We will work relentlessly to get New Yorkers back to work, committing to creating 500,000 jobs for New Yorkers by the end of Shaun's first term. We will prioritize building an equitable economy where all New Yorkers have the opportunity to build the skills they need to secure good jobs, grow professionally, and make a good living.

We need a city committed to using its power and resources to ensure a fair playing field for everyone; where everyone has a fair chance at a life of dignity; where everyone can earn a decent living, build a business, and test their talents and ambitions; and where businesses thrive — in every neighborhood and every borough.

We need a city focused not only on the problems of today, but the opportunities of tomorrow: with Shaun’s plan, we will build the industries that will drive long-term growth and create good jobs for years to come.

In rebuilding our city, we need to start where job loss and economic decline have been most sharp and consequential. Our plan for New York’s economic recovery is anchored in six key principles of equitable development:

Grow the economy to create opportunities for all New Yorkers; Build a path for every New Yorker to develop skills that are directly tied to jobs; Invest in neighborhoods, beginning with those that have endured the greatest disinvestment; See, understand, and address racial inequalities explicitly, and measure progress; Address inequalities head-on in partnership with community and business leaders; Prioritize racial equity through strategic leadership and key appointments.

https://shaunfornyc.com/issues/economic-development/

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As mayor, I will work to ensure that all workers are paid fairly, are able to secure their pay without hassle or cheating and have access to benefits — whether they are a freelancer, an employee, or an undocumented worker. Over the past few years, New York City and State have made progress on securing the rights of independent workers: my Administration will make sure that these requirements are clearly understood. I’ll also work with the federal government to include our undocumented workers, gig, and other nonstandard workers are included in assistance packages.

We will be committed to ensuring that every New Yorker — despite immigration status — has access to affordable healthcare options. We will work to ensure that every New Yorker has access to healthcare as part of “15 Minute Neighborhoods.” We will make sure that every neighborhood has primary care access points where every New Yorker can obtain affordable, preventive care, effective diagnosis and treatment of chronic disease, and behavioral health care through public-private partnerships. We will create public-private partnerships that will leverage investment to increase access in communities which currently do not have sufficient primary care, and will work with the state to direct indigent care pool funding to the healthcare safety net.

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The top priority for the next mayor must be the social, economic, and physical recovery of our city and its residents. The damage caused by COVID will be felt for years to come, and it will take considerable investment to not only return to what we had before, but to use this crisis to create something better. To do this, we will need significant relief from the federal government.

My strong personal relationships with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and members of Congress and the Senate puts me in a unique position to get the federal support that New Yorkers need and have been cruelly denied by the Trump administration. I will work to ensure we receive the necessary business and infrastructure aid, personal protective equipment, and other essentials as we rebuild and reimagine our economy as one that works for all New Yorkers.

New Yorkers are confronting unemployment at unprecedented levels. Jobs in tourism, accommodation, restaurants, retail, culture and the arts have been decimated. The first priority has to be supporting job creation and a return to full employment. Job creation and full employment are fully predicated on the return of people — visitors, employees, and residents.

My administration will work hand in hand with public health experts, leading with science, to ensure our recovery is aligned with coronavirus-safety protocols. In order to get visitors back and residents outside again as soon as possible, we cannot cut corners.

We must also recognize that quality of life is a main driver of economic development and recovery, and that getting people to spend money at our businesses will require investments in the surrounding communities.

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Finding effective, sustainable solutions to our city’s economic and budgetary crisis will be a key priority for our next mayor. As Director of the Office of Management and Budget, I worked to make the tax code more progressive, and I will continue these efforts as mayor. This means collaborating with the federal government to end the Trump tax cuts and asking the wealthy to pay a fairer share.

One in five New Yorkers are now out of work. As a direct result, the city is staring down a fiscal pandemic. The response ought to begin with the president and Congress sending back just some of the $26.6 billion more that our state pays than it draws down each year.

We cannot borrow our way out of this crisis. This will take collaboration and a commitment to smart investments that give everyone a fair shot at economic opportunity and security, while driving down the deficit. Instead of posing a choice between borrowing or 22,000 layoffs, we should propose smarter options, such as attrition and a real hiring freeze, reducing prescription drug costs by increasing city bargaining power with insurers and pharmacy benefit providers, improving healthcare quality and lowering costs through delivery system reform with strategies we used in the Affordable Care Act.

With a spotlight on racial inequity, we should focus on policing reform, but also look more broadly to reduce the cost of corrections, where we spend over half a million dollars per incarcerated prisoner each year. We are not starting with assumptions that solving the budget will require a general increase in property or income taxes. Any tax proposals will be viewed through the lenses of equity and the short- and long-term needs of the city, in particular looking to protect working people and small businesses.

