Issues

Working for You

First as an Organizer working at a non-profit organization and then as Chief of Staff to Assemblymember Vito Lopez, I have worked closely with labor organizations, city agencies, and private residents to ensure New Yorkers have a greater quality of life. I have worked with Teamsters Local 237 to oppose and protest cuts to groundskeepers and maintenance workers in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). I have worked closely with SSEU Local 371 to oppose the recent City cuts of over 200 union jobs in NYCHA community center facilities. I fought on behalf of building service workers to ensure that, in the recent 421-a reform, all buildings over 50 units receiving 421-a benefits pay prevailing wages. Most recently, I have worked closely with DC 1707 and CSA to fight against City Hall’s plan to cut over 3,000 Day Care Center slots from ASC programs throughout the City. I am dedicated to the struggles of working New Yorkers and I have made it my life’s work to fight on their behalf. Indeed, the road ahead is often hard, but working together we can achieve our goal of making New York a better place to live, work, and raise our families.

Creating and Preserving Affordable Housing

I believe that our City’s greatest asset is the people that live here. However, it’s become increasingly difficult for middle class families, senior citizens, and everyday New Yorkers to find a decent and affordable place to live. Just look at the numbers. According to Coalition for the Homeless, we are seeing an increase of 40% this year in the number of families entering the shelter system, a record level since we started recording homelessness in NYC. Something is terribly wrong and we need to fix it.

I have spent the last few years working to build, preserve, and ensure affordable housing in Brooklyn. As Chief of Staff to Assembly Housing Chair Vito Lopez, I helped to get millions of dollars in State funding for affordable housing programs in New York City. I worked closely with the affordable housing advocacy community to reform the 421a tax incentive law, conditioning tax breaks on 20% on-site affordability in many parts of the City, including all five boroughs. The new law is expected to create thousands of units of affordable housing and save the City hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the part

I have worked for years, from my time as a Community Organizer in Bushwick, on protecting homeowners from unscrupulous and predatory lending practices that have decimated our neighborhoods and led to our current mortgage crisis. In 2008, I helped craft State legislation that provided increased protection for homeowners against the most egregious lending practices while increasing the penalties for unscrupulous lenders who violate the law.

This year, I am working to help pass the most progressive set of rent regulation laws in a generation. We will repeal the Vacancy and Luxury Decontrol laws that have allowed landlords to skirt rent stabilization by evicting tenants and increasing rents beyond the “luxury” threshold.

I am proposing an affordable housing platform for the City that will protect New York City’s most valuable resource: New Yorkers. My platform is designed to preserve and create truly affordable housing for low-income and middle-income families, as well as senior citizens and homeowners.

    Creating Affordable Housing

  • Create a Program For New Middle-Income Housing in NYC. I will work with the Mayor’s office, HPD, and the City Council on developing a new housing middle-income housing development program. Based on New York State’s Mitchell-Lama program, which successfully built middle-income co-ops and rentals for decades, I will fight for the City to make the smart capital investment in affordable housing in new and innovative ways.
  • Require Developers to Participate in Inclusionary Housing. I will work to require all large scale market-rate development, which has gone up throughout our neighborhoods in recent years, to include 20% affordable units in their developments.
  • Continuing our Commitment to Affordable Housing. The City should continue its commitment to affordable housing, building upon the $7.5 billion investment in the New Housing Marketplace Plan to build and preserve over 165,000 affordable units by 2013. We should expand upon this commitment and vow to fund the creation and preservation of 100,000 more affordable units by 2020 by diversifying our funding options.
  • Senior Housing. The City should establish a new Senior Housing Program. Currently, only the Federal 202 Program builds new senior housing in New York City. We need a new and innovative program, modeled on the Federal 202 Program, only with greater funding stream to increase the production of units. I am presently working on legislation to build additional senior citizen housing units as well as affordable assisted living units. This new innovative program will be modeled on the federal 202, using assisted living dollars as well as state and city tax credits.

