With the city facing its worst fiscal crisis in decades, City Councilmembers Brad Lander (D-Park Slope, Gowanus, Windsor Terrace, Kensington), Robert Cornegy Jr. (D-Bedford-Stuyvesant, Northern Crown Heights) and Vanessa Gibson (D-Bronx) blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio for trimming some fat off the city’s four-year capital budget plan.
De Blasio’s preliminary Fiscal Years 2020-2024 capital plan budget was $85.2 billion. However, his executive budget delivered in April was for $83 billion, trimming roughly $2.3 billion off his original proposal.
The largest cuts are to the NYC Economic Development Corporation ($1.262 billion for job creation and neighborhood development projects), the NYC Department of Transportation ($480 million for bridge and road repairs), the NYC Department of Correction ($472 million for borough-based jails construction) and the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) with cuts of over $1 billion in FY20 and FY21 with more than 40% of that money earmarked for affordable housing.
The lawmakers argued that HPD’s cuts could result in thousands of housing units and jobs lost. However, they did not address the scandal that KCP uncovered in which HPD attempted to take smaller black- and brown-owned affordable housing properties worth millions of dollars and giving them to favored non-profit developers under the guise of developing more affordable housing.
“Affordable housing intersects with public health, with job creation, and with the long-term needs of our shared communities,” said Cornegy. “These counterproductive capital budget cuts would set all those aims back. That is thousands of housing units, thousands of jobs, hundreds of contracts with MWBEs, and millions more in maintenance costs.”
The councilmembers were joined in a press conference by the New York Housing Conference and other housing advocates – some of which stood to profit from the HPD scandal – who released a letter signed by over 160 organizations urging the Mayor to reverse cuts to the affordable housing budget.
Many of the speakers cited deeper reasons for why they thought the cuts to be a bad decision, some arguing that this was not the time to make these types of cuts after coming out of a pandemic.
“The city is experiencing an unprecedented budget shortfall due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Gibson, “We understand that deep, painful cuts must be made to ensure the city continues to provide services, but cuts to the capital budget will not bring in additional savings.”
According to the analysis composed by Lander and Gibson, the savings from these cuts would be minimal and would result in up to 15,000 lost housing units, thousands of lost construction jobs, and millions lost in contracts for minority and women-owned businesses.
Some even used the broader messages being protested about on the streets as a grounds against the cuts.
Laura Mascuch, Executive Director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, a non-profit bent on trying to end NYC’s homelessness, voiced just that.
“This week — and these last few months — have starkly shown us the face of systemic racism in our city and our society: in the murder of George Floyd; in the police reactions to protests and in the hugely disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color and poor neighborhoods,” said Mascuch.
Whether the cuts are due to racism or the fiscal crisis, Lander thinks cutting the capital budget should not come into play.
“[Councilmember Lander] is very well aware of the fiscal crisis we are facing and cuts to the operating budget are necessary, but this report is specifically about the cuts to the capital budget, which is separate and funded by borrowing for longer-term investments in infrastructure,” said Lander Spokesperson Naomi Dann.
The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment in time for this pst.