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I believe that New York City cannot recover from the COVID-19 crisis unless it commits to principles of fairness and opportunity for all in its effort to get New Yorkers back to work, rebuild our economy, and ensure that our city has the strongest, most vibrant economy in the world.

My administration will prioritize building an equitable economy where all New Yorkers have the opportunity to build the skills they need to secure good jobs, grow professionally, and make a good living.

The devastation wrought in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic and the national reckoning on race that followed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others have only made it clearer that we cannot simply work toward a return to normal. We must hold ourselves and our economy to a much higher standard.

On day one of my administration, I will appoint a Chief Equity Officer in the mayor’s cabinet to set goals, measure progress, and coordinate across all NYC agencies to ensure progressive achievements.

And this means not only focusing on the problems of today, but the opportunities for tomorrow: We plan on building the industries that will drive long-term growth and create good jobs for years to come.

In rebuilding our city, we need to start where job loss and economic decline have been most sharp and consequential. To find out more, please read my jobs plan linked below.

https://shaunfornyc.com/issues/economic-development

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As part of our plan for economic recovery, we must prioritize getting people back to work and giving them the resources to meet any debt obligations they have. This is salient particularly to the many current students that normally have to work while in school and have faced economic hardship as a result of the pandemic.

By creating the Education Recovery Corps, we will both supplement learning and social-emotional support for younger students — helping bridge the learning gap that is widening due to the pandemic — and offer immediate employment in their own communities to CUNY students and graduates. Through our NYC Jobs Corps, we will help young people find work and create opportunities for shut-out workers, and through our commitment to create the largest comprehensive skills-based program in the country, we will help all New Yorkers secure well-paying, family-sustaining jobs with long-term career opportunities.

We must partner CUNY with employers across high growth sectors and pool public and private funding to dramatically increase these paid, relevant internships, apprenticeships, and other meaningful career experiences at the secondary and postsecondary level.

In terms of directly addressing the amount of student loan debt currently held by New Yorkers, I will work closely with my colleagues in the Biden administration, as well as the New York State government, and look for ways to give people financial relief as we come out of this crisis.

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The MTA is in crisis and the transit system is falling apart. Although ridership has plummeted during the pandemic, millions of New Yorkers still rely on transit every day. 55% of all frontline workers use the subways as the primary mode of transportation for New Yorkers. A robust system is critical to the recovery of New York. The MTA’s $51.5 billion Capital Plan is estimated to generate 350,000 jobs total for the five years with close to 80% of the jobs in New York City. My team will partner with the MTA on key priorities, collaborate on bringing new financing, and install more effective and high-level communication channels. We need to be at the table as it comes to decision-making at the MTA.

The mayor has the opportunity to use their bully pulpit to encourage collaboration between the city, state, and federal governments. As the MTA is experiencing a major financial deficit, aid from the federal government is more important than ever. Downstate New York accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP, which translates to great bargaining power. We can use that power to bring funding to the MTA by lobbying for federal tax dollars and ensuring that the sources of funding are dedicated to city priorities.

One such program that needs investment is Fair Fairs. Fair Fares is a critical program and I applaud advocated and elected leaders for putting this program into place. Now more than ever, working New Yorkers need access to the transit system. As mayor, I would fully fund Fair Fares and ensure that New Yorkers know this program is available to them.

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Creating and preserving affordable housing is an essential way to lock-in affordability and diversity in gentrifying neighborhoods. So I will work to ensure that affordable housing is built in every neighborhood of the city. Where developers receive zoning bonuses, they must be required to include affordable housing.

Building affordable housing isn’t the only way to protect residents from being displaced, however. In my administration, we will continue to expand legal assistance for tenants, in addition to increasing access to affordable housing support for existing residents through more available rental assistance.

Our full housing platform will be released in the coming weeks with more specific details and I’d love to revisit the issue with CSS.

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We must fundamentally alter the city’s homeless strategy to reimagine the right to shelter as a right to housing. Building on my record of dramatically reducing homelessness nationally as the leader of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness under President Obama, I would scale up production of supportive housing and negotiate a New York/New York V agreement with the state. I would also ensure every New Yorker leaving incarceration or mental health facilities is matched with housing and services through comprehensive discharge planning and better interagency coordinating and data-sharing.

In the short-run, to provide decent living conditions for the homeless on the streets or in shelters, the city must provide more smaller, low barrier shelters like Safe Havens that provide private rooms. These have been effective at getting people, especially single adults, into more permanent housing. Additionally, many shelters are in old buildings that have been repurposed — these buildings are in need of serious capital improvements like internet access, heating and cooling, and roof repairs. Safety goes beyond physical design and we must hire professional staff that are trained in trauma-informed care as well as offer services on nights and weekends at shelters.

