Dear New Yorkers,  

City contracting – or hiring a business to provide services to the City – is a powerful tool to achieve New York City’s priorities. It’s how we build our schools, repair our roads, upgrade our parks, protect our water supply, provide meals to home-bound seniors, run child care and afterschool programs for our kids, and so much more. 

This past fiscal year, the City spent roughly $40 billion on contracts for everything from office supplies to human services to technology projects to the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects. That’s a lot of money.  

But as our annual M/WBE report reveals, businesses owned by women and people of color continue to represent a tiny share of spending on City contracts.

As I testified before the New York City Council today, just 5.3 percent of the City’s roughly $40 billion in annual contract spending went to minority- and women-owned business enterprises (known as M/WBEs) in the 2023 fiscal year.

And even of the smaller share of contracts covered by M/WBE participation goals, only 9.8% went to M/WBEs — and only 1% went to Black, Hispanic, or women-of-color owned businesses.

If these contracts were distributed equitably, proportionately to our population in a city where 29% of the population is Latino or Hispanic, 20% is Black, 16% are Asian, and more than 50% are women, they would be an enormous force for reducing those wealth gaps and sharing prosperity more broadly.

Sadly, of course, that has not been the case. Despite decades of efforts, disparities in the City’s procurement continue to exacerbate racial and gender disparities, rather than narrow them. 

WATCH NOW: We collected firsthand stories from real New Yorkers about their difficulties doing business with the City supported the conclusions we gained from analyzing the contract data.

My office organized a series of roundtable discussions in neighborhoods around the city (in East New York, Jamaica, the Northeast Bronx and the North Shore of Staten Island) to hear directly from a wide array of M/WBE business owners about the challenges they faced at various steps in the process.

There was a lot of frustration about pain points – but also a lot of hope that New York City government could figure out better ways to invest more equitably in our future.

Though the Adams Administration has taken steps to improve equity in City contracting and some progress was made since our last M/WBE report, there is reforming to be done. Our report recommends that we streamline connections between M/WBEs and agencies, survey underutilized firms, and strengthen goal-setting procedures, support, and oversight. We must also increase utilization of M/WBE subcontractors in human services contracting.

Watch testimonies from our M/WBE Roundtables here, and read our full FY 2023 M/WBE report here.

Thanks,

Brad