New Yorkers are deeply divided ahead of this mayor’s race. But there is one area of broad consensus.
I’m talking, of course, about the need to address the affordability crisis in New York by building more housing. This is a goal that unites us — left, right, and center — even if we differ on the details of how to get it done.
That’s why the Charter Revision Commission’s proposal to streamline the process of approving the building of new affordable housing should be something we can rally around.
But sometimes common sense and common ground run smack into the kind of cynical. turf protection racket that New York politics too often becomes.
That’s what’s happening with the City Council’s desperate effort to block the Charter Revision Commission’s proposals to build more affordable housing.
The worst part is that they’re doing it with your money — in violation of established law.
Why? It’s because their members will have less individual ability to kill housing development in their districts. Instead, Community Boards and the City Council-approved City Planning Commission would have the power to fast-track affordable housing.
This is a matter of supply and demand. With a 1% vacancy rate, we have a supply problem in New York.
But taking away this power from Council is a deal-breaker — for them. And they’ve been focused on trying to stop the charter revision any way they can.
First, the City Council tried to kill this pro-housing proposal by pressuring the Board of Elections to take the unprecedented step of kicking the proposals off the ballot, denying voters a chance to decide for themselves.
But after facing massive pushback from good government groups like Citizens Union, the Board of Elections refused to take the bait and decided to enforce the law.
Not satisfied with that defeat, now the City Council is trying an equally desperate, unprecedented, and illegal maneuver to stop the affordable housing proposal.
Here’s the deal: Government agencies cannot use taxpayer dollars for what is known as “electioneering” — which is advocating for a specific election outcome. Ironically, this is written in the City Charter, which bars officials from using their office to “support or oppose a particular election outcome.”
You can however spend that money for purely educational purposes. And that’s the loophole the City Council is trying to drive a truck through.
Education requires fidelity to the facts. The City Council has sent out mailers to residents, falsely fear-mongering about the impact of the proposal. The dishonesty is breathtaking — the mailers pretend to back the construction of affordable housing while actually trying to block it.
Their mailings and website argue that the provisions will lead to “less affordability,” “less investment” and “more gentrification” — when the reforms are clearly designed to lead to more affordability and investment and less gentrification, because neighborhoods that have less affordable housing would have those developments expedited.
And if the City Council’s status quo requisite approval was so effective we would have far more affordable housing than we do today. Instead, it leads to bottle necks and misplaced veto power. The Community Boards and the City Planning Commission ensure that local input and wise use planning will continue in an expedited fashion.
There’s no fair reading of these materials that lead to the conclusion that these are just educational rather than electioneering against the proposed charter reforms. As Columbia Law Prof. Richard Briffault explains, “Council members have a right to campaign against the charter amendments, but not with taxpayer dollars.”
If this sounds like a bad joke to you, it also does to some members of the City Council, including one member who anonymously slammed the mailers in an interview with Crain’s New York as “misleading and silly.” “Anyone with a brain will see this most certainly as electioneering or trying to deceive voters on what I think are very meaningful housing proposals,” the member said. “it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
It also intentionally breaks the spirit of the law if not the letter. This is about power — not the people — and certainly not building more housing. Laws against electioneering should be enforced. New York City needs to fast track affordable construction, so we can ease the affordability crisis by increasing the supply of new housing.
Avlon is the chairman of Citizens Union, fighting for reform in New York for more than a century.
