Green Jobs, “Public Health Corps” to Uplift Unemployed and NYCHA Residents
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
New York State has set the national tone on how to responsibly and efficiently handle the coronavirus pandemic. Now we must move to the next level: It’s obvious we desperately need a good-faith strategy to meet the urgencies of this moment for young people, displaced workers and low income families.
And let’s face facts here: a national economic depression is well underway, and the public health elements of the crisis show no sign of abatement. While extreme social-distancing measures have bent the curve in New York, the rest of the country is headed in the opposite direction. There is no evidence that major employers have bought into President Donald Trump’s preposterous hype that the economy will be back in high gear in a month or so.
In short, if the pressure to reopen was supposed to generate a sense of normalcy and induce employers to bring back their workers, it is not working and premature state openings are sure to result in deaths and further economic pain. So the recovery from the pandemic will likely take years, not months, resulting in even bigger barriers for the poor to achieve any economic revival.
As a result, the time is now to think big and to take bold action because the crisis has created a potential wealth of desperately needed jobs for young people whose families can no longer afford college, low income New Yorkers suddenly out of work and public housing residents. Aside from the traditional construction-trades work that might come from public infrastructure spending, Covid-19 counter-measure work is vast: contact tracing, sanitizing public places, bringing food to the hungry, supporting the elderly, taking temperatures at public gathering spots, and tutoring elementary school students.
New York City Councilmember and Health Committee Chair Mark Levine has called for a $1 billion “Public Health Corps” to help support the city’s 8 million residents (21 percent of whom have been infected with Covid-19, according to estimates from Gov. Andrew Cuomo). This idea has merit and must be coordinated with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ plan to work with the state health department to recruit and train contract tracers, many from the state and city university systems. Contact tracing is also a great way to tap into the language skills of displaced immigrant workers.
The standard body politics’ embrace of infrastructure spending typically translates into healthy contracts for big-dollar donors, like lawyers, architects, engineers and construction companies who tend to fill jobs with workers from Long Island and New Jersey. It makes more sense that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) be targeted by Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio for progressive infrastructure spending
At NYCHA, investing in not just roofs and boilers but also in more energy-efficient solar panels, upgraded windows, white roofs and the like; these are great opportunities to make housing more environmentally sustainable and give job training and meaningful work to public housing residents. Depression-level unemployment is only going to increase the already out-sized role of public housing, which is badly in need of billions of dollars for repairs. The same goes for the MTA which is still trying to figure out the riddle of mass sanitizing commuter trains and buses.
An organization called Data for Progress is promoting “A Green New Deal” for NYCHA that calls for retrofitting buildings with solar panels and other energy-efficient improvements that creates jobs and training opportunities for public housing residents. Before the pandemic, City Comptroller Scott Stringer called on the mayor to commit $1 billion annually to NYCHA energy efficiency. Separately, another group, Align, has recommended the same environmentally-friendly retrofits for New York City’s largest buildings which Align says generates 70 percent of the city’s carbon admissions.
All this raises another question: Cuomo, de Blasio, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and others have all talked about the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to take a progressive leap into the future, to reimagine socio-economic systems and to fix inequities; and not simply to succumb to the old ways of thinking. The big vision is for a better, more equitable and environmentally sustainable New York City.
Just as the virus has not spread evenly across the state and New York City, neither will the economic consequences of the shutdown. We’ve witnessed firsthand what a long struggle our great city endured from September 11th through the Great Recession to today. We all know this crisis will disproportionately impact low-income black and brown families and communities.
It goes without saying that our ambitions are that New York’s next steps not be viewed by anyone involved through the prism of political fortunes, but rather with an eye toward investing in black and brown communities and addressing systemic inequities head-on. Something we have ignored for too long.