De Blasio won … because better than anyone else, he articulated the sense of loss that many New Yorkers are feeling these days. He acknowledged the residents of the city who are always looking over their shoulders, waiting for the next rent hike, the next demolition, the next conversion of a local store to a national chain. He spoke to the folks who are barely hanging on as the city gets bigger and stronger and richer around them.1
Since taking the reins, de Blasio has proven to be far from the radical leftist that many feared. Rather, he has arguably been a solid real estate advocate.2
It was de Blasio’s third day as mayor of New York City. On January 3, 2014, New York was hit by the second snowstorm of the winter, which left five inches of snow and shut down all the major highways and airports. On NY1, images began circulating of the newly elected mayor shoveling the sidewalk of his house in Park Slope in front of the cameras. The photo op emphasized the image of an approachable, feet-on-the-ground kind of mayor. Pointing to Bloomberg’s absence from the city during a similar blizzard in 2010, during which the former mayor was visiting his vacation home in Bermuda, reporters emphasized the striking difference between the way the new mayor and his predecessor presented themselves to the public: de Blasio appeared amicable and warm-hearted, whereas Bloomberg had been seen as distant and inaccessible.3
Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City in November 2013, 25 years after the election of the last Democrat in office (David Dinkins in 1989), and on the heels of two decades of sweeping urban transformations under the administrations of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. In his service as public advocate between 2010 and 2013, de Blasio had made headlines for launching the “NYC’s Worst Landlords Watchlist” to publicly track the city’s most negligent landlords and pressure them to make repairs in their properties, and had successfully opposed the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA’s) decision to cut around 2,600 Section 8 vouchers issued to low-income New Yorkers in 2010. Conscious of the growing dissatisfaction of struggling middle-class New Yorkers with their former mayor, de Blasio’s campaign was based on an aggressive anti-Bloomberg rhetoric. If Bloomberg had reassured the real estate elites and the financial industries by promising (and leading) an era of unprecedented growth and record-high profits, de Blasio chose to speak straight to the souls of underprivileged and middle-class New Yorkers who had been left behind by Bloomberg’s “luxury city” agenda. Throughout his campaign, he made headlines with his “tale of two cities” message, which placed the issue of inequality at the center of a new, progressive political agenda for New York City:
This is a place that in too many ways has become a tale of two cities, a place where City Hall has too often catered to the interests of the elite rather than the needs of everyday New Yorkers.4
De Blasio promised to tackle inequality in one of the most unequal cities on the planet, and to take bold actions that would finally benefit ordinary citizens struggling to make ends meet or to survive in their rapidly changing neighborhoods. He vowed to put an end to New York’s housing crisis by creating or preserving 200,000 affordable units, which he promised would be feasible by making inclusionary zoning a mandatory program rather than a voluntary incentive. He committed to revising New York City’s convoluted property tax system, which today allows for grotesque disparities because of its reliance on property assessments that have little or nothing to do with actual market values. He also vowed to address the strain of the working poor by broadening living-wage legislation and by expanding laws mandating companies to offer paid sick days to their employees. He pledged to secure universal prekindergarten and after-school programs with a tax increase on the wealthiest New Yorkers, and to put an end to the NYPD’s practice of “stop and frisk,” which had been contested in the Bloomberg years for its racial profiling of young men of color.
Especially in matters of urban development, de Blasio’s mayoral campaign promises sounded like a fierce rebuttal of Bloomberg’s three terms in office. As he said in a 2013 interview:
Towering, glitzy buildings marketed to the global elite is not the type of development New Yorkers are looking for. I look forward to working with the real estate community to spur the development, in all five boroughs, of real affordable housing, mixed-income neighborhoods, sustainable and vibrant density, and new spaces for small and new businesses to grow and thrive.5
The media started playing on the “radicalism” of de Blasio by emphasizing selected episodes of his past, like a 10-day trip to Nicaragua in the late 1980s to volunteer for the Sandinistas during the Nicaraguan revolution. Conservative pundits depicted him as a dangerous socialist who would make a U-turn not only from the “luxury city” agenda of his billionaire predecessor but also from the capitalist consensus on a free-market approach to city building. The New York Post referred to him as “Che de Blasio,” while Republican opponent Joe Lhota foreshadowed New York’s return to the bleak days of decay of the 1970s if de Blasio won the election. On the other hand, liberal media emphasized his progressive appeal by focusing on his multicultural family (particularly his wife, a black woman who once identified as a lesbian, and his 15-year-old biracial son).
