MSCC, John Mudd, November 3, 2024

The New York City Councils conviened on October 21 and 22, of 2024. The public testified on the second day. You can view the public’s testimonials here.

Following are a few collected testimonials for the New York City Council’s Zoning Committee on the City Of Yes…

Testamony from MSCC, John Mudd

I’m John Mudd, the Executive Director of Midtown South Community Council, and I’ve been living in Midtown since 84. The Council has been around just as long. We work with agencies, elected officials, nonprofits, activists, and community, church, and other groups regarding our basic human needs of health, housing, and food.

The housing crisis is decades old and we haven’t made any real attempts to resolved it. Our infrastructure is archaic, agencies of oversight understaffed, and response is at a snails pace. Things haven’t changed. The City’s development policies are largely to blame for the burdening rents, poor health, widening disparity, and increasing homelessness. 

Rather than produce the kinds of housing needed, protect our rent controlled and stabilized stock, and bring the 64,000 warehoused apartments onto the market, we’re making deals with developers and securing their investments by ensuring development friendly folks are in office, running the Rent Guidelines Board, and sitting on the Community Boards to manufacture consent for their communities. 

Case in point, four members of Open New York, a nonprofit funded by Billionaire and co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz with a purpose to influence elections and develop, have seats on CB4, and on other boards around the city. This “nonprofit” is dubiously appealing for “affordable’ housing and is wedded to  the “YIMBY” (Yes In My Back Yard) movement–exists a super pac called Abundant NY.  And they are primed to influence elections by funding their political proxies to lift the zoning restraints and simplistically solve the “New York‘s housing shortage by increasing the rate of housing production.” Click here for more information.

You will also find Open New York folks providing several testimonials for the City Council’s Subcommittee on The City Of Yes here today, October 22, 2024.

Agency officials are not protected from stupidity, ideology, or corporate capture. For HPD Commissioner Carrion to laud his agency’s “robust partnership” with private industry is appalling, particularly when they have been responsible for pushing extractive plans responsible for our health, food, housing crises.

Our housing policies in general, as with this City Of Yes proposal, serves the developers best interest, and does very little to ease or end the homelessness and the housing crisis (that is a crisis of affordability). 

The proponents scream housing crisis often enough and use the term ‘affordable housing,’ which has been bastardized, overused, and misused to serve the real estate industry’s marketing goals to coax the public into accepting their schemes.

Land-use and wealth far outweighs public concerns. Rather than wrangle the developer’s grips from their stranglehold on this City’s land-use and protect our livable, breathable, and healing spaces to give people security and comfort; we’re given the City Of Yes, an opportunity for the developers to acquire and commoditize more valuable public space; thereby supercharging the housing crisis.

The plan disguises tax giveaways as incentives, uses a repackaged problematic 421A tax giveaway and a problematic AMI to determine what’s affordable; It continues using a dysfunctional voucher system to subsidize landlords, and it has no mandates for the right to housing.—See Samuel Stein, Community Service Society, Housing Policy Analyst, 421A discussion here and video here.

The plan does not account or resolve a variety of infrastructure problems. Many agreed with Councilman Robert Holden’s statement, that a proposal “With no infrastructure upgrade plans—such as aging electric grids, deteriorating roads, overwhelmed sewer systems, and under-resourced schools—and recent storms killing people in basement apartments, the last thing we should be doing is pushing forward a rushed plan that most community boards and countless civic associations oppose.”

When budgeting a startup business you would consider all the infrastructure needs such as sewers, gas, electric, garbage, transit, and more to run that business inefficiently. Society needs as much consideration. This plan leaves it to the individual and or the municipality to deal with while the developer runs off with the money.

The City Of Yes, with unanswered questions, packaged and marketed as an answer to our housing crisis, is but another wealth extractive plan, that takes advantage during a moment of need—a disaster capitalist approach. The build it and let the free market fix it gimmick was disproven a long time ago. The continual commoditizing of homes will always have the investor looking for more profits at the expense of the renter. This build mentality and let the market resolve the affordable crisis is likely a purposely ignorant ideology to continue extracting wealth from a  collapsing economy.

In no way does privatization serve the public. But it gives them power to cost us out of living. Corporate self interest and indifference toward the public is undeniable.

