[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. He gave a State of the Borough Address last night, which got some advanced publicity for the aggressive housing site planning the borough president is doing, identifying 171 sites, even in dense Manhattan, according to The New York Times, where new housing can be built to ease the chronic shortage and make housing more affordable.

We'll talk about other things too because how do you assess the state of the borough when the borough is the crossroads of the world and it generates questions these days like if the central business district as we know it is dying because of the pandemic and hybrid work, if suburban fear of crime, statistically rational or not, is causing severe harm to the arts and entertainment industry, what it's like having the first-in-the-state legal recreational cannabis dispensaries in the village amid an ongoing debate about whether one can open in Harlem near the Apollo Theater, if single male asylum seekers have a right to the same kind of hotel housing as migrant families with children, that's in today's headlines from Chelsea, if Mayor Adams' defense of special anti-crime units is risking a New York repeat of what happened to Tyre Nichols, and last but not least, if the state should impose a congestion pricing toll, and if so how, to drive into the central business district regardless of how much life it has.

How do you describe the state of the borough that is the second biggest tech hub next to Silicon Valley but is suffering thousands of layoffs in the sector, and that has so many poor people and the richest people and corporations in the world? It was Mark Levine's challenge to try. Borough President, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Brian, it's great to be here. I think you just gave a great State of the Borough speech, but we're going to need two hours to hit all those things.

Brian Lehrer: I know. That's a State of the Borough question list. I haven't seen the full text of the speech. Did you start by saying the state of the borough is strong like they always seem to start with at the State of the State and the State of the Union?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, we were a little more creative. I said that Manhattan is coming back. That really was the theme of the speech. All the ways that we see our progress. Manhattan's population is growing. I think this is underappreciated. We're up almost 4% compared to pre-pandemic. I also wasn't afraid to focus on challenges. I am worried that we come back in a way that perpetuates the inequality that defined Manhattan and New York City pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. In particular, I'm alarmed at the affordability crisis and just how hard it is for families to afford housing here. We really did make that the central piece of the speech.

Brian Lehrer: That's the news you want to make from the speech and I'll let you make it. The Times article played it like, "Gee whiz. In dense Manhattan, he can identify 171 sites available for new housing development?" Is that the kind of angle you want to hear from the press?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, yes. Let's just focus on the fact that the average rent for market-rate apartments in Manhattan is now over $5,000. This is unprecedented. It has had devastating consequences. The number one reason why families wind up in our homeless shelter system is that they cannot find and keep an apartment they can afford. It's at this point, even middle and working-class families, bus drivers, nurses, teachers cannot find an apartment they can afford in Manhattan.

For young people who have grown up here, they have very little hope of eventually being able to get their own place in the borough and that's just not acceptable. This can't be a place where you have to be wealthy to rent an apartment. There's no doubt that we just have to create more of the housing Manhattanites need at all income levels, especially affordable housing. Yes, I do often hear a statement like, "Well, there's no more room in Manhattan."

I think that this report answers that question. We scoured every block. We found 171 sites. Everything from vacant lots to underutilized or empty buildings to single-story retail where you could put housing on top. It added up to be about 73,000 units total. That's the capacity. We wanted to make a bold statement that there are great locations to create housing and it's urgent that we do it.

Brian Lehrer: I'm still reeling from your stat. Average rent, $5,000 a month. Who ever heard of such a thing, right? What population could survive such a thing for very long? The perennial question with these potential 73,000 units of housing you've identified is how do you finance that construction and how much of it can be how affordable?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: We have all different kinds of sites in the plan. Many are owned by the city or, in some cases, another government agency. In those cases, we can really set the terms. We can ensure that those are 100% affordable apartments. We can even ensure that they have very, very low-income targets. In other cases, there are private sites where there's some guarantee in place that we'll get affordability like what's called "mandatory inclusionary housing" is in place. When you add it all up, making very conservative assumptions, we estimate that 30,000 of these units will be affordable. Just think what that would mean to families who, instead of having to leave the borough, would have a shot at getting a home they can afford. It would change the trajectory of Manhattan. In terms of cost--

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like that's the kind of deal that developers, the private sector, has the government over a barrel enough to demand. You're talking about a lot of units, 30,000 below market rate, but it's still a minority of the 70,000 you identified could be built. That's the kind of leverage that the private sector has because I'm sure if the city and the state had the money to build a zillion units of genuinely affordable housing for people with incomes that actually matched the population, I think it would do it, but the cost is too prohibitive, so you have to make these deals with developers, yes?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, first, let me say, the biggest leverage that landlords have over us now is that there's a brutal competition for every open apartment. They're allowed to jack up the rents and they are. Of course, the wealthy are going to win that fight and low-income and working-class people wind up having to leave Manhattan. Also, historically, we've left it up to developers to create 100% luxury units. They've been only too happy to do that. We have started to change our zoning code to require that they have affordability on their dime.

