, concerning a contested power project Con Edison had been trying for a decade to build in the Hudson Highlands 50 miles north of mid-Manhattan. Al was attorney for the gentry who had won the landmark 1965 “Scenic Hudson” decision granting citizens legal standing to defend natural or historic places. Con Ed had subsequently modified its design to mitigate the project’s intrusion on Storm King Mountain. After years of stasis, ground-breaking was imminent. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lindsay’s environmental agency was overseeing the permitting. Along with an attorney there, Ken Semmel, I had devised an ingenious alternative, pairing combustion turbines with heat-recovering generators making both electricity and steam. Our configuration might actually compete with the Con Ed plan on cost, efficiency, and reliability. Around Thanksgiving, City Hall cleared the agency to send Con Ed our plan for comment. It was time to open a public channel.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I contacted Al. Meeting was a bit like looking in a mirror. We were probably both surprised at the other’s relative youth. I was 26 but looked closer to 20. Al, in his mid-30s, was just as skinny and still boyish. He was rumpled, easy-going, and affable. He spoke with a lilt, sometimes laughing at his own words, but he was steely and, at the end of the day, no-nonsense.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I described our concept. Al quickly grasped that our plan appeared to beat Con Edison at its own game. It would burn less oil, make less pollution, be buildable in stages, and, sited in Manhattan and the Bronx, be more reliable. It may have been Al who deduced that municipal tax revenues from our plan could neutralize criticism that we were advancing the economic interests of wealthy landowners.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That day launched a collaboration lasting half-a-dozen years. In short order, Al arranged for me to present my Storm King alternative to a Washington audience that included Westchester member of Congress and conservationist Dick Ottinger — and to leak our analysis to New York Times reporter Pete Kihss, who cornered Con Ed into preparing a response. When no deep flaws emerged, our plan gained the support of the state attorney general, in mid-1974.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">From then to 1980, the Storm King project died a slow death, its demise multiply determined. New York’s near-bankruptcy, cratering power demand, Con Ed’s 1977 transmission-caused blackout, fears of larval striped bass destruction from Storm King’s massive water pumps, all played a part. Ken’s and my labors possibly rate an historical footnote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Al’s work on Storm King as litigator and strategist was a different matter. For years after the “Scenic Hudson” decision, when Con Ed still had economic muscle to push the project forward, he kept the utility off-balance. His unflagging confidence gave Hudson River defenders faith we could prevail. Al always insisted that a better solution lay in store that wouldn’t mar the Hudson Highlands. He was right.</span></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><b><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/storm-king-hwy-mountain-from.jpg" width="450" /><br /></b>Storm King Mountain (photo: Charles Komanoff)</p> <p><b>***<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It wasn’t long before the two of us took up an even bigger issue, nuclear power. The Long Island Lighting Company was juggling two reactor ventures on Suffolk County’s north shore. Shoreham had a construction permit from the federal Atomic Energy Commission, but Jamesport, a much larger project 20 miles east, still faced public hearings. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It was 1975, four years before anti-nuke activism would be turbocharged by the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania. Oil-dependent, tech-rich Long Island was hospitable to nukes. Ann Carl, a biologist from the north shore village of Lloyd Harbor, had other ideas. Channeling dissidents like Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, Ann considered nuclear power expensive and unnecessary and wanted Lilco to prioritize energy conservation and efficiency before Jamesport. She hired Al, and Al retained me.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It didn’t take us long to apply what we had learned from our Con Ed work. Knowing that Storm King depended on cheap, surplus nuclear electricity to overcome power lost from pushing Hudson River water uphill to a reservoir each night, we peered behind the atomic curtain. Rather quickly, we saw that the nuclear power industry, a juggernaut from the outside, was reeling from cascading regulatory changes and delays that piled up carrying costs. On paper, spiraling oil prices validated more nuclear power from plants like Jamesport. In real life, the combination of costly oil-fired power and the struggle to build two reactors at once pushed up Lilco’s electric rates, driving down demand and drying up financing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These critiques, obvious in hindsight, were heretical at the time. Al never shied from them. I’ll say he was a born contrarian, a lover of undisturbed nature, and a spoiler for a good fight. Riding into battle with Al, you had the edge. There seemed no argument he couldn’t win, no trap he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit. Not just the smartest guy in the room, he was the most effective. </span></p> <p><b>***<br /></b><b>From Michael:</b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />When I graduated from law school in 1978 I joined the boutique environmental law firm Berle, Butzel &amp; Kass. It mostly represented community groups fighting projects that threatened to worsen local pollution. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Along with Peter Berle, who would later become state environmental commissioner, Al taught me how to try a case. Two were particularly memorable. The first concerned a proposed U.S. Postal Service vehicle maintenance garage in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Al was the lead lawyer, and he contended that the Postal Service's environmental impact assessment was inadequate because, among other things, it failed to consider an alternative site that had been proposed by a young, flamboyant real estate developer named Donald Trump. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The federal judge hearing the case stopped Al's argument at that point and said, at some length, that Trump was a blowhard who had never really built anything and never would, and his proposals should not be taken seriously. Al stood there stoically while the judge lashed into him, and then proceeded calmly to try the case. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The other, far weightier case concerned Westway. For close to a decade, Al was the lead lawyer fighting this proposed underground interstate highway along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side, which opponents branded “a massive real estate development project masquerading as a highway.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He first contested it on the grounds that it would bring more traffic and therefore air pollution into Manhattan’s congested streets — an argument developed by his expert, Brian Ketcham, the engineer who had devised a plan in the waning days of the Lindsay administration to meet federal clean air standards through a combination of policy carrots and sticks designed to curb motor vehicle traffic.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ketcham’s thesis was an early expression of the paradigm now known as induced traffic, which holds that expanding road capacity temporarily makes driving easier and more efficient, up until the increased traffic volumes cancel the initial boost in vehicle speeds. This argument is today nearly gospel (except among hardened, senior highway officials), but in the 1970s it was no match for the ridicule from the state transportation officials pursuing Westway.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The trial on the induced traffic issue took place before a hearing officer of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in one of the twin towers of the original World Trade Center. The lead lawyer on the other side was Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., a legendary trial lawyer from the even more legendary law firm of Cravath, Swaine &amp; Moore. (Ordinarily the state attorney general’s office would have been representing the state, but the attorney general at the time, Bob Abrams, opposed Westway and made the state hire outside counsel.) The first cross examination I ever conducted was of an expert witness called by Schwarz; that was intimidating, to say the least, but Al coolly coached me through it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the major issues in the case was whether there was enough parking capacity in Manhattan’s commercial garages to hold all the cars Al said would be attracted by the highway; if there weren’t, maybe they wouldn’t come. The official numbers in the city’s records indicated there were enough, but Al didn’t trust them. So Al spent several weeks riding around Manhattan on his bicycle, stopping at every parking garage and writing down the number of spaces it had posted. The other partners in the firm questioned whether this was the best use of a senior lawyer’s time (when I became a senior lawyer myself, I realized that of course it wasn’t), but Al was insistent on getting the numbers right.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The hearing officer (a retired upstate judge) recommended that the permit be granted; the DEC Commissioner (reporting to Governor Hugh Carey, a strong supporter of Westway) signed the permit. Thus ended our traffic case.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Al then pivoted to the aquatic biology he had learned in the Storm King dispute. To Judge Thomas Griesa of the federal district court for the Southern District of New York, who was hearing the lawsuit, he brought fisheries biologists who testified that creating the 220 acres of new landfill to undergird Westway would grievously harm the habitat of the striped bass that spawned upriver before leaving the Hudson to populate New York and New England bays and sounds. Under Al’s questioning, the biologists stressed the potential devastation, highlighting the highway’s appropriation of ten percent of the river’s expanse along Manhattan’s west side.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The biggest question in the trial was whether the Army Corps of Engineers had been intentionally misleading when it said in its environmental impact statement that this stretch of the Hudson River was a “biological wasteland.” From time to time plain brown envelopes containing internal Corps documents would appear under the door of our law firm when we entered in the morning. We never learned who slipped these documents to us; we called the source “deep fish.” But the papers helped us prove that the Corps had indeed been misleading. Judge Griesa pronounced from the bench, “I’ve thrown people into jail for securities fraud for less.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During this time, Al made sure to coordinate his public push to protect the river with appeals from transit advocates led by NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign to use Westway funds to bolster the transit financing that activist MTA Chair Richard Ravitch was cobbling from state and federal funding sources. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After two long trials, Al, our colleague Mitch Bernard, and the Westway opponents prevailed. The massive highway was shelved and eventually replaced by the boulevard-type West Street and the parallel Hudson River Greenway, now the nation’s most heavily used bicycle path. And nearly a billion dollars — a critical infusion at the time — was traded in from the highway project to improve the city’s mass transit.</span></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The two of us owe Al a great deal. More importantly, so do New York’s urban environment, the surrounding natural world, and all who call New York home.</span></p> <p><b>***</b><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Charles Komanoff is a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Michael Gerrard is an attorney who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.</span></p> <p>

