Holding de Blasio to his promise
Four years ago, New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio mayor after he told a two-cities tale about too many of us being priced out of our homes and hometown. One term in, he’s on pace to fulfill his hugely ambitious promise to save or create 200,000 affordable units over 10 years, yet the market wave has continued to rise faster than his public wall has gone up. Even as de Blasio glides to reelection, New Yorkers are still being priced out, and ever further out — Bed Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville.
“The problem is that what de Blasio is doing hasn’t yet stabilized neighborhoods,” says Rev. David Brawley of St.Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York. “Where there’s a fire, the only thing you want to know is: ‘Did my house get saved?’
“A fire commissioner doesn’t get a pass for saying how much water he used, and how hard he tried. It should be no different with what’s happening to our city, and our homes.”
Brawley had been telling me about the hour-long meeting he’d attended the previous Friday with de Blasio, along with a dozen other leaders of Metro-IAF, the group founded by community organizer Saul Alinsky and with a legendary pedigree of actually building affordable housing here.
That pedigree goes back decades — to when abandonment and arson had left the city littered with lots and land — and includes the Nehemiah houses first proposed by planner and builder I.D. Robbins in his Daily News column.
The group was at Gracie Mansion to try and reset its relationship with this mayor, who’s hewed to a more directly political, top-down and perhaps less constructive left-wing model of 10-year plans and grand pronouncements accompanied by exhausting lists of co-signers meant to demonstrate overwhelming support.
It’s a style that’s too often left actual builders looking in from the outside, and community members irritated by official pronouncements of progress even as their rents keep rising.
As the community leaders went around the table to introduce themselves, each told the mayor how many members they’d be bringing to City Hall for a rally this coming Monday — more than 5,000 in all.
Then they presented de Blasio with their own affordable-housing plan, which includes shifting city subsidies so that “affordable” covers more New Yorkers with lower incomes; rehabilitating deteriorating NYCHA buildings, and using the Housing Authority’s parking lots to build 15,000 new units for seniors, freeing up existing apartments in the process for some of the quarter-million people New Yorkers on the years-long waiting list for them.
While the group’s plan identifies a few significant potential revenue sources — the $185 million a year NYCHA pays the city for water and other services, and $40 million a year in excess funds from the Battery Park City Authority — the price tag here is in the billions, for a city that’s already spending far more than ever.
Then again, de Blasio won office because voters heard him say he’d make the city more affordable, and he’s yet to deliver on that with the tools and dollars at hand. And the new senior housing at the heart of this plan is in line with the mayor’s own so-far unfulfilled plans to mine money from underused NYCHA land as the feds have all but abandoned their support for the city within our city they built and that’s home to some 600,000 New Yorkers.
“Our proposal comes from our institutions and their members, folks who live in the community,” said Brawley, implicitly pointing to de Blasio’s troubles getting sign-off for his citywide plans from local Council members, community boards and residents.
“He doesn’t have to manufacture support for this. This is coming from the community.”
The mayor promised the leaders an answer by this coming Monday, when those 5,000 New Yorkers — most of them black or Latino and each with their own story about trying to make it here or at least hang on — will be at City Hall to either applaud de Blasio and commit to holding him to his word or to demand more from him.
“It’s a matter of the people continuing to hold the mayor’s feet to the fire,” said Rev. Shaun Lee of Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Bedford Stuyvesant, another leader of the Metro-IAF’s East Brooklyn Congregations who met with de Blasio. “To remind him of his promises and to help him fulfill them.
“I don’t think there is a lot of pressure regarding the mayor’s reelection,” said Lee, who will be at City Hall Monday along with hundreds of his congregants.
“But there is on the affordable housing crisis. It doesn’t matter if New York has universal pre-K if the people who would benefit from it can’t afford to stay in the city.”