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The capital needs of NYCHA’s public housing portfolio are now estimated to total over $30 billion. Preserving these developments is critical to the health and safety of the more than 170,000 New Yorkers who live in these developments and essential to ensuring that New York City and its neighborhoods remain diverse and inclusive. I would advocate on a state and federal level the need for this funding to make capital improvements.

I would adopt RAD 2.0 that improves physical and financial conditions but better incorporates resident needs, recognize NYCHA as asset manager rather than a property manager by outsourcing property management and day-to-day operations, decentralize property management to be more responsive to residents and unique needs of each campus, accelerate energy-efficiency and resiliency investments through use of energy performance contract, and incorporate community and resident input.

This is a program that will need aid from the federal government and I plan to use my long standing relationships with President Biden and Vice President Harris as well as Congress to deliver the relief that NYCHA so badly needs.

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We will work to help New Yorkers stay in their homes, and to stabilize the buildings and neighborhoods where they live. Every New Yorker deserves a safe and stable place to call home — free from hazardous conditions, harassment, or the threat of eviction. Having led the Obama administration’s housing efforts during the last housing crisis, I understand the urgency of preventing evictions and foreclosures.

To make sure home is a safe haven for New York City tenants, we will create new and improved emergency rental assistance and foreclosure prevention programs to help people weather economic setbacks, develop more effective and proactive code enforcement mechanisms that help ensure decent and habitable housing for all. We will expand access to counsel so that tenants can enforce their rights in court. And we will partner with landlords to maintain and rehabilitate affordable housing, while collaborating to reach New York’s climate goals.

We will implement a city-state housing partnership for affordable and supportive housing. Both New York City and State have separately committed to historic levels of investment in our communities through the creation and preservation of affordable and supportive housing. We will work to create a partnership that coordinates and leverages each other’s work to ensure resources are constant and delivered seamlessly. We will build upon past collaborations between city and state governments that have housed thousands of individuals in supportive housing.

Investing in the preservation of existing affordable housing has been a critical piece of past administrations’ housing plans, and will be a pillar of our plan. In addition to improving the conditions of the existing housing stock, preservation also keeps existing low-income tenants in their homes, preventing displacement and providing stability to the community.

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We need to expand access to affordable healthcare to all New Yorkers, regardless of their immigration status. In addressing healthcare quality and access to affordable care, we must take a holistic approach. We must:

Call on New York State to close the coverage gap by expanding eligibility for the Essential Plan to all low-income New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status; Expand the network and invest an additional $100 million annually in NYC Care to include trusted, community-based health centers; Invest in community health centers across the city through targeted capital grants, loans, and financing; Reduce wait times and improve access to specialty services through NYC Health + Hospitals; Expand availability of telehealth services by investing in its continued expansion through NYC Health + Hospitals, providing capital grants and technical assistance to providers, and calling on the state and federal government to extend regulations promulgated during COVID-19; Increase funding for trusted, community-based organizations with proven experience working in diverse communities to enroll the uninsured in coverage; Strengthen New York City’s public health insurance option, MetroPlus, by improving member experience and building on efforts to invest in services that address social determinants of health; Call on the federal government to take steps to preserve and strengthen the Affordable Care Act; Call on the federal government to approve the state’s waiver to provide Medicaid coverage to incarcerated individuals leaving prisons and jails; Strengthen healthcare services for individuals experiencing homelessness; Fund patient navigators in all NYC Health + Hospitals Emergency Departments to assist with discharge planning for homeless patients; Address the maternal mortality crisis and expand sexual health programs; Promote and invest in quality improvement programs, cultural competency and simulation training for providers; Call on the federal government to safeguard protections against discrimination for transgender patients.

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In keeping with the idea of 15 minute neighborhoods, I’d ensure everyone has access to a public health clinic in their neighborhood where they can be seen by a primary care doctor. Primary care is essential to prevention, diagnosis and treatment, but suffers from lack of investment. One additional primary care provider per 10,000 people yields 5.5% fewer hospitalizations, 11% fewer emergency department visits, reduces premature mortality, and improves health outcomes.

Expanding care to Medicaid/Medicare participants is critical to ensuring families have access to high-quality, affordable, and culturally competent health professionals. This includes providing wrap-around services like mental health care in every neighborhood. We would work with the state to raise incentives for private mental health providers to treat Medicaid/Medicare patients and collaborate with family doctors.