“America Shifts Left” was the headline of a Washington Post article on victory day, in which de Blasio was referred to as an “ebullient progressive,”6 while the New York Times celebrated the revolutionary shift that de Blasio’s election would bring about, predicting that his mayoralty would bear a much broader significance for the history of the nation, way beyond the limits of local politics.7 A parade of VIP liberal New Yorkers, including Hollywood star Susan Sarandon and Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker, gave de Blasio their public endorsement. The buzz around the new mayor was reminiscent of the halo the media created around the figure of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential elections, shifting the focus from the fact that many of de Blasio’s campaign donors were, as usual, representatives of New York City’s big real estate and financial industries—again, New York’s city producers.8 Opponent Christine Quinn, whose campaign elaborated the “Tale of Two de Blasios” slogan, emphasized this contradiction and accused him of double-talk and flip-flopping on key issues.9
The media also seemed to play down the fact that de Blasio had a more mainstream curriculum than it seemed, and that he certainly was no stranger to the corridors of power. De Blasio had volunteered for David Dinkins’s mayoral campaign in 1989, and had served in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a regional director for New York and New Jersey. Before becoming New York City’s public advocate in 2010, he had served as a city council member from 2001 to 2009. De Blasio had also worked as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager during her 2000 Senate race, and once in office he endorsed, although belatedly, her unsuccessful candidacy for the 2016 presidential race, calling her “the candidate who I believe can fundamentally address income inequality effectively, the candidate who has the right vision, the right experience and the ability to get the job done.”10
De Blasio made headlines with his promises to end public giveaways to luxury housing developers. Yet his record was certainly not that of a staunch antidevelopment activist. In city council, de Blasio had been a strong supporter of Bloomberg’s Atlantic Yards mega-plan in downtown Brooklyn, which he strenuously defended by pointing to the jobs, services, and affordable housing it would bring to the local community.11 With the promise of creating opportunities for affordable housing, he also supported projects for the development of two luxury towers with spectacular waterfront views inside Brooklyn Bridge Park.12 According to Politico commentator Dana Rubinstein, “de Blasio’s record as a councilman demonstrated a willingness to work with developers to spur economic development and tackle the city’s affordable housing crisis, using an approach to land use that at times bore a strong resemblance to Bloomberg’s own.”13
In fact, lost among the media buzz around de Blasio’s “radicalism” was the fact that his solutions to New York City’s inequality and housing crisis didn’t differ much from those of his predecessor. In a speech he gave at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service in July 2012, he emphasized his pro-growth stance, touting aggressive real estate development as the only way to solve the city’s affordable housing crisis:
First and foremost, when given the choice to grow or to sit idle, we need to grow and we have to be aggressive about it…. The things I value as a progressive—good jobs and affordable housing—cannot happen if projects stall or never materialize. If we aren’t doing everything possible as a City government to spur on development, even if valid compromises are included, we risk nothing getting built at all, and that is the worst possible outcome.14
The equation more development = more affordable units had been a mantra of the Bloomberg administration for over a decade, yet its meager results in terms of actual affordable housing production had by then become obvious to many low- and middle-income New Yorkers. But de Blasio’s tying of upzoning for more density with a mandatory inclusionary zoning program seemed like a practical—although not radical—strategy to create a larger number of affordable units while maximizing profits for developers and increasing tax returns for the city. A mandatory inclusionary zoning program would also help developers overcome the opposition of the many antidevelopment activist groups across the city. In sum, far from the “radical” tones of his campaign rhetoric, de Blasio’s stance on development was that of a pro-development liberal, or a “development pragmatist.”15
We’re going to take an entirely different approach is the simple answer…. We are looking at the notion of what city planning is with fresh eyes…. This is about using the planning process to achieve a bigger set of strategic goals. That includes the creation of affordable housing, that includes facilitating job development, that includes trying to address inequality.16
In his inaugural address on January 1, 2014, de Blasio reiterated his campaign pledge to finally address New York City’s economic and social inequalities. But when the list of mayoral appointees emerged in early 2014, people started wondering whether the new administration would really stick to its promise of making a clean break from past administrations. Their credentials in the world of big business and finance unsettled ordinary citizens, while they reassured the New York elites that the radical stances of pre-election de Blasio would loosen up once in office.
De Blasio had run for mayor aggressively contesting the NYPD’s notorious “stop and frisk” policy. He notably released a TV ad in which his biracial teenage son promised that his father would finally put an end to racial profiling in the streets of New York. But in what came as a surprise for most, de Blasio reappointed Giuliani’s former commissioner William Bratton as head of the NYPD—the man under whom the NYPD had incorporated the controversial policy in the first place, as a centerpiece of Giuliani’s “law and order” platform.
Just like Bloomberg did before him, de Blasio hired a former Goldman Sachs executive, Alicia Glen, to be his deputy mayor for housing and economic development. For 12 years, Glen had headed Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group, a division that has massively invested in low-income communities across the United States. As reported by Gothamist in 2013:
Glen’s Urban Investment Group played a large part in the Bloomberg administration’s development agenda over the past decade, helping fund much of the uneven development that has priced out many New Yorkers from neighborhoods across the city. If you’re into what Franklin Avenue has become in Crown Heights, then Glen’s the person for you.17
As deputy mayor, Glen now controls the activity of 26 city agencies and has a final say on all rezoning and land use plans. Most important, she has been tasked with implementing de Blasio’s housing plan—the cornerstone of the mayor’s electoral promises—coordinating the preservation of 120,000 and the creation of 80,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade.
Another of de Blasio’s eyebrow-raising choices was to retain Bloomberg’s appointee and another former Goldman Sachs executive Kyle Kimball as the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). When asked about this choice and how this seemed like a repudiation of his campaign promises, de Blasio simply responded: “I think I’ve tried to articulate repeatedly the theory under which we’re working here…. I’ve set forth an exceedingly clear, aggressive, progressive agenda. It’s there: black and white. It’s the exact same one I put forward in the primary and the general election– it ain’t changing.”18
De Blasio appointed Carl Weisbrod, a well-respected urban development insider, as chair of the City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning (DCP). Under Koch, Weisbrod had served as the executive director of the DCP and was appointed president of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project, heading up the first efforts to revitalize the seedy Times Square by cleaning up the area and striking a major deal with Disney to take over the New Amsterdam Theater. In the early 1990s, under Dinkins, he became founding president of the NYCEDC. His long resume also includes working as the founding president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, the nation’s largest business improvement district, which channeled funds in the revitalization of Lower Manhattan, particularly after 9/11. More recently, he was partner of the real estate consulting firm HR&A Advisors,19 which oversaw the rezoning of the Hudson Square area in Manhattan, and president of Trinity Real Estate, the real estate division of Trinity Church that owns large real estate holdings in the neighborhood and has been a major applicant for the Hudson Square rezoning.20 He is responsible for steering the city’s rezoning initiatives in new disadvantaged areas of the city, like East New York, and for implementing the new mandatory inclusionary zoning policy.