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A New Think Tank on Latino Politics 2023-03-24T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-24T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11885-latino-think-tank-new-york-politics Eli Valentin evalentin@gg.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3b-ev-new-think-c.jpg" /></p> <p>Puerto Rican and Dominican pride in New York City</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For six years as a contributing writer for Gotham Gazette I have written almost exclusively on the trajectory and current dynamics of Latino politics in New York. </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/6843-latino-voters-and-the-2017-new-york-city-elections" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">In my first column</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> here, in 2017, I explored how the increase in the Latino electorate was shifting the dynamics of our city’s politics. In the years since, I’ve written about many trends, elections, officials, and more. (I am most grateful to Gotham Gazette and editor Ben Max for giving me a platform from which to explore the important realities of Latinos and politics in New York.)</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My writing on this subject stems from a deep passion to give voice to my fellow Latinos, a group that historically has been disenfranchised, rejected, and pushed out from political discourse and participation in the city and state. Indeed, that has also been the national dynamic. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Whether locally or nationally, the struggle is hardly a recent one. Latinos have been fighting for political recognition and representation for nearly a century, ever since large numbers of Puerto Ricans began to arrive in Gotham. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These early efforts, financed by numbers runners (</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">boliteros</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">) and organized by cigar makers (</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">tabaqueros</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">) and pioneering women like Antonia Denis, led in 1937 to the first Latino elected to office in the history of New York, the Puerto Rican Oscar Garcia Rivera, who won the East Harlem Assembly seat. I have shared some of this history in an ongoing series for Gotham Gazette </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/11476-forgotten-history-latino-politics-new-york" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">here</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/11570-forgotten-history-latino-politics-new-york-city-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">here</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While Latinos now comprise almost a third of the population of New York City, and while there has been significant progress since the pioneering efforts of Latinos that came before us, our Latino community continues to struggle for recognition and empowerment. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the dynamics in the “Condado de la Salsa.” The Bronx is the only Latino-majority borough — it is also the poorest borough in the city with the lowest voting participation rates, and it no longer has any borough-wide Latino representation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My passion to give voice to my people has now led me to embark on a new journey: the founding of a new, independent, nonpartisan think tank focused on Latino politics and policy called The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy (ILPP). The Institute will expand on many of the topics I have explored in my writing at Gotham Gazette and elsewhere over the past six years. Its mission is to promote research, publications, and the education of the wider public on policy and political issues affecting Latinos in New York, including through advocacy and community engagement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Institute is inspired by the pioneering efforts of thinkers like Angelo Falcón and José Ramón Sánchez, who decades ago formed their own policy research entity to explore the Latino political and social reality in New York. Falcón, who passed away five years ago, labored as best he could to interpret and describe this reality. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Through the long process of conceiving this think tank, I have been honored to receive the support of many others who have also sought to be a voice for their fellow Latinos — Lucía Gómez (in many ways a Falcón ‘alum’), Aldrin Bonilla, Rev. Ray Rivera, Dr. Sam Cruz, Marlene Peralta, Rev. Fred Davie, Emerita Torres, and still more. This group has been an important sounding board in the exploratory phase of the Institute. A number of educational institutions have also expressed a desire to work collaboratively with The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the coming months, the Institute will sponsor virtual and in-person events bringing together academics, policy-makers, faith-based and community leaders for conversation on issues that affect Latino communities. It will also soon begin releasing reports and video content on themes relating to the political and social realities of Latinos in New York.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In sum, The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy is another platform through which I and we can advance the Latino cause and explore the larger context of Latino politics. I hope that you, reader, whether Latino or not, will join me in this effort. You can follow us online at </span><a href="http://www.latinopolitics.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.latinopolitics.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and on Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/InstituteLatino" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@InstituteLatino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>***<br />Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/elivalentinNY" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@EliValentinNY</a>.</p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3b-ev-new-think-c.jpg" /></p> <p>Puerto Rican and Dominican pride in New York City</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For six years as a contributing writer for Gotham Gazette I have written almost exclusively on the trajectory and current dynamics of Latino politics in New York. </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/6843-latino-voters-and-the-2017-new-york-city-elections" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">In my first column</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> here, in 2017, I explored how the increase in the Latino electorate was shifting the dynamics of our city’s politics. In the years since, I’ve written about many trends, elections, officials, and more. (I am most grateful to Gotham Gazette and editor Ben Max for giving me a platform from which to explore the important realities of Latinos and politics in New York.)</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My writing on this subject stems from a deep passion to give voice to my fellow Latinos, a group that historically has been disenfranchised, rejected, and pushed out from political discourse and participation in the city and state. Indeed, that has also been the national dynamic. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Whether locally or nationally, the struggle is hardly a recent one. Latinos have been fighting for political recognition and representation for nearly a century, ever since large numbers of Puerto Ricans began to arrive in Gotham. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These early efforts, financed by numbers runners (</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">boliteros</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">) and organized by cigar makers (</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">tabaqueros</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">) and pioneering women like Antonia Denis, led in 1937 to the first Latino elected to office in the history of New York, the Puerto Rican Oscar Garcia Rivera, who won the East Harlem Assembly seat. I have shared some of this history in an ongoing series for Gotham Gazette </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/11476-forgotten-history-latino-politics-new-york" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">here</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/11570-forgotten-history-latino-politics-new-york-city-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">here</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While Latinos now comprise almost a third of the population of New York City, and while there has been significant progress since the pioneering efforts of Latinos that came before us, our Latino community continues to struggle for recognition and empowerment. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the dynamics in the “Condado de la Salsa.” The Bronx is the only Latino-majority borough — it is also the poorest borough in the city with the lowest voting participation rates, and it no longer has any borough-wide Latino representation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My passion to give voice to my people has now led me to embark on a new journey: the founding of a new, independent, nonpartisan think tank focused on Latino politics and policy called The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy (ILPP). The Institute will expand on many of the topics I have explored in my writing at Gotham Gazette and elsewhere over the past six years. Its mission is to promote research, publications, and the education of the wider public on policy and political issues affecting Latinos in New York, including through advocacy and community engagement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Institute is inspired by the pioneering efforts of thinkers like Angelo Falcón and José Ramón Sánchez, who decades ago formed their own policy research entity to explore the Latino political and social reality in New York. Falcón, who passed away five years ago, labored as best he could to interpret and describe this reality. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Through the long process of conceiving this think tank, I have been honored to receive the support of many others who have also sought to be a voice for their fellow Latinos — Lucía Gómez (in many ways a Falcón ‘alum’), Aldrin Bonilla, Rev. Ray Rivera, Dr. Sam Cruz, Marlene Peralta, Rev. Fred Davie, Emerita Torres, and still more. This group has been an important sounding board in the exploratory phase of the Institute. A number of educational institutions have also expressed a desire to work collaboratively with The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the coming months, the Institute will sponsor virtual and in-person events bringing together academics, policy-makers, faith-based and community leaders for conversation on issues that affect Latino communities. It will also soon begin releasing reports and video content on themes relating to the political and social realities of Latinos in New York.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In sum, The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy is another platform through which I and we can advance the Latino cause and explore the larger context of Latino politics. I hope that you, reader, whether Latino or not, will join me in this effort. You can follow us online at </span><a href="http://www.latinopolitics.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.latinopolitics.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and on Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/InstituteLatino" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@InstituteLatino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>***<br />Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/elivalentinNY" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@EliValentinNY</a>.</p> <p>

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What New York City Should Take from San Francisco’s Ongoing Reparations Debate 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11895-new-york-city-san-francisco-reparations-black-slavery Akhurapa Ambak & Erika Tannor mauthors@gothamgazette.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/site-b-sf.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>A Black Lives Matter street renaming (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In his third inaugural address on January 1, 1986, Mayor Ed Koch </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/02/nyregion/text-of-address-delivered-by-mayor-koch-at-his-third-inauguration.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">remarked that</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> "New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.” It was a poetic take on the old idea that New York is a leader in culture, politics, and public policy; a place where cutting edge ideas are embraced only to be belatedly adopted by the rest of the country. This is often true, but one glaring exception has emerged related to a deeply important policy being examined by our West Coast counterparts: reparations for Black Americans.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unless you are paying close attention you might have missed the major news that San Francisco is gaining momentum behind proposals to implement groundbreaking modern reparations. In 2020, California </span><a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB3121" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">enacted a law</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to create a task force to determine how the state could provide reparations to Black Americans and who would be eligible.