    Preserving Affordable Housing

  • Commitment to Maintaining Affordability and Livability. In light of a dire housing situation for many of the most vulnerable tenants in our City, we need to expand our funding commitment and accessibility to programs, such as Section 8, Jiggits, HomeBase, SCRIE, and DRIE that keep working families and senior citizens in decent apartments. We need to establish a Homeowners Preservation Fund, providing accessible low-interest loans for owners to make capital improvements if they agree to maintain affordability standards.
  • Homeowners Tax Credit. In order to stimulate homeownership in our City, I am proposing a $5,000 per-year/3-year City Tax Credit for condos, co-ops, and one- and two-family homes throughout the five boroughs. We should be incentivizing homeownership during this time of economic hardship and widespread disinvestment.
  • Strengthen Rent Regulations. We need to ensure that we protect tenants, the backbone of our City, by making sure that the State passes Vacancy and Luxury Decontrol Repeal bills this year, thereby eliminating the incentives that unscrupulous landlords use to opt out of rent stabilization provisions. We also need to ensure that we protect tenants by strengthening penalties and enforcement for owners who harass and intimidate tenants.

 

Preserving Our Neighborhoods

Over the past ten years, many of our neighborhoods have been transformed by overdevelopment with few of the resources and benefits going to longtime residents of our communities. Now, from Greenpoint to Downtown Brooklyn, we have luxury condos for the most well-off and not enough affordable units for those who built our neighborhoods with their hard work. We need better planning to preserve our neighborhoods.

I have worked with the Department of City Planning and Housing Preservation and Development on a comprehensive rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, bringing new developments into the context of the surrounding neighborhoods. The key in this rezoning is to limit new building heights in traditional residential neighborhoods so that developers can only build higher through an inclusionary bonus for affordable housing on certain wider streets that can handle more height.

  • Contextual Zoning. The current process in Williamsburg/Greenpoint should serve as a good example, and I think the Department of City Planning has done a very good job of involving the community in the process. If we want to preserve the character of our neighborhoods, we need to adhere to the surrounding contexts. Future rezonings need to reflect that.
  • Good Growth Standards. We need to empower our communities to have a more forceful say in the planning of our neighborhoods. I am in favor of a Good Growth standard to be written into the city laws. Larger projects should produce plans to address the consequences of the growth they will bring: the need for affordable housing, environmental and infrastructure impacts of the development, and the need for open space and park space, as well as community facilities. These issues should not be dealt with on a case-by-case basis with no overarching standard. They need to be addressed according to a city-wide Good Growth standard.
  • Parks and Recreational Spaces. Parks and recreational spaces play a very important role in the quality of life in our community. The City needs to make good on its promise to provide acres of open space on the Williamsburg waterfront. So far, only a fraction of that promise has been delivered. We need to find new and creative ways to ensure that park land is developed and maintained, and that our parks remain a budget priority.
  • Brooklyn Bridge Park. I firmly believe that we need a Brooklyn Bridge Park for everyone. That is why I am against any further housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Brooklyn Bridge Park represents a great (and once in a lifetime) opportunity to provide a magnificent public benefit, not only to Brooklyn, but to the entire City of New York. The current park plan does not meet that potential.

    I also believe Brooklyn Bridge Park should have a much greater capacity for public use and year-round recreational facilities than is provided for in the current plan. In order to pay for the maintenance costs of the park, I support a PIRC (Park Increment Recapture) plan to use revenue from future nearby rezonings, not tax increases or housing within the park. I support community-based initiatives to revise the plan for Brooklyn Bridge Park to eliminate private housing and increase public use.

    We cannot let this opportunity for a world-class, public park under the Brooklyn Bridge, pass us by.

 

Protecting Our Environment

This year ExxonMobil has once again posted staggering profits- $42.5 billion to be exact. Meanwhile, in North Brooklyn along the Newtown Creek, we have been suffering for the past 50 years from one of the largest oil spills in human history-3 times larger than the Exxon Valdez. ExxonMobil needs to operate in good faith by dedicating substantially more of their resources to the cleanup. Up to this point they have been moving shamefully slowly.

As Chief of Staff to Assemblyman Vito Lopez, I worked with community residents, local elected officials and groups like Riverkeeper and Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee to sue ExxonMobil for neglecting their responsibility. ExxonMobil has the cash-they need to dedicate more of it to cleaning up the Newtown Creek.

The New York League of Conservation Voters has recognized my commitment to environmental with their recent endorsement. To view my responses to the New York League of Conservation Voters’ candidate questionnaire, please click here.