In another unexpected move, in 2014 de Blasio appointed Scott Walsh, vice president of development for Forest City Ratner, the realtor that pushed for the massive Atlantic Yards rezoning project and a long-time de Blasio fundraiser,21 to join the Rent Guidelines Board—the panel responsible for establishing annual rent adjustments for the over one million apartments that are under the city’s rent stabilization program. The choice dismayed housing activists. Although New Yorkers were surprised when in June 2015 the board voted, for the first time in its 46-year history, for a rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments with one-year leases, fulfilling one of de Blasio’s electoral promises, the only opposing votes came from de Blasio appointees, including Scott Walsh.22 De Blasio also appointed campaign donor Jonathan Greenspun, managing director of Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm serving clients including leaders in the real estate industry, as chair of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which is entrusted with ensuring fairness in the provision of housing, employment, and credit.23
These appointments to the top positions of the city-planning machine baffled those middle-class New Yorkers who believed in a radical cut with past policies. In opposition to the anti-Bloomberg rhetoric of his campaign, they suggested a choice of continuity, announcing that more of the same was on the way.
Further disappointment came in 2016, when the federal government began to investigate allegations that de Blasio’s nonprofit, “The Campaign for One New York,” had received millions in contributions from powerful interest groups, including unions, lobbyists, and developers.24 Many of these contributions came from real estate firms engaged in some of the largest residential development projects across the city,25 like Two Trees Management, whose $1.5 billion redevelopment plan for the old Domino Sugar refinery on the Brooklyn waterfront was approved by the city in 2014.26 Aides to the mayor were subpoenaed by state and federal prosecutors, who conducted several investigations into the mayor’s fundraising operations. In March 2017, the prosecutors announced they would not file charges against the mayor or his aides, despite Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance commenting that some of the team’s fundraising practices appeared “contrary to the intent and spirit of the law.”27 As a public advocate, de Blasio had vocally criticized corporate donations to politicians. The multiple investigations into his fundraising practices have infuriated many of those who had supported the new mayor on the basis of his moral values.
After over a decade of outrageous luxury development under Bloomberg, by 2013 the scarcity of affordable housing in New York had become the buzzword in all local media—and fixing it became the promise of all mayoral candidates. But the real estate frenzy in which New York City had been engulfed since the years of Bloomberg, and that was the result of an almost 40-year-long neoliberal shift in urban development policy, is far from being over.
By the end of the Bloomberg years, about a third of the city’s residents were spending at least half of their income in rent, and fixing the affordable housing crisis became a centerpiece of de Blasio’s campaign. Four months into his term, he unveiled his “Housing New York: A Five-Borough, Ten-Year Plan,” pledging it would provide for affordable housing to all struggling New Yorkers, even those at the bottom of the social ladder, by building 80,000 new units and preserving 120,000 affordable units in 10 years. The $41.1 billion plan would increase protections for low-income tenants and would require landlords to include below-market units in all developments that would benefit from zoning changes across the city. In his introduction to the plan, de Blasio stated:
Our affordable housing policies must reach every New Yorker in need, which is why this plan thinks big about the changes we need to make—in government and in the private sector—to make this a city where everyone rises together, and everyone has a safe and decent home. If you’re in a community where affordability is disappearing, we want to protect it. If your family lives in a rent-regulated apartment, this plan is focused on helping you keep it. If you’re a senior trying to remain in the neighborhood you helped to build, we are fighting to help you stay. If you are a building owner or developer intent on building or preserving affordable apartments, we will support you. This is a five-borough, ten-year plan. It will marshal people and resources from every corner of this city behind a singular purpose: to make this city again a place where our most vulnerable, our working people, and our middle class can all thrive.28
De Blasio’s agenda highlighted several strategies, some of which would indeed set it apart from Bloomberg’s housing approach. Among these were the introduction of a mandatory inclusionary zoning program, an emphasis on affordability for low-income households, the introduction of new mixed-income housing programs to supersede the previous “80/20” agreement, an increase of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s annual capital funding, attention to prevent abuses of vacancy and luxury decontrol provisions, and the expansion of low-cost permanent supportive housing for the homeless by reallocating a portion of the existing funding for homeless shelters.
Some major aspects of the plan, however, bear a striking resemblance to Bloomberg’s housing plan. Rezoning across the board, just like under Bloomberg, is at the core of de Blasio’s housing agenda. The city aims to identify new locations near mass transit that may be suitable for development of mixed-income high-rise units that would also include affordable housing. Just like under Bloomberg, new buildable sites could be created by decking over rail facilities and other large infrastructures, by strengthening coastal infrastructure to facilitate waterfront developments, and by offering incentives for environmental remediation on Brownfield sites. Just like with Bloomberg, the emphasis is on dense development, which will be facilitated by removing rules preventing the construction of micro housing units for single-person households, by allowing developers to build higher also in contextual zoning districts, and by easing restrictions on the transferability of development rights. There is also a proposal to allow private developers to build mixed-income housing on land owned by the NYCHA to generate revenue that may help cut the NYCHA’s budget deficit—a plan that had been advanced by the Bloomberg administration and that de Blasio had once strongly criticized, so much so that the New York Post jumped in with the headline “De Blasio Recycles Bloomberg Housing Plan He Once Bashed.”29
De Blasio’s housing plan, designed under the supervision of Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, is to be financed in large part (73%, or $30 billion) from the private sector, together with other city, state, and federal funds. According to the city, the plan will create 194,000 construction jobs and nearly 7,100 permanent jobs. The massive scale of the plan, which dwarfs in size even Koch’s housing plan of the 1970s and 1980s; the promise of major upzonings that will loosen height restrictions and favor development in new strategic areas across the city; and the continued reliance on incentives and subsidies to private developers, have been welcomed by the real estate and construction community, which has lined up in support of de Blasio.30 According to a Business Insider reporter, the coupling of more development with affordable housing provisions “looks designed to create a win-win: more density, more development, more affordable housing as part of that development, more developer profits, and more real estate taxes collected by the city.”31 But is it so? According to Tom Angotti, once again there is little guarantee that the “affordable housing” produced will be affordable to those who need it the most, because the very definition of affordability remains unchanged in a city where “low income” is defined as 50% to 80% of the area median income (AMI), or up to $67,000 a year for a family of four.32 The risk is that, as usual, only the development industry might end up as the winner.
