The casualties of the 421-a feud
The back-and-forth between Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio over the fate of the 421-a tax subsidy program reminds me of the African proverb that “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.” While the pols wage an increasingly personal feud over whether to extend, improve or kill the program, they are trampling the hopes of thousands of unemployed and underemployed black and Latino New Yorkers who appear doomed to remain on the sidelines while the city embarks on a historic, publicly subsidized multibillion-dollar building boom.
There’s almost universal agreement that the city’s 421-a tax incentive program, which gives up to a 25-year tax break to builders who create new rental apartments, needs an overhaul: We’re currently handing out more than $1 billion in tax breaks every year, to the tune of more than $550,000 per affordable unit created.
New York will never build enough affordable housing at that cost, which is why de Blasio is rejiggering the incentives. Meantime, he would let developers of 421-a projects continue building without requiring they all pay the so-called prevailing wage.
Those top-dollar rates, posted by the city controller, are impressive: A bricklayer, for instance, gets $48.91 an hour plus another $28.03 in benefits. Carpenters get $49.88 an hour plus $44.10 per hour in benefits. A dump truck driver? $38.86 an hour plus $40.44 in benefits.
All with time-and-a-half for overtime and the usual 10 paid holidays.
De Blasio sensibly recognizes that we’ll never keep rents down in New York if construction sites are swarming with tradesmen whose $75-an-hour costs collectively run up the subsidy on each affordable unit.
He wants to keep the prevailing wage out of the mix for 421-a construction (extending it only to the lower-paid service workers ultimately employed in those buildings), ban the use of 421-a to build condos and impose a “mansion tax” on the sale of high-priced buildings, all in exchange for extending 421-a subsidies to 35 years from 25.
Cuomo, siding with the building trades unions, who want prevailing wage paid on all projects in the program, calls the mayor’s plan “a step backwards,” although it’s not clear what the governor would prefer, or why. Which de Blasio calls a “disingenuous” misreading of his plan, and so on.
While the political bickering goes on, New York continues to suffer an employment crisis to which the new building boom could be the solution.
We don’t have reliable information on who’s getting those good, prevailing-wage union construction jobs, even on publicly subsidized projects. But glance at any construction site and try to spot more than a handful of black or Latino workers on the job doing more than directing traffic. And note how many out-of-town license plates you see on the workers’ cars parked around the construction sites.
In 2006, in a report aptly titled “Chance of a Lifetime,” the Center for an Urban Future think tank noted that, with the average age of construction workers approaching 50, New York should be preparing young people — especially the 200,000 “disconnected” youth who aren’t in college or working — for some of the thousands of construction jobs expected to open up.
That, by and large, has not happened. An apprenticeship, the traditional route into most building trades, in many cases has jump-through-hoops requirements that border on the absurd. An announcement posted on the state Labor Department website, for instance, says that Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 1 intends to sign up bricklayer-mason apprentices between March 2015 and February 2016.
Great news, right? Wrong. There are only 10 slots open in an area covering all five boroughs and Nassau and Suffolk counties, and applications are handed out on one day a month from a single office in Queens for 30 minutes between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.
That is how you keep a profession closed to people who desperately need work. “The composition of New York’s construction workforce is an astounding 91% male and a very anemic 13% black, with Latinos not faring significantly better,” said Kirsten John Foy of the National Action Network, in testimony to the City Council. “The civil rights community is recommending that the Council take immediate action and mandate a local workforce component that is replete with job training, certification and job placement for any project receiving any public subsidies, abatements, credits, grants or regulatory consideration.”
It will do the mayor no good to win a minor battle against Cuomo and lose the broader war for better jobs for the city’s disconnected youth.
Black & Latino youth need a way to break in