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I would advocate with the state to increase the share of the Indigent Care Pool to H+H and other safety-net providers such as FQHCs. Other important financial stability actions would include enrolling as many eligible people as possible into health insurance; maximize insurance reimbursement; and continuing to support H+H financially to care for those who may not be eligible for health insurance.

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I support a complete end to surprise billing. I would support new regulations to address medical billing by the city’s not-for-profit hospitals, especially for people with limited income or resources, many of whom may have insurance or be under-insured, while at the same time, working to ensure that our city’s safety net hospitals are financially sustainable.

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One of the starkest examples of the inequities in our health system is the gross disparity in maternal health outcomes between communities in our city. Black and Latina women are more likely to die and more likely to experience severe complications related to pregnancy and childbirth than white women, even when they deliver at the same hospital, controlling for socioeconomic and insurance status.

Addressing this gap requires a comprehensive approach that involves making high-quality prenatal care available to everyone, including those in the shelter system, justice system, and public schools. Every New Yorker who visits NYC Health + Hospitals for prenatal care should be screened by a social worker to identify needs and address social determinants of health, and group prenatal care programming should be expanded in all NYC Health + Hospitals locations.

An important part of ensuring that every person receives the prenatal care they need is making sure that healthcare providers have tools that help them meet the needs of each patient. Therefore, we must promote and invest in quality improvement programs, cultural competency, and simulation training for our providers.

Additionally, we must expand supportive services for those most in need. This involves increasing access to doulas and community health workers in underserved areas and expanding prenatal outreach programs to at-risk mothers, linking existing programs like Growing Up NYC and Healthy Start and building our local outreach and community health workforces. Associated with NYC Health + Hospitals sites, these services would follow mothers throughout pregnancy, as well as pre- and post-partum monitoring.

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To solve this crisis, we have to recognize that today's broken relationship between communities and the police occurs in the context of more than a half century of disinvestment in, and abandonment of, many communities of color. For decades, when there was instability and crime in these neighborhoods, the city called in the police, instead of answering their real needs.

So when we talk about addressing aggressive policing, we need to have accountability for the police, but we also have to reimagine how we achieve public safety.

As mayor, I will begin at the root of the problem by prioritizing community investment as the best solution for instability and crime, rather than turning to the police as the answer to every problem. I will bolster community-based anti-violence initiatives, youth programs, and housing services. I will stop asking police to do too much, and instead refocus police resources on guns and serious crime rather than schools, mental health, and homelessness. For example, to prevent harmful police contact, my administration will establish a system of non-law enforcement responders to help people dealing with mental health crises.

To put an end to NYPD misconduct and brutality, I will demand accountability by appointing a commissioner who shares my vision, building a leadership team at the NYPD that represents the city's diversity, and holding individual officers responsible for bad acts that too often go unpunished today. My administration will collect and publicize data on police interactions and public perceptions of safety and policing, including racial disparities, so that communities can hold me and the department fully accountable for the results we deliver.

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The brutality of New York City's jails is well-documented and is all the more unacceptable given the vast amount of money that we spend each year to operate those jails: nearly $500,000 per incarcerated person per year.

As mayor, I will focus on reducing incarceration so that jail is used only as a last resort, in situations where there are no other alternatives. I will invest in communities and programs to prevent violence and instability, work with the DAs and courts so that only the most serious cases go to jail, and build mental health resources and capacity so that we stop using our jails as a warehouse for people with mental illness.

For those who are incarcerated, my administration will recognize that nearly everyone who is incarcerated, even those accused of the most serious charges, will ultimately return to their communities. We will be committed to the safety, health, and welfare of the staff and people who remain confined in jail. Removing all incarcerated people from Rikers Island will be a high priority, because the location of the majority of the jails there contributes to the dysfunction and incredible costs of the jails. Closing Rikers is the only acceptable path forward for our city and will ultimately save hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, that can be reinvested in communities.

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I support Clean Slate legislation to seal or expunge most criminal convictions after a set period of time, and I commend the work that CSS is doing to advance these policies in Albany. Too many New Yorkers suffer the collateral consequences of a conviction for a lifetime, hindering their efforts to gain employment and stable housing and to live as productive community members, long after they have paid their debt to society. The harmful consequences go far beyond the individual to impact families and whole communities.

A Clean Slate bill is just the start. People who are returning from jail and prison face enormous difficulties, and it is in all of our interests to help them succeed. As mayor, I will seek to ensure that returning citizens — who are often paroled straight into the shelter system — have access to housing and healthcare. This way, rather than wasting our resources on cycles of incarceration, we will use those resources to help build safe and healthy communities.

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