Two years since the the beginning of the pandemic and an economic recession that disproportionately impacted low-income Black and brown residents, Governor Hochul and the State Legislature last Friday announced a budget agreement that advances important investments.
As New York City continues its recovery process, CSS housing analyst Oksana Mironova provides seven recommendations to the NYC Council Committee on Housing and Buildings.
Immigrants make up around 43 percent of the city’s four-million strong workforce. While they are employed in a wide range of industries, they comprise a majority of the frontline essential workers who continued to operate in-person throughout the pandemic.
As the MTA reviews the environmental benefits of congestion pricing, including its prospective effects on low-income communities and people of color, we have updated our 2017 analysis using more current 2015-2019 American Community Survey Five-Year data available from the Census Bureau.
In a new poll, over half of New Yorkers fear being unable to pay for basic health care, and nearly 70 percent believe they would be unable to afford care in the event of a major illness.
Before the pandemic, evictions were a major contributor to instability in low-income neighborhoods of color. Over the past few years, we have found a correlation between neighborhoods with a high share of black or Latinx renters and evictions, controlling for poverty levels.
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.
As New York City continues its recovery process, we provide the following recommendations to stabilize the lives of low-income New Yorkers.
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.