As we speak Related is working to acquire the largest stock of low income housing this nation has produced. This developer, with some of our elected officials support, is planning to end public housing and demolish approximately 4,500 people out of their homes in Chelsea to steal the land beneath them. 

Our history of development is our crystal ball, and you don’t have to go very far to see our future, starting “with former NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s 2008 rezoning failure of Midtown, which allowed the over-saturation of hotels, squashed tenement buildings, and worsened the homeless and housing crisis.” 

Other examples…

The Hudson Yards development plan “didn’t go too well, not from the public’s perspective: The shopping mall project hit hurdles commonly associated with mega-projects, including revenue shortfalls, cost overruns and spillovers, as well as revenue lost to tax breaks,” according to The New School, Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. The New York Independent Budget Office highlighted as much, with their analysis of the Hudson Yards financing failure and cost to the public. The Gothamist asked if we would ever see the 4.5 Billion of taxpayer money spent to cover the shortfall; have we? Maybe in spreadsheets or reports validating the financial finagling success to be used for their next adventure?  

Furthermore, “the Related Companies, the developer behind Hudson Yards, raked in at least $1.2 billion,” with the help from the Empire State Development (ESD) gerrymandered map qualifying the site for a “controversial investor visa program known as EB-5,” that “was designed to lure foreign investment to distressed communities.” But “Instead, it subsidizes luxury real estate.”

The Governor Hochul’s guiding principle and unwavering support for Vornado Realty, Steven Roth’s plan to siphon more tax dollars, crush people’s homes, and eliminate small businesses in the Penn Station Area, and the indifference for the the public’s interest can easily be reasoned—void of integrity—by the generous campaign donations.

The Hochul, Empire State Development Corp (ESD), and Vornado Realty Trust’s development plan ignores the housing crisis and the worst vacancy rate and economic downturn of our time to demolish almost 20 million square feet around the Pennsylvania train station, “to bring more commercial property rentals to an already overly commercialized mecca,” to complete their “river to river” commercial dream. 

Public transit suffers as a result of Hochul’s blatant disregard for—Through-running’s viability—a more efficient modern fluid transit system that would afford more convenience, access, and reach to other regions.

The priorities are clear, particularly, when you allow the homelessness conditions to persist with the millions and billions spent on development. You can not rightly say you are developing with the kind of outcomes seen on our streets, hospitals, ERs, food lines, elderly facilities; the cost burdens wear on the public’s psyche and destroys them physically, until their earning power is diminished, before being pushed out of their homes and neighborhoods and into nursing homes or worse, the streets.

Our economic system is destroying lives, natural resources, healthcare, housing, food systems, and driving people out of existence. As our economy degrades further, this vulgar system, in its more brutal form, that is participating in the genocide and waring efforts happening overseas, will come to feast more veraciously here at home. It’s time to put the monster on a diet. We need to stop allowing corporate to use the City as a piggy bank. We need protections from the laws we make and we need protectorates against the rampaging influences of the corporate class. 

People need to be a forethought, not an afterthought. If you truly want this city to be progressive and humane; then refuse this plan, mine it for anything of value, don’t work within a bubble, and bring the City councils together, with the public advocate, and—equally—the people, with their advocates, experts, nonprofits, and advisors, along for the ride.

In other words, let us grab a little bit of democracy from the oligarchy control to have a more conclusive discussion without private equity and the hierarchical positions already taken, influenced, planned, and in the works, that are only giving us the optics of inclusiveness (case in point: Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses planned demolition).

Respectfully,

John Mudd, Midtown South Community Council

Testamony From Len Poletta

Councilmember Riley and Councilmembers, my name is Leonard Polletta and I am former Assistant General Counsel of District Council 37, AFSCME and a former chair of the New York State Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board. I am currently a member of Limited Equity at Penn South, LEAPS. Mutual Redevelopment Houses Inc., aka Penn South is a complex with over 2800 affordable housing co-ops in Chelsea built with City and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union funds in the 1960s. I have lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan for over 45 years.

The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity will not provide the low-income affordable housing that New York desperately needs. This wholesale deregulation approach to zoning regulations harkens back to Reagan’s supply side economics which did not work then and will not work today to lower rents. 

There are several tried and true ways to provide low-cost, affordable housing. 

