20 minute read
FIRST READ
The New York City Council Women’s Caucus celebrated a victory last week by passing bills to improve abortion access for locals and out of staters alike.
NYC APPROVES ABORTION ACCESS BILLS
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As the country deals with the fallout of Roe v. Wade being overturned, the New York City Council took steps to improve abortion access for both local residents and out of staters. The newly approved legislation would require some city health clinics to provide free abortion pills and would prevent city resources from going to efforts to enforce out-of-state abortion laws. They would also permit civil lawsuits against people or organizations that attempt to interfere with a person’s access to reproductive care. Meanwhile, at the state level, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the distribution of the first $10 million in grants to abortion care providers out of the $35 million she had set aside earlier this year for an abortion access fund. And
COPS CAN’T SMOKE YET
As if the New York City Police Department needed any other impediments to recruiting rookies, it looks like officers will still be subject to marijuana testing despite recreational use of the drug being legal in New York. A Law Department memo had suggested that random marijuana testing might go away, but the NYPD quickly clarified that drug testing would continue, effectively making it impossible for cops to unwind from a stressful day with newly legal pot.
– New York City Mayor Eric Adams, on City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and other council members objecting to school funding cuts in the budget they just passed, via the New York Post
– New York City Council Member Sandy Nurse, on the council’s rat mitigation plan to limit easily accessible trash, via NY1 President Joe Biden issued an executive order that health care facilities must perform abortions if the life of the mother is at risk, regardless of any individual state’s laws.
CANNABIS STORES ON THE HORIZON
New York took one step closer to legal pot sales after the state Cannabis Control Board voted to approve regulations for conditional retail licenses. First unveiled in March, the rules garnered some 600 public comments in the past few months, including concerns about those with prior pot-related convictions getting first dibs on the licenses. However, the board members reaffirmed their social equity commitment and plan to reserve the first licenses for those impacted by past marijuana enforcement. Over 200 farmers have already received conditional growing licenses to supply the retail stores, which are expected to begin operation later this year or early next year.
TOP JUDGE TO STEP DOWN
In a surprise decision, New York Chief Judge Janet DiFiore announced that she would step down from her position leading the Court of Appeals at the end of August. Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed her to lead the state’s top court roughly seven years ago, meaning that she will only end up serving half of her 14-year term. DiFiore
did not give a reason for her departure but said in a letter to colleagues that she had achieved what she had hoped to and felt she left the court heading in the right direction. However, after her announcement, reporting revealed that she was facing an ethics probe – though it’s unclear whether that factored into her decision. With DiFiore leaving, Hochul will appoint a new chief judge, her second Court of Appeals pick since taking office. Already, Democrats in the state Legislature are urging her to choose a progressive judge with the court’s more recent conservative bent.
COVID-19 ON THE RISE AGAIN
For those who thought the pandemic was over, think again. COVID-19 cases are once again on the rise, hitting highs the city and state haven’t seen in months. In New York City, test positivity rates are back around 15%, a significant spike considering also that past summers saw fewer cases. The culprit is another new highly transmissible omicron variant that has been infecting even fully vaccinated and boosted New Yorkers. Still, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has not announced new restrictions, mandates or precautionary measures in the face of those alarming numbers. At the same time, a judge in western New York ruled that new isolation and quarantine procedures from the state were unconstitutional.
New York Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, far right, announced her resignation last week, which will allow Gov. Kathy Hochul to make her second appointment to the Court of Appeals.
De Blasio calls for new COVID-19 strategy
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio just can’t keep away from his old stomping grounds. The 10th Congressional District candidate held his second press conference last week outside City Hall, this time to call for additional actions by the city, state and federal government to fight the current surge in COVID-19 cases as the highly transmissible BA.5 variant becomes dominant.
“When you see cases surging, when you see the worst variant we’ve ever seen in terms of transmissibility, when you see hospitalizations going up rapidly, it’s time to do something different,” de Blasio told reporters outside City Hall’s gates.
The former mayor outlined six actions for different levels of government to take, though most of them would fall on the city. They included the city and federal government distributing at-home test kits, masks and information about the antiviral drug Paxlovid to every New York City household by mail; the city partnering with the private sector to distribute N95 and KN95 masks at every venue where people congregate, like theaters and gyms; the city actually enforcing the private sector vaccine mandate; redefining the meaning of “fully vaccinated” to mean adults who have received at least one booster shot, or two booster shots for the most vulnerable adults; the federal government authorizing a second booster shot for all adults; and the city working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to set a new and higher standard for indoor air quality; and the federal government releasing stimulus and infrastructure funds to support businesses in making those upgrades.