Two massive zoning changes were essential to make de Blasio’s housing vision a reality. One, called mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH), would require developers to include affordable units in all rezoned areas. The other, called zoning for quality and affordability (ZQA), would entail yet another massive series of amendments to the 1961 zoning resolution to allow for taller buildings, eliminate strict parking requirements for affordable housing located near subway lines, and change shape regulations for new constructions in certain areas to better accommodate state-of-the-art ground-floor retail.
In 2015, more details of the ZQA and MIH plans were unveiled. The administration identified several areas across the five boroughs to be rezoned for higher density. These included East Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, East New York in Brooklyn, Flushing and Long Island City in Queens, the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx, and the Bay Street corridor in Staten Island. For each neighborhood or area, the city would choose one of three different options, or a combination of different options, through which developers may respond to the affordable housing mandate:33 either 25% of units affordable to be reserved to households earning 60% of AMI (around $46,620 for a family of three, so that a two-bedroom apartment would cost about $1,150 a month); 30% of units to be set aside for households earning around 80% of AMI ($62,150 for a family of three, and $1,550 rent for a two-bedroom apartment); or, in cases where the developers got no government subsidy, 30% of units affordable to be reserved for households earning 120% of AMI ($93,240 for a family of three, with a two-bedroom apartment renting for about $2,330) in so-called emerging (call them gentrifying) markets. The latter option would not be available in Manhattan south of 96th Street on the east side and south of 110th Street on the west side.
What is clear by looking at these figures is that most of the units envisioned under de Blasio’s plan once again won’t be in the reach of the majority of New Yorkers who need them the most,34 in a city where half of renters make less than 60% of the AMI, and where almost one million citizens make less than 50% of AMI (or about $39,000 for a family of three). Most important, these levels of “affordability” are nowhere near the average incomes of the vast majority of residents currently living in the poorest areas slated for rezoning. For instance, as of 2013, the median household income in East Harlem, one of the first areas earmarked for rezoning, was $28,800, or 37% of AMI. In the Jerome Avenue area of the South Bronx, it was just $25,000, less than one-third of AMI. In Inwood, in the area east of 10th Avenue that’s currently slated for rezoning, the neighborhood’s median income was only $21,000.35
It is undeniable that, in cities like New York, middle- and upper-middle-class apartments are easier to build, not only because they are more profitable for developers, but also because wealthy buyers can take advantage of generous tax deductions, while federal subsidies are extremely tight for low-income households.36 And mayors have little power to change what gets decided in Washington. But what about the much-trumpeted housing for the most vulnerable New Yorkers? The plan calls for about 16,000 units for families making less than $25,000, yet about one-fourth of the city’s population is in this income bracket. According to a Gothamist reporter:
That’s … far less than the 60,000 homeless people, the estimated 250,000 rent-stabilized apartments lost in the last 20 years, the 270,000 people on the waiting list for public housing, and the 425,000 low-income apartments the Housing First Plan estimated that the city needed in 2014.37
To make matters worse, if there’s anything we learned during the Bloomberg years, it is that rezoning has almost invariably resulted in escalating property prices, which in turn has contributed to intensify waves of gentrification and displacement of existing residents and businesses. Lately, the rezoned area of the South Bronx (recently rebranded “the Piano District”) has seen residential sale prices more than double in only two years between 2012 and 2014. De Blasio’s announcement in 2015 that he would establish a fund to provide free legal aid and support to protect tenants facing eviction doesn’t change the reality that the city’s very rezoning policies will presumably be the number-one factor encouraging landlords to evict low-income tenants. In 2016, the administration pledged $76 million in legal assistance for tenants facing eviction, but this will assist only New Yorkers living in rent-regulated apartments.38
The truth is that gentrification is built into de Blasio’s housing plan. The plan will produce far more units than any effort led since the times of Ed Koch. Most of these units will be built in very disadvantaged neighborhoods, but their standard of affordability will likely attract middle-income transplants escaping from the rising costs in more expensive neighborhoods, while they will still be out of the reach of locals.
I’m still hearing the same arguments as in the previous administration…. Where are all the low-income residents in downtown Brooklyn? They’re in North Carolina, South Carolina. I get letters from them saying they couldn’t afford to stay.39
De Blasio’s plan has been presented with the bottom line that there is no alternative to harnessing the force of high-end private development if the city aims to build more housing for the poor, especially in a regime of disappearing federal subsidies, in which programs for low-income families such as Section 8 are accepting no new applicants.40 At a city council zoning subcommittee meeting in February 2016, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen insisted that, if levels of affordability are set too low, developers just won’t build, and “we can’t just sit by and do nothing as market pressures change the city,” while HPD Commissioner Been told the council: “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.”41
Yet we have seen it all before. De Blasio’s plan seems to rely on the same strategies that made big real estate so fond of Bloomberg: incentivizing the production of more units by loosening zoning regulations in strategic areas across the city, and granting generous giveaways to luxury developers with the condition that they include a percentage of affordable units in the upscale developments that continue to pop up in gentrifying neighborhoods across the city. But “the majority of new housing, invariably built for the luxury market, is still bound to drive up housing prices and rents and displace more affordable units than it creates.”42 The monolithic consensus among city producers that more development will wash away the housing crisis remains unchallenged. Yet this was already done under Bloomberg, with miserable results: luxury development was the number-one factor of displacement for middle- and low-income New Yorkers during the Bloomberg years.