This is not funded by the city. In some cases, we can also put city money in to get even more affordable units. That's as it should be. If you're getting the ability to build more apartments on property you own, it's right that the city should demand that a lot of those apartments be affordable. Again, we did identify over 80 properties that are owned by the city, and there we can do 100% affordable. It all adds up. Again, making pretty conservative assumptions that well over 40% of the units we identified would be affordable, and that would be a really big deal.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners in Manhattan, what is the state of the borough according to you, or is it really the state of your neighborhood or the state of your block that concerns you from the Battery Tunnel to the Broadway Bridge at 220th Street from the George Washington Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge? Call us up and give Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine a citizen's report or ask him any question, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

The headlines this week, Borough President, about resistance to Governor Hochul's big number housing construction goal is that there's resistance from the suburbs, where many people argue they live there because they don't want density. We could get into underlying race and class issues as we do when we talk about that, but Manhattan neighborhoods also had big arguments about new construction that are sometimes also about avoiding diversity.

They're also that gentrifying neighborhoods like your old city council district uptown, where people fear that more housing will mean less affordable housing, not more, because supply and demand doesn't really work that neatly. How do you see resistance to building what you want to build, where you want to build it, and your approach to doing right by everybody?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, first, let me say that the fact that the suburbs have continually blocked creation of more housing actually hurts us in Manhattan and New York City as well. It's one housing market. There should be dense residential neighborhoods around every LIRR stop. We're putting on the table locations for 73,000 units in Manhattan. There's no reason Nassau shouldn't do the same.

Yes, the politics are different in Manhattan, but every inch of real estate here is precious and there's always competing uses. Yes, these are often contentious fights. What we wanted to do in this plan is get beyond the way we've always operated, which is we just sit back and wait till a proposal comes in from a developer or a city agency, and then we have a fight about that one proposal and we give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

We want it to go big and look at the borough and say, "We need housing here," and then affirmatively answer the question where we can build it. That changes the debate because I've had some conversations with folks who've pushed back on an individual site and I've said, "No problem. We're not going to fight over an individual site, but give me an alternative location in your neighborhood where we can get a comparable number of units."

If people own the idea that we need more housing and especially affordable housing, it really changes the conversation. I have to say, so far, the feedback we're getting and the response is better than I could have hoped. Actually, Brian, believe it or not, the most common incoming that we're getting and we're getting a lot is people suggesting other properties, other locations in their neighborhoods.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Good.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: So much so that I think we might need to do a Version 2.0 of this plan because we're getting a lot of good ideas. By the way, if your listeners have some, send them our way.

Brian Lehrer: I see in The Times, your plan includes 27,000 homes requiring rezoning in the upscale neighborhoods of Chelsea, Yorkville, and Kips Bay. Have you gotten any NIMBY, "Not in my backyard," pushback from there yet?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, first, let me make the point that we really wanted to correct the inequality and how land use has been done historically really for decades in this city, where it was overwhelmingly focused in low-income communities of color and 75% of the units we're proposing. Our plan are south of 96th Street. It's every community board. It's every neighborhood.

We wanted equity, but we weren't pulling these things out of thin air. In every case, these are ideas, which have been bubbling up in neighborhoods, in community boards, or among council members and elected officials. We were able to pick great ideas and perhaps flush them out a little bit more. There are a lot of areas of manufacturing, people might be surprised to know, that are still zoned for manufacturing exclusively.

The last time we had a rezoning plan citywide was 1961. We don't have as much manufacturing here anymore, so there are parts of Manhattan that we just want to allow conversion to residential. You mentioned some areas in the East 90s for people who know the neighborhood around Holmes Towers where, right now, you could have an auto service business or storage facility, but not housing. We think just by updating the zoning that way, we could capture thousands of units in various neighborhoods.