Mayor Eric Adams has declined to enforce the private sector vaccine mandate, which was enacted in the final days of the de Blasio administration, saying they’ve been focusing instead on education about the importance of vaccination. He has also rolled back several other policies put in place under his predecessor, including mask mandates and a vaccine requirement to enter indoor venues, known as the Key to NYC program. Adams has also discontinued a color-coded alert system for different risk levels of COVID-19, with recommended actions for the city and individuals to take based on the current risk level. The city has said that it is reevaluating that system.
“Now that we have a strong supply of at-home tests – which we know people prefer – and treatments – which we know save lives – that is what we are focused (on) putting in the hands of New Yorkers,” Adams spokesperson Kate Smart wrote in an email. – Annie McDonough
THE WEEK AHEAD
WEDNESDAY 7/20
Crain’s New York Business hosts a “Future of New York: Cryptocurrency” panel at 9 a.m., featuring state Department of Financial Services Superintendent Adrienne Harris. WEDNESDAY 7/20
The Regional Plan Association hosts a 2 p.m. webinar on history of urban economics in the New York metropolitan region. THURSDAY 7/21
City & State hosts the Protecting New York Summit 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. INSIDE DOPE
Campaign finance filings for New York City, state and federal candidates were all due on Friday, July 15, so expect a lot of money talk this week from City & State.
THIS IS WHERE UPSTATE BEGINS
OR MAYBE THIS IS WHERE IT BEGINS
HERE’S WHERE REP. MONDAIRE JONES IS RUNNING FOR CONGRESS NEXT CYCLE
WRITTEN IN THE STARS
THE FIRST IMAGE FROM THE JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE CONTAINS HIDDEN NEW YORK POLITICAL MESSAGES.
By City & State
The first pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope provided the sharpest infrared images of a small portion of the distant expanse of our universe. Last week, President Joe Biden released this image at the White House to celebrate the joint venture launched on Christmas 2021 with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency. The James Webb telescope images were much brighter than those from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. With that more detailed picture of our universe, City & State may have spotted some important details that even professional astronomers missed.
THIS IS WHERE ERIC ADAMS’ OTHER SECRET OFFICE IS
HERE’S WHERE ERIC ADAMS REALLY LIVES
THE MAJORITY OF NYPD OFFICERS LIVE WAY OUT HERE
THE NEXT GROUP OF 40 UNDER 40 RISING STARS NEW YORK CITY FINALLY FINDS A PLACE WITH NO NIMBYS
A Q&A with Hispanic Federation President and CEO
FRANKIE MIRANDA
How has it been continuing the federation’s work for New York’s Latino communities as COVID-19 has subsided? For us, it’s been a little bit of a struggle to make people understand that the issues affecting our community and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color, specifically in our community, are not issues that are going away. We were forced to look in the eye of the disparities that we have been talking about for a long time. In the desire to come back to some sort of sense of normality, it’s almost like people are trying to say, “Let’s go back to pre-pandemic times,” when we were not okay with prepandemic times.
What’s making the recovery challenging for Latino New Yorkers? We’re still seeing the effects of the pandemic in our community. There are a lot of issues when it comes to those who can afford to do remote work versus those that have to come back in person on public transportation, having to get on a bus, on a train, with all the anxiety of whether or not they are going to be infected, protected. It could just be the anxiety of just taking mass transportation. And a lot of the safety nets that were put in place – excluded worker funds, the protection against eviction and other many programs that helped many people affected in our community – are going away. I think right now, we’re looking at a moment in which many of the needs of the organizations that we’re supporting are going to start shifting in different ways. Vaccine equity and access continues to be a primary focus for us, especially now with the education on children and new guidelines from the CDC. But at the same time, we still see that food insecurity continues to be a big concern, because of the economic impact that it continues to have in our community. At the Hispanic Federation, we are concerned that the limited funding that has been allocated out there is going to start shifting to other priorities because of this urge to say we’re over the pandemic, we need to just move on and take care of other needs.
What are some of your priorities working with Latino communities after the pandemic? We’re putting a lot of attention on digital skills. Automation is going to eliminate millions of jobs, but at the same time, it’s going to have an opportunity for those that are prepared for those jobs in the future. So, we are right now working with 40 organizations around the country to ensure that there is a digital skilling curriculum and that we can continue expanding that, because having digital skills will ensure that families will have wealth in the future. We have seen in some of our programs on the lower end that some of the participants have seen an increase of $19,000 in their income. On the higher end, those that go into IT or programming have seen a $79,000 increase in their income for their families. – Ralph R. Ortega
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Trusting NYCHA to stay public
The state’s modernization funding plan may be the agency’s last hope – or kill public housing in New York City.