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While this process moves forward, some localities are taking action on their own, namely San Francisco, where the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/san-francisco-decide-black-reparations-plan-5m-person-rcna74873" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">voiced enthusiastic support</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for proposals, including payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult. While this expression of support by the board does not mean all recommendations will be approved, policymakers around the country would be wise to take note.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The moral case for reparations is clear: for 246 years, Africans taken from their homes and their descendants born on this land were purchased and sold as chattel, pieces of property, and enslaved. Millions of Africans and their African-American descendants were forced to labor in the most brutal conditions with no rights to self-determination and, of course, no compensation for their labor. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After the abolition of slavery, and for the next century, freed Blacks and their descendants were subject to Jim Crow Laws that limited their participation as full citizens. For centuries, Black Americans have been subject to systemic racism that has hampered their economic growth potential and specific government policies have explicitly left these communities out. For example, the Social Security Act itself, as enacted, did not provide benefits to those in professions then dominated by Black Americans, including agricultural and domestic workers. The GI Bill, which triggered the post-WWII economic boom as enacted, systematically excluded Black service members from being able to reap its benefits. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The result of all this history is an unquestioned loss of wealth generation and accumulation. According to a recent report from the </span><a href="https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 2019 the </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">average per capita wealth of white Americans was $338,093 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The public policy case for reparations, much like </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/10788-baby-bonds-great-dont-make-kids-wait-universal-income" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">universal income proposals</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is also sound. New York should provide reparations to the descendants of those who were enslaved not just as a matter of moral justice, a recognition that slavery was wrong and an act of contrition for the very active role that New York played in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but as a matter of good policy. Providing reparations and closing the racial wealth gap will allow more Black families to stay in New York City, which has seen its Black population </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/nyregion/black-residents-nyc.html#:~:text=But%20many%20of%20those%20interviewed,a%20family%20in%20New%20York.&amp;text=Black%20families%20drawn%20to%20opportunities,spread%20out%20%20and%20build%20%20wealth."><span style="font-weight: 400;">continue to shrink</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> due to the economic pressure of living in the highest tax and highest cost-of-living city in the country.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Further, despite the initial fiscal hit of a multibillion-dollar outlay, paying reparations and closing the racial wealth gap also means there will be several hundred thousand fewer New Yorkers reliant on the city’s social safety net, likely saving taxpayers money in the long run and freeing up resources to be put toward things we all agree need more funding. Like other cash transfers, this has potential to be an economic stimulant, especially given that research shows Black entrepreneurs </span><a href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/08/17/black-entrepreneurship-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">start businesses at higher rates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> than other groups, which will spur economic activity that lifts others out of poverty, further reducing reliance on social safety programs and increasing tax receipts. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There even exists an historical precedent for reparations in New York City. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over four days in July 1863, while the battle of Gettysburg was being fought over 150 miles away in Pennsylvania, mobs of white New Yorkers, protesting the draft, terrorized Black people by roaming the streets setting fire to buildings and killing people. The overall death toll is estimated at between over 100 and up to 1,000. After the riots, the white merchants of New York combined forces to </span><a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AJA2257.0001.001?rgn=subject;view=toc;q1=African+Americans+--+New+York++State" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">raise money</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to care for the injured, repair the damaged property, and support the legal and employment needs of the community's Black people. The shopkeepers raised over </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/draft-riots-racism.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$40,000, equivalent to $825,000 in 2021</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reparations are not “unAmerican” or unconstitutional, in fact they are deeply American. Indeed, the United States has regularly proposed, and occasionally paid, reparations to groups intentionally harmed by its policies. A small selection of those occasions includes the following: </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On January 12, in the midst of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman and U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met with 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia. Four days later, General Sherman issued </span><a href="http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sfo15.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Special Field Order No. 15</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> stating that Black people would receive an army mule and not more than 40 acres on coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. By June, roughly 40,000 Blacks had settled on 400,000 acres of land — before Confederate landowners, former enslavers, aided by the new Johnson administration, started taking back "their" land.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With the </span><a href="https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/117/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pueblo Lands Act of 1924</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Congress authorized the establishment of the Pueblo Lands Board to adjudicate land title disputes, along with a payment of $1,300,000 to the Pueblo for the land they lost (although the Pueblo disputed the amount). Later, in 1980 as the result of a lawsuit, the federal government appropriated </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/07/01/sioux-win-105-million/a595cc88-36c6-49b9-be4f-6ea3c2a8fa06/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$105 million to be paid to the Sioux of South Dakota</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for seizure of their land. Again in 1985 </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/14/archives/seminoles-awarded-12million-for-florida-lands-us-seized.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$12.3 million was set aside for the Seminoles of Florida</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. And of course in 1988, with the </span><a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Civil Liberties Act of 1988</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill providing $1.2 billion ($20,000 a person) and an apology to each of the approximately 60,000 living Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Support for modern reparations policies is growing. In 2021, Evanston, IL released its first batch of funds in a program </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/us/reparations-evanston-hr-40-legislation-whats-next/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">offering reparations to Black residents</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> whose families faced discriminatory housing practices and Amalgamated Bank became </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/business/amalgamated-bank-hr-40/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the first major U.S. bank</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to support a federal proposal to explore reparations. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the exact dollar amount is, and should be, debated (and it is worth noting that San Francisco’s proposal of multi-million-dollar payments is an outlier as most experts on the study of reparations propose payments closer to $350,000 per eligible individual, a number that would represent closure of the racial wealth gap) there should be no doubt that New York, the nation’s largest Black city, and a city that played a starring role in the economy of slavery, must lead in redressing the lasting harm that manifests itself daily. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These proposals will surely be met with legal and political challenges. But the impact of slavery, and subsequent century of policy choices that excluded Black Americans from opportunity and wealth creation is felt across our city every day, from the racial wealth gap to disparities in health and education, segregation in housing, and much more, its impacts are also felt by those who benefited from that history and continue to do so, even if they don’t know it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Akhurapa Ambak is an attorney and sits on the associate board of the Harlem School of the Arts and is a Board Member of the Drexel Law School Black Alumni Association. Erika Tannor is an SVP at Tusk Strategies and the co-founder of the 5BORO Institute who has written on cash transfers extensively.</span></p> <p>

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</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/site-b-sf.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>A Black Lives Matter street renaming (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In his third inaugural address on January 1, 1986, Mayor Ed Koch </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/02/nyregion/text-of-address-delivered-by-mayor-koch-at-his-third-inauguration.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">remarked that</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> "New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.” It was a poetic take on the old idea that New York is a leader in culture, politics, and public policy; a place where cutting edge ideas are embraced only to be belatedly adopted by the rest of the country. This is often true, but one glaring exception has emerged related to a deeply important policy being examined by our West Coast counterparts: reparations for Black Americans.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unless you are paying close attention you might have missed the major news that San Francisco is gaining momentum behind proposals to implement groundbreaking modern reparations. In 2020, California </span><a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB3121" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">enacted a law</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to create a task force to determine how the state could provide reparations to Black Americans and who would be eligible.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While this process moves forward, some localities are taking action on their own, namely San Francisco, where the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/san-francisco-decide-black-reparations-plan-5m-person-rcna74873" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">voiced enthusiastic support</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for proposals, including payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult. While this expression of support by the board does not mean all recommendations will be approved, policymakers around the country would be wise to take note.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The moral case for reparations is clear: for 246 years, Africans taken from their homes and their descendants born on this land were purchased and sold as chattel, pieces of property, and enslaved. Millions of Africans and their African-American descendants were forced to labor in the most brutal conditions with no rights to self-determination and, of course, no compensation for their labor. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After the abolition of slavery, and for the next century, freed Blacks and their descendants were subject to Jim Crow Laws that limited their participation as full citizens. For centuries, Black Americans have been subject to systemic racism that has hampered their economic growth potential and specific government policies have explicitly left these communities out. For example, the Social Security Act itself, as enacted, did not provide benefits to those in professions then dominated by Black Americans, including agricultural and domestic workers. The GI Bill, which triggered the post-WWII economic boom as enacted, systematically excluded Black service members from being able to reap its benefits. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The result of all this history is an unquestioned loss of wealth generation and accumulation. According to a recent report from the </span><a href="https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 2019 the </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">average per capita wealth of white Americans was $338,093 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The public policy case for reparations, much like </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/10788-baby-bonds-great-dont-make-kids-wait-universal-income" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">universal income proposals</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is also sound. New York should provide reparations to the descendants of those who were enslaved not just as a matter of moral justice, a recognition that slavery was wrong and an act of contrition for the very active role that New York played in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but as a matter of good policy. Providing reparations and closing the racial wealth gap will allow more Black families to stay in New York City, which has seen its Black population </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/nyregion/black-residents-nyc.html#:~:text=But%20many%20of%20those%20interviewed,a%20family%20in%20New%20York.&amp;text=Black%20families%20drawn%20to%20opportunities,spread%20out%20%20and%20build%20%20wealth."><span style="font-weight: 400;">continue to shrink</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> due to the economic pressure of living in the highest tax and highest cost-of-living city in the country.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Further, despite the initial fiscal hit of a multibillion-dollar outlay, paying reparations and closing the racial wealth gap also means there will be several hundred thousand fewer New Yorkers reliant on the city’s social safety net, likely saving taxpayers money in the long run and freeing up resources to be put toward things we all agree need more funding. Like other cash transfers, this has potential to be an economic stimulant, especially given that research shows Black entrepreneurs </span><a href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/08/17/black-entrepreneurship-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">start businesses at higher rates</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> than other groups, which will spur economic activity that lifts others out of poverty, further reducing reliance on social safety programs and increasing tax receipts. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There even exists an historical precedent for reparations in New York City. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over four days in July 1863, while the battle of Gettysburg was being fought over 150 miles away in Pennsylvania, mobs of white New Yorkers, protesting the draft, terrorized Black people by roaming the streets setting fire to buildings and killing people. The overall death toll is estimated at between over 100 and up to 1,000. After the riots, the white merchants of New York combined forces to </span><a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AJA2257.0001.001?rgn=subject;view=toc;q1=African+Americans+--+New+York++State" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">raise money</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to care for the injured, repair the damaged property, and support the legal and employment needs of the community's Black people. The shopkeepers raised over </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/draft-riots-racism.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$40,000, equivalent to $825,000 in 2021</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reparations are not “unAmerican” or unconstitutional, in fact they are deeply American. Indeed, the United States has regularly proposed, and occasionally paid, reparations to groups intentionally harmed by its policies. A small selection of those occasions includes the following: </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On January 12, in the midst of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman and U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met with 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia. Four days later, General Sherman issued </span><a href="http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sfo15.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Special Field Order No. 15</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> stating that Black people would receive an army mule and not more than 40 acres on coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. By June, roughly 40,000 Blacks had settled on 400,000 acres of land — before Confederate landowners, former enslavers, aided by the new Johnson administration, started taking back "their" land.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With the </span><a href="https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/117/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pueblo Lands Act of 1924</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Congress authorized the establishment of the Pueblo Lands Board to adjudicate land title disputes, along with a payment of $1,300,000 to the Pueblo for the land they lost (although the Pueblo disputed the amount). Later, in 1980 as the result of a lawsuit, the federal government appropriated </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/07/01/sioux-win-105-million/a595cc88-36c6-49b9-be4f-6ea3c2a8fa06/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$105 million to be paid to the Sioux of South Dakota</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for seizure of their land. Again in 1985 </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/14/archives/seminoles-awarded-12million-for-florida-lands-us-seized.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">$12.3 million was set aside for the Seminoles of Florida</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. And of course in 1988, with the </span><a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Civil Liberties Act of 1988</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill providing $1.2 billion ($20,000 a person) and an apology to each of the approximately 60,000 living Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Support for modern reparations policies is growing. In 2021, Evanston, IL released its first batch of funds in a program </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/us/reparations-evanston-hr-40-legislation-whats-next/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">offering reparations to Black residents</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> whose families faced discriminatory housing practices and Amalgamated Bank became </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/business/amalgamated-bank-hr-40/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the first major U.S. bank</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to support a federal proposal to explore reparations. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the exact dollar amount is, and should be, debated (and it is worth noting that San Francisco’s proposal of multi-million-dollar payments is an outlier as most experts on the study of reparations propose payments closer to $350,000 per eligible individual, a number that would represent closure of the racial wealth gap) there should be no doubt that New York, the nation’s largest Black city, and a city that played a starring role in the economy of slavery, must lead in redressing the lasting harm that manifests itself daily. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These proposals will surely be met with legal and political challenges. But the impact of slavery, and subsequent century of policy choices that excluded Black Americans from opportunity and wealth creation is felt across our city every day, from the racial wealth gap to disparities in health and education, segregation in housing, and much more, its impacts are also felt by those who benefited from that history and continue to do so, even if they don’t know it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Akhurapa Ambak is an attorney and sits on the associate board of the Harlem School of the Arts and is a Board Member of the Drexel Law School Black Alumni Association. Erika Tannor is an SVP at Tusk Strategies and the co-founder of the 5BORO Institute who has written on cash transfers extensively.</span></p> <p>

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Getting to a Deal on the Housing Compact New York Needs 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11896-deal-compromise-housing-compact-new-york Rachel Fee rfee@gg.cim <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/gkh-delivers.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Gov. Hochul addresses the state (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Policymakers in Albany sent a clear message to their constituents last week: we are not serious about solving the housing shortage that is driving rents up, causing extreme housing insecurity, and keeping our communities segregated. The housing growth strategy outlined in both the Senate and Assembly one-house budget resolutions is a weak, incentive-driven approach that replicates housing policies that have been tried and failed. Localities that want to remain exclusionary and not add housing can still opt out. It’s all carrots and no sticks. There is not even a data collection requirement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This isn’t a plan. It’s cowardly cover for inaction in a state with a severe housing crisis.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Legislature’s budget response serves as an ill-timed repudiation of the well-researched, well-informed Housing Compact plan put forth by Governor Kathy Hochul to end New York’s crisis – a serious and realistic plan with policies that work – and could signal a major missed opportunity for the Empire State. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The good news is that there is still time to negotiate and come to an agreement that meets the moment, or at least meets in the middle. The reason I am still optimistic is that every single legislator that I’ve met – Republicans and Democrats from rural, suburban, and urban districts – all agree that we have a desperate housing crisis and that something needs to be done. While I am concerned that the excuses that I hear each time I meet with legislators on the Housing Compact might win the day, there are a handful of points for negotiation that have come out of these many meetings that are worth exploring.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Often, legislators start with the lack of infrastructure and planning capabilities in the communities they represent, claiming an inability to support housing at the necessary scale due to pressure on traffic, schools, and sewers. While the Housing Compact has funding for infrastructure improvements ($250 million) and planning ($20 million) capability, I would agree that these sums are inadequate to support a growth strategy to add more zoning capacity for housing across the state over the next decade.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is the first place for negotiations: doubling incentives, as proposed by the Legislature with the $500 million infrastructure fund in each house’s budget resolution..</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Critics also claim that the Housing Compact does not adequately prioritize affordability and will only produce luxury housing. To be clear, though, it is not an affordable housing plan – </span><a href="https://thenyhc.org/2022/04/14/hochuls-new-25b-housing-plan-in-enacted-budget/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">that was accomplished last year</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – but rather a much-needed housing supply plan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But it does prioritize affordable housing by counting it at two times market-rate production for a community to reach growth targets. It also incentivizes affordable housing production with a tax abatement outside of New York City. And by adding density in communities dominated by single-family zoning, New Yorkers will have many more housing options than they do now – at lower price points than they otherwise would. The New York Housing Conference </span><a href="https://thenyhc.org/transit-oriented-development/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">recently analyzed Zillow data</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to show that condos/co-ops are up to 40% less expensive than single-family homes in the New York City suburbs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affordability can be another point for compromise, whether it is in how growth is measured, where growth is encouraged, or incentives for creating new affordable homes. Both the Senate and the Assembly budget plans offer ideas on this. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Others allege that the density requirements in the governor’s transit-oriented development (TOD) proposal are a threat to areas dominated by single-family housing. While there are plenty of examples of developments that already exceed the proposed density levels right now, alternative minimum density requirements as proposed by the Senate should be considered too. Ultimately, striking a TOD deal will benefit the MTA, make New York greener, and create more multifamily housing – all while desegregating many downstate communities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some claim there is nowhere to build, but this is not true. As a region, data shows New York suburbs lag far behind other states – Long Island added just 7 new housing units per 1,000 residents from 2012-2022 and the Lower Hudson Valley added just 13 units per 1,000 residents. The New Jersey suburbs, by contrast, added 35 units per 1,000 residents; Virginia’s suburbs added 39 units. It can be done.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are a </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/fewer-parking-spots.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">plethora of empty parking lots</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and innovative adaptive reuses of shopping malls, factories, and apartments that all represent opportunities. But for communities that did recently build new housing, they should have a longer look-back period to credit them for efforts and not be penalized with a higher growth goal. This is an easy fix.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On the issue of local control and the desire to maintain planning power, I would argue that the state does not want to control zoning but rather achieve local participation. Communities still decide where to put more housing, what it should look like, how it will best fit in with public spaces, and existing housing, and meet economic development goals.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, if communities choose to take no action, then under the governor’s plan the new State appeals board may approve a development that was previously denied. That’s not an ideal outcome, but it reflects the nature of our housing crisis: we’re at a point where such action is the only way to ensure every community does its part. Without this “stick,” there is no plan – and it is where Governor Hochul needs to draw the line.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Still, there are plenty of ways to soften this approach. Negotiators could consider a longer compliance ramp, designation of additional exclusions from growth targets, or easing requirements around preferred actions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our world is changing, and updating outdated zoning offers an opportunity for the built environment to be responsive to how we want to work, shop, and live today. And it gets to the core of the affordability crisis: a supply shortage. Governor Hochul has put forth a real plan to solve that real problem with real solutions that work in the real world. Now, all that’s left is coming together on a version the Legislature can agree to. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And what will happen if they reach an agreement? We will create a more affordable, sustainable, and prosperous New York for ourselves and our children. Is there really any excuse to prevent that future? </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***<br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Fee is Executive Director of the New York Housing Conference. On Twitter </span><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelFee4NY" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@RachelFee4NY</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &amp; </span><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/theNYHC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@TheNYHC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/gkh-delivers.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Gov. Hochul addresses the state (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Policymakers in Albany sent a clear message to their constituents last week: we are not serious about solving the housing shortage that is driving rents up, causing extreme housing insecurity, and keeping our communities segregated. The housing growth strategy outlined in both the Senate and Assembly one-house budget resolutions is a weak, incentive-driven approach that replicates housing policies that have been tried and failed. Localities that want to remain exclusionary and not add housing can still opt out. It’s all carrots and no sticks. There is not even a data collection requirement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This isn’t a plan. It’s cowardly cover for inaction in a state with a severe housing crisis.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Legislature’s budget response serves as an ill-timed repudiation of the well-researched, well-informed Housing Compact plan put forth by Governor Kathy Hochul to end New York’s crisis – a serious and realistic plan with policies that work – and could signal a major missed opportunity for the Empire State. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The good news is that there is still time to negotiate and come to an agreement that meets the moment, or at least meets in the middle. The reason I am still optimistic is that every single legislator that I’ve met – Republicans and Democrats from rural, suburban, and urban districts – all agree that we have a desperate housing crisis and that something needs to be done. While I am concerned that the excuses that I hear each time I meet with legislators on the Housing Compact might win the day, there are a handful of points for negotiation that have come out of these many meetings that are worth exploring.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Often, legislators start with the lack of infrastructure and planning capabilities in the communities they represent, claiming an inability to support housing at the necessary scale due to pressure on traffic, schools, and sewers. While the Housing Compact has funding for infrastructure improvements ($250 million) and planning ($20 million) capability, I would agree that these sums are inadequate to support a growth strategy to add more zoning capacity for housing across the state over the next decade.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is the first place for negotiations: doubling incentives, as proposed by the Legislature with the $500 million infrastructure fund in each house’s budget resolution..</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Critics also claim that the Housing Compact does not adequately prioritize affordability and will only produce luxury housing. To be clear, though, it is not an affordable housing plan – </span><a href="https://thenyhc.org/2022/04/14/hochuls-new-25b-housing-plan-in-enacted-budget/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">that was accomplished last year</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – but rather a much-needed housing supply plan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But it does prioritize affordable housing by counting it at two times market-rate production for a community to reach growth targets. It also incentivizes affordable housing production with a tax abatement outside of New York City. And by adding density in communities dominated by single-family zoning, New Yorkers will have many more housing options than they do now – at lower price points than they otherwise would. The New York Housing Conference </span><a href="https://thenyhc.org/transit-oriented-development/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">recently analyzed Zillow data</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to show that condos/co-ops are up to 40% less expensive than single-family homes in the New York City suburbs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affordability can be another point for compromise, whether it is in how growth is measured, where growth is encouraged, or incentives for creating new affordable homes. Both the Senate and the Assembly budget plans offer ideas on this. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Others allege that the density requirements in the governor’s transit-oriented development (TOD) proposal are a threat to areas dominated by single-family housing. While there are plenty of examples of developments that already exceed the proposed density levels right now, alternative minimum density requirements as proposed by the Senate should be considered too. Ultimately, striking a TOD deal will benefit the MTA, make New York greener, and create more multifamily housing – all while desegregating many downstate communities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some claim there is nowhere to build, but this is not true. As a region, data shows New York suburbs lag far behind other states – Long Island added just 7 new housing units per 1,000 residents from 2012-2022 and the Lower Hudson Valley added just 13 units per 1,000 residents. The New Jersey suburbs, by contrast, added 35 units per 1,000 residents; Virginia’s suburbs added 39 units. It can be done.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are a </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/fewer-parking-spots.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">plethora of empty parking lots</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and innovative adaptive reuses of shopping malls, factories, and apartments that all represent opportunities. But for communities that did recently build new housing, they should have a longer look-back period to credit them for efforts and not be penalized with a higher growth goal. This is an easy fix.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On the issue of local control and the desire to maintain planning power, I would argue that the state does not want to control zoning but rather achieve local participation. Communities still decide where to put more housing, what it should look like, how it will best fit in with public spaces, and existing housing, and meet economic development goals.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, if communities choose to take no action, then under the governor’s plan the new State appeals board may approve a development that was previously denied. That’s not an ideal outcome, but it reflects the nature of our housing crisis: we’re at a point where such action is the only way to ensure every community does its part. Without this “stick,” there is no plan – and it is where Governor Hochul needs to draw the line.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Still, there are plenty of ways to soften this approach. Negotiators could consider a longer compliance ramp, designation of additional exclusions from growth targets, or easing requirements around preferred actions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our world is changing, and updating outdated zoning offers an opportunity for the built environment to be responsive to how we want to work, shop, and live today. And it gets to the core of the affordability crisis: a supply shortage. Governor Hochul has put forth a real plan to solve that real problem with real solutions that work in the real world. Now, all that’s left is coming together on a version the Legislature can agree to. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And what will happen if they reach an agreement? We will create a more affordable, sustainable, and prosperous New York for ourselves and our children. Is there really any excuse to prevent that future? </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***<br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Fee is Executive Director of the New York Housing Conference. On Twitter </span><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelFee4NY" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@RachelFee4NY</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &amp; </span><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/theNYHC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@TheNYHC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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To Close Rikers, The City Council Must Correct the Department of Correction 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-23T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11900-rikers-city-council-correction-department-mayor Rosa Cohen-Cruz & Julia Solomons mauthors@gothamgazette.com <p> <img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-rikers-island-staff.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams &amp; DOC Commissioner Molina on Rikers Island (photo: Benny Polatseck/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p>On Thursday, Speaker Adrienne Adams will chair a City Council hearing where leadership of the city’s Department of Correction (DOC) will share budget priorities. What may be perceived as a routine hearing impacts the future of thousands of New Yorkers currently suffering on Rikers Island and others who will be sent there.</p> <p>DOC holds the lives of over 6,000 New Yorkers in its hands, and yet it has shown a brazen disregard for their well-being as well as the City Council’s oversight. If left unchecked, DOC’s actions will lead to more suffering and death. Lawmakers must make sure this year’s city budget brings us closer to, not further from, closing Rikers.