It's exciting stuff and, yes, these are going to be contentious, but community boards have a role as they should. Local council members will have a role. Almost everything we propose is going to require some public action. There will be a dialogue and we're going to look for balance in historic preservation and maintaining livability. All that has to be considered. At the end of the day, Brian, we have a housing crisis. We have an affordability crisis and not acting simply is not an option.

Brian Lehrer: Mitchell in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. Hi, Mitchell.

Mitchell: Hi, thank you so much. As we speak, a group of asylum seekers who's been staying at The Watson Hotel under city guidelines have made the decision to camp outside the hotel after being evicted. They told they needed to go to a warehouse in Red Hook that's freezing, that's infested. Several people who had made the decision to go to Red Hook have fled and come back to The Watson Hotel on 57th between 9th and 10th. I want to know, will you let this group of asylum seekers either stay in The Watson Hotel or provide similar hotel or apartment accommodations, not warehousing accommodations for these asylum seekers who have said that the accommodations in Red Hook are dangerous at best?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Mitchell, first, let me say that I absolutely embrace the asylum seekers who are coming to New York City. I'm absolutely confident that they will make huge net contributions to our city. I've spoken to many. Almost without fail, the first thing they say to me is that they want to work. They want to pay taxes. They want to have an income and rent their own apartment. It's also true that in the short term, they need support.

We have to offer them that support, including shelter and medical care and food if they need it. We are facing now an incredibly overcrowded shelter system where we are at unprecedented levels. We are being faced with more and more bad options. We are running out of empty hotel space in Manhattan. One reason is that tourism is booming. The hotels that were empty are now filling up. I mentioned that the asylum seekers want to work. This is one reason they want to be in Midtown because they want to be close to the job market.

Mitchell: That's right.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: The site in Brooklyn is very far away. I think there's some misinformation about the conditions of Brooklyn. I haven't been there yet. I want to say that I did visit the one in Randall's Island that had been in place in the fall, but there is medical care and food service and mental health counseling. My understanding is that I don't know if there was a problem earlier but that the heat now is pretty good at the moment and the climate control, et cetera.

There also have been some rumors that they would jeopardize their immigration status by going there and that's not true. Look, the people who are camped out there are engaging in an act of civil disobedience and they're entirely non-violent. I support them being able to protest. I just want to make sure that we have the accurate information out there about what's on offer.

Brian Lehrer: Mitchell, thank you very much. Is it a math problem? Mayor Adams says, "Look, The Watson Hotel, if we have hotel rooms and you were just saying there aren't enough hotel rooms to go around with all the migrants who've come recently who need shelter that the priority," according to the mayor, "should be for these families with children." That hotel was being used for single men. If there aren't enough hotel rooms, then the remaining options include this dormitory-style bed, bed, bed, bed, bed, temporary facility in Brooklyn. What's the response to them? Maybe I should ask the caller. If it's a math problem-- Mitchell, you're still there?

Mitchell: Yes, I am.

Brian Lehrer: If it's a math problem, how do you solve it?

Mitchell: Well, what I want to know is why the hotel told these asylum seekers that they needed to leave in the middle of the night because they were doing construction. The city has said that they're clearing out the hotel and sending these asylum seekers. Exactly like you said, it's bed to bed in the middle of COVID surge. There's no place for people to keep their personal belongings. Many people already have jobs in Midtown Manhattan that they won't be able to get to. What I want to know is why the hotel said one thing that they were doing construction and the city said another thing.

Brian Lehrer: That's a fair question. Had you heard that where they lied to, Borough President, and also more--

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: I hadn't heard that, but that's outrageous. There'd be no defense for that. You do describe a real problem that we have now, Brian, which is that we have families arriving. You really need separate rooms for families and you just can't have families in a congregate setting.

Brian Lehrer: What's your role as borough president in finding as many decent-as-possible, quality-as-possible rooms for everybody during the surge?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, we've been looking around Manhattan for suitable sites and we've had a hard time finding them. It's getting harder and harder with each passing month because we've already filled up those remaining hotels. We've looked for suitable, temporary, alternative locations. We're having a hard time finding them. I want to be honest about that.

I would welcome suggestions from your listeners about locations in Manhattan that we could use as shelter and housing for the migrants. This is tough. I want to remind people that we're doing this with wholly inadequate federal support. We're not getting the kind of reimbursements that Texas has always gotten. The pot of money from FEMA has run out. If we had more financial assistance, that would make all these challenges easier. We've had a broad cross-section from left to right in politics in New York saying that.

