Crain's New York Business

A BedStuy teen’s sneaker brand heads to the Oscars

TIPPING POINT

A burgeoning labor movement and staff shortages challenge strained health care companies

BY JACQUELINE NEBER

At the end of last year, Monte ore Medical Center refused to voluntarily recognize residents’ and fellows’ bid to join a labor union. In February, the resident physicians sidestepped the rejection and unionized anyway.

e plan had always been to join the Service Employees International Union’s Committee of Interns and Residents, the largest house-sta union in the country, with more than 24,000 members. But because residents and fellows have the right to decide whether they want to be represented by a union—regardless of what hospital management would prefer—when Monte ore didn’t recognize the union in November, the process moved to a National Labor Relations Board vote. On Feb. 23, residents in Monte ore’s emergency department livestreamed the NLRB vote, during which 82% of physicians opted to be part of the union.

e residents’ decision to proceed with unionization follows the New York State Nurses Association’s threeday strike in January at Monte ore and at Mount Sinai Hospital. e nurses’ move resulted in historic wage hikes and provisions that are expected to improve

See UNIONS on page 19

Transit union blocks proposal to reschedule subway service around hybrid work patterns

BY CAROLINE SPIVACK

Alabor arbitrator last Tuesday blocked changes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s service plan,

saying it would violate a contract with Transport Workers Union Local 100. e MTA argued it is trying to better align subway schedules to current commuting patterns.

Beginning in June, the MTA had planned to

VOL. 39, NO. 9 © 2023 CRAIN COMMUNICATIONS INC.

reduce Monday and Friday service on seven lines: the 1, 6, 7, F, E, L and Q. In turn, it planned to increase rush-hour weekday

See SUBWAY on page 22

The top of ce leases in Manhattan

GOP, Dems both find fault with governor’s housing plan

BY EDDIE SMALL

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ambitious plan to build 800,000 new homes in the state over the next decade faced pushback and questioning from skeptical lawmakers in both parties during a Wednesday budget hearing.

Legislators questioned Homes and Community Renewal Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas about several aspects of the plan during her roughly 2.5-hour appearance before the Assembly and the state Senate. Republican members large-

three years, and communities with Metro-North stops would need to rezone the areas around their train stations to allow for new residential projects. Jack Martins, a Republican state senator representing Long Island, blasted the plan as something that would change the fabric of his district.

“We see it as an attack on our suburban communities,” he said, “and I urge you and the governor to reconsider this as we go forward.”

Infrastructure fund

needed to create new water, sewer, pumping stations, power plants and roads for the governor’s housing compact?” asked Ari Brown, a Republican assemblyman from Long Island. “Aren’t we really talking about billions of dollars?”

Visnauskas stressed that the $250 million was not meant to be the sole funding source for infrastructure needs and referred to it as “a down payment” to support housing growth.

ly focused their concerns on the impact the plan could have on the city’s suburbs, while Democrats raised more questions about how the plan could increase the supply of affordable housing specifically.

Hochul’s plan would require all downstate communities to hit 3% growth targets for housing every

A typical complaint anti-housing activists make about more development coming to their neighborhoods is that there will not be enough infrastructure to support it. The Hochul administration has tried to get out in front of this by including a $250 million infrastructure fund to address the population increase, but mutiple legislators claimed this would not be nearly enough to support growth on the scale that the state wants.

“Do you honestly believe that the $250 million designated for planning and infrastructure will cover even a small fraction of the monies

“We really look forward to working with municipalities, to work with them on achieving these goals,” she said. “We think that doing nothing is not an option.”

The housing compact did not win universal praise from Hochul’s fellow Democrats either. Her plan does not get very specific about what types of homes the new 800,000 will be, and many legislators expressed concerns that it could spark a glut of additional pricey units.

“A lot of the housing could be rather expensive, and it’ll be driven by market rates,” said Queens state Sen. John Liu. “Your philosophy might be that increasing supply somehow reduces prices a little bit, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of inducement for affordable housing.”

Westchester Assemblyman Chris Burdick echoed this concern, saying that he and his colleagues don’t just want to see “luxury condos around train stations.”

No other choice

Visnauskas noted that the compact does incentivize affordable housing by having every affordable unit count for twice as much as a market rate unit toward achieving a community’s 3% growth target. And

though she also fielded questions around the general idea of the state stepping in and telling local communities how much housing they need to build, she argued that the scale of the crisis had left the Hochul administration with no other choice

“We would assert that the housing crisis in the state is so bad and that the need for our housing is so great that it is a matter of state concern,” she said. ■

Flatiron Building is headed to auction block following dispute among its five owners

BY NATALIE SACHMECHI

EVENTS CALLOUT MARCH 15

POWER BREAKFAST

Mark your calendar to hear Keechant

L. Sewell, commissioner of the New York City Police Department, interviewed live on stage by Crain’s New York Business Editor-in-Chief

Cory Schouten. You’ll learn about the progress the NYPD has made and the challenges that remain in ensuring employees can safely get to work as companies and building owners bank on more workers returning to offices this year. The discussion will also include how businesses can best work with the NYPD to get a post-pandemic crime wave—including property crime and thefts—under control.

DETAILS

Time: 8:30 to 10 a.m.

Location: 180 Central Park S. CrainsNewYork.com/pb_sewell

The iconic, triangle-shaped Flatiron Building is heading to auction March 22 to resolve a dispute between its owners, according to a judgment filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The decision to sell came from the foursome of GFP Real Estate, Newmark, Sorgente Group and ABS Real Estate Partners, which constitute 75% of the building’s ownership.

The remaining 25% belongs to Nathan Silverstein, whom his partners claim in court papers is making poor business decisions regarding the future of the now-vacant building after its sole tenant, MacMillan Publishers, moved out in 2019.

In July 2021 the other four partners sued Silverstein to sell the building. According to court documents, he proposed dividing the building into multiple spaces and was also uninterested in renovating the property before marketing it to new tenants.

In December of that year, Silver-

stein sued his partners for damages, alleging that they didn’t do enough to get the building leased up, and accused Newmark of not marketing it properly and making a deal with the other owners to lease it to Knotel at below-market-rate rents.

Newmark is the owner of Knotel. The deal never came to fruition. That lawsuit is still pending. The group agreed to complete a $80 million renovation of the property, court documents show, but Silverstein then alleged that GFP inflated construction costs.

Partition sale

Unable to come to an agreement about how to move forward, the partners sought a partition sale through a judge to get their invest-

ments out of the property.

They got the green light in January from a state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, who held that the transaction would have to be a cash sale, and the partners would receive the proceeds according to the fraction of the building each

owns. GFP Real Estate owns 52% of the building.

An auction is set for March 22 with Mannion Auctions.

PincusCo was the first to report the news. An attorney for Silverstein did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ■

“A LOT OF ThE hOUSING COULD BE RATHER EXPENSIVE, AND IT’LL BE DRIVEN BY MARKET RATES”

TRAYNHAM-ARTIS

with the Lane 1 originals

Bed-Stuy 14-year-old brings her sneaker design to the Oscars

Amira-Dior Traynham-Artis’ kicks will be included in a showcase of goods for Academy Award nominees

BY OLIVIA BENSIMON

Amira-Dior Traynham-Artis, a 14-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant resident, is preparing to be in Los Angeles soon, displaying her sneaker brand, Lane 1, in a showcase of luxury o erings for this year’s Academy Award nominees.

What started two and a half years ago as a distraction from the monotony of the Covid-19 pandemic, designing sneakers is now a way for Traynham-Artis to express herself and match the expectations and ambitions of those around her, making money while doing it.

“People were setting my goals for me when I wasn’t even at the age to achieve them,” she said. “ ere was always this weight on my shoulders that I had to be this certain person. I didn’t have a way to escape until I found art.”

Her art involves writing, drawing, painting and sketching; designing sneakers is just one iteration of the nal product.

Traynham-Artis remembers seeing her mom—Kenesha Traynham-Cooper, the 56th Assembly District leader in Brooklyn—and her aunt designing clothing and shoes, and wanting to be a part of it. When Traynham-Artis couldn’t nd a pair of earth-tone sneakers to her liking, her mom, who had been encouraging her to be an entrepreneur, asked, “Why not make them yourself?”

And so she did. Her designs—six so far—are inspired by friends and family, she said.

“ e point of my brand is not to t everyone’s aesthetic because I know not everyone is the same,” she said. She’ll sketch

something out and upload it to an online platform that allows her to design the sneaker’s shape and color before manufacturing the shoes, her mom explained. e shoes—handmade in Italy and made to order—cost $150 to $250 per pair and can be bought through a link on the Lane 1 Instagram page.

Following news reports about the teen’s growing sneaker business, S.W. Roseburgh, a family friend and owner of management company Dubois Pelin & Associates, reached out to Traynham-Cooper about Lane 1 being included in a luxury goods showcase for Oscar nominees ahead of the awards show. e sneakers on display are a design partnership with Gernie, another Brooklyn-based brand.

e teen said Lane 1 has sold almost 100 pairs of sneakers so far. Having her designs presented to celebrities is an accomplishment that means the world to her.

“When it comes to the sneakers, if I have a speci c goal, I’m going to achieve it,” she said. “If I have the opportunity to do something, I’m going to take it, no matter what.”

Personal style

Traynham-Artis has always been into streetwear. ese days her out ts and sneakers are inspired by late R&B singer Aaliyah, whom she says embodied the style she’s always loved. A mix of baggy pants and tted tops allows Trayn-

ham-Artis to be both comfortable and stylish at the same time.

Although Lane 1’s designs are shaped around whatever Traynham-Artis would want to wear herself, she said she really likes Nike’s latest Seafoam Jordan 4s.

Since the o cial launch of Lane 1 in January, TraynhamArtis has experienced a whirlwind of excitement, she said, adding that she views the experience as a testament to what’s possible if she sets her mind to something. She has heard of too many Black and brown peers giving up on their dreams.

“ ey look down on their selves because they’ve been told all of their life that they can’t do something,” she said. “When you’re being told you can’t do something over and over and over again, you create this mindset in your head that maybe you can’t do it.”

She said she appreciates the encouragement she has received from her mother and other family members, her friends and the general public.