Stronger rent control laws and vigorous enforcement of those laws will do more to reduce rents and make housing more affordable than all the changes contemplated by the City of Yes. Currently, the city has thousands of vacant rent-controlled and other warehoused apartments that should be available for tenants to occupy. The Council can and should hold hearings to investigate and address this man-made crisis, and find legislative solutions to revive and resurrect strong rent control laws and bring rents down.  

Rent stabilization is not a program to monetize housing investments for developers and big landlords. Housing should not be a source of speculation or focused on increasing returns on investments for developers and investors. The city should not be in the business of making the rich richer. Housing is a human right and the Council should be focused on treating it as such. 

The Council’s focus also should be to build more public housing and guarantee a strong public revenue stream for the maintenance and improvement of existing public housing for the million residents living there now. Rather than spending billions on simply managing homelessness with private companies, the city could be focused on mandating the rehabilitation and renting of vacant and warehoused apartments throughout the city. There are now some 7000 vacant apartments in NYCHA and upwards of 60,000 more warehoused throughout the city. There is no shortage of apartments, only a shortage of affordable rents.  

The City of Yes is a top-down centralization of power away from our diverse neighborhoods where the real needs of the community can be expressed and addressed. Shifting power to a citywide executive process that is subject to the pressures of big developers and political donations builds in the potential for corruption.

We do not need a comprehensive city-wide lifting of so many zoning restrictions. This deregulation together with the absence of mandatory affordability requirements will not provide us with affordable housing we desperately need. Reliance on developers to provide affordability voluntarily ignores the reality of their fixation on the maximization of profit. 

The absence of measurable mandatory affordability requirements is a fatal capitulation to developers. This means little or no truly affordable housing will be built ultimately. 

Additionally, as many others have testified, there are no provisions for the City to address the building of amenities and infrastructure. This will exacerbate not alleviate economic and racial segregation patterns and further limit housing options for working class New Yorkers. The notion that this rezoning is necessary to address “racial justice” or counter “Nimby” efforts is a fig leaf hiding the profoundly undemocratic nature of the whole endeavor.  

Lastly, the City of Yes gives undue discretion to the mayor and mayoral appointees and reduces Council members’ powers along with eviscerating local neighborhood control. As many have said, by converting many Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) actions into discretionary certifications, the initiative reduces the power of elected council members and local communities. This diminishes local oversight and accountability in land use decisions.

The Campus Infill provision invites overcrowding, elimination of desperately needed green spaces and will further our environmental crises. This aspect of the City of Yes is especially objectionable to Penn South residents because the initiative allows for infill development, threatening our campus with the loss of much-needed open space. 

As so many have testified, there are features of this proposal that are objectionable and should not be passed. Any zoning changes should only be made after careful examination and investigation by the Council, after hearings where local residents can be heard. Changes need to be made locally with surgical precision not in a city-wide blunderbuss approach. Vote no on the City of Yes.

Testimonial From Marni Halasa

MARNI SAYS NO TO CITY OF YES

Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Marni Halasa and I am an activist in Chelsea, fighting to stop the demolition of public housing, as well as to save NYCHA’s Section 9. I also, with my husband Peter, own a wine bar in Hells Kitchen, called The Purple Tongue. I am also a professional figure skater and have lived in NYC for 30 years. 

(Just fyi, I signed up to speak yesterday at 9:30am but was never called by CM Abreu. And I never re-registered because I didn’t think I had to since I already registered. I watched the hearing from 1pm to 12pm waiting to be called, and at the end when the CM asked if there any more speakers, he shut it down after seconds. I am very disappointed I didn’t speak, which I put on Twitter @marni4change. This editorial will be published in the Westview News.)

I also ran for City Council in 2017 and 2021, an experience which really opened my eyes to the very insidious and diabolical ways that corporate and real estate interests work in matters of land use — and how elected officials and especially those in City Council suck on the teat of REBNY, constantly opposing the interests of their own constituents in the hopes of enriching themselves. And they do this with a smile.

I say NO to the City of Yes, and that’s because it’s a sham. NYC does not need a tiny percentage of affordable units, but millions of genuine affordable units for regular New Yorkers, in the ranges of $800 to $1500, where people can have longevity, security and sustainability in their homes. Housing is of course a human right.