</p> <p>Since Commissioner Louis Molina started, DOC has gleefully and flagrantly ignored any oversight of its authority on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.</p> <p>In January, the Board of Correction (BOC), which oversees DOC’s compliance with city policy, <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/boc/downloads/pdf/News/Statement-on-Video-Access-1.18.23.pdf">announced</a> that DOC had revoked the Board’s right to independently view video surveillance of city jails in real time. BOC must now submit a request, subject to DOC’s approval. This blatantly undermines the Board’s oversight as authorized by the <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/boc/about/about.page">City Charter</a>, while further obscuring the suffering of people in DOC custody.</p> <p>Later that same month at a City Council hearing, Commissioner Molina <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-correction-commissioner-faces-scrutiny-over-safely-housing-transgender-detainees-at-rikers">refused to acknowledge</a> the agency’s failure to protect the safety and lives of trans and gender expansive people in its custody, despite extensive and damning documentation by a <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/boc/jail-regulations/task-force-on-issues-faced-by-tgncbi.page">Council Task Force</a> and the <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/1/24/23567498/rikers-lgbtq-trans-eric-adams-corrections">media</a>. Under questioning, Commissioner Molina not only revealed a stunning ignorance of how his agency operates, but embodied its indifference by refusing to stay and listen to the testimony of trans and gender expansive people who suffered unspeakable harm in DOC custody.</p> <p>In that same vein, at another City Council hearing in February, Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif confronted DOC with <a href="https://documentedny.com/2023/02/17/early-arrival-doc-ice-new-york-city-council/">email evidence</a> that the agency was transferring New Yorkers from Rikers Island into ICE custody without a judicial warrant, violating city laws barring such cooperation. The emails also revealed a pervasive anti-immigrant culture deep within DOC, with officers like Rikers Island Captain Deshan Rainey signing off emails to ICE with the hashtag“<a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/1021_teamsendthemback.pdf">#teamsendthemback</a>,” referring to ICE cooperation and deportation.</p> <p>When confronted with questions about how New Yorkers could trust DOC to protect immigrant New Yorkers, DOC’s General Counsel Paul Shecthman sneered at the Council, <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/teamsendthemback-private-emails-reveal-cozy-relationship-cooperation-between-nyc-correction-officers-and-ice">insisting</a> that a policy memo in 2019 had meaningfully changed DOC culture. The response was shocking, especially when advocates testified about ongoing violations as <a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/the-immigrant-defense-project-and-black-alliance-for-just-immigration-release-emails-showing-clear-collusion-between-the-department-of-corrections-and-ice/">recently as 2022.</a> It was also insulting, as if an internal memo restating the law would suddenly make Captain Rainey, who still supervises DOC staff on Rikers Island, reconsider how she communicates with ICE or treats people in her care.</p> <p>Sensing Mayor Adams’ tacit approval of DOC’s actions, people who are formerly incarcerated and their family members have been steadfastly attending every BOC meeting to stop DOC’s attempts to thwart accountability, while keeping a public spotlight on the daily harm that goes unnoticed. Thanks to their persistence, BOC just <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-jails-oversight-body-rejects-plan-to-ban-mail-and-packages-at-rikers">rejected</a> DOC’s plan to ban physical mail and packages at Rikers Island. But it shouldn’t fall to everyday New Yorkers to hold DOC accountable.</p> <p>City lawmakers must stand up to DOC and show that it cannot continue to act with impunity. In her State of the City address, Speaker Adams affirmed that Rikers Island must close by 2027, as is the law. Mayor Adams’ and Commissioner Molina’s <a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/03/timeline-closure-rikers-island/376662/">public doubts</a> about meeting this legally-mandated obligation is simply one more tactic of evasion, and the City Council must not fall for it.</p> <p>Instead, the Council should use every budgetary and legislative tool at its disposal to close Rikers Island – now. This includes pending legislation to further decarcerate city jails and prevent New Yorkers from entering the system in the first place.</p> <p>Majority Leader Keith Powers’ and Council Member Hanif’s <a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ICE-Out-NYC-Fact-Sheet-english-July-2022.pdf">detainer law package</a> would, among other things, create a private right of action to hold DOC accountable if a New Yorker thinks they were detained and transferred to ICE unlawfully. While the Public Advocate <a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5698267&amp;GUID=6F47F49A-06A3-444C-BBB7-3CBFF899DD84&amp;Options=&amp;Search=">has a bill</a> with majority Council support to finally and completely end the practice of solitary confinement. Passing both bills, while publicly supporting state legislation like the <a href="https://documentedny.com/2022/05/31/new-york-for-all-act/">New York For All Act</a>, would send a clear message that deliberately flouting state and city law will not be tolerated and there is a better vision for safety and justice.</p> <p>The Council must also hold Mayor Adams to his promise of investing in resources that actually strengthen communities. Foremost is bolstering the reentry hotel program established at the start of the pandemic, which was incredibly successful in <a href="https://citylimits.org/2021/09/20/as-nycs-jail-crisis-worsens-stable-housing-could-be-the-difference-between-rikers-and-release/">getting New Yorkers out of jail</a> and into housing with medical and mental health care. At a time when the mayor says he is looking for solutions, expanding this type of rapid reentry housing, in addition to transitional housing slated for the summer, will quickly decarcerate Rikers and give New Yorkers a proven and dignified path to recovery.</p> <p>These measures, while necessary, are the bare minimum. The only way to ensure there is not one more death, one more deportation, or one more violation of people’s rights inside Rikers is for Rikers to cease to exist. The City Council must hold fast to this north star, and do everything in the meantime to protect those who must endure DOC’s cruelty.</p> <p>***<br />Rosa Cohen-Cruz is Immigration Policy Director at The Bronx Defenders. Julia Solomons is Senior Policy Social Worker at The Bronx Defenders. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/BronxDefenders">@BronxDefenders</a>. </p> <p>

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<p> <img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-rikers-island-staff.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams &amp; DOC Commissioner Molina on Rikers Island (photo: Benny Polatseck/Mayor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p>On Thursday, Speaker Adrienne Adams will chair a City Council hearing where leadership of the city’s Department of Correction (DOC) will share budget priorities. What may be perceived as a routine hearing impacts the future of thousands of New Yorkers currently suffering on Rikers Island and others who will be sent there.</p> <p>DOC holds the lives of over 6,000 New Yorkers in its hands, and yet it has shown a brazen disregard for their well-being as well as the City Council’s oversight. If left unchecked, DOC’s actions will lead to more suffering and death. Lawmakers must make sure this year’s city budget brings us closer to, not further from, closing Rikers.</p> <p>Since Commissioner Louis Molina started, DOC has gleefully and flagrantly ignored any oversight of its authority on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.</p> <p>In January, the Board of Correction (BOC), which oversees DOC’s compliance with city policy, <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/boc/downloads/pdf/News/Statement-on-Video-Access-1.18.23.pdf">announced</a> that DOC had revoked the Board’s right to independently view video surveillance of city jails in real time. BOC must now submit a request, subject to DOC’s approval. This blatantly undermines the Board’s oversight as authorized by the <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/boc/about/about.page">City Charter</a>, while further obscuring the suffering of people in DOC custody.</p> <p>Later that same month at a City Council hearing, Commissioner Molina <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-correction-commissioner-faces-scrutiny-over-safely-housing-transgender-detainees-at-rikers">refused to acknowledge</a> the agency’s failure to protect the safety and lives of trans and gender expansive people in its custody, despite extensive and damning documentation by a <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/boc/jail-regulations/task-force-on-issues-faced-by-tgncbi.page">Council Task Force</a> and the <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/1/24/23567498/rikers-lgbtq-trans-eric-adams-corrections">media</a>. Under questioning, Commissioner Molina not only revealed a stunning ignorance of how his agency operates, but embodied its indifference by refusing to stay and listen to the testimony of trans and gender expansive people who suffered unspeakable harm in DOC custody.</p> <p>In that same vein, at another City Council hearing in February, Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif confronted DOC with <a href="https://documentedny.com/2023/02/17/early-arrival-doc-ice-new-york-city-council/">email evidence</a> that the agency was transferring New Yorkers from Rikers Island into ICE custody without a judicial warrant, violating city laws barring such cooperation. The emails also revealed a pervasive anti-immigrant culture deep within DOC, with officers like Rikers Island Captain Deshan Rainey signing off emails to ICE with the hashtag“<a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/1021_teamsendthemback.pdf">#teamsendthemback</a>,” referring to ICE cooperation and deportation.</p> <p>When confronted with questions about how New Yorkers could trust DOC to protect immigrant New Yorkers, DOC’s General Counsel Paul Shecthman sneered at the Council, <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/teamsendthemback-private-emails-reveal-cozy-relationship-cooperation-between-nyc-correction-officers-and-ice">insisting</a> that a policy memo in 2019 had meaningfully changed DOC culture. The response was shocking, especially when advocates testified about ongoing violations as <a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/the-immigrant-defense-project-and-black-alliance-for-just-immigration-release-emails-showing-clear-collusion-between-the-department-of-corrections-and-ice/">recently as 2022.</a> It was also insulting, as if an internal memo restating the law would suddenly make Captain Rainey, who still supervises DOC staff on Rikers Island, reconsider how she communicates with ICE or treats people in her care.</p> <p>Sensing Mayor Adams’ tacit approval of DOC’s actions, people who are formerly incarcerated and their family members have been steadfastly attending every BOC meeting to stop DOC’s attempts to thwart accountability, while keeping a public spotlight on the daily harm that goes unnoticed. Thanks to their persistence, BOC just <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-jails-oversight-body-rejects-plan-to-ban-mail-and-packages-at-rikers">rejected</a> DOC’s plan to ban physical mail and packages at Rikers Island. But it shouldn’t fall to everyday New Yorkers to hold DOC accountable.</p> <p>City lawmakers must stand up to DOC and show that it cannot continue to act with impunity. In her State of the City address, Speaker Adams affirmed that Rikers Island must close by 2027, as is the law. Mayor Adams’ and Commissioner Molina’s <a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/03/timeline-closure-rikers-island/376662/">public doubts</a> about meeting this legally-mandated obligation is simply one more tactic of evasion, and the City Council must not fall for it.</p> <p>Instead, the Council should use every budgetary and legislative tool at its disposal to close Rikers Island – now. This includes pending legislation to further decarcerate city jails and prevent New Yorkers from entering the system in the first place.</p> <p>Majority Leader Keith Powers’ and Council Member Hanif’s <a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ICE-Out-NYC-Fact-Sheet-english-July-2022.pdf">detainer law package</a> would, among other things, create a private right of action to hold DOC accountable if a New Yorker thinks they were detained and transferred to ICE unlawfully. While the Public Advocate <a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5698267&amp;GUID=6F47F49A-06A3-444C-BBB7-3CBFF899DD84&amp;Options=&amp;Search=">has a bill</a> with majority Council support to finally and completely end the practice of solitary confinement. Passing both bills, while publicly supporting state legislation like the <a href="https://documentedny.com/2022/05/31/new-york-for-all-act/">New York For All Act</a>, would send a clear message that deliberately flouting state and city law will not be tolerated and there is a better vision for safety and justice.</p> <p>The Council must also hold Mayor Adams to his promise of investing in resources that actually strengthen communities. Foremost is bolstering the reentry hotel program established at the start of the pandemic, which was incredibly successful in <a href="https://citylimits.org/2021/09/20/as-nycs-jail-crisis-worsens-stable-housing-could-be-the-difference-between-rikers-and-release/">getting New Yorkers out of jail</a> and into housing with medical and mental health care. At a time when the mayor says he is looking for solutions, expanding this type of rapid reentry housing, in addition to transitional housing slated for the summer, will quickly decarcerate Rikers and give New Yorkers a proven and dignified path to recovery.</p> <p>These measures, while necessary, are the bare minimum. The only way to ensure there is not one more death, one more deportation, or one more violation of people’s rights inside Rikers is for Rikers to cease to exist. The City Council must hold fast to this north star, and do everything in the meantime to protect those who must endure DOC’s cruelty.</p> <p>***<br />Rosa Cohen-Cruz is Immigration Policy Director at The Bronx Defenders. Julia Solomons is Senior Policy Social Worker at The Bronx Defenders. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/BronxDefenders">@BronxDefenders</a>. </p> <p>