At the DPA Luxe gift suite in Los Angeles, Traynham-Artis hopes to meet Zendaya, whom she’s been following since her Disney Channel days: “I’ll tell her how she’s inspired me ever since I was young and how much of a role model she is for me, for starting so young and being as successful as she is today.”

e 95th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 12, at 8 p.m. Eastern. ■

“IF I HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO SOMETHING, I’M GOING TO TAKE IT, NO MATTER WHAT”

Sanctioned Russian oligarch’s Upper East Side luxury condos shine a spotlight on straw-buying

Officials say billionaire Viktor Vekselberg bought the units with laundered funds through a shell company

BY C. J. HUGHES

Using a shell company to buy a luxury apartment has often been slammed as little more than a tool for hiding laundered money, even if examples have sometimes been hard to come by.

But the recent move by federal officials to seize a half-dozen homes belonging to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, including a pair of condos on the Upper East Side, has shed light on the alleged practice in revealing and specific ways.

“Strawmen, corrupt professionals and shell companies may be the hallmarks of money laundering and sanctions evasion, but they are

the 21st floor of the limestone tower, unit 21, and an office that’s several stories below. In public records, there’s no indication they belong to Vekselberg, a billionaire metals magnate considered to be one of Russia’s richest citizens.

But Manhattan prosecutors say the listed buyer of both apartments, Medallion Inc., is a straw buyer that Vekselberg controls. Medallion bought the larger apartment in 2008 for about $11 million and the smaller unit in 2013 for about $600,000, records show.

For years Vekselberg, who made his billions in aluminum and gas and who owns a collection of Fabergé eggs, was a behind-the-scenes kind of owner, prosecutors say.

He relied on “close friend and associate”

cords show. Reached by phone, Wise declined to comment.

2022, Compass de-listed the apartments just two months later.

Michael Koeneke, the Compass agent who marketed the properties, declined to comment.

Last winter, of course, also marked the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which saw U.S. officials intensify their crackdown on wealthy Russian nationals with connections to Putin. Indeed, in the wake of the invasion, the Treasury and Justice departments launched a task force called KleptoCapture to take newly aggressive “economic countermeasures” against sanctions evaders.

obstacles that diligent, dedicated investigators and prosecutors will surmount,” said Andrew Adams, an investigator with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, in a statement.

Located in the condo 515 Park Ave., Vekselberg’s New York properties are a four-bedroom unit on

Vladimir Voronchenko to coordinate with a local lawyer to pay all the common charges and taxes for the uptown condos, as well as the fees at properties in the Hamptons and Miami, an effort that cost nearly $19 million, they say.

Though the attorney was not named in the recent announcement, lawyer Robert G. Wise handled both of Medallion’s real estate transactions at 515 Park and signed the deeds for the apartments, re-

ON REAL ESTATE

But in 2018 the financial arrangement changed, according to prosecutors. Trump officials slapped sanctions on Vekselberg and six other Russian businessmen in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle for Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea section of Ukraine.

Also that year, a firm that Vekselberg had a stake in allegedly made a $500,000 payment to a shell company owned by Trump attorney Michael Cohen, though Vekselberg denied the connection.

As a result, Vekselberg had to do an even better job of concealing his local real estate investments, prosecutors say.

So, to evade authorities, Vo-

ronchenko and the same attorney began paying condo fees in New York and elsewhere from different sources, including a shell company, Smile Holding, based in the Bahamas. About $4 million in fees was paid out to service real estate from 2018 to 2022, officials say.

Seeking to sell

Last winter Vekselberg moved to sell the Park Avenue homes, apparently without first getting special permission from Treasury Department officials. The apartments in the 1990s tower, at East 60th Street, were listed for $14.6 million by Compass, which praised their “rare combination of location, triple-mint finish, privacy and views.” But after unveiling them in January

“The United States sends a strong message to those who violate sanctions and engage in money laundering that the United States will use every available tool to forfeit criminal proceeds and will use that money to help our allies in Ukraine,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for New York, in a statement.

Last April the FBI and Spanish police seized Vekselberg’s yacht, Tango. Then, on Feb. 24, a joint task force announced the intended civil forfeiture of the six Vekselberg properties, which include a home on Duck Pond Lane in Southampton and apartments on Fisher Island in Miami Beach. Voronchenko, a U.S. citizen, meanwhile, fled for Moscow last spring after being subpoenaed in connection with the Vekselberg case, say officials, who formally indicted him Feb. 7.■

Could moving MSG save Vornado’s Penn District plan?

The city’s community board meetings can be tough to get through. I used to attend several while reporting on the South Bronx for the late, great DNAinfo. By the end of the hours-long affairs, my notes were usually filled with astute journalistic observations such as “I’m hungry,” “How are they still talking about this?” and “Ugh, I am so, so hungry.” I did not get many good story ideas out of those notes.

But I kept going to the meetings anyway because, every once in a while, some genuinely interesting and important news would come out of them. This was the case at last week’s Manhattan Community Board 5 meeting, where neighbors questioned why Madison Square Garden Entertainment should get a new permit to keep the venue in its current spot. Late in the meeting, a Madison Square Garden Entertain-

ment executive mentioned that the company might be willing to move the famed arena across Seventh Avenue. This would put it right in the middle of the area around Penn Station that Vornado Realty Trust is trying to develop.

The comment from MSG Executive Vice President Joel Fisher raises far more questions than answers, not least of which is how seriously the company is contemplating such a move. But in the wake of Vornado Realty Trust hitting the brakes on its original Penn District plan given the bleak commercial real estate environment and the state’s insisting it will move forward with a plan to renovate Penn Station regardless, the idea of making a new Madison Square Garden central to the Vornado plan is absolutely worth exploring.

A quick refresher for those unfamiliar: The state wants to renovate

Penn Station, and it had planned to pay for this revamp with tax revenue from a slew of new office towers, many built by Steven Roth’s Vornado. Then the pandemic hit, and a surplus of office space quickly became one of the city’s biggest problems given the rise in the popularity of remote work. After stubbornly insisting that everything was fine for almost three years, Vornado said in November that it would delay its Penn plan given market conditions.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration says it is still committed to moving forward with renovating Penn

Station but has yet to get specific on what a different plan could look like. So why not at least explore whether relocating Madison Square Garden could make sense as part of a new path forward?

People may be reluctant to go back to the office, but they seem much less reluctant to go back to Knicks games, although it remains unclear which is actually the more unpleasant experience. (Yes, the Knicks currently have a decent record, but we’re still encouraged to make fun of them, right?)

A mammoth undertaking

Moving an iconic venue like the Garden would be a mammoth undertaking, and it could make the already thorny issue of its property taxes even thornier. MSG enjoys a lucrative state tax exemption that has saved it $875 million, at least,

over the past four decades, and the company would surely fight tooth and nail to keep it no matter where the arena is located. This could make paying for a new Penn Station from property tax revenue, well, complicated.

But trying to pay for it with tax revenue from empty office towers that Vornado doesn’t have much interest in building right now would be complicated as well. And leaving Penn Station as it is would be a huge blow to the 500,000 commuters trudging through it every day and the governor herself, who has shown no signs of backing off the project yet.

I don’t know if a new Garden is something Vornado, the state or MSG itself would actually commit to building, but it’s a worthwhile conversation to have. And, hey, if it ends up happening, maybe we’d even get to see the fiery James Dolan and Roth do a joint media appearance to tout the project. That alone might make the whole thing worth it. ■

COMPAASS

MANHATTAN PROSECUTORS SAY THE LISTED BUYER OF BOTH APARTMENTS, MEDALLION INC., IS A STRAW BUYER THAT VEKSELBERG CONTROLS

THE LIVING ROOM, of unit 21 at 515 Park Ave.

EDDIE SMALL

big BQE

BY CAROLINE SPIVACK

The city Department of Transportation has hit the brakes on controversial plans to reimagine a crumbling stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway as it studies whether to have four lanes of traffic or six.

The DOT announced Friday that it will revisit the number of lanes as part of an overhaul of the crumbling triple-cantilever section of the BQE that runs along the Brooklyn Heights waterfront. The department said the study will delay the start of the environmental review process until autumn; it had been slated to begin in the spring.

The delay might mean the city will miss out on federal infrastructure money.

DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez described the delay as a response to concerns about the environmental and health impacts of restoring six lanes of traffic, three in each direction. Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 had narrowed that section of the highway to four lanes in a bid to extend its life.

“We are committed to environmental justice, public health and reducing the harmful effects of the BQE by building as narrow a structure as possible,” Rodriguez said in a statement.

All three proposals the DOT has developed—known as the terraces, the lookout and the stoop—to revitalize the 1.5-mile, city-owned portion of the highway would restore six lanes of traffic to the road. Officials have said that there would be three lanes in each direction, with one serving as a shoulder, a bus priority lane or a lane for high-occupancy vehicles. In addition, each lane must be widened to 12 feet from 10 feet to comply with federal highway standards.

Transportation advocates and local officials have objected to the plans, calling for a more environmentally friendly vision.

“Every elected official representing the triple-cantilever section has been clear with DOT: We want to see a two-lane solution,” said City Council member Lincoln Restler, who represents Brooklyn Heights.

“We can’t afford to add a third lane that would amount to 6 million more vehicles releasing emissions in our community every year,” Restler said. “It’s unacceptable for our climate future, and we expect DOT to identify a two-lane solution.”

Need for speed

BQE repairs are urgent. Transportation officials have warned that parts of the expressway could be unusable as soon as 2026. As part of a city plan to stretch the road’s life expectancy, de Blasio said the city would ticket trucks weighing more than 40 tons on the BQE to prevent damage to the highway.

Under federal law, trucks on the highway may not exceed 40 tons, but the city says some trucks on the expressway weigh as much as 85 tons.

The city program to crack down on those trucks has stalled, howev-

er. The city blames the holdup on a federal requirement that weight sensors be calibrated a specific way.

In December, DOT’s chief strategy officer, Julie Bero, called it “mission critical” that the city move forward with an environmental review in the spring to meet federal infrastructure grant application deadlines for the project. The DOT did not immediately respond to questions about how the delay might affect the city’s eligibility for funds.

The state DOT is the entity that might ultimately dictate the reduc-

tion of the BQE’s footprint. The state owns the sections of the BQE north and south of the triple-cantilever section and has said that it has

no plans to develop a comprehensive vision for the entire corridor with the city.

“The easy cop-out would be for the city to just shrug its shoulders and say, ‘Let’s go with three lanes to be consistent with the state and go after the money,’” said Rachel Weinberger, director of research strategy at the Regional Plan Association.

“The city is trying really hard to balance the needs of doing the right thing and doing something—which still relies on getting the money. It looks like they’re taking the harder

path—which suggests that they want to do something innovative.”

Transit advocates welcomed the exploration of a pared-down BQE.