By Tim Murphy
LAST MONTH, the state Legislature passed a bill that would allow the New York City Housing Authority, which runs the city’s roughly 170,000 public housing apartments, to lease up to 25,000 of those units to a newly created public benefit corporation. That entity, the Public Housing Preservation Trust, could then borrow billions in private dollars for repairs throughout NYCHA’s more than 300 sites citywide, most of which date back to the 1950s and are badly in need of refurbishment. NYCHA has estimated that it needs $40 billion for the task.
First proposed two years ago, the plan would let residents of each NYCHA campus vote on whether they wanted to participate in the trust – and, if they did, would move that site from Section 9, the traditional federal public housing program, to Section 8, which provides tenants with rent vouchers to provide a revenue stream that would be used as backing to borrow private money for repairs. The land and buildings would still be owned by NYCHA.
Officials have hailed the plan as the only way to modernize NYCHA units, whose federal funding has plunged in the past few decades. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan would’ve infused NYCHA with billions in repairs funding but died in the Democratic-led Congress, leading champions of the trust to point out that Congress simply can’t be counted on to come through for NYCHA.
“For decades, NYCHA residents have been promised repair after repair that never materialized,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a news release about the trust. “We will finally deliver on those promises and offer NYCHA residents the dignity and safe, high-quality, affordable homes they deserve.”
NYCHA Chair and CEO Greg Russ called the passage of the trust “a momentous event in the history of public housing (that) gives NYCHA the ability to raise billions of dollars in capital funds to invest in its properties and residents a true voice in the future of their homes.”
So widespread is the idea that private money is the only hope for massive NYCHA upgrades that the bill behind the trust was backed by anti-corporate progressive state Sen. Julia Salazar, whose district contains many NYCHA sites and who stepped in as a last-minute sponsor for the bill after state Sen. Brian Kavanagh dropped his sponsorship, citing tenant opposition. Another supporter was the Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres, who has said the trust “has the benefits of renovation without the cost of privatization” and that “NYCHA has no (other) good options.”
That sentiment was echoed by others. “It would be nice if there were big pots of pub-
– Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Hunter College urban planning professor
Ramona Ferreyra, who lives in NYCHA’s Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx, leads the anti-privatization group Save Section 9.
lic money out there,” said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a Hunter College urban planning professor, “but the federal government has basically gotten out of the public housing business – and there is a real risk that … NYCHA projects become unlivable in the next few years.”
TENANT PUSHBACK DESPITE BILL’S PASSAGE
But if officials and policy wonks cite the trust as NYCHA’s only survival option, some of the authority’s residents don’t want it to happen anyway. Just how many is hard to determine; it’s likely a great many NYCHA residents haven’t even heard about the trust. Trust promoters have said repeatedly that the law was created with tenant input – reflected in the clause that each campus must vote on whether to join the trust, and that the total number of units to go into the trust is 25,000, down from Russ’ original ask of 110,000 units.
Yet nine of the 10 members of the Citywide Council of Presidents, tenant leaders who represent all NYCHA residents, voted against the trust. Ramona Ferreyra, who lives in NYCHA’s Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx and leads the anti-privatization Save Section 9, canvassed Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses and Stuyvesant Gardens this spring and found that more than 75% of residents hadn’t heard of the trust.
Moreover, when they were explained what the trust was, she said, “No tenants liked it. Supporters will say that a whole campus supports it when in fact it’s only the tenant association presidents.” She believes the presidents were pressured to get behind it.
The opposition’s biggest point was the claim that the law did not guarantee that if a NYCHA campus defaulted on the trust, then the city or state would step in to make sure that it did not fall into private hands. Trust supporters denied this would happen. “The trust law prohibits pledging the fee ownership of the properties as collateral,” NYCHA said in a statement to City & State. “It is further codified in the trust law that low-income rights, protections and rents must remain in place on these properties. Under no scenario can the buildings be sold, become market rate or have the resident rights or protections changed.”
But Paula Segal, a lawyer for the tenant group Residents to Preserve Public Housing that’s opposed to the trust, said that “‘fee ownership’ are legal words that mean TOTAL ownership. The trust will never have fee ownership. It will only have a leasehold interest but a leasehold interest is a property right that can be pledged – such as how the Chrysler Building is owned.”
She said the law would have to be changed from “the fee ownership of” to “any ownership interest in.” It would also, she added, have to remove an entire section of the bill that said the trust will be able to pledge an “interest in ... housing facilities as a remedy to ... default” – and also remove language that neither the city or the state will have the obligation to cure that default.