 

Education

The education of our children is the most fundamental service that we, as a society, can provide. Not only is it our sacred obligation, it is an investment in our future that will pay dividends for years to come. There is no greater way to ensure the future prosperity of New York City than to give our kids a world class education and prepare them to be the leaders of the next generations.

    Early Childhood Education

    This year, New York City is at a crossroads. We are currently faced with an unprecedented financial crisis and a looming deficit, and we need to make some very difficult decisions in the months ahead. However, I believe that City Hall’s proposal to cut $52.5 million, or 7%, of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) budget is just plain wrong. It is more important than ever that we give our working families, and their children, the opportunity to make it in this City. That means expanding Universal Pre-K, not cutting it. That means doing more for foster families, not less. That means providing greater child-care and Kindergarten opportunities, not scaling them back.

    A child’s potential is limitless. It is well known that the ages of 2-5 are critical to a child’s development, and I believe that every child, given the opportunities, can grow up to be a success. After all, that is what the American dream is all about – opportunity. It is absolutely essential that New York City do everything it can to give our kids the quality education they need, at a time in their lives when it matters most.

    That is why the ACS budget cuts need to be restored. We cannot balance the budget on the backs of our kids.

     

Economy and Jobs

I will fight to strengthen economic development in New York City in order to create and preserve jobs for New Yorkers and advocate for greater unemployment benefits, improved education and job training, and expanded healthcare coverage. I am committed to using ingenuity and hard work to help solve the economic issues facing us here in New York City. I have dedicated my career to improving the quality of life for all New Yorkers and now, more than ever, working New Yorkers deserve a fairer, safer and more flexible workplace.

  • New Job Initiatives & Green Jobs. As a City Council Member, I will work tirelessly to create new jobs initiatives. With programs directed toward ensuring a safer, more environmentally sound, healthy and sustainable City, including initiatives focused on improving the City’s infrastructure, these highly beneficial programs would serve to create new, steady and good quality jobs. By focusing on “greening” New York, I support an aggressive effort to train New Yorkers to work to retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient. I also support bringing green industry to New York and in doing so implementing first source hiring for those jobs. Working with communities, I plan to use existing but underutilized resources to stimulate new jobs such as creatively developing unfinished construction projects, vacant housing and building inventory to best serve communities.
  • Job Training.With a transitioning workforce, the City needs to implement better access to job training resources and create new programs to train New Yorkers to work in emerging industries and new opportunities.
  • Paid Family Leave. The key to successful business practices is maintaining a well-trained workforce. Guaranteed paid family leave is a basic right that should be afforded to all New Yorkers. Paid family leave would allow for working New Yorkers to have the flexibility needed to balance work and family and would at the same time allow for business owners to have improved productivity and better retain workers. No one should have to choose between taking care of one’s self or one’s family and his or her livelihood.
  • Preserving and Supporting Small Businesses. I am an advocate for small businesses and support increased financial assistance for small businesses through tax credits, continued expansion of programs such as the NYC Capital Access Revolving Loan Guarantee Program granting loans to small businesses that have trouble accessing traditional loans, and other similar programs. I worked closely with the Economic Development Corporation to help save the Moore Street Market, a market in East Williamsburg made up of small business owners, and in doing so, helped to preserve a neighborhood. I have also worked with various merchants’ associations, including the Wyckoff Avenue and Knickerbocker Merchants Associations to stimulate development of and support for small businesses.
  • Independent Workers. I fully support independent workers, who make up more than 30% of the nation’s workforce and account for more than 60% of New York City’s job growth since 1975. In addition to creating tax incentives to support small businesses using city and state programs to ensure healthcare coverage for these independent workers, I also support reforming the City’s Unincorporated Business Tax (UBT) to stop the heavy taxation of independent workers.
  • Stimulus Money. I would lead efforts to direct stimulus money yet to be allocated to New York City to best serve Brooklyn and the City. Stimulus projects would provide prevailing wages for workers and provide quality healthcare coverage.
  • Helping New Yorkers Find New Jobs. I believe the city should better extend benefits for healthcare for the unemployed, and be sure to quickly extend other unemployment benefits to out of work New Yorkers to provide a safety net for those seeking work.