Chris Bastian, transportation chair of the Brooklyn Heights Association, lauded the city for responding to community feedback. The additional planning is worth it, he said, so long as it doesn’t lead to a prolonged delay to BQE repairs.

“I worry that all this means is we’re going to drag things out and kick the can down the road,” said Bastian. “Whatever the ultimate strategy is, we’re still facing an indefinite deadline somewhere in the future.

“The roadway has to be repaired.” ■

BLOOMBERG

ASKED & ANSWERED

NANCY HAGANS New York State Nurses Association

INTERVIEW BY AMANDA D’AMBROSIO

Just a few years after starting her career as a surgical intensive care unit nurse at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn in 1989, Nancy Hagans became the president of one of the New York State Nurses Association’s local bargaining units. Now Hagans is leading the union, which represents 42,000 nurses in the state, to demand increased pay and staf ng to preserve patient safety. Thousands of city nurses went on strike at the beginning of this year, ultimately winning contracts with local hospitals ensuring higher staff-to-patient ratios. In her leadership role, which she assumed in 2021, Hagans is galvanizing nurses to achieve pay equity and take care of their mental health.

Now that the union has won higher patient-to-staff ratios for many hospitals in the city, how will you ensure they are enforced?

Staf ng continues to be the number one issue for nurses everywhere. We won staf ng not only at Mount Sinai Hospital and Monte ore Health System, but at all the other hospitals in the city, we negotiated and ended up with patient-nurse ratios. Now that’s when the work begins. We have to continuously monitor what’s going on. We have monthly staf ng committee meetings, and we have to be part of the hiring process to make sure the nurses that are leaving are being replaced. That’s the hard work right now: to make sure that what’s on paper is actually being done.

DOSSIER

WHO IS SHE President, New York State Nurses Association; critical care nurse, Maimonides Medical Center

BORN Port au Prince, Haiti

GREW UP West Brighton, Staten Island

RESIDES Tompkinsville, Staten Island

EDUCATION Bachelor’s in nursing, RN, CCRN, Long Island University in Brooklyn UNION CAREER Hagans has participated in NYSNA leadership for 30 years. She started as the local bargaining unit president at Maimonides in 1993 and was elected to the NYSNA board in 2015. She became treasurer in 2019 and president in 2021. She’s also on its social justice committee.

FAMILY LIFE She loves spending time with her two teenage daughters and her chocolate Labrador, Ace.

How has burnout among health care workers contributed to the staf ng crisis?

I’ve lost so many patients, and sometimes I never got the opportunity to even grieve that loss. Because I go in the bathroom and wipe my eyes with a piece of

tissue, and then the next patient comes. And there are times you want to sit there and have that conversation with that family, spend that little time with them. Because I know what it’s like to lose someone close to you. But when you’re working understaffed, you don’t even have that time. We don’t even have time to re ect.

What other bene ts do you want to see in nurse contracts?

My goal as president is for every hospital to have places like a hotline, places where the nurse could call when they have a bad day. And in our contracts, to be permitted to take—I wouldn’t call it a mental health day, but to take a serenity day. When somebody says, “I lost a patient; I’m really not in a condition to work,” to have a safe place to have a conversation with someone or to go to one of those serenity rooms and do a little meditation and take a little time for yourself. As nurses, self-care is something that we don’t do.

How do you think the contracts that nurses won in the private sector affect staff in public hospitals?

Well, Health + Hospitals nurses work as hard as we do, if not harder. Remember, Elmhurst Hospital was the epicenter during Covid. They need to have pay parity, right now. Our siblings at Health + Hospitals are making $20,000 less than us in the private sector, which is totally unacceptable. My biggest concern is that those nurses will leave H+H to seek employment at the private hospitals. The mayor and everybody in New York should stand up and rally around us nurses and say, “You know what, they deserve the same pay equity,” because we do the same work. We care for patients the same way.

Thinking about the contracts NYSNA won earlier this year, what lessons are you taking with you for future negotiations?

Everybody’s watching, and they watch New York and ask, how did we do it? We stood together for our patients, for our profession and for our future. Because we are the backbone of the hospitals. Hospitals cannot survive without nurses. ■

As Garment District landlords seek green light for residential conversions, others say slow down

BY C. J. HUGHES

The Garment District may be shaping up to be the rst major test of the city’s push to convert o ces to apartments.

At a City Council hearing last week, a landlord representative urged o cials to tweak the zoning in the Midtown neighborhood to allow apartments at the expense of fashion businesses. But a key council member, Gale Brewer, pushed back on the proposal to protect an iconic city industry.

Gerald Scupp, the vice president of the Garment District Alliance, an advocacy group composed mostly

fering from a commercial vacancy rate of 20%, and the o ces that are occupied are less than half-full on any given day. Plus, homeless encampments and crime on vacant sidewalks are creating a vicious circle where fewer people want to be in the neighborhood because so few people are there.

“ e experience on the street is really unfortunate, and this is the middle of Manhattan,” Scupp said in testimony to the committee. “We think having residential will bring more of a 24/7 feel to the neighborhood.”

could be built in a decade, according to the alliance. Mayor Eric Adams has said the city needs 500,000 over that time frame.

Group support

of building owners, told the council’s land-use committee that the mostly commercial area has fewer residents per acre than anywhere in the ve boroughs.

On top of that, the district is suf-

But new residents could force out a vital industry for the city’s nearby theater industry, said Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president who now represents the Upper West Side. Even if garment manufacturers have dwindled to just 2% of commercial tenants, that number could easily increase as the city creaks back to normal, Brewer said, adding, “don’t mess with the Garment Center.”

If the zoning changes, 5,000 units

Scupp added that his group has the support of Majority Leader Keith Powers and current Borough President Mark Levine, as well as the two community boards that cover the area. “I don’t think Broadway is going to close down because a glove manufacturer moves a few blocks away,” added Scupp, who had the most speci c pitch of Tuesday’s speakers.

Others at the hearing included developers, architects and building-trade groups, who testi ed in favor of city and state plans to relax conversion requirements such as building age.

Previously, the only structures eligible for the most part were built pre-1961, a requirement made to keep at least some buildings viable for o ce functions, analysts say.

But a January report from the Adaptive Reuse Task Force of the mayor’s o ce, which echoes calls by Gov. Kathy Hochul, would raise that building age cap to 1990.

“ e Garment District is the logical place for conversions to start, since it has been arti cially underutilized by zoning rules,” Ken Fisher, a land-use specialist with the rm Cozen O’Connor and a

councilman in the 1990s, told Crain’s. Still, for all the buzz, conversions may not produce huge amounts of housing, because every site can have its own limiting quirks, like established tenants. “O ce conversions are like chicken soup. ey can’t hurt, and they might help,” Fisher said. “But they’re a drop in the bucket compared with what the city needs.” ■

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

“OFFICE CONVERSIONS ARE LIKE CHICKEN SOUP. THEY CAN’T HURT, AND THEY MIGHT HELP.”

How geospatial tech propels climate action in world-class cities

populated area,” said William Shea, director of distribution and collection at Toronto Water. “Employees were running around, turning valves, trying to understand the problem. Now we have hundreds of sensors and IoT [Internet of Things] devices in the field, providing real-time data that then populates our GIS system for clear visualization of events.”

In Dublin, Ireland, high-tech maps and GIS analysis have benefitted the city’s cycling infrastructure and its climate objectives. “We wanted to assess cycling safety and accessibility across the city to identify priority areas for improvement,” said Cameron McDonald, an associate and geospatial projects lead for the analytics team at Knight Frank Research. “That fed into Dublin’s larger climate action plan.” The team collected data from public bike providers and other entities across the city that helped them understand bike density and availability. By performing analyses to identify the most popular routes along the cycling network, the team established which junctions and roads were most critical. The cyclability of those thoroughfares were assessed, and prioritizations for infrastructure improvements were determined accordingly.

In 2023 tackling climate change is a code-red mandate—and innovators from cities and regions around the world say they are using advanced location technology to understand climate impacts, support decision-making and plan for resilient infrastructure.

In a Feb. 8 webinar, “Building Everyday Resilience in New York City Infrastructure: How a Geographic Approach Accelerates Action,” an international group of trendsetters across private and public sectors shared how their organizations are using geospatial technology to adapt to climate change and build resilient infrastructure.

The virtual event, hosted by Crain’s Content Studio and Esri, was moderated by Betsy Gardner, editor of Data-Smart City Solutions, a research resource at Harvard University’s Bloomberg Center for Cities. In a succession of keynote addresses, expert presentations and a panel conversation, participants described how location technology has become essential to their climate and sustainability plans.

Leading off the event was Kizzy Charles-Guzmán, executive director

of the New York mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.

“Data is key to our preparation for a range of climate hazards,” she said.

For example, Charles-Guzmán said, the agency has used locational intelligence to identify neighborhoods most vulnerable to extreme heat, often where air conditioning is not ubiquitous. Pinpointing those highrisk areas allowed for targeted tree planting strategies, which provides meaningful health benefits to New Yorkers who need it most, she said.

Often, the centralization of such data is itself game-changing.

Jesús Cerezo Arillo, head of process integration service for the General Sub-directorate for Urban Innovation and Information at Madrid City Hall, described how breaking down data silos between departments transformed city-wide operations.

“Our information is now highly searchable, allowing decision-makers to immediately find relevant data,” he said.

For Rail Baltica, a multi-country railway infrastructure project underway in North Europe,

geographic information systems (GIS) technology is crucial for collecting, managing, structuring and showcasing data. “It’s the portal for our many stakeholders and partners to access the intel they need,” said Raitis Bušmanis, head of virtual design and construction for the project.

Location analytics are also mitigating environmental impacts. “We

determine the best offshore sites for permanent carbon sequestration,” shared Leslie Ruta, director of planning at the Port of Corpus Christi, a major hub for outbound crude oil.

Notably, GIS technology can also be harnessed to boost social mobility. Anne Shaw, executive director of transport for the West Midlands in the U.K., shared how understanding

In India, which is among the most water-stressed nations worldwide, GIS has emerged as vital to water resource planning. “Geospatial maps help us with many important tasks, from canal network design and rainwater harvesting to flood inundation mapping and identification of irrigable areas,” said Dr. R. N. Sankhua of the India National Water Development Agency.

monitor animal movement to limit interference with migration corridors during construction,” said Vaidas Ulenskas, a GIS team leader at Rail Baltica. “We’ve even created digital maps to understand noise pollution.”

Half a world away, Texas officials are tackling pollution of another kind – carbon. “We plan to use grants recently won for subsurface data collection. With that data we can

the region’s population drives policy. “By layering all kinds of information,” she explained, “from transit data to gradations of deprivation, we gain clarity on where targeted transit investments will increase access to education and employment.”

