The government’s answer to Noelia’s question—“Who’s there to help us?”—is someone like Daniel Squadron. He is the state senator for New York’s 26th District, which includes all of Lower Manhattan—Wall Street, Tribeca, the Lower East Side, Chinatown—and many of the waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn, just across the East River.
His grandfather immigrated to the United States, passing through Ellis Island, which, as Daniel likes to point out, is in his district. After living and working on the Lower East Side for much of his life, Daniel’s grandfather moved the family to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, leaving Ludlow Street for “life in the country,” as Daniel puts it. His father was a leader for the American Jewish Congress delegation and marched in Washington, DC, with Martin Luther King, Jr.; his mother went to Mississippi to march during Freedom Summer in 1964.
I grew up in a house with parents for whom a basic sense of fairness and opportunity in government was really a mission. This says a lot about why I do public service. That drives me in a lot of ways. There are individual and community issues that inevitably get left out, that get left behind, that are overlooked. They are the orphans of the system.
Daniel has glasses and a closely trimmed beard—he looks serious and studious. He likes to point out that the crowded metropolis of New York qualifies by multiple measures—population, economy, etc.—as a “large state or even a small nation.” His chief of staff is at his side, scrolling endlessly through her inbox on her phone. She looks at her watch every few minutes so that Daniel doesn’t have to.
We sit on a park bench between events on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Daniel steers clear of the word gentrification. It is not a helpful word for a politician speaking on the record—and it’s risky: too many implications, too many donors who might not like what they hear. So Daniel does not talk about gentrification, opting instead for many murky references to “it.” He uses language that’s bright and optimistic, that verges on empty—equality, democracy, opportunity. This is the mark of the politician. Squadron, like Alan Fishman, is more comfortable with the macro, the big idea, the framework, while the micro—the intricacies of self, the apartment shared with rats and feral cats, etc.—is avoided altogether. At a certain point in the conversation, you hear The Vision—the kind of thing that’s better suited to a speech than a conversation. In Squadron’s case, The Vision is intelligent and generous and sounds like a magical place I’d like to visit, where democracy reasserts itself to share power equally with capitalism:
We’ve seen some of the ways in which as much as things change the challenges stay the same. If you look at the Chinatown community you still have a lot of the same challenges you had before with folks who don’t have basic protections because they are undocumented. On the Lower East Side, sometimes one of the big fights is to have people realize just how much need continues to exist there. More than forty thousand public housing residents, a number of immigrant communities—and so when you talk about all the changes it’s always really important to remember there are many things that aren’t changing.
Housing is, in many ways, the existential issue for the city’s future.
Having housing and neighborhoods that allow a broad diversity of people to make a life in this city is the greatest challenge, in my view, of the next decade. This issue is the most important issue and we are not doing nearly enough. We have more people that want to live in the city than we have room for right now. And when this has happened in the past, the city and state have been extraordinarily aggressive in figuring out policies that make it work. That must happen. If we become a city where you need to be at the top of whatever profession you’re in, or an investor, or one of the very few who live in what’s left of subsidized housing—that doesn’t work. We need more affordable housing, we need more middle-class housing, we need to think about things like workforce housing. Once upon a time there were all kinds of programs to help labor unions build and help artists have dedicated housing. And we were expanding public housing instead of desperately trying to hold on to what we already have. Because of how many people want to live in the city today, we need to deal with that.
Currently 247,262 families are on the waiting list for public housing in New York. And the Section 8 housing program, which provides rent subsidies to low-income earners in cities across the country, has closed its waiting list: it will take more time than anyone is willing to predict to respond to the 121,999 families awaiting word on their applications in New York for that program.
The idea that it is inevitable, that the city is going to change completely and we’re not going to be a city that’s as diverse is absolutely unacceptable. And it will mean we lose the city. The greatest thing about this city is that we have the strongest collection of energy and expertise anywhere in the world. And that means people from around the world who are coming here to be part of the great engine of opportunity, it means people from around the country who want to be a part of what New York has to offer, it means people who are born here with fewer resources but still are able to get the opportunities offered—and it means people who can live anywhere in the world and chose to live here. If it’s not all of that, we’ve lost it. And there’s a real risk of that.
My wife and I are raising our son in Brooklyn. We see all around us how hard it is to make a life here. And it’s much harder than it used to be. That’s true for sort of everyone, whatever their background. And I think the experience of having a growing family, desperately wanting to be part of this city that we love and the challenges we see around us, is meaningful.
As a city we need to figure out how to grow and change but we need to do it in a way that is community driven. It is possible to grow and change in a way that brings the community in instead of taking it out.