The hostility simmering in East New York and beyond, coming from many of the very people who voted Mr. de Blasio into office on a platform of reducing inequality, is not just a challenge to the mayor’s efforts to add thousands of units for lower-income residents. It has also raised legitimate questions, housing activists say, about whether the city can build without further gentrifying large areas.43
The accelerated development of market-rate housing has had a disastrous ripple effect as other landlords are incentivized to push tenants out to take advantage of rising rents. Williamsburg, Brooklyn and West Chelsea have seen the largest production of affordable housing in recent years. They are also two of the most rapidly gentrifying and unaffordable neighborhoods in NYC.44
The plan was okayed by the real estate industry and endorsed by its most powerful lobby, the Real Estate Board of New York, whose president Steven Spinola called it “a realistic road map for solutions.”45 Praise also came from Bill Rudin,46 CEO of Rudin Management, who has led the conversion of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village into a super-luxury 10-building condo complex called Greenwich Lane. Prices at Greenwich Lane will average $8.8 million per condo unit, with the penthouse set to hit the market for $45 million.47 In 2013, de Blasio had vocally protested against that development, leading a “Hospitals Not Condos” rally along with top personalities like singer Harry Belafonte and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon.48
But when the public review process for the MIH plan was started in September 2015, New Yorkers didn’t welcome it just as cheerfully. The experience of 10 years of Bloomberg had made them wary of city producers coming in with promises of bringing “affordable housing” by maximizing development. By November 2015, four of the five borough presidents and most of the city’s 59 community boards had voted against the plan, including almost all community boards in poor neighborhoods like Queens and the Bronx. Queens borough president Melinda Katz said of the MIH plan: “There are concerns that the proposed new mandatory inclusionary [plan] may replace existing affordable housing with housing deemed affordable that is not within reach to the current residents.”49 Her dismay was echoed by Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz, who asked: “Will neighborhood residents even be able to live in these apartments?”50 As for the ZQA, preservationists also made the argument that raising height caps up to 30%, as the plan allows, would further compromise the character of neighborhoods, particularly in those districts where it took years of effort from community activists to obtain some restrictions to prevent out-of-scale development.
But the opposition of community boards and borough presidents didn’t prevent the plans from moving ahead. “Those advisory votes are meaningful, but they’re not the final word,” de Blasio said in November 2015. “When it comes to anything that might be new development, the community [board is] often negatively disposed. That’s not a news flash. We know that. What we’re talking about is a different approach to development.”51
On February 4, 2016, the City Planning Commission approved both plans with minor tweaks, sending them to city council to hold public hearings. Before the final decision in city council in March 2016, resistance to the plans escalated. On February 9, protesters attended a council hearing, chanting, “De Blasio’s plan ain’t affordable for me,” and had to be escorted out.52 Other rallies in the following weeks were held outside city hall, with banners that read “Affordable for whom?” Concerns about the plans were also raised by some council members, as well as city comptroller Scott Stringer and public advocate Letitia James. City representatives assured the public that, while they recognized that MIH alone wouldn’t be able to produce enough units for the many low-income New Yorkers in need of housing, the city would use more tools to produce affordable housing for those in deep poverty.53 But the expiration in January 2016 of the state’s 421-a tax exemption program, which was used to incentivize developers in exchange for affordable housing, may put de Blasio’s affordable housing vision in jeopardy. As of this writing, the renewal of the program has been derailed after months of negotiations because of the inability of the real estate lobbies to reach an agreement with labor unions demanding union labor and wages included in the program.
As the city council vote neared, Real Affordability for All, a coalition of 65 tenant organizations, unions, and other housing advocacy groups, organized a rally with around 1,000 protesters in front of city hall, demanding modifications to the MIH plan and insisting that at least 30% of new housing be affordable to those making 30% of AMI. On March 22, 2016, in a frantic session during which some shouting protesters had to be escorted out, city council approved both plans, with a 40-to-6 vote, with one abstention, to pass the ZQA plan, and a 42-to-5 vote to approve a revised MIH plan.54 The revised version of the MIH introduced the requirement for an additional 5% of affordable units if the affordable housing component is built off-site (at another location). It also added a new affordability option that allows developers a choice of creating 20% of units in their developments for households making 40% of AMI, or about $31,000 for a family of three, in rezoned neighborhoods. According to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, this tweak could help close to half a million families that would have been left out in the initial proposal.55 But there is no guarantee that this will be the case, as it will be the council members’ duty to select the most appropriate from among the four affordability options on a case-by-case basis, and ultimately it will be left to the developers to decide the mix of affordability brackets they will choose to include in their developments.
“We see what’s going on around in the city,” said Joyce Scott-Brayboy, 58, a local community board member and retired city worker. “No to that in East New York. No. No.”56
East New York. A vast impoverished area in the predominantly black section of Eastern Brooklyn, which Manhattanites know mostly from shooting reports on local TV and for its notorious reputation as Brooklyn’s murder capital. It is an area ravaged by years of “blockbusting”57 and ensuing foreclosures in the 1970s, which have made it today a relatively unpopulated neighborhood scattered with vast vacant lots. Yet it sits not far from neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, which had similar reputations until not long ago but in a matter of a few years have changed beyond recognition because of the influx of young hipsters, middle-class professionals, galleries, and cafes. Despite its poverty and the general shortage of services, this is an area where the presence of many public housing complexes provides for a large number of affordable housing units, in a city where urban development has made almost any parcel of urban land prohibitively expensive.
In recent years, the neighborhood has seen the first influx of new hordes of Brooklyn expats who are unable to pay skyrocketing rents in other parts of the borough. This is the last frontier of urban renewal—and the testing ground of de Blasio’s massive housing plan. But according to the New York Times, “nowhere is the distrust of his strategy deeper than in Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio’s home borough, where it can seem as if it is only a matter of time before development transforms even the poorest neighborhoods beyond recognition, straining the subways, packing schools and pushing longtime residents out.”58 The rezoning plan envisioned by the city will apply to a massive area of eastern Brooklyn (around 190 blocks) comprising a portion of the area of Ocean Hill west of Broadway Junction and the main portion of East New York and Cypress Hills to the east, bounded by Fulton Street to the north, Pitkin Avenue to the south, Sheffield Avenue to the west, and Lincoln Avenue to the east. The plan promises to provide for nearly 6,300 new housing units by 2030, bringing the area back to its original 1960s population of around 66,000 residents. The densest developments will be allowed along the main arteries like Atlantic Avenue, where the rezoning allows for 12- to 14-story residential buildings with retail on the ground floor. Less tall buildings (8 to 10 stories) will be allowed on Pitkin Avenue. Liberty Avenue and Fulton Street will be lined with 6- to 8-story buildings. Through the implementation of MIH, a percentage of new housing will be set aside as permanently affordable. The rezoning will also result in almost a million square feet of commercial space, a new 1,000-seat school, upgrades in transportation infrastructure, and streetscape improvements. To avoid raising the costs of construction (which ultimately translates into higher prices), the plan will waive parking requirements for affordable and senior developments within a mile of the subway. The plan also promises to implement measures to preserve existing government-assisted units whose affordability programs are about to expire and to invest $36 million in legal services to residents who may be facing landlord harassment, to limit the wave of evictions that the rezoning will likely produce.