We've got to fight for more federal resources. Also, by the way, on the topic of work. Asylum seekers, as people might not know, are allowed to seek work permits, but there's an incredible, bureaucratic backlog in Washington on this. It can take years even. If we could just get the federal government to expedite work permits, then the men and the families would be able to very quickly move into the job market and pay for their own housing. There's a lot. We need the federal government to do better here.

Brian Lehrer: Mitchell, thank you for your call on that. Lina in Manhattan, who, I think, has a Harlem housing question. Lina, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Lina: Thank you very much for taking my call. I walk across 125th Street every day. There are plenty of commercial or education buildings that are three and four stories high relatively recent and no housing on top. Now, I'm not suggesting that 125th become like 57th Street with the needles. Surely, there could be zoning to mandate housing on top of any new structure, including adding to the ones that already exist on top of a Whole Foods or school or whatever. There's plenty of room up there for affordable housing all the way across 125th Street.

Brian Lehrer: You got another tip there, Borough President.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: [chuckles] Thank you, Lina. This is a great point. We actually did identify single-story and two-story retail all over the city, where we felt that you could put housing on top and would be great for neighborhood vitality as well as creating housing. There's a challenge at 125th Street, which is that there's currently no mandate of affordability. There's no MIH, mandatory inclusionary housing, on 125th Street. Those parcels, if they had housing today, the owner could simply do all market rate. We want to find a way to fix that. We actually addressed this in detail in the report.

We identified dozens of sites like that where they're privately owned and the owner could build, but we would currently get no affordability. We say, "We've got to find a way to fix that through zoning action, through tax credits, through other subsidy programs." We've got to find a way to ensure that when we build on sites like that on 125th Street and we identified, I think, 8 or 10 just on that one street that there is affordability, but we have work to do there. Some things are going to have to change or we're going to get 100% luxury and we do not want that.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking on the day of Tyre Nichols' funeral. I want to ask how you would grade Manhattan's police precinct overall. I don't know if you talked about this at all in the State of the Borough speech, but maybe that's too broad a question as well. I saw a stat about last year being on pace for record payouts by the city, that's citywide, not just Manhattan, but for settlements of police misconduct lawsuits.

It was already $67 million as of last August, according to Gothamist. Mayor Adams has reconstituted the so-called anti-crime unit that he insists is different from the Memphis SCORPION unit that produced Tyre Nichols' killers. Mayor Adams says that unit here got hundreds of guns off the street last year. Where would you start in grading Manhattan's police prints overall on a public service as opposed to occupying force scale?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, Tyre Nichols is just absolutely heartbreaking and the video is just revolting. My heart bleeds for the family from Memphis. It's a painful reminder, I think, of the kind of fear and anxiety that Black Americans are still confronting every day in the society. It's unacceptable. New York City is not immune to it. We do still get complaints in our office about people experiencing overly aggressive or even violent interactions with the police and that's unacceptable. We have to have accountability for that.

I think that there have been enough constraints in place on these anti-crime units that they have not veered into the kind of blatant misconduct that we saw in the previous incarnation, but we have to be ever-vigilant about this. Of course, we have to make every neighborhood in Manhattan safer, but we don't want it to be via disproportionate, racially-unbalanced targeting as has happened too often nationally and in the city. We have no choice but to pursue those twin goals. Achieving safety and fixing the broken history of racism and policing.

Brian Lehrer: I want to get one more housing question in for you that's coming in from a number of people, both on Twitter and on the phones. A Twitter question asked, "What about all the wealthy foreigners renting the luxury apartments for money laundering? Time started writing about this." Another, "Has the borough president seen the Curbed article trying to research the supply side of the rental market? There's been a net deficit of New York City's population. People are leaving, yet the housing market is hotter than ever. This suggests rentals being kept off the market." One more, I'll let Dariel in the Bronx ask the question, though it's about housing in Manhattan. Dariel, you're on WNYC with Manhattan Borough President. Hi.

Dariel: Oh, hi. My question was in a similar vein, I'm a first-time caller, longtime listener, about all of the apartments in Midtown that seem to be empty and purchased and just being warehoused by oligarchs, foreign nationals that are using these apartments for money.

