Transit affordability is one of the lower hanging fruits on the path to an inclusive recovery. Fair Fares is an incredibly small fraction of the city’s budget, but will improve hundreds of thousands of lives, if not over a million lives should the program be expanded to reflect true poverty in NYC.
The pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing racial and class inequalities in our city. Today, nearly 220,000 renter households have been sued for eviction in housing court.
Good Cause eviction protections strengthen not only individual tenants, but entire communities. They provide tenants with a baseline ability to plan their lives, have some housing stability, and live secure in the knowledge that they will not be arbitrarily driven from their homes.
For most of the past half century, workers’ rights and workplace protections have been sacrificed by corporations seeking to maximize their bottom lines. The result is ballooning inequality as corporate owners have been able to keep an increasing share of the fruits of workers’ productivity as profits, enriching themselves.
Street vendors are New York State’s smallest businesses, and they are an essential part of New York City’s cultural ecosystem and economy. Nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs, primarily immigrants, people of color, military veterans and women, are engaged in street vending, many existing as part of a shadow economy of workers unable to acquire necessary business licensing to legitimize their business.