More day-to-day concerns are supported by location analytics, too.

“Early in my career, there was a major water pressure issue in a densely

In closing, Matthew Lewin, director of management consulting at Esri Canada, emphasized how a geographic approach differs from other approaches. “It allows for multifactorial investigation, providing a rich understanding of elements influencing the sustainability of an organization or community,” he said. “It’s holistic, geospatial, data-driven. And in climate action, those are everything.”

“It’s holistic, geospatial, data-driven. And in climate action, those are everything.”

-

Matthew Lewin, director of management consulting at Esri Canada

Transportation of cials, let’s also move ahead on these essential projects

The Grand Central Madison station, giving Long Islanders a one-seat ride to Midtown, is a monumental achievement for the city’s transportation infrastructure. e station is also a signi cant investment in New Yorkers, though the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still needs to work out some of the kinks.

We should never lose sight of the fact that transportation infrastructure is what makes it possible for people to access jobs, education and health care. e Long Island Rail Road connection to Grand Central also will make Gov. Kathy Hochul’s mandate for suburban housing more feasible.

and social consequences.

It’s inexcusable that the city and the state seem to be incapable of building anything on time and on budget. As taxpayers, we should expect more of our government: simple things, like realistic deadlines and holding contractors accountable.

As Crain’s reporter Caroline Spivack wrote, the MTA recently delayed the implementation of congestion pricing by a few more months, resulting in a $250 million reduction in expected revenue for its 2024 capital plan.

DELAYS ARE LIKELY TO HAVE SIGNIFICANT ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES

In recent days, however, o cials have announced new delays to congestion pricing and repairs to the crumbling triplecantilever section of the BrooklynQueens Expressway. Both projects are critical to the city’s transportation system, and the delays are likely to have signi cant economic

OP-ED

e move comes as the MTA awaits the Federal Highway Administration’s determination on its 4,000-page environmental assessment of the proposed central business district tolling program, which would charge most motorists traveling into Manhattan south of 60th Street. Revenue generated from the program is estimated at approximately $1 billion per year.

Congestion pricing is an important tool for reducing tra c and improving air quality in the city. By charging motorists for driving in congested areas, the city can encourage people to use

public transportation instead, reducing emissions.

en last week, the city Department of Transportation hit the brakes on its controversial plan to x the BQE as it reconsiders whether to have four lanes of tra c or six in Brooklyn Heights. e delay could jeopardize the city’s bid for federal infrastructure money. Repairs are critical to ensuring the safety and reliability of the BQE. Construction delays could lead to increased congestion, longer commutes and reduced access to key economic centers. at would hurt the city's econo-

It’s time to end fee caps on restaurant delivery platforms

BY ARUN SUNDARARAJAN

Delivery platforms such as DoorDash, Grubhub and

Uber Eats were a lifeline for independent restaurants during the early years of the pandemic, offering a critical alternative channel for consumers during the shutdowns and then contributing to small-business resilience during recovery e orts. Today the longterm survival of many independent restaurants is being threatened again—not by Covid-19, but by ongoing, government-imposed fee caps on delivery platforms enacted early in the pandemic. ose price controls might have been well meaning. It is now clear, however, that they trigger unintended consequences that hurt independent restaurants.

It’s time to reverse this awed policy and allow small businesses to take better advantage of the options delivery platforms o er.

Why were price controls enact-

ed in the rst place? As on-site dining was shuttered in 2020, the restaurant industry was in crisis, losing more than $50 billion in revenue in March and April alone.

Fearing an excessive dependence of restaurants on delivery platforms, city governments nationwide rapidly capped delivery service fees.

During those days of uncertainty and unprecedented restrictions on everyday activities, the seemingly minor regulatory intervention was overshadowed by the enormity of the crisis.

As the Covid-19 dust settled, evidence emerged that delivery platforms were critical in allowing independent restaurants to survive and thrive. My own research shows the platform-related economic bene ts to independent restaurants weren’t just from short-term revenues. Independent restaurants that had more shutdown-era platform deliveries also had a higher survival rate a year later.

my, making it harder for businesses to operate and for people to nd employment.

Grand Central Madison took nearly six decades of planning and construction, and its cost ballooned to $11.1 billion, making it one of the most expensive mass transit undertakings in the world. Now that it’s here, it will help revive the economy and make regional travel less onerous.

Repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and implementing congestion pricing would also be economic wins. Transportation o cials must keep their eyes on this important prize. ■

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Ironically, those positive e ects of delivery platforms were diminished rather than aided by the very regulatory policy put in place to help independent restaurants.

Why? e fee caps didn’t just cover delivery fees. ey covered other value-adding promotion and marketing services.

Big restaurants and chains with large budgets have multiple marketing channels to reach potential diners. us, an inability to choose additional platform marketing because of price caps has a more severe impact on smaller restaurants that rely heavily on pay-as-you-go services such as better in-app placement, promotion and preferred diner access. Indeed, evidence has emerged that the central economic e ect of the price controls was to shift demand away from independent restaurants and toward big corporate chains.

Keeping the price controls will hurt smaller restaurants in other ways. Price controls will nudge

platforms toward alternative supply options, perhaps even incentivizing them to create “store brand” ghost kitchens. Fee caps force platforms to raise fees on consumers placing orders, shifting demand away from delivery and toward in-person dining or pickup—which favors restaurants that have multiple locations.

Bad policy

Absent a dire emergency, price controls in a competitive market are the government intervention that virtually every economist opposes. Price controls are bad policy.

It’s time for the price controls to end. New York City has long been home to independent and specialty dining that is the envy of the rest of the country. Our restaurants now have the opportunity to grow, pursuing strategies that reach local diners and more distant delivery loyalists alike. It’s time that we follow the lead of every other major city in the country in revising our pandemic-era restrictions. ■

Arun Sundararajan, a professor of entrepreneurship and technology at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is author of e Sharing Economy

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New York can lead the nation in skills development by rethinking, expanding apprenticeship programs

BY ABBY JO SIGAL

Apprenticeships are making a comeback. The moment arrives as employers wrestle to find staff, young people struggle to get the right skills, and the economy demands more talent. But todays apprenticeships are not your grandfather’s.

For years the apprenticeship model was limited largely to traditional trades work, but in recent years it has been adopted by industries including finance, health care and tech—with incredible results. A recent report showed the wages for young people completing an ap-

of New Yorkers participate in a state-registered program.

That’s why Mayor Eric Adams announced the Apprenticeship Accelerator, a new initiative to make New York City the national leader, with a goal of 30,000 apprenticeships by 2030. The accelerator program will partner with businesses, unions, schools, nonprofits, communities and families, as well as state and federal policymakers, to expand apprenticeships across the city.

Through embracing apprenticeships, New York City can create multiple pathways to success for both job seekers and employers for all entry-level occupations that lead to promising, well-paying jobs.

THROUGH EMBracING APPRENTICESHIPS, NEW YORK caN CREATE MULTIPLE PaThWaYS TO SUccESS

prenticeship program were nearly two and a half times higher than earnings by youth overall, with apprentices averaging $31 per hour, while their peers average less than $13.

But in New York City, there currently aren’t enough apprenticeships to go around. Only about 1%

Apprenticeships bring together education and real, skill-based training.

They include paid employment; gaining employer-valued credentials and skills, supported by a formal educational component; and a direct route to a full-time job. Apprentices gain both the theoretical knowledge about and the practical application of a particular occupation. Plus, they begin early to build a professional network and relationships that will

be critical to their career.

An apprenticeship offers a time-tested means of learning skills. In Switzerland, for example, about 70% of young people participate in an apprenticeship beginning at age 15. As a result, Switzerland enjoys significantly lower youth unemployment than the United States, a well-trained workforce that attracts business and an efficient economy that invests in talent over the long run.

Changing economy

New York City needs to adapt to

Willets Point plan is a model for public-private partnerships

BY ANDREW KIMBALL

For 20 years the city’s Economic Development Corp. has been methodically working toward a new, more productive use of the 70 acres in Willets Point, Queens, immortalized as the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. In the early 1900s the site served as a dumping ground and had a trash-burning facility before suffering further environmental degradation in the second half of the 20th century after its conversion

we have a visionary plan for 2,500 units of 100% affordable housing as well as the city’s first privately financed professional sports stadium.

The Willets Point transformation will deliver an entirely new live, work and play community with a school, a hotel, and retail and open space, as well as public roads, essential infrastructure and city services. The project will deliver nearly 15,000 new jobs, including thousands of union construction jobs— expected to generate $6 billion in economic impact in the next 30 years.

Every major economic development project deserves scrutiny.

into a dystopian array of car-repair facilities and chop shops.

But now, thanks to Mayor Eric Adams’ leadership—and with the support of Borough President Donovan Richards, City Council member Francisco Moya, community leaders and construction unions—

When critiques miss the mark, however, we will not hesitate to set the record straight.

A recent analysis by the Independent Budget Office, for example, seemed to suggest that by not selling the stadium site to a private developer, the city was forgoing more than half a billion dollars in future property tax payments. Really?

It is inconceivable that a private developer would buy the polluted land, remediate it and install the water, sewer and electric needed for aboveground development. And such a development would have to include the highest return uses possible, such as luxury housing—a use inconsistent with the needs of the local community.

Public investment

The environmental remediation at Willets Point is underway. Later this year the first buildings of what will become the city’s largest affordable housing project in 40 years will start to come out of the ground. Is there public investment in the project? Of course. After a century of environmental degradation, the soil needs to be cleaned. Basic infrastructure—water, sewers, roads—needs to be installed, as well as raising the floodplain to protect future residents. And to ensure maximum affordability, the housing needs to be supported by public financing.

Although the commitment to affordable housing is historic, it is not the only unique element of the Wil-

for many.

We have already made headway under the Adams administration. We are bringing in new players, including leaders such as Accenture and JPMorgan, to partner with our public schools for Career Pathways, starting our apprenticeship pipeline as early as possible.

Postsecondary programs at CUNY and NYU are adapting their curricula to include applied associates’ degrees, which apprentices can earn while working.

the changing economy and acknowledge there is not just one path to enter the workforce. American businesses tend to rely on a linear approach to talent development—which fails in multiple ways.

For too long we’ve told young people that the only way to succeed in the job market is to get a college or technical degree. But too many young people entering the job market with a degree are unable to secure a good job. Additionally, the current system perpetuates the racial divide that has created additional hurdles to well-paying jobs

The goal is simple. Whether carpentry or computer science, we want to create a multisector campaign and lead the nation in skills development.