Brian Lehrer: Borough President?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: If you look up at some of these towers at night, it looks like there's a blackout. Actually, it's just that no one's home. During the opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I actually called for those as the assets of Russian oligarchs who own those properties to be seized. Manhattan has really been a safe harbor for people to park assets, often ill-gotten, because our laws have allowed them to do it anonymously.

That's really outrageous. We need to crack down on this by making it more difficult to hide behind LLCs, et cetera. As for vacant apartments that are off the market, this is also a huge problem. Even in NYCHA, we've learned that there's over 3,000 apartments, which are vacant in the middle of a housing crisis. It takes, on average, eight months to turn over an apartment. We've got to do much better on that.

Brian Lehrer: Are they allowed? Should they be allowed? Is there a policy response to any of this?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Should they be allowed, NYCHA? It's a mismanagement.

Brian Lehrer: No, any of the warehousing.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, we have the same thing happening even on a bigger scale in private apartments, rent-stabilized apartments, which are off the market and just being warehoused. That's outrageous. We have to find a solution to that. In the middle of a housing crisis to have 30,000-plus apartments vacant, that's unacceptable. We've got to get those apartments back on the market. We have to move on many fronts.

We also, by the way, still have to do more to help tenants who are in apartments than facing eviction, Brian. I've been on this show a number of times to talk about the landmark law we passed in New York City creating a right to counsel for tenants in housing court. It was a game-change pre-pandemic. Now, as the number of evictions is rising in New York City, it has overwhelmed the resources of the tenant legal service nonprofits.

Every day, there are tenants in housing court facing eviction without a lawyer. There are people who are losing their homes because they did not have a lawyer in an eviction proceeding. I've joined with my partner in this effort, Borough President Vanessa Gibson. We have demanded that the state court move no case forward if the tenant does not have an attorney. We want the calendaring of cases to be slowed.

It's a two-front battle. We have to do even more to keep vulnerable tenants in their homes and we have to do more to get more housing for people who don't have homes. Partly, yes, that's getting apartments on the market, which are vacant, but there's also no avoiding the fact that we just need more housing and more affordable housing in Manhattan and citywide.

Brian Lehrer: Did you just say that there is now a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction but that there aren't enough lawyers to go around who do that work, and so the courts are proceeding without those tenants being represented?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Yes, this is worthy of a whole segment.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: This has been building all year. As soon as the moratorium on evictions was listed in January, we sounded the alarm. We feared this would happen. Pretty much, by March, April, the tenant legal service nonprofits like Legal Aid started to say that they had no more attorneys and it's happening every day. Thousands of cases have been heard without tenants having legal protection.

Brian Lehrer: It means the right to counsel exists on paper but not in reality.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: It is not being fulfilled. We are demanding that the calendaring of cases be slowed. We do not want any cases proceeding when the tenant has no attorney. It is continuing to happen every single day, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We're over time, but I'm going to let you end with a tweet from an apparent fan. Listener writes, "Tell Mark Levine it was a great speech. Informative, optimistic, and also realistic, inspiring, inclusive." I assume this person doesn't work for you, but maybe I shouldn't assume that. "For you, West Wing fans out there," writes this person, "the jokes were funny. I particularly liked the housing proposal and the million new trees." Why did I read this? So you can take our last 15 seconds to talk about a million new trees. We love trees on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Well, I don't know who wrote that tweet, but I got to get them a job. That was pretty good. We are calling for the planting of a million more trees. We've joined with all four of my fellow borough presidents on this. This is about slowing climate change. It's about absorbing storm runoff. It's about cooling neighborhoods on hot days.

It is an equity issue, Brian. Neighborhoods like East Harlem have disproportionately fewer trees than wealthier and whiter neighborhoods. If we plant a million more, we can close that equity gap. We're working really hard with my partners around the city, all five of the BPs. I'm optimistic we're going to make it happen and maybe that individual will write more nice tweets.

Brian Lehrer: Is that about city council funding? Is that how you get to tree equity?

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: It is. We estimate it would be-- I believe the number is $800 million in capital funding over a decade. It is capital-eligible. This is imminently doable. If you look at the economic impact, arguably, it's fiscally prudent. This is doable. We can afford this and we're going to keep fighting for this to be in the budget.

Brian Lehrer: Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, thank you very much.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Thank you, Brian.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.