There is disagreement over the likelihood that the trust would ever default.
“The chance is remote that Section 8 would stop paying out, or that the state or city would not step in to refinance these projects where so many people live,” Bloom said. “Would they really allow a public agency to default? Even when a lot of these big projects were faced with default in the 1970s, the state stepped in.”
Yet if that’s true, “Then why didn’t the city or state guarantee stepping in, in the event of a default?” asked Marquis Jenkins, a longtime resident of NYCHA’s Bracetti Plaza in the East Village and a founding member of Residents to Preserve Public Housing.
The other concern among opponents was that NYCHA, which should issue detailed guidelines for campus-by-campus opt-in voting in the fall, won’t set the quorum high enough to be truly reflective of a given site. Jenkins thought it should be 80%, and that the vote should be preceded by each campus conducting a fiscal needs assessment that looks at the current repair budget against the shortfall – and against how much the trust wants to borrow.
“If there’s only $100 million available for a development,” he said, “then residents should be armed with choices, such as, ‘We want to prioritize the roofs and deal with the grounds later.’” Yet, he said he was skeptical that NYCHA would be fully transparent.
Asked how high NYCHA would set the per-campus quorum, the agency replied via email: “The trust legislation states that within 60 days of the effective date of the signed bill, NYCHA will issue a set of proposed requirements related to the resident voting process, and that there will be a public comment period as well as a public hearing where NYCHA residents and all groups may provide their input before a final voting process is established. The legislation also states that the voting process shall require a minimum percentage of tenants of record at a housing development to participate in the voting process, in order for the voting process to be valid. These guidelines and regulations will be further developed through a collaborative and transparent stakeholder process. Fearmongering and spreading misinformation will obstruct residents’ lawful right to participate.”
FEARS A POSSIBLE PRECEDENT THE EVENT OF A DEFAULT
Opponents of the trust said they’re afraid of the worst-case scenario: If NYCHA campuses fall into private hands, then the trust’s promise that campuses will remain within NYCHA management will fall through – and private management could lead to evictions in the case of rent nonpayment. In the fall, NYCHA told The New York Times that 42% of its tenants, in the wake of COVID-19 unemployment, were behind on their rent.
Jenkins pointed to a Human Rights Watch report earlier this year that found at least two NYCHA campuses experienced an increase in evictions once they came under private management through a program called PACT. The program leases NYCHA buildings and land to private and nonprofit development partners, who then do repairs, provide site management as well as social and community services using federal Section 8 funding.
One thing the law was clear about: Should NYCHA properties fall into private hands, they will be obliged to maintain them as housing for low-income New Yorkers. “But they will still be the new owner,” said Segal, and hence potentially could manage them how they wish.
For now, with the trust a done deal in Albany, opponents said they’re focused in the next legislative session on striking from the law language that left open the possibility of private seizure. Jenkins said he wondered if Salazar would urge lawmakers to do so. He also wondered aloud if Salazar would urge them to reduce the maximum bonds the trust could issue from $10 billion to $5 billion, or from $200,000 to $100,000 per unit – thereby reducing risk. (To this point, NYCHA said the average capital needed per unit was roughly $225,000.)
Staff for Salazar said she was unavailable to respond to those questions when City & State reached out.
Regardless of what happens with the trust – if all, some or none of the NYCHA campuses opt into it, if it manages to fund even a portion of NYCHA’s massive repairs, or if it defaults – one thing is clear: For tenants, it’s an uphill battle trying to keep their homes entirely in the public realm, maintained entirely with public money.
“It’s not a rational fear” that private investment will fell NYCHA, Bloom said. “It’s very remote as a possibility. The money will be borrowed against future Section 8 payments, not against the actual rents, and Section 8 is very politically popular.”
But perhaps the fear, even if inflated, is more visceral for those, like Ferreyra, who actually rely on NYCHA as their sole source of affordable housing in a very unaffordable city. She said she and her Save Section 9 peers went to Washington, D.C., in mid-June to meet with New York City representatives as politically diverse as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Staten Island Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. They asked both to put a moratorium on any sort of NYCHA privatization.
It may seem pie-in-the-sky at this point, but Ferreyra is determined. “We want to make sure our electeds in D.C. understand what the original promise of public housing was,” she said, “and what steps we need to get back on track.” ■
On June 16, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation creating the Public Housing Preservation Trust.
Tim Murphy is a Queens-based freelance journalist focusing on health care, housing and LGBTQ issues.