The transition to an apprenticeship model won’t be easy. It will require mindset shifts; institutional redesign; resource reallocation; and changes to how we recruit, hire, train and advance talent. But this is New York. We do not shy away from a challenge. Together, we can rethink how we train New Yorkers and prepare them for the jobs of the future. ■

lets Point transformation. A professional sports stadium in New York City—for soccer—will be built solely with private funds; zero taxpayer dollars will be used.

The stadium will pay annual ground rent to the city that will generate up to $4 million in a year, and, unlike past stadium deals, public tax-exempt bonds will not finance it.

The Willets Point plan demonstrates a smart, pragmatic approach to urban planning, economic development and stadium deals that cities across the country can look to as a blueprint. It locates affordable housing close to jobs, and it reinforces the cluster of sporting venues—Citi Field, the National Tennis Center and the new soccer stadi-

um—and complements the rapidly growing Downtown Flushing commercial hub.

An agreement with the Mets has allowed for the soccer stadium’s construction with zero additional parking lots—which means more room for affordable housing and open space.

In creating New York’s next great live, work and play neighborhood, the Willets plan has struck the right balance. It is a model for public-private partnership and demonstrates how New York under Mayor Adams is getting stuff done. ■

Abby Jo Sigal is executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Workforce Development.

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DDK & Company LLP

DDK & Company, an accounting, tax, and consulting rm, is thrilled to announce the promotion of Edward Kotlyanskiy to Partner. Throughout his 11-year tenure, he played a pivotal role in the development and implementation of tax strategies. As an expert in Individual, Partnership, and Corporate Tax, he provides exceptional tax compliance and planning services to a range of clients, such as small businesses and high-net-worth individuals. As Partner, he is eager to drive growth and excellence.

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Withum

Jay Shepulski, Partner at Withum, was promoted to National Leader of the rm’s Private Equity Practice. Shepulski previously led Withum’s SPAC Practice which became the auditor of record on over 350 IPOs and raised over $120 billion in proceeds. In his new role, he will advise and strategize with private equity sponsors, portfolio management teams and clients to create value and provide guidance throughout the investment life cycle.

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DiNardo has been promoted to Managing Director. Ashley will lead the Legislative & Political Affairs team on budgeting and securing capital; community and civic mobilization; permitting and approvals; government contracts and procurement; and real estate entitlements. Prior to joining Capalino, Ashley spent over six years in New York City government, most recently as a legislative representative to Mayor de Blasio, working on priorities including “Vision Zero” & “Avonte’s Law.”

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Foley Hoag

Foley Hoag announced that Carmen DeMatteis has joined the rm as a Partner in its Emerging Company and Venture Capital practice group. DeMatteis brings over a decade of experience guiding emerging companies and investors on venture capital nancings, domestic and international mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and general corporate counseling. DeMatteis was previously in the Tech Group at the New Jersey of ce of Lowenstein Sandler LLP, where she had started her career in 2007.

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Middough Inc.

Middough is pleased to welcome Mark Seifried, PE, PMP, as Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Buffalo, NY and Cleveland, OH of ces. In this role, Mark will oversee the daily operations of the two of ces in collaboration with functional leaders. He will provide leadership for growth, strategic initiatives, relationship building, project execution, and resource management activities to achieve company goals and objectives for safety, quality, and nancial performance.

Foley Hoag

Nixon Peabody LLP

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Bike New York

ARCHITECTURE

DXA Studio

DXA Studio announced that Sando Thordarson was promoted to Principal. Sando joined the rm in 2014 and has since been highly in uential on the design of a range of projects while displaying exemplary project management and leadership abilities. In his role as Principal, Sando will work in tandem with the Partners to oversee the general direction of the rm as it expands and pursues a commanding list of projects and design initiatives.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

TIAA

TIAA, a leading provider of secure retirements and outcome-focused investment solutions to millions of people and thousands of institutions, appointed Zara Mirza as Chief Brand Of cer. Mirza joins on March 6, 2023, from GE where she was charged with accelerating business transformation of the 130-yearold company. In her new role, she will lead the brand strategy, brand marketing, creative and corporate social responsibility teams for TIAA and Nuveen.

Nixon Peabody LLP is pleased to announce Michal Cantor and Jéna Grady of our Healthcare practice have been promoted to counsel. Michal represents clients in state and federal government investigations and related litigation, including civil and criminal investigations and prosecutions. Her practice encompasses internal and regulatory investigations, risk mitigation, and compliance matters. Jéna provides regulatory advice for healthcare private equity investments, and assists providers in navigating complex regulatory and legal issues that arise while delivering behavioral health. She also advises clients on issues related to Medicare and Medicaid compliance, scope of work and licensing, fraud and abuse, and healthcare privacy issues.

Bike New York, a leading non-pro t organization focused on empowering New Yorkers and their communities through biking, recently announced the appointment of Bev Lacy as its new Chief Development Of cer. Bev is a highly accomplished development professional with an extensive track record of success in raising funds for nonpro t organizations throughout the New York City Metro Region and Delaware. Bev previously served as the Chief Development Of cer for the YMCA of Delaware.

REAL ESTATE

The Community Builders

The Community Builders (TCB) named Jesse Batus regional vice president for real estate development in New York/New Jersey. A 16-year veteran of TCB, Jesse will direct a real estate development portfolio of $656 million across the region. He will serve as relationship executive and lead a project management team in identifying and executing residential and mixed-use developments from conception to completion. LAW

Foley Hoag announced that Amanda Lefton, a national leader in the renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure eld and former Director of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), has joined the rm as Senior Policy Director. She will work with the rm’s clients in the renewable energy, climate solutions and environmental practices at both the federal and state levels, as a member of the rm’s Energy & Climate group.

Latham & Watkins LLP

Michael Milazzo has joined the New York of ce of Latham & Watkins as a partner in the Transactional Tax Practice. He advises private investment funds and their sponsors on the tax aspects of forming, structuring, and investing in private funds, including private equity, infrastructure, credit and debt, real estate, venture/ growth equity, and ESG/energy transition funds, across the US and Europe.

Cantor Grady

Making a splash in the city: Sober dive bars

BY ALEXIS BENVENISTE

Say goodbye to old, stinky dive bars that smell like fraternity houses. Sober dive bars offering zero-proof drinks are becoming a refreshing addition to the city’s mix. Spots including Getaway Bar in Greenpoint and Hekate in the East Village have become mainstays for sober and sober-curious New Yorkers.

The popularity of mocktails and alcohol-free options is backed by high sales numbers. Between August 2021 and August 2022, non-alcoholic-drink sales nationwide came out to a whopping $395 million, showing year-over-year growth of 20%, according to Nielsen. Alcohol-free beer dominated the sector, taking up more than 85% of those sales with a $328.6 million market value.

Proprietors say alcohol-free bars are providing a fun environment for New Yorkers who are living or exploring a booze-free lifestyle.

“People who can’t or don’t drink alcohol deserve a cool place to hang out with their friends,” Abby Ehmann, the owner of Hekate, said. The witchy bar and tea shop brings in an eclectic and artsy crowd. It’s the best time in history to be sober, Ehmann said. “There are hundreds

of new products designed just for those seeking to omit booze from their lives or cut back.” Though most nights the setting feels like a normal bar, others feel like a celebration—“convivial” as Ehmann called it—with some patrons celebrating sobriety anniversaries there

As for business opportunities, the non-alcoholic category has experienced huge growth, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing, Ehmann said. Hekate was “mobbed through ‘dry January,’” filled with people eager to swap out alcohol

for zero-proof options. And when it comes to business opportunities, Ehmann said, an offer to try a new zero-proof product comes along almost daily.

Non-alcoholic liquor stores— such as Minus Moonshine, Spirited Away and Boisson—are springing up around the city, offering a booze-free retail experience in Cobble Hill, Williamsburg, Prospect Heights, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, the West Village and Rockefeller Center.

At Boisson, it’s easy to feel like a kid in a (non-alcoholic) candy

store. The shelves are lined with colorful bottles for zero-proof spritzers and boozefree rosé.

Pop-up bar concepts such as Absence of Proof are also sprinkled throughout the city. The event-curation company and online retailer, run by Elizabeth Gascoigne, had its first pop-up in Chelsea in August, and its New York community has been growing ever since, with weekly pop-ups and events.

“We carefully curate the vibe to be high energy,” Gascoigne said of Absence of Proof’s offerings. At the New York space, people mingle, play games and dance as they enjoy mocktails. “Apart from the non-alcoholic drinks, our top priority is fostering and creating community,” she said.

The trend is booming, and people are becoming more interested in the zero-proof space. In fact, 45% of millennials said they would give up alcohol in order to improve their health, according to global research firm Mintel .

“Investors are noticing that the non-alcoholic movement is here to stay,” Gascoigne said. And when it comes to the pop-up concept, “we love bringing traffic to other small businesses around the city,” she added.

Other restaurant news:

● L’Appartement 4F, a popular bakery in Brooklyn Heights, is adding a French bistro to its location, offering an after-hours menu to its patrons.

● After opening Oaxacan restaurant Ixta in NoHo in November, Mike Himani is opening a second Mexican restaurant in the city. The birria taco spot will take over the old Hale & Hearty location near Penn Station.

● Subway Inn, an 80-year-old dive bar, has moved for the third time. Its new home is on the Upper East Side at 1154 Second Ave.; its old location was on 1140 Second Ave.

● After a buzzy opening in NoHo in December, Gjelina, a Los Angeles favorite, remains closed due to a fire.

● A Chicago brewing company that received two Michelin stars in 2021 and 2022 opened its West Village sushi bar, Moody Tongue Sushi, Feb. 10. ■

Nominate a healthcare professional who has significantly expanded the business, service or technology side of healthcare and promotes diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

COURTESY OF HEKATE

HEKATE in the East Village has become a mainstay for sober and sober-curious New Yorkers.

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Largest transactions during the second half of last year, ranked by square footage

Federal Reserve says overvalued commercial real estate poses risk to entire financial system

BY AARON ELSTEIN

Worries about empty office towers have reached the Federal Reserve, which has warned that ongoing problems in commercial real estate threaten the stability of the financial system.

That warning, delivered deep in the minutes of the Fed’s most recent meeting, comes as stress for

particular office landlord, it cares a lot about banks that lent them money that might be uncollectible.

Those worries were articulated in the minutes to the central bank’s Jan. 31–Feb. 1 meeting, at which interest rates were raised again.

