Bill bricks up the window
Mayor de Blasio has a thing for commissioning reports to boost his cherished goals: studies on the likes of Uber’s contribution to traffic jams, the prospects for building a platform atop Sunnyside Rail Yard in Queens and the path to closing Rikers Island.
But just try to use statistical analysis to challenge the wisdom of his programs, and prepare for the findings to be squashed with an exterminator’s zeal.
A civil rights group alleges in federal court that the city’s affordable housing programs systematically further illegal racial discrimination by giving first dibs to applicants who live nearby.
Under a policy in place for years, half of all apartments are typically set aside for present residents of the same community district — a political concession to locals who might otherwise resist development, and to City Council members whose support often decides whether new construction will rise or die on the vine.
Live on a budget in majority-black Canarsie but want to relocate to majority-white Chelsea, in a building aided with city dollars or built under de Blasio’s mandate for affordable housing in newly permitted towers? Good luck with that — while the NYU student who moved to Hell’s Kitchen last month jumps the line.
To prove their case, the plaintiffs hired a demographer with sterling credentials, Andrew Beveridge of Queens College, to mine data shared by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development showing who enters, who wins and who loses in its affordable housing lotteries, and produce an expert report.
What the professor found we don’t know — because de Blasio’s lawyers rushed to Manhattan Federal Court earlier this year to demand the Beveridge report be suppressed from public view, even though the data summarized does nothing to threaten the privacy of the city’s affordable housing applicants.
A magistrate has granted that request, a ruling yet to be addressed by the judge presiding on the case, Laura Taylor Swain.
Like with the long-hidden-from-public-view “agents of the city” emails, it’s a fair bet that the top-secret info proves highly inconvenient to de Blasio, and not just for tarnishing his self-made image as a champion of progress and opportunity.
De Blasio’s mania for secrecy fuels already red-hot suspicions about who really benefits from his embattled housing programs. Either there’s nothing to hide — or some serious work to be done to correct a civil rights wrong.
Open the books, mayor.