When the city started the public review process for the East New York rezoning, locals were outraged. Things got worse when a report by Comptroller Scott Stringer was released on December 2015, stating that most of the newly built affordable housing units would be unaffordable to the majority of locals, and that nearly 50,000 low-income residents in 22,000 unprotected housing units would risk displacement if the plan went through. According to the report, the affordability price ranges envisioned in the plan would allow only 1,724 (and possibly even less, or about 948) out of 6,312 new apartments to be in the reach of local residents through the city’s affordable housing lotteries.59 Fortunately, the modifications to the MIH made in 2016 may allow for an extra option for families making about $31,000, more in line with the median income of East New York. It remains to be seen if developers will choose to go for this very low-income bracket option.
At public hearings in early 2016, the plan encountered harsh resistance. Pointing to the price range of the newly planned “affordable” housing, local activists and long-time residents showed little trust that de Blasio’s plan was meant to improve the neighborhood for them: it was wealthier newcomers that the plan was aiming to attract.60 Communities for Change and Real Affordability for All, among other groups, demanded more resources to preserve the existing affordable housing units, an increased supply of very low- and low-income units to house locals, and increased investments in programs to prevent commercial displacement of local small businesses.
When we watch TV we see de Blasio promote this plan as an affordable housing plan…. But this is pure propaganda. We did the math and we realized after reading the report on housing and his ten-year plan that this is not truly an affordable housing plan. It favors the creation of luxury housing that we don’t consider affordable.61
A similar opposition has targeted de Blasio’s implementation of the MIH plan in East Harlem, where the area between Madison/Lexington Avenue between 115th and 132nd Streets has been slated for rezoning. At community meetings and public rallies, residents have vocally opposed the plan, arguing that it will disrupt the lives of the many low-income tenants and small business owners in the neighborhood, and that it will wipe out the social and cultural fabric of “El Barrio” as they know it.62 Locals have complained about the affordability ranges included in the plan, claiming they don’t reflect the actual income of the people living in the area. For many low-income residents in East Harlem, being eligible to get these affordable units will be impossible. Most are already struggling with two or three low-wage jobs just to make ends meet in a local housing market that, although prohibitive, is more affordable than most of the housing the plan envisions. They are scared they will lose their homes. Residents also complained about de Blasio’s NYCHA’s “Next-Gen” program—a plan first envisioned by the Bloomberg administration which allows developers to build up to 50% market-rate housing on playgrounds, lawns, community facilities, and parking lots belonging to NYCHA complexes. In the summer of 2015, local residents united in the Movement for Justice in El Barrio organized several “Consultas del Barrio,” a series of community meetings and workshops, the results of which have been summarized in a 10-point community plan to preserve rent-stabilized housing in the neighborhood. The plan was delivered to the members of the community board and the community invited the administration to discuss it, but to no avail.63
East New York and East Harlem are only the trailblazers for more rezoning efforts to come through the pipeline across the five boroughs, like Jerome Avenue west of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, West Flushing along Flushing Creek in Queens, Long Island City, and Bay Street in Staten Island.
But despite the gigantic scale of de Blasio’s housing efforts and their relatively stronger focus (compared to Bloomberg’s plan) on the demands of working-class New Yorkers, very few housing units will be available for struggling citizens64—particularly those African Americans and Latinos who represented the largest constituency of the new mayor in the 2013 elections.
In 2015, the city released reports stating that over 40,000 units had been produced in the two years since 2014. But of all these, only about 15% went to households making less than $39,000, and just 5% were for people making less than $23,000. The large majority of units were reserved for much wealthier households.65 According to City Limits reporter Gregory Jost, “the core components [of the plan] benefit higher income bands, new arrivals, and industries like finance and real estate … and leaves the majority of those most threatened with displacement with no hope of even qualifying to play the lottery, let alone win it.”66
Yet again, rezoning is employed by city producers not as a tool to provide housing to struggling New Yorkers, but as a bridgehead for capital to penetrate into new underexploited urban frontiers.
There are some small businesses that are probably going to just fail because they’re not very good businesses.67
What good are money-management courses and networking events if you can’t stay in business because of the exorbitant rent increases?68
For almost a decade, a mysterious blogger under the pen name of Jeremiah Moss has chronicled the loss of innumerable mom-and-pop businesses that have shut their doors across the city because of skyrocketing rents in his Vanishing New York blog. James and Karla Murray have instead chosen photography to document New York City’s storefronts before they disappear, devoting a photographic testament to the most iconic establishments across the five boroughs: bodegas, hairdressers, stationeries, kosher joints, tobacconists, and laundromats. Of all the stores they photographed in their 2011 book, only about a third are still standing today: most have closed up shop or given way to corporate chains. Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species. Today, the ubiquitous presence of vacant storefronts all across the city is one of the most disturbing effects of the rampage against small business: warehoused storefronts can be kept vacant for years, until landlords find the next large enough retail chain to move in.