“In their discussion of issues related to financial stability, several participants discussed vulnerabilities in the financial system associated with higher interest rates, including the elevated valuations for some categories of assets,” the minutes read, “particularly in the CRE sector.”

commercial landlords is rising three years after the Covid-19 pandemic upended their world. Defaults are becoming more frequent, and in February Vornado Realty Trust wrote down the value of Midtown buildings by nearly $500 million. The share prices of Vornado, SL Green, Boston Properties and Paramount Group trade near or below their 2020 lows.

Although the Fed isn’t too concerned with the wellbeing of any

It was a steep ramp up in rhetoric from the previous Fed comments about office lending at December’s meeting. Then, officials rather blandly observed that banks were making more loans for multifamily and industrial properties, “reflecting caution in the context of rising office vacancies.”

Bank loans

Commercial real estate of all types typically accounts for anywhere from 6% to 30% of a bank’s loans, according to the Internation-

al Monetary Fund. New Jersey–based Valley National Bancorp is the most CRE-heavy lender in the country, according to S&P Global. Commercial real estate comprises 62% of Valley National’s nearly $50 billion loan portfolio.

Chief Executive Ira Robbins said his bank no longer writes loans for small and midsize urban office buildings.

“It’s a nonstarter for us,” Robbins said.

He added he is baffled that money continues pouring into commercial real estate. Capitalization rates, which measure a property’s estimated financial return, remain close to risk-free Treasury bonds, he said. That’s a sign institutional investors don’t perceive a lot of risk

in commercial real estate broadly. “Cap rates don’t make any sense,” Robbins said. “There will be losses and forced liquidations.”

The Fed said it will conduct stress tests during the spring to estimate how well banks could withstand a slowdown across the economy and particularly in commercial real estate. ■

push for more housing in the suburbs

Can Gov. Kathy Hochul undo the suburbs?

That is not how she would phrase the question—she’s a politician who would like to get re-elected in four years, after all—but the framing describes the reality of the enormous task ahead of her. Like Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, who decided he would break Jim Crow with far-reaching civil rights legislation that his predecessors abandoned, Hochul soon will have to decide if she’s ready for the pitched battle that will put her on the right side of history but alienate a certain number of Democrats and Republicans for generations to come.

Hochul recently announced a proposal that would require towns and cities in the New York metropolitan area to increase their housing supply by 3% every three years. The plan would allow the state to override local zoning laws to approve projects in towns that refuse to meet the goals. Each of New York City’s 59 community districts will have the same 3% target, and New York towns outside

the metropolitan area would have a 1% growth target every three years. None of that should be controversial. But in a fair and just world, Johnson’s attempts to break a system of racial apartheid shouldn’t have provoked the kind of backlash that drove southerners out of the Democratic Party. Residents of Long Island and Westchester County might bristle at such c o mparisons—today’s suburbs, certainly, are not as openly racist as the Jim Crow towns of the 20th century—but the outcomes, when it comes to how people actually live, aren’t so different.

The city’s suburbs remain deeply segregated. Affordable housing is scarce. Between 2010 and 2018, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties issued a combined 26,175 building permits, as The New York Times’ Mara Gay pointed out.

In the same time frame, Boston’s suburbs issued 54,787 permits, the Bay Area suburbs issued 63,290, and the Northern Virginia suburbs approved 76,786. All three regions are smaller than Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester combined.

Although Hochul’s proposal wouldn’t automatically override local zoning—towns and city neighborhoods can simply meet their targets—it seems inevitable that the state will need to step in.

New housing opposed

Opposition to new housing construction can be found just about anywhere, but it’s particularly virulent on Long Island, where various ordinances and regulations forbid the construction of any kind of apart-

ment-style building. Last year Hochul made a rather anodyne push to legalize accessory dwelling units and encountered fierce backlash from local Democrats and Republicans. Running for re-election at the time, she abandoned the proposal.

Now Hochul has ahead of her four years as governor and every incentive to forge onward. Democrats have been able to maintain large majorities in both houses of the state Legislature despite suffering heavy losses on Long Island.

National Democrats might come to resent Hochul’s upzoning fight because House races in the suburbs could hinge on local resentment of new construction. But to guarantee New York a better future, Hochul will have to battle the political class and the communities that have roadblocked new housing for more than a half-century.

If the governor is successful, she could go down in history as one of the state’s most significant leaders. The state’s future, and her legacy, will very much ride on what she does in the next year.

Quick takes

● Will the New York City Council pursue an outright ban on facial-recognition technology? Given James Dolan’s abuse of it, that might be the most just course to take.

● Hochul is proposing the city carry the full costs of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Access-a-Ride, which transports people with disabilities. Given that the MTA is state-run, it should be a state responsibility. ■

Ross Barkan is an author and journalist in New York City.

Governor’s

will go down on the right side of history

ON POLITICS

ROSS BARKAN

BUCK ENNIS

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE TYPICALLY ACCOUNTS FOR ANYWhERE FROM 6% TO 30% OF A BANK’S LOANS

BLOOMBERG

MTA’s rollout of congestion pricing delayed again

BY CAROLINE SPIVACK

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has delayed its rollout of congestion pricing by a few more months, shaving $250 million in expected revenue from its capital plan for 2024.

MTA Chief Executive Janno Lieber sought to downplay the delay’s nancial repercussions. e capital plan is designed to fund system improvements including subway signaling technology, accessibility upgrades and new subway cars, buses and commuter rail cars.

“We need that money,” Lieber told reporters ursday after the MTA’s board meeting. “From a cash ow basis, we don’t need the money tomorrow. And so far we have been able to fund and advance all the projects that were scheduled to be advanced in our capital program.”

e move comes as the MTA awaits the Federal Highway Admin-

istration’s determination on its 4,000-page environmental assessment of the proposed central business district tolling program, which would charge most motorists traveling into Manhattan south of 60th Street. Revenue generated from the program—approximately $1 billion per year that the MTA would bond to $15 billion—will go toward key infrastructure upgrades in the agency’s 2020–2024 capital plan, the agency has projected.

Transit o cials originally hoped to implement the toll program in 2021, after it was approved by the state Legislature in 2019. But a series of bureaucratic delays threw that timeline o . More recently, the MTA had hoped to launch congestion pricing by the beginning of next year but have instead pushed that date to the start of the second quarter

“ is change will reduce anticipated [tolling program] revenue for the Capital Lockbox from $1 billion to $750 million in 2024,” the agency’s February nancial plan states.

“ e operating budget is not impacted by this adjustment.”

Still, congestion pricing makes up a sizable piece of the nancing

in the MTA’s most recent capital plan. e money cannot be made up from the agency’s own resources. is is particularly true as the agency teeters on the edge of a scal cli while it waits on a rescue plan in the state’s nal budget. e Federal Highway Administration did not return requests for comment on when it expects to complete its review of the tolling program’s environmental assessment. at could spell trouble for the

MTA because the longer it takes to launch congestion pricing the more costly delays could be.

Historically low funding

A report last year from government watchdog Reinvent Albany called attention to “historically low funding and spending” for the MTA’s most recent capital plan. Rachael Fauss, senior researcher at Reinvent Albany, noted at ursday’s MTA board meeting that to date the capital plan has received

only 17% of funds budgeted, or nearly $9.7 billion of $55 billion. It’s a slower pace compared with the past two capital plans.

“Congestion pricing is essential,” Fauss said, “if we want to make important progress on this capital plan.”

Lieber conceded that the clock is running down on the MTA’s need for congestion pricing revenue. “We have some more time, but it’s not endless,” he said. “So I am continuing to push forward.” ■

THE LONGER IT TAKES TO LAUNCH CONGESTION PRICING THE MORE COSTLY DELAYS COULD BE.

MWBE contracts ‘abysmally short’ even with mayor’s ambitious goals, report says

BY NICK GARBER

The city is falling “abysmally short” in its push to award more contracts to minority- and woman-owned business enterprises, according to a new report by the city Comptroller’s O ce. Despite years of incentive programs, the rate of such deals actually dropped last year by some measures.

During the 2022 scal year, 5.2% of the $44.6 billion in contracts and purchase orders recorded by the city went to MWBEs—an increase from the 3.8% reached the previous year.

But within the smaller subset of contracts that are subject to MWBE participation goals under city law, the rate of such contracts dropped to 15.9% last year, from 16.5% the year before, the report found.

“For far too long, the City of New York has failed to spend public dollars with Black- and brown‐owned businesses,” Comptroller Brad Lander said. e scal watchdog’s o ce has conducted annual probes of MWBE spending since 2014.

e dismal ndings come despite high-pro le, long-running efforts to boost MWBE procurement—starting in 1992, when David Dinkins created a procurement program during his tenure as the city’s rst Black mayor. Mayor Rudy Giuliani terminated the program two years later, but his successor,

Michael Bloomberg, revived it, and Bloomberg signed a 2013 law aimed at making procurement more inclusive.

Creating standards

Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation in 2014 to set MWBE standards, created a dedicated MWBE o ce in 2016 and mandated a chief diversity o cer at every city agency in 2020.

e latest results also put more pressure on Mayor Eric Adams, who pledged last month to increase MWBE contracts from today’s total of around $2 billion to $25 billion by 2026 and $60 billion by 2030, as part of his State of the City address.

To that end, Adams appointed the city’s rst-ever chief business diversity o cer this month.

Lander’s o ce praised City Hall for those goals but said the city will need to abide by a set of recommendations to achieve them.

For one, the o ce said, the city needs to increase MWBE access to higher-value contracts by using more lists of prequali ed applicants and so-called best-value procurement, which allows the city to consider factors besides price when awarding contracts.

at would address a chief cause of the current disparity: Last year the average contract awarded to an MWBE was $679,000, compared with $5 million for the average nonMWBE company.

City agencies should make more use of existing programs, like increasing the $500,000 cap on a procurement method established in 2020 that allows the city to award noncompetitive contracts directly to MWBEs, Lander’s o ce said. (Adams has oated a similar proposal, which would require approval from the state Legislature.)

e city also should give agencies better tools for analyzing MWBE data and speed up the process of

Outdoor dining may become seasonal as new legislation takes shape

BY NICK GARBER

New York’s outdoor dining program might be limited to warmer months under a long-awaited bill designed to formalize the pandemic-era practice, o cials said this week.

With spring rapidly approaching, talks are ongoing between the City Council, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration and the restaurant industry. It seems increasingly likely that the bill will create a seasonal program that would require owners to dismantle their curbside setups each fall, two council sources said Monday.