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New York Families Demand A Climate Budget 2023-03-19T13:00:00+00:00 2023-03-19T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11889-new-york-families-demand-climate-budget Robert Jackson, Liat Olenick, & Laurel Tumarkin mauthors@gothamgazette.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/families-climate.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Rallying for Climate Justice (photo: Chandra Bocci)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We write this on behalf of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, educators, and caregivers deeply concerned for our children’s futures. Over the next few weeks, Governor Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie will finalize the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year. When they do, they must remember their littlest constituents and include the full </span><a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1PxK-44CB62EOltK0DbzdR0UVABK9ODw7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NY Renews Climate, Jobs, and Justice Package</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to ensure our children, and all New Yorkers, have a chance at a safe, healthy, secure future. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Climate change is already taking a harrowing toll on frontline communities across New York State. From flooding in low-lying areas to extreme heat in the summers to crop disruption and beyond, it’s clear we’re in a crisis. And our children – particularly Black, Latino, Asian, immigrant, and Indigenous children – bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution; dirty air puts them at greater risk of preterm birth, asthma, cancer, reduced cognitive ability, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support climate action – the Environmental Bond Act passed in November with close to 70% of the vote statewide – New York is failing to meet its own climate commitments. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) passed in 2019, almost four years ago, and set ambitious targets for emissions reductions and investment in both renewable energy and climate resiliency. Today’s kindergarteners were babies when the bill first passed. But while our children have progressed, the state has stalled — the law is still not fully funded, and the state is falling behind in its transition to clean energy. Our leaders must act now to ensure this year’s budget fully funds and implements the CLCPA. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is also past time for the state to invest in publicly-owned renewable energy, hold polluters accountable, and tax the ultra wealthy to fund climate justice. The climate crisis is rapidly accelerating – so too must our state’s plans to shift off of fossil fuels and invest in community based resiliency and mitigation. Publicly-owned renewables will enable New York to quickly make clean energy available to more and more New Yorkers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meanwhile, we now know that corporate polluters – and their funders on Wall Street – have continued to expand fossil fuel infrastructure for decades despite being fully aware of the consequences for people and the planet. They must be held accountable. The </span><a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S2129" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Climate Change Superfund Act</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> would make New York’s worst polluters, the major oil companies, pay for the damage they have done to our communities. This would generate $75 billion in revenue over the next 25 years for investment in community climate programs.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget must also include taxes on corporations and New York’s ultra-rich. </span><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/227249/greatest-gap-between-rich-and-poor-by-us-state/#:~:text=New%20York%20was%20the%20state,score%20of%200.51%20in%202021." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York is the most unequal state in the country</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and New York City is home to more </span><a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/new-york-boasts-the-worlds-most-millionaires-01663100972" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">millionaires</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2022/04/05/where-the-richest-live-the-cities-with-the-most-billionaires-2022/?sh=2aef43b94e09" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">billionaires</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> than any other city in the world. While working parents and caregivers have struggled to stay afloat through three years of a pandemic and disrupted access to school and daycare, corporations – including fossil fuel companies – have raked in record profits. There is no excuse for failing to fund climate justice programs and a clean energy transition when New York is awash in wealth. The </span><a href="https://investinourny.org/2023-campaign" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Invest in Our New York</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> legislative package will ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share after years of tax breaks and kickbacks. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As people who spend our days caring for and worrying about children, we are counting on Democratic leadership’s tenacity, foresight, and commitment to this vital endeavor. It’s time to pass the Climate, Jobs, and Justice package in full. Before it’s too late.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senator Robert Jackson represents District 31 in the New York State Senate, and is a parent of three and grandfather of two. Liat Olenick is a leader of Climate Families NYC, a teacher, and a parent. Laurel Tumarkin sits on the steering committee of the NY Renews climate coalition and is a parent. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RJackson_NYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@RJackson_NYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Liat_RO" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@Liat_RO</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/LaurelTumarkin" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@LaurelTumarkin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ClimateFamsNYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ClimateFamsNYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/NYRenews" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@NYRenews</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/families-climate.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Rallying for Climate Justice (photo: Chandra Bocci)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We write this on behalf of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, educators, and caregivers deeply concerned for our children’s futures. Over the next few weeks, Governor Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie will finalize the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year. When they do, they must remember their littlest constituents and include the full </span><a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1PxK-44CB62EOltK0DbzdR0UVABK9ODw7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NY Renews Climate, Jobs, and Justice Package</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to ensure our children, and all New Yorkers, have a chance at a safe, healthy, secure future. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Climate change is already taking a harrowing toll on frontline communities across New York State. From flooding in low-lying areas to extreme heat in the summers to crop disruption and beyond, it’s clear we’re in a crisis. And our children – particularly Black, Latino, Asian, immigrant, and Indigenous children – bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution; dirty air puts them at greater risk of preterm birth, asthma, cancer, reduced cognitive ability, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support climate action – the Environmental Bond Act passed in November with close to 70% of the vote statewide – New York is failing to meet its own climate commitments. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) passed in 2019, almost four years ago, and set ambitious targets for emissions reductions and investment in both renewable energy and climate resiliency. Today’s kindergarteners were babies when the bill first passed. But while our children have progressed, the state has stalled — the law is still not fully funded, and the state is falling behind in its transition to clean energy. Our leaders must act now to ensure this year’s budget fully funds and implements the CLCPA. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is also past time for the state to invest in publicly-owned renewable energy, hold polluters accountable, and tax the ultra wealthy to fund climate justice. The climate crisis is rapidly accelerating – so too must our state’s plans to shift off of fossil fuels and invest in community based resiliency and mitigation. Publicly-owned renewables will enable New York to quickly make clean energy available to more and more New Yorkers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meanwhile, we now know that corporate polluters – and their funders on Wall Street – have continued to expand fossil fuel infrastructure for decades despite being fully aware of the consequences for people and the planet. They must be held accountable. The </span><a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S2129" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Climate Change Superfund Act</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> would make New York’s worst polluters, the major oil companies, pay for the damage they have done to our communities. This would generate $75 billion in revenue over the next 25 years for investment in community climate programs.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget must also include taxes on corporations and New York’s ultra-rich. </span><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/227249/greatest-gap-between-rich-and-poor-by-us-state/#:~:text=New%20York%20was%20the%20state,score%20of%200.51%20in%202021." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York is the most unequal state in the country</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and New York City is home to more </span><a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/new-york-boasts-the-worlds-most-millionaires-01663100972" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">millionaires</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2022/04/05/where-the-richest-live-the-cities-with-the-most-billionaires-2022/?sh=2aef43b94e09" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">billionaires</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> than any other city in the world. While working parents and caregivers have struggled to stay afloat through three years of a pandemic and disrupted access to school and daycare, corporations – including fossil fuel companies – have raked in record profits. There is no excuse for failing to fund climate justice programs and a clean energy transition when New York is awash in wealth. The </span><a href="https://investinourny.org/2023-campaign" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Invest in Our New York</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> legislative package will ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share after years of tax breaks and kickbacks. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As people who spend our days caring for and worrying about children, we are counting on Democratic leadership’s tenacity, foresight, and commitment to this vital endeavor. It’s time to pass the Climate, Jobs, and Justice package in full. Before it’s too late.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">***</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senator Robert Jackson represents District 31 in the New York State Senate, and is a parent of three and grandfather of two. Liat Olenick is a leader of Climate Families NYC, a teacher, and a parent. Laurel Tumarkin sits on the steering committee of the NY Renews climate coalition and is a parent. On Twitter </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RJackson_NYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@RJackson_NYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Liat_RO" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@Liat_RO</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/LaurelTumarkin" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@LaurelTumarkin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ClimateFamsNYC" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ClimateFamsNYC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/NYRenews" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@NYRenews</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p>