But developers don’t care — and anyone who thinks they will, out of the goodness of their heart, are not living in reality. Big real estate is in the same boat as what reporter Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs in 2011 as … “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

City of Yes was designed to create luxury apartments that no one can afford, and I seems like every young twenty or thirty something person on this zoom has taken their marching orders from Open New York, refusing to critically think, parroting talking points that not only paint a dishonest reality — but mark my words — will be the deathknell that sends them back to the Iowa’s and Ohio’s they came from.

Look at how developers now are coming after NYCHA public housing,  privatizing and demolishing apartments that are the largest source of deep affordability in the city for seniors and the low income.  I have examined the actual privatized Nycha leases that go through RAD/PACT. These leases state that construction can last up to 20 years, that shareholder profits — not repairing apartments — are the developer’s priority. Other leases state that the developer can change the percentage of affordable housing if it doesn’t fit in with profit formulas. It’s a classic bait and switch and happens all the time. But these young people — many with ties to these City of Yes groups — purposely keep their heads in the sand.

In places like Chelsea, developers want to demolish Fulton and Elliott Chelsea Houses to build luxury condos to displace low income people of color, with the real intent of gentrification on steroids — so Chelsea can develop into an even WHITER wealthier neighborhood, ridding itself of our black and hispanic neighbors who have lived there for decades. 

Watch the 2023 documentary, “Razing Liberty Square,” and you will see that after all the hullabaloo that “no resident would be displaced,” that only 5 tenants out of thousands of long-term residents ever returned, while a new neat tidy development of luxury condos emerged. Liberty Square, built in 1937, was one of the oldest public housing developments in the nation. And the demolition had dire consequences: (1) former tenants, many seniors and the disabled, became homeless, (2) others died waiting on lists to get into apartments supposedly set aside for former tenants, all of which ultimately destroyed this black and brown community forever. Whether you agree or disagree with the City of Yes, you must concur that privatization/demolition development schemes, place low income people of color in harms way, and are as well racist, discriminatory and prey on the most vulnerable.

If the Mayor is serious about making NYC affordable, he should direct city agencies to clawback the 26,000 rent-regulated units being warehoused by landlords, as well as use planning tools to slow land speculation, tax warehoused property and pied-à-terres, and subsidize housing outside of the profit-making system. But I don’t think he is serious. 

But I also say to all the young people on the City of Yes zoom call — for your own protection: dig deeper, look at the opposing side and study it. Read the editorials and presentations of Paul Graziano and Andrew Berman who will illustrate in detail why CoY is a sham. Then make a more informed decision.

But on a spiritual note, you should also look up the Akashic Records. I don’t know if you believe in a higher power, but if you do, you do understand that those who knowingly harm people in this life, and subscribe to policies that put others in danger, are walking a very unsteady path where you cannot hide. Karma is everywhere and when it inevitably come for you, you will want to have made compassionate choices, or else…

Testimonial From Zool

I live in Midtown, but I am originally from the south, the South Bronx. You can take the boy out of The Bronx, but not The Bronx out of the boy, which means to me – a lifelong concern for the poor, for the migrant, for working people of all backgrounds and ages from all parts of our world – for “the least of these.”

I applaud Chair Garodnick for his superhuman efforts to solve our decades-long and ever-overwhelming affordable housing crisis. 

A little more housing in every neighborhood and greater density around transit hubs are excellent concepts, but what kind of housing, who’s building it, who’s profiting, who’s paying too high a price?

We must have modest, contextual development, as Chair Garodnick says, and housing affordability must come with greater investment in places like Queens and The Bronx as Councilmember Salamanca pointed out yesterday, but the underlying question with this City of Yes Housing Opportunity text amendment remains – will it increase or decrease economic and racial segregation in our town?

Here’s an example of how developers, bankers, and venture cap game the global real estate market in this city – The Prince George, a 1904 landmark, thirteen stories with more than 400 units of supportive housing, always in need of funds, sold air rights to the developers of the “billionaires’ bunker-in-the-sky” on Fifth Avenue & West 29th Street, more than fifty stories high with maybe less than 30 units, none smaller than two story duplexes, for people who might reside there for the two weeks of the US Open… meanwhile the Avenue is teeming with our unhoused neighbors.

Let’s ask ourselves how we might build the housing we need while preserving light & clean air, our streetscapes & green spaces… Let US  make investments in housing, hospitals, schools, parks, and public transportation rather than leaving this to the whim of private pecuniary interest.

zool, zoolTheArtAndPolitics@hotmail.com