It could look much like the April-to-November program outlined last year in an initial council bill. e measure has stalled for months amid uncertainty over how new dining structures would be designed and which agency would supervise them.

It’s unclear how well a seasonal version will sit with restaurant owners, many of whom spent tens of thousands of dollars to build dining sheds and might not have the money or storage space to take them down each fall.

“Where are we supposed to store

these things?” wondered Patrick Fromuth, an employee at Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Fromuth helped construct the bar’s elaborate, colorful street-side dining structure, which Grub Street called a work of art.

“How are we supposed to ght back in the warmer months to get the cars out of the way, to redo it?” he said.

The latest proposal

As Streetsblog reported last Monday, the latest proposal could keep outdoor dining under the auspices of the Department of Transportation, which has led the program throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, rather than shift it to the smaller Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, as last year’s bill had called for.

Outdoor dining has remade the city’s streetscape and has served as a lifeline for thousands of restaurants during the pandemic, allowing them to expand seating onto the sidewalk and into the street during a time when many New Yorkers were reluctant to eat indoors.

But it also saddled some streets with unsightly plywood sheds that sat largely empty during the colder

months, and it prompted lawsuits from residents who claimed the sheds fostered noise and sanitation issues.

e existing bill, introduced by Marjorie Velázquez of the Bronx, would allow so-called roadway cafés—tables and chairs in the curb lanes or parking lanes of city streets—to be up and running from April 1 through Oct. 31.

Sidewalk cafés, by contrast, could stay open year-round under Velázquez’s bill and would be similar to those that existed before the pandemic. Restaurateurs would need to get separate two-year licenses for each type of setup, paying $255 for a curbside café and between $225 and $510 for sidewalk seating.

Streetsblog reported that the new bill could be voted on by next month, but council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ o ce insisted that negotiations have not concluded and “no bill has been nalized.”

“Reports to the contrary are premature,” a council spokesperson said. “ e council is continuing to work on a bill that creates a permanent outdoor dining program for the city that strikes the right balance for our restaurants, neighbor-

mental Protection (7.9%) and Transportation (10.6%). e Department of Education, which has the city’s biggest procurement portfolio, would have been last at 5.6%, but it is not o cially held to MWBE standards because it not a mayoral agency.

e top-performing agencies were Small Business Services (90.1%), Cultural A airs (85.2%) and Buildings (79.6%).

More disparities exist within registered MWBE rms. More than 70% of last year’s MWBE contract money went to businesses owned by white women or Asian American men, while just 2% went to enterprises owned by Black New Yorkers, Hispanic Americans or Asian American women.

registering for city contracts, according to the comptroller’s report.

“ e data presented here tell the detailed, abysmal story of where things stand, of how far we have to go and of a few bright spots,” Lander said in a statement.

As in past years, the report names and shames the agencies with the smallest share of eligible contract money awarded to MWBEs. e Department of Finance came in last, at 7.4%, followed by Environ-

In prior years, City Hall has pushed back on the comptroller’s MWBE report in prior years, arguing that it unfairly compares fully paid-out MWBE contracts to the city’s entire contract portfolio. But Lander’s o ce said it has resolved those issues by broadening the report’s perspective—and Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that he welcomed the latest study.

“We appreciate the recommendations in today’s report, and still recognize we have a long way to go on the road to increasing access for groups that have been persistently and negatively impacted by procurement inequities,” he said in a statement. ■

neighborhoods including Chinatown, where streets are too narrow to allow for sidewalk cafés.

hoods and all New Yorkers.”

About 100,000 food service jobs were saved by the temporary Open Restaurants program, the city has said. More than 12,000 restaurants have participated—from dining destinations such as the West Village and Midtown to more residential neighborhoods in the outer boroughs.

A report in December by NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service found that 41% of participants in Open Restaurants were based in neighborhoods with majority-nonwhite populations, more than double the rate of the pre-pandemic sidewalk café program. Low-income neighborhoods, too, nearly doubled their rate of outdoor restaurants.

e Wagner report recommended keeping roadway dining yearround, arguing that a seasonal program would harm businesses in

Fromuth, whose bar abuts the popular Vanderbilt Avenue open street, said Open Restaurants had almost single-handedly saved Branded Saloon from closing. Older patrons who remain concerned about coronavirus transmission still bundle up to use the curbside seats during winter months, he said.

“ ey’re trying to take away more seats from us during the slowest months of the year,” Fromuth said.

Andrew Rigie, president of the New York Hospitality Alliance and an outspoken supporter of outdoor dining, said Monday that he was open to making roadway dining seasonal—but only if the law allowed restaurants to keep their outdoor setups year-round in some capacity.

“Without the exibility to operate year-round, it will be cost- and operationally prohibitive for a lot of small restaurants to participate in outdoor dining,” he said. “What is clear is that restaurants need the best possible outdoor dining program—one that cuts the red tape and includes reasonable fees to participate.” ■

ELAINE GREENE, owner of an MWBE-certi ed uniform store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn

BUCK ENNIS

Manhattan landlord grows its ambitions for a new Hudson Yards office building as market struggles

BY EDDIE SMALL

AManhattan landlord appears to be expanding its plans for an office building in Hudson Yards as a new report shows that the city’s Class A office properties are holding up better than others.

Cove Property Group had filed plans in April for a retail and office project at 413-419 Ninth Ave. that would stand 31 stories tall and span about 178,000 square feet. However, the developer just filed plans, earlier in February, for a project at

mostly offices, along with retail on the ground floor. Cove inked a ground lease for the site from Hornig Capital Partners in July for $57.6 million, property records show.

A representative for Cove did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Office project

It would seem like an unusual time to expand an office project given how much the sector has struggled to recover from the pandemic and the rise of remote work, although a recent report from the Real Estate Board of New York indicated that Class A properties are doing fairly well.

413 Ninth Ave. that would stand 34 stories tall and span about 286,000 square feet. This appears to be an amendment to the original building proposal, not a plan for a second building.

The 535-foot-tall project would still be entirely commercial space—

Class A office properties are typically marked by their prime location, along with their high-quality construction and building systems, while Class B properties tend to be older buildings with fewer amenities than their Class A counterparts.

REBNY worked with Newmark Research to determine the building classifications in its report.

The study analyzed location data from Placer.ai in 250 Manhattan office buildings and found that the average visitation rate for Class A+ office buildings in 2022 was 66.3% of its pre-Covid 2019 baseline, while the rate for Class B properties was just 53.6%. The study lends some credence to the “flight to quality” trend many office land-

lords have discussed since Covid hit. It basically argues that employees will still be willing to come into work if their offices are nice enough.

The average visitation rate last year for all New York office buildings the study looked at was 62.2% of 2019 levels.

Cove and the Baupost Group announced in late 2021 that they had

sold another Hudson Yards office building, Hudson Commons at 441 Ninth Ave., to CommonWealth Partners for about $1 billion. Cove Managing Partner Kevin Hoo said at the time that the deal reflected “the resurgence of confidence in the office sector,” particularly among newer and redeveloped properties. ■

IT’S AN UNUSUAL MOMENT TO EXPAND AN OFFICE PROJECT GIVEN THE SECTOR’S STRUGGLES

patient care and health care professionals’ quality of life. It also advanced the burgeoning trend of unionization among the burnedout health care workforce.

“ ere’s just been a lot of energy, I think, as people saw what happened over the last couple of months,” said Dr. Mustfa Manzur, an emergency department resident at Monte ore. “And to see actual changes be implemented from the contract in real life in our day-today clinical environment, I think it really galvanized us.” He added that since the new contracts took e ect, he has seen more nurses on each shift, patients’ wait times for tests and lab work have decreased and patient experiences have improved.

But the labor movement’s successes in the health care sector come at an inconvenient time for hospitals, as burnout is shrinking the workforce while the cost and demands of care are ballooning. As widespread personnel shortages give remaining sta increased bargaining power, the unionization movement could further strain the system.

A growing movement

Monte ore—which has more than 1,200 residents and fellows— is the latest in a slew of newly formed local resident unions. e trend is national. In Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania Health System’s more than 1,400 residents announced their intention to form a union last month. In January, University of Vermont Medical Center support and technical sta voted to unionize. And in the past year, the Committee of Interns and Residents has recorded at least seven residency programs that formed unions, according to Sunyata Altenor, the group’s communications director.

Dr. Clare Wynne, a third-year pediatric resident at Monte ore, said the nurses’ strike answered workers’ questions about whether unions could create change.

Sta members who were interested in unionization but wanted

union.

NYSNA nurses at South Shore University Hospital, a Northwell institution, voted to authorize a strike but then came to a tentative agreement Feb. 23 and rati ed a new contract Feb. 24.

Vivas said she has been approached by doctors who are looking into unionizing their residency and fellowship sta .

No relief in sight Hospitals, meanwhile, largely have resisted unionization e orts.

Following the vote ursday, Monte ore representative Joe Solmonese said simply that the hospital respects employees’ rights to unionize and will begin the bargaining process in good faith.

As more sta members choose to join or start unions, the hospital system might be unable to stretch far enough.

tricts are losing everything but their shirt[s],” Kenneth Raske, the president of GNYHA, said at a joint legislative public hearing on the governor’s proposed budget at the end of February.

is year, according to a survey conducted by the American College of Healthcare Executives, workforce challenges are hospital executives’ primary concern; nancial challenges rank second.

BY THE NUMBERS

61 CENTS

“ e workforce shortage is the No. 1 issue at top of mind for every health system and hospital leader right now,” said Wendy Darwell, chief executive of the Suburban Hospital Alliance, which represents more than 50 hospitals in the state.

nursing homes and assisted-living providers.

Stephanie Buhle, a New York City Health + Hospitals representative, said that while the health system wants to incentivize sta to stay, it needs state and federal support to stay a oat.

1199 SEIU and other hospital associations are calling on legislators to include a 10% reimbursement rate bump in the plan.

Bargaining power

Neeraj Kaushal, a professor of social policy at Columbia University, boiled the unionization movement down to a story of supply and demand. Demand will just keep climbing, Kaushal said, as workers continue to bow out of the health care industry.

proof that it was “actually an e ective way to do things were able to see this strike happen and see the contracts that the nurses were able to win for themselves, right as we were sort of public and getting ready for our own election,” Wynne said. “So I think that was really inuential. I think there was a lot of shared pride.”

e private hospital strike impact has rippled across other hospitals, said Lorena Vivas, a neurosurgical intensive care nurse and NYSNA member who has worked at Mount Sinai for 19 years. She pointed to Mount Sinai South Nassau, which had been the last Sinai campus not represented by NYSNA. Nurses there recently elected to join the

By the end of last year, New York’s hospitals were in critical condition, according to a report by the Healthcare Association of New York State, the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Healthcare Association of Western and Central New York, the Iroquois Healthcare Association and the Suburban Hospital Alliance of New York State.