It is a well-known fact that the Bloomberg years were a living hell for New York’s small businesses: during Bloomberg’s tenure, there were 83,211 commercial eviction warrants issued, and 168,000 stores closed without a court fight. This equals about 800 to 1,000 stores closing per month, each year, for over a decade.69 When running for public advocate in 2009, de Blasio made protecting struggling small businesses a centerpiece of his campaign. He was also among the champions of a Small Business Jobs Survival Act (SBJSA) proposal that has been the subject of discussion for decades in New York, without ever seeing the light of day. The bill would give commercial tenants the right to demand 10-year leases with the right to renewal, and would give low-earning tenants the opportunity to bring lease renewals to arbitration if they think the new terms are unacceptable.70 But the bill was denied a vote at city council for over 30 years, opposed as it was by city hall and the real estate elites interested in maximizing profits from commercial properties in a booming city. In 2009, Speaker Quinn denied a vote on the bill, which at that time had 32 sponsoring council members.71
In his campaign for mayor and once in office, however, de Blasio declined to discuss the SBJSA any further, and his battle changed focus abruptly. While real estate speculation, exorbitant commercial rents, and a lack of tenant protections fully disappeared from his political talks, he started pointing to the “dramatic increase in inspections and nuisance fines on small businesses.” His solution to the problem was hence based on “improving the regulatory climate in the city” to alleviate “the incredible burden on small businesses from the rapid rise in fines.”72 “In my 30 years advocating for small business,” says Sung Soo Kim, historical small business advocate and cofounder of the New York City Small Business Congress and the Coalition to Save New York City Small Businesses, “no elected official has exhibited as dramatic a change in small business policy as our Mayor Bill de Blasio. He has gone the gamut, changing his assessment of the crisis from ‘rent gouging and extortion’ to ‘fines and lack of access to loans,’ a complete flip-flop from the last election.”73
Proposals for the introduction of forms of commercial rent control or fairer lease negotiation opportunities, the most powerful strategy to help local businesses in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, have been routinely dismissed by de Blasio officials. When confronted with the concerns of small business owners, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen quite smugly declared that such solutions would not help solve “the problem that people think the problem is.”74 The SBJSA currently has 27 sponsoring members, which is the needed majority at city council. Yet, no vote on this legislation has been called so far by city council. Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito had sponsored the bill when she was a council member during the administration of Bloomberg, only to suddenly withdraw her support in 2014 as council speaker (the most powerful position in city government after the mayor) during the self-proclaimed “progressive” administration of Bill de Blasio.75
As a result, no radical change is about to come for small businesses under the new mayor. The same policies of the Bloomberg years are still in place and are producing similar results: in 2014, there was an average of 488 eviction warrants issued to small businesses per month, compared with 485 such warrants in 2012 and 499 in 2013 under Bloomberg. And in 2015, there were 542 court evictions per month.76 If anything has changed under de Blasio, it has changed for the worse. And de Blasio’s rezoning plans will do their part to impact also those small mom-and-pop businesses that managed to make it through a decade of hell under Bloomberg, as well as prospective small businesses that may be looking for a chance in New York’s frantic market: zoning regulations to improve ground-floor retail space are very likely to be paralleled by exorbitant rent increases, and this in the last decade has almost invariably meant that big chains have replaced small local stores unable to renew their leases. The influx of new residents will also penalize those many small businesses and family and neighborhood stores that are unable to cater to a new population of consumers.
The administration has launched two programs to support small retailers under threat: NYC Business Solution, a service offered by the Department of Small Business Services to support businesses with legal advice and assistance, and Small Business First. The latter was unveiled in 2014 with the aim to “improve the regulatory climate in New York City and help businesses avoid penalties and fines.”77 But only two years later, in 2016, the Daily News and ProPublica published a frightening report showing the dark side of the “regulatory climate” for small business owners in New York City. The report investigated the NYPD’s alleged systematic practices of entrapment and extortion against small and immigrant business owners of bodegas, laundromats, and liquor stores in poor and minority neighborhoods like East Harlem, Inwood, Washington Heights, and Flushing.78 In about 18 months since 2013, the report found 646 cases filed by the NYPD against business owners for alleged violations, and found that 90% of such actions were against small businesses located in minority or immigrant neighborhoods.79
De Blasio must be credited for some significant achievements he obtained during his tenure. By the second half of his term, New York City’s economy had registered a steady increase in employment (248,000 new jobs were created in his first two years in office) and in wages, especially in the outer boroughs.80 And tourism keeps on setting new records year after year. De Blasio has also managed to adopt measures to alleviate the plight of some working-class New Yorkers. He won a battle to secure free full-day universal prekindergarten care after only eight months in office, without the tax on the wealthy (those with incomes above $500,000) that he had called his “number one proposal” during the mayoral campaign.81 He is campaigning for a $15 minimum wage for city employees by the end of 2018, and has also managed to expand paid sick leave, a landmark law that has brought worker benefits to 3.4 million private- and nonprofit-sector working New Yorkers, opening the way for other cities, including Philadelphia and Oakland, and the states of California and Massachusetts to enact similar legislation. Although misdemeanor arrests increased slightly at the beginning of his tenure, he was responsible for strongly reducing the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which had skyrocketed during the Bloomberg years. By the end of 2015, the number of stop-and-frisk encounters dropped to around 23,000, from a record 685,000 in 2011 during Bloomberg’s tenure.82
De Blasio, who has made combating inequality a centerpiece of his administration’s rhetoric, has championed himself as a crusading progressive also on the national stage. In 2014, he began embarking on a road show of public talks and appearances across the United States, to illuminate other city governments about his solutions to fix what he called “the crisis of our time.” But when it comes to affordable housing—one of the centerpieces of his progressive agenda for New York City—many struggling New Yorkers haven’t seen much of a change. Over a decade of rezoning across the board during the Bloomberg years has taught residents in low-income neighborhoods that whenever the city comes out with a rezoning plan, regardless of vague promises of affordable housing, prices will go up, and if they are tenants or small business owners, their permanence in the community will be at risk. They have understood that, if a rezoning plan is adopted, it will accelerate the gentrification of their neighborhood and trigger developments that will transform its social and cultural fabric beyond recognition. Regardless of the quotas reserved for “affordable” units, they are conscious that the majority of new housing will invariably be aimed at wealthier residents. They have seen it all before, and they have come to distrust the words of elected officials, even of those who run for mayor as the “anti-Bloomberg.” Notably, the biggest opposition to de Blasio’s agenda was to be found in Brooklyn, the mayor’s home borough, and it has been strong particularly among many of those Latin and African American voters who cheered his election into office in 2013.
