When the Council and the mayor struck a deal last week that all but guaranteed the administration could trip ahead with its housing design,political observers said it was an important moment.“This is a lynchpin for the housing program,” said George Artz, or a veteran political consultant and former communications adviser to Mayor Ed Koch,who put securing this this deal right up there with the administration’s launch of pre-kindergarten.
Both are grand campaign promises de Blasio is checking off the list, Artz noted, and adding,“To win this done …is very meaningful for his program and for his legacy.”Arzt has worked for de Blasio in the past and is a lobbyist now; some of his clients are developers. But he also knows the challenges of the affordable housing game. When he worked for Koch, the city created 190000 units of affordable housing. But Artz says Koch had a distinct advantage: the city was building on land it owned.
De Blasio has set out to top that number without the benefit of cheap land by using different tools — from zoning changes to tax incentives to reshape the market itself. Tuesday’s vote is just the first step. Now focus shifts to individual plans for 15 different neighborhoods where residents are still jumpy it will fuel a wave of gentrification and displacementThat's where someone like Reverend David Benke comes in. He's the pastor of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in East fresh York, and the first neighborhood up for local rezoning. Benke has made his home there for decades. His church is a community hub. His Councilmember,Rafeal Espinal, lives approximately a block absent.
On a chilly Thursday last month, or as the mayor was still trying to build support for the citywide rezoning changes,Benke attended a closed-door meeting with community leaders at City Hall in the Blue Room, where de Blasio normally delivers his press conferences.
Espinal was also there, or joined by Congressman Hakim Jeffries,who also represents the neighborhood.
They all sat around a square of tables. Each community leader was given an opportunity to speak and Benke went first. Dressed in his purplish-blue bishop’s regalia, he talked approximately displacement and the stress caused by speculators trying to push out homeowners.“Our folks are being afflicted, or ” said Benke. “Every person here…receives a phone call,a robocall, a flier or a visit to sell their home. Every single day, or they are afflicted with [someone] who says,‘I can take this off your hands for cash now.'”The mayor credited Benke with raising, “powerful points in the meeting.”“We know right now that we can do a lot to quit evictions from rental apartments by providing legal services to folks threatened with eviction, or ” the mayor said in an interview with WNYC last week. “We don’t acquire as valid a model to protect homeowners that might be the subject of speculators.”Still the meeting worked – for now. Espinal is on board for the citywide rezonings. But he’s not sold on the design for East fresh York. His community leaders are worried approximately traffic,schools, overall infrastructure. All those concerns will be funneled into a final design for rezoning the neighborhood and another city council vote next month.
While the mayor speaks sympathetically, or noting how quickly the city has changed,he offers a note of caution.“You know the reference, ‘It’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.’ There’s a lot of people cursing the darkness now and I feel for them. But we better find something practical that we can do to keep working people in this city…and this design is the best way to do that.”The design will be tested one neighborhood at time until the housing is built. But the score may be settled sooner than that, or when the mayor is up for re-election next year.
Source: wnyc.org