According to their ndings, nearly half of hospitals surveyed scaled back or cut services due to sta ng shortages between 2019 and 2022. Additionally, 77% of hospitals reported delaying or canceling improvement projects, and about 80% reported negative or unsustainable margins. More than two-thirds said they were in the red.

“Hospitals in many of your dis-

“And coming out of the very traumatic experience of the pandemic, we’ve got a workforce that is stressed, and that has repercussions.”

As pressures for hospitals mount, no single solution can make up for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates, which cause hospitals to lose money. It is estimated that Medicaid reimburses about 61 cents on the dollar on average, and Medicare about 84 cents. Ahead of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s scal 2024 budget announcement, the GNYHA teamed up with the Service Employees International Union to urge Albany to “close the Medicaid coverage gap” with a 10% rate increase. Across other parts of the health care sector, providers called for as much as a 20% bump to keep pace with the rising costs of providing care.

Instead, the governor’s budget proposal—which included a record $35 billion in state funding for Medicaid—included a 5% reimbursement rate increase for hospitals,

“A hospital is nothing without its sta , and we want all of our employees to feel valued and stay at our hospitals,” Buhle said. “ ere are so many ways our state and federal colleagues can support us, including expanded student loan repayment programs and targeted funding for essential safety-net hospitals.”

Some hospitals have already slowed elective procedures and cut capital projects because of low reimbursement rates, Darwell said. Regardless of whether the sta is unionized, she said, hospitals are trying to keep their pay rates consistent with in ation. But they can’t do that without getting more money from the federal government, she said.

e Covid-19 pandemic has drawn attention to nancial discrepancies between hospitals and their sta . Monte ore’s chief executive, Dr. Philip Ozuah, took home more than $6 million in cash compensation in 2021, according to tax lings.

e GNYHA, which represents more than 200 hospitals in the state, declined to comment, as did its member hospitals and Monteore. But as the Legislature budget vote creeps closer, the GNYHA,

As the population ages, the need for more health care workers grows. Because of scarcity in the market, workers are pushing for higher wages, Kaushal said, adding that the only solution is solving the shortage.

She o ered two ways to solve the problem: “One is to increase avenues for more training, and the second is to increase visa options to allow foreign-trained nurses and health care professionals to come in.”

Hiring foreign-trained medical professionals generally is cost-ecient for hospitals, she said, as wages are typically lower than for U.S.trained workers. e percentage of nurses in this country who are foreign-trained currently sits at about 5%, and the rate is about 25% for doctors, she said.

As hospitals wrestle with potential solutions, Vivas, the NYSNA nurse, said unionization will continue to unfurl, making it impossible for hospitals to ignore employee demands.

“When leadership only cares for the bottom line, they hire less people. ey take on more procedures even if the sta is not equipped to fully handle and take care of everyone,” Vivas said. “ ere has to be a balance that exists where we are allowed to practice safely and continue standards of care in the profession while not impeding the bottom line.” ■

BUCK ENNIS

“COMING OUT OF THE PANDEMIC, WE’VE GOT A WORKFORCE THAT IS STRESSED, AND THAT HAS REPERCUSSIONS.”

NURSES STRIKE Mount Sinai, Jan. 9

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service on the A and C lines and boost G, J and M weekend service. The plan, unveiled in December, came in the wake of riders’ calls for greater weekend service. Transit officials said the strategic redistribution would have saved the agency $1.5 million this year.

But TWU Local 100, the powerful union that represents a majority of the MTA’s workforce, objected to the changes. Labor leaders argued that the service adjustments would create irregular schedules for conductors and train operations. Arbitrator

$600 million operating deficit this year. If it does not get financial assistance, MTA Chief Executive Janno Lieber has warned, it might turn to drastic service and staff cuts to balance its books.

Defending legal rights

Local 100 President Richard Davis touted the arbitrator’s decision, emphasizing in a statement that the union “will never hesitate to defend our members’ legal rights, whether it’s in the streets or the arbitration suite.”

Davis cast the decision as a win for both riders and transit workers, noting that weekday service cuts would have forced riders to wait longer on platforms and experience more crowded conditions. For workers, the changes would have created unacceptable starting and ending shift times, he argued.

Howard Edelman agreed, forcing the MTA to shelve the changes.

“The new schedules contain substantial variations in start and end times,” Edelman wrote in his decision. “This change has a major impact upon workers’ lives, especially those who have child care obligations.”

The dispute could be a forerunner of upcoming clashes between transit and labor leaders as the MTA seeks a fiscal rescue in the state budget due to its projected

“Anyone with children, elderly parents or other family responsibilities would recognize how chaotic and problematic an unstructured schedule would be,” he said.

Edelman took care to note that labor leaders should not “misinterpret” his finding, noting that the MTA does not have to strictly adhere to its previous practices to adjust schedules. But in this instance the MTA “must give far greater deference” to its employees’ rights, he wrote.

MTA officials could submit a revised plan, but an agency spokesperson said it currently has no timeline to do so. Richard Davey, president of New York City Transit, indicated that the MTA eventually will return to the union with reworked schedule adjustments.

“We respect the arbitrator’s decision and will work within it to accomplish our goal of increasing weekend subway service to the level riders deserve and expect,” Davey said in a statement.

To complicate matters for the

MTA, the union’s contract is set to expire May 15. Contract negotiations are expected to begin in earnest soon, and transit workers undoubtedly will want a raise to keep pace with recent inflation.

The MTA’s shaky financial plan approved in December assumes a 2% increase in worker pay, though the actual increase might be more.

Lieber has conceded that the 2% figure is “a placeholder for beginning of negotiations.”

Every additional 1% wage increase above the 2% assumption

would cost the MTA $100 million per year, according to the MTA’s chief financial officer, Kevin Willens.

Tense contract negotiations in 2005 led to the first transit strike in a quarter of a century. At the time the three-day strike stranded millions of commuters and wreaked havoc on the city’s economy.

Any strike could be devastating to the MTA’s plans to recover ridership, which on the subway has stubbornly hovered around 65% of 2019 levels. ■

“THIS CHANGE HAS AN IMPACT UPON WORKERS’ LIVES, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO HAVE ChILD CARE OBLIGATIONS”

LIEBER’S MTA had sought to reduce Monday and Friday service on seven lines and expand weekend service in response to rider comments. Transit officials said the strategic redistribution would have saved the agency $1.5 million this year.

GLORIA FRANK

BORN Grenada

GREW UP Flatlands, Brooklyn

LIVES Rockville Centre, Long Island

EDUCATION Bachelor’s in sociology and urban affairs, Hunter College; master’s in human resources training and development, Seton Hall University

PROUD MOMENT One incident

Frank recalls with pride is when she revived a man who went into cardiac arrest at JFK airport. She performed CPR while also serving as a reassuring presence to the man’s family. For her efforts, she received an award from the American Heart Association.

MOM LIFE Frank is a devoted mother to her 6-year-old daughter. To recruits who ask how she balances her professional and personal life, she says, “You always need that support unit right at home, because you’re not doing this alone. It’s not a one-woman job.”

BIGGEST INSPIRATION She views her parents as her guiding light. “I am who I am today because of my mom and dad.”

Getting ahead by helping people

Port Authority’s rst female three-star police chief seeks to be a role model

BY OLIVIA BENSIMON

Like clockwork, almost every two years, Gloria Frank of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department got promoted.

From her rst assignments patrolling the Port Authority Bus Terminal and John F. Kennedy International Airport to her years as the commanding o cer at the World Trade Center, Frank rose through the ranks: patrol o cer, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, inspector, assistant chief. And as of this past December, 25 years since she rst entered the academy, she holds the role of three-star chief, the highest rank a woman has achieved in the bistate agency’s more than 100year history.

And she hopes to not be the last.

With this new appointment, Frank now has more responsibility to identify opportunities for systemic change within the department. She aims to work on police reforms, recruiting and community relations, and bring about more diversity and inclusion in the force

during her tenure as chief of agency a airs. “It’s important that the department re ects the community that we serve,” she said.

e Port Authority Police Department is in charge of the safety and security of people driving across bridges and passing through tunnels, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the World Trade Center, PATH stations, the port and ve

She graduated from the Port Authority Police Academy in 1998 as one of only three female PAPD ocers out of a class of 53 recruits.

She remembers only a handful of women holding high-ranking positions at the time. “But none certainly over the rank of captain,” she added.

Frank knows how crucial it is for young women to see others in positions of power; it can inspire them and show them what is possible in their own future.

Law enforcement was not the career path that Frank initially set out on. After graduating from Hunter College with a degree in sociology and urban a airs, she worked as a parole o cer while pursuing her master's in pharmacy at Long Island University. When a coworker told her about a job at the PAPD, she thought, why not?

Something about the intersection between public service and the physical requirements expected of the recruits appealed to her.

airports between the city and New Jersey. Last year the agency served 128.1 million passengers across all ve airports; 120.7 million eastbound vehicles through its tunnels, over its bridges and in its terminals; and 42.6 million PATH riders. Frank says it’s essentially all about “getting people home—safely.”

She said she wants to serve as a role model for younger women looking to pave a career in a male-dominated eld like law enforcement.

e latest graduating class is the department’s most diverse. Of the 129 graduates, the rst since the onset of Covid-19, 24 graduates were women and 57% of the class identify as Hispanic, African American or Asian American, according to an agency spokesperson.

As millions of people traverse through one of the busiest transit hubs in the world, what it takes to keep them safe might not be so obvious. But for Frank, the presence of o cers should inspire comfort that they can be leaned on no matter the need—anything from helping someone give birth to reviving another in cardiac arrest to patrolling and enforcing the law.

“I’ve always been in the business of helping people, whether it’s in the social services eld, the medical eld or in law enforcement,” she said. “I love that part. Helping people is what I do best.” ■

FRANK says PAPD of cers work to get area residents home safely.

“IT’S IMPORTANT THAT THE DEPARTMENT REFLECTS THECOMMUNITY THAT WE SERVE”

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION AWARDS

N O M I N AT E

the Champions of Diversity & Inclusion.

Crain’s annual Diversity and Inclusion Awards honors New York City individuals and organizations that promote diversity and have proven success with their diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Nomination Deadline: March 17

CrainsNewYork.com/D&I_Noms