“How Are You Enjoying the De Blasio Revolution?” was the title of a December 2015 cover story for New York Magazine, which pointed to the mayor’s very poor approval ratings only two years into his term.83 In May 2015, a poll released by Quinnipiac University showed that only 44% of voters approved of de Blasio’s job performance after one and a half years in office.84 Five months later, this number declined to 38% according to a Marist College poll. Notably, support for the mayor dropped 9 points among African American voters and 12 points among Latinos.85 The same month, three out of five New Yorkers disapproved of de Blasio’s handling of the city’s homelessness and affordable housing crisis, despite both issues having been at the core of his political agenda, according to a survey conducted by Siena College and the New York Times.86 A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed that 50% of New Yorkers would not approve of his re-election in 2017.87
These numbers are significant, considering the polls were conducted in moments of general economic prosperity for the city. The numbers suggest that de Blasio may have disappointed both sides of the city: middle-class voters have seen a mayor who in talks and public appearances seemed too focused on the plight of the poor, while at the same time, poor New Yorkers haven’t seen the change they were expecting under the new mayor. But there is another issue capable of disconcerting both the rich and the poor, and that few would have expected to get worse under the new administration: the rising number of homeless people on the streets of New York.
“We cannot let children like Dasani down,”88 said de Blasio at a public speech a few weeks after his 2013 election. Dasani was a then-11-year-old homeless girl whose touching story, reported in a widely read New York Times series,89 testified to the horrible conditions of the 22,000 children living in the grim homeless shelters of New York City—a sad legacy of the Bloomberg administration, and living proof of the failure of its affordable housing policies. It was a shameful legacy that de Blasio vowed to amend.
The number of homeless people hit all-time-high levels during the latter years of Bloomberg. Despite promises to cut homelessness by two-thirds by the end of his time in office, the number of people living in the streets or in homeless shelters increased year after year during his tenure, reaching a record of over 50,000 people living in homeless shelters by the end of 2013. Meanwhile, because of skyrocketing rental prices, in little more than a decade under Bloomberg, the number of official evictions in New York City rose from 21,945 in 2005 to 26,857 in 2014 (and this number doesn’t take into account the probably larger number of informal evictions). Between 2002 and 2010, the number of families entering homeless shelters after an eviction quadrupled.90 Bloomberg eliminated permanent housing assistance programs for homeless families, particularly after 2005, when he ended the practice of giving priority access to NYCHA public housing units and federal Section 8 vouchers to homeless families.91 He replaced these programs with the so-called Homeless Stability Plus, and later with the Advantage program, which offered two years of rental assistance to a selected number of working families living in shelters. Homeless advocates criticized both programs as ineffective, and state funding for these programs was cut in 2011 by Governor Cuomo.
De Blasio had not been deaf to the problem. He had invested in programs for homeless prevention and had restored the policy of the NYCHA to reserve a small number of apartments for families leaving the shelters. In 2014, he launched Living in Communities, or LINC, a voucher program designed to move shelter families into stable housing. The vouchers provide short-term rental assistance to those leaving the shelter system. Initially the program encountered several obstacles, particularly due to budget disputes with Albany, since the state rejected the city’s proposal to set the rent levels at the federal “Fair Market Rent” limits, which would have made the program competitive with federal Section 8 vouchers. As a result, in many cases landlords were refusing to accept the vouchers.92 Later in 2015, the administration devoted additional funds to raise the rent levels in the LINC program, making landlords less reluctant to accept the vouchers.93 In 2014, the city also set aside around 750 of the 5,500 NYCHA vacant apartments available every year for the homeless, and this number was doubled one year later.94
But the tragic reality of homelessness, which had intensified in the times of Koch, and escalated further under the tenures of Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, seems to have only gotten worse under de Blasio’s watch. And merciless tabloids have been quick to point it out with headlines such as “De Blasio Proves He’s Clueless About the Homeless Crisis.”95 But there is truth to these stories. By November 2015, a federal report indicated that New York was officially the United States’ homeless capital, with a staggering 75,323 homeless people, including 58,000 sleeping in city shelters, even as the number of homeless people nationwide was sinking.96 By the end of 2016, the number of homeless individuals in the city shelter system had risen to an all-time record of over 60,000.97
When faced with this growing political emergency, de Blasio for too long dismissed the phenomenon as the creation of tabloids and political opposers, and blamed the emergency on the failures of the Bloomberg administration, the lack of adequate communication with the press, and the resistance of New York State Governor Cuomo, who had refused to support several proposals to address the situation.98 Only at the end of 2015, as his ratings were dropping and homelessness had become an emergency covered almost daily by all major city magazines, did he decide to take action. He unveiled a $2.6 billion plan aimed at moving people out of the shelter system by creating 15,000 supportive housing units for the homeless, including veterans, the mentally ill, and disabled people, over a 15-year period.99 He removed Commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services Gilbert Taylor and announced plans to overhaul the department along with the other agency dealing with combating homelessness, the Human Resources Administration.100 He also announced a new homelessness outreach program called HOME-STAT, which employs specially trained staff of the NYPD’s homeless outreach unit along with social workers, to provide a daily count of homeless people living in the city streets and allow outreach teams to respond to calls from residents reporting the presence of homeless people on the street.101 Meanwhile, NYPD Commissioner Bratton announced that the department would try to pass legislation that makes it illegal for homeless people to panhandle within 10 feet of any ATM, among other measures. But homeless advocates claim that HOME-STAT may simply revive the Giuliani method of criminalizing the homeless on the street, leading to more arrests rather than offering any alternative shelter. A member of advocacy group Picture the Homeless commented: “The Mayor and the police commissioner are trying to show people they’re doing something, to get the public off the back, but there’s nothing to it … except more surveillance and more police targeting homeless African-Americans and Hispanics…. We need housing. It’s really simple.”102