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Keep The Compact: The Legislature's Lackluster Housing Plans Won't Work 2023-03-20T04:00:00+00:00 2023-03-20T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/government/130-opinion/11891-state-legislature-lackluster-housing-plans-hochul Andrew Fine afine12@gg.com <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/construction_site.jpg" /><br />Housing in the works (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p>Housing has taken center stage in the current budget negotiations in Albany and for good reason: Our statewide housing crisis has become dire, and for the first time in decades, there are many concrete proposals to tackle it.</p> <p>Discussions about the issue often focus on rents in the five boroughs and how they have reached historic levels, but the crisis does not stop at the city’s borders, nor is the crisis limited to renters. In communities across the state, renters and homeowners are struggling with housing costs, as younger generations are unable to find affordable housing in their hometowns, local governments are unable to hire teachers and firefighters, and seniors must move further away from their families or are stuck in homes that do not accommodate their current needs.</p> <p>These problems share a common cause: New York has failed to enact a statewide approach for promoting housing growth, providing localities with free rein to make new housing illegal across the state.</p> <p>But for the first time since the 1970s, the Governor has proposed a framework to plan for sustainable growth in every community. The <a href="https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-housing-compact#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Housing%20Compact%2C%20part%20of%20Governor%20Hochul's%20FY,homes%20over%20the%20next%20decade.https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-housing-compact#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Housing%20Compact%2C%20part%20of%20Governor%20Hochul's%20FY,homes%20over%20the%20next%20decade." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">New York Housing Compact</a> focuses on housing production, aiming to close our housing shortage by encouraging the construction of at least 800,000 homes over the next decade.</p> <p>Unfortunately, this past week both the State Senate and Assembly proposed major cuts to the Housing Compact that would severely weaken its potential impact. If enacted, their proposals would do little to dent the dire housing crisis; instead, they would maintain the inequitable status quo that we've had for too long. In the face of the first real pro-housing framework that Albany has debated in decades, the Legislature seems to be closing its eyes and hoping the crisis goes away.</p> <p>In its budget resolution, the Assembly deleted almost every piece of the Compact, including seemingly non-controversial items like enabling outdated office buildings in New York City to convert to housing. The Senate kept the office-to-residential piece, but otherwise, it also nixed all of the Compact’s many tools to encourage new housing growth of all kinds across the state.</p> <p>In an apparent attempt to save face, the Senate and Assembly included a toothless version of the Governor’s proposal to require every community to grow its housing by a small amount every three years. Instead of imposing even minimal consequences on localities that shut their gates, the Senate’s and Assembly’s versions would try to bribe local governments to plan for housing growth.</p> <p>While a program like this might sound new, it really just maintains the status quo—towns across New York already receive more money from a variety of county and state sources when they grow, and yet there is still anemic housing growth in the New York City metro region despite rapid economic growth. Similar incentive-based programs in Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, and Washington have <a href="https://furmancenter.org/files/Ending_Exclusionary_Zoning_in_New_York_Citys_Suburbs.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">failed</a> for decades—particularly in the areas with the least housing growth, most extreme prices, and closest proximity to cities and transit— and there is no reason to think that the Senate’s and Assembly’s proposals will succeed in New York.</p> <p>The Senate and Assembly included one new and laudable housing initiative, the Housing Voucher Access Program (HAVP), which would provide crucial financial assistance to an estimated <a href="https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/2_A_State-Level_Rent_Voucher_Program_Final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">13,760 New Yorkers</a> over the next few years. But as many recent news <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/nyregion/homelessness-housing-voucher.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reports</a> have shown, even New Yorkers who receive these new vouchers may struggle to use them, because there are so few safe and affordable apartments available to rent in New York. While the Senate and Assembly seem to think that the State must choose between policies that support vouchers and policies that support new housing growth, the two in fact need to go hand-in-hand.</p> <p>As budget negotiations enter their next stage, the Governor needs to fight to keep the Compact strong, while also moving forward with policies in which the Legislature has rightfully signaled interest, such as HAVP and new tenant protections for New Yorkers who live in unregulated housing.</p> <p>​A statewide framework that includes real mandates to end exclusionary zoning practices, encourage housing growth in transit-rich areas, and ensure all neighborhoods do their part to increase housing opportunities is essential for addressing the depth of the crisis and increasing leverage for renters. It is long past time for New York  to enact a framework like the Housing Compact.</p> <p>***<br />Andrew Fine is Policy Director for Open New York. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/andrewdfine" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@​​andrewdfine</a>.</p> <p>

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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email opinion@gothamgazette.com

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<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/construction_site.jpg" /><br />Housing in the works (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p>Housing has taken center stage in the current budget negotiations in Albany and for good reason: Our statewide housing crisis has become dire, and for the first time in decades, there are many concrete proposals to tackle it.</p> <p>Discussions about the issue often focus on rents in the five boroughs and how they have reached historic levels, but the crisis does not stop at the city’s borders, nor is the crisis limited to renters. In communities across the state, renters and homeowners are struggling with housing costs, as younger generations are unable to find affordable housing in their hometowns, local governments are unable to hire teachers and firefighters, and seniors must move further away from their families or are stuck in homes that do not accommodate their current needs.</p> <p>These problems share a common cause: New York has failed to enact a statewide approach for promoting housing growth, providing localities with free rein to make new housing illegal across the state.</p> <p>But for the first time since the 1970s, the Governor has proposed a framework to plan for sustainable growth in every community. The <a href="https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-housing-compact#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Housing%20Compact%2C%20part%20of%20Governor%20Hochul's%20FY,homes%20over%20the%20next%20decade.https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-housing-compact#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Housing%20Compact%2C%20part%20of%20Governor%20Hochul's%20FY,homes%20over%20the%20next%20decade." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">New York Housing Compact</a> focuses on housing production, aiming to close our housing shortage by encouraging the construction of at least 800,000 homes over the next decade.</p> <p>Unfortunately, this past week both the State Senate and Assembly proposed major cuts to the Housing Compact that would severely weaken its potential impact. If enacted, their proposals would do little to dent the dire housing crisis; instead, they would maintain the inequitable status quo that we've had for too long. In the face of the first real pro-housing framework that Albany has debated in decades, the Legislature seems to be closing its eyes and hoping the crisis goes away.</p> <p>In its budget resolution, the Assembly deleted almost every piece of the Compact, including seemingly non-controversial items like enabling outdated office buildings in New York City to convert to housing. The Senate kept the office-to-residential piece, but otherwise, it also nixed all of the Compact’s many tools to encourage new housing growth of all kinds across the state.</p> <p>In an apparent attempt to save face, the Senate and Assembly included a toothless version of the Governor’s proposal to require every community to grow its housing by a small amount every three years. Instead of imposing even minimal consequences on localities that shut their gates, the Senate’s and Assembly’s versions would try to bribe local governments to plan for housing growth.</p> <p>While a program like this might sound new, it really just maintains the status quo—towns across New York already receive more money from a variety of county and state sources when they grow, and yet there is still anemic housing growth in the New York City metro region despite rapid economic growth. Similar incentive-based programs in Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, and Washington have <a href="https://furmancenter.org/files/Ending_Exclusionary_Zoning_in_New_York_Citys_Suburbs.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">failed</a> for decades—particularly in the areas with the least housing growth, most extreme prices, and closest proximity to cities and transit— and there is no reason to think that the Senate’s and Assembly’s proposals will succeed in New York.</p> <p>The Senate and Assembly included one new and laudable housing initiative, the Housing Voucher Access Program (HAVP), which would provide crucial financial assistance to an estimated <a href="https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/2_A_State-Level_Rent_Voucher_Program_Final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">13,760 New Yorkers</a> over the next few years. But as many recent news <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/nyregion/homelessness-housing-voucher.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reports</a> have shown, even New Yorkers who receive these new vouchers may struggle to use them, because there are so few safe and affordable apartments available to rent in New York. While the Senate and Assembly seem to think that the State must choose between policies that support vouchers and policies that support new housing growth, the two in fact need to go hand-in-hand.</p> <p>As budget negotiations enter their next stage, the Governor needs to fight to keep the Compact strong, while also moving forward with policies in which the Legislature has rightfully signaled interest, such as HAVP and new tenant protections for New Yorkers who live in unregulated housing.</p> <p>​A statewide framework that includes real mandates to end exclusionary zoning practices, encourage housing growth in transit-rich areas, and ensure all neighborhoods do their part to increase housing opportunities is essential for addressing the depth of the crisis and increasing leverage for renters. It is long past time for New York  to enact a framework like the Housing Compact.</p> <p>***<br />Andrew Fine is Policy Director for Open New York. On Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/andrewdfine" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@​​andrewdfine</a>.</p> <p>

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email opinion@gothamgazette.com

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