Smearing Westchester County
White Plains, N.Y.: It is easy for someone like Craig Gurian of the Anti-Discrimination Center to smear an entire county as racist (“Racial bias in Hillary’s backyard,” Op-Ed, Feb. 18). First, he manufactures a meaningless statistic (“19 towns and villages [have] a non-Latino, African-American household population of less than 2%”). Then he hopes nobody pays attention to the fact that any group can be cherry-picked and subdivided into a small number, which he uses to perpetuate the false and hateful claim.
Westchester is a welcoming place; the facts prove it. Out of New York’s 62 counties, Westchester is the fourth-most diverse, tied with Manhattan, in terms of African-American and Hispanic representation — with Hispanics the fastest-growing group, showing increases in every municipality since the last census.
Since 2009, Westchester is probably the most scrutinized county in the United States when it comes to race and housing, given the well-documented settlement reached that year by my predecessor and the federal government to develop 750 units of affordable housing in 31 mostly white communities by the end of this year.
The county has proudly exceeded the settlement’s affordable housing benchmarks each year. Progress is directly attributable to working cooperatively with our towns and villages to get the housing built. Our progress also negates the notion that Westchester’s zoning is exclusionary. The simple fact is that the affordable housing could not have been brought online if local zoning did not permit it.
Everyone should also know that published reports show the ADC is an organization of two people, Gurian and his wife, that pocketed $7.5 million from the settlement — none going toward affordable housing in Westchester. “Gurian lives in and owns property worth millions — located far from the low-income housing developments he promotes,” according to a 2015 investigation by Watchdog.org. Rob Astorino Westchester county executive