Two big events today (more details below):

Today at 1 PM: Join Senator Elizabeth Warren and me for a conversation with workers in health care, food service, and sanitation about local and national efforts to pass an Essential Workers Bill of Rights. Register here or watch live on Facebook.

Today at 7 PM: Briefing on COVID-19 Relief Resources for Freelancers, including updated information about applying for unemployment/PUA, rent, and more. Register here.

Dear John,

Last weekend’s sunny weather prompted a lot of us to go outside to enjoy some badly-needed fresh air. And we’re due for many more days of good weather as this pandemic spring moves toward a long, hot summer.

Social distancing during this time of anxiety and crisis is hard on rainy days ... and harder still when the sun is shining. We’ve got a lot of work to do, for many months to come, if we’re going to achieve the kind of social distancing compliance that’s necessary to slow the spread of the virus, and to save lives.

We’ve all seen people, across the communities of our city, out without masks, crowded too close together in parks or at funerals. Then this weekend, we also saw the video of NYPD officers violently wrestling a NYCHA employee to the ground, nominally for a social distancing violation.

Social distancing is hard and counter-intuitive. To make it work requires an understanding of public health, epidemiology, and hospital capacity (brilliantly satirized by Dave Eggers), and a kind of social solidarity that is pretty rarely asked of us. That’s harder in a democratic society than an authoritarian one, and harder in a diverse society than a homogenous one.

I don’t believe aggressive NYPD enforcement is going to achieve the kind of broad community compliance that we need, especially as communities of color have good reason to fear racial profiling and disparate enforcement. Social media shaming is not going to get it done either. (And neither, sadly, will earnest e-mails from me).

People need to hear, regularly, from people they trust, whose language they speak and values they share, that being diligent about this weird practice is necessary to keep our communities safe. They are going to need regular, well-updated, clear information as rules and guidelines change. And for sanctions, they’ll respond best to ones that are grounded in community norms (rather than a summons they can’t afford to pay, or the odd threat of being locked in a crowded jail cell for the crime of being in a crowded space).

The most effective work to promote social distancing that I saw this past weekend was at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. The rules and guidelines were made clear, through signs, barricades, and staff. The GrowNYC staff were firm but friendly. And they were operating with a shared sense of purpose: we want to keep this greenmarket open, and we can only do that if we make it work together. And, of course, the sanction was clear: if you don’t comply, you can’t come into the greenmarket.

So imagine that we trained up a NYC Public Health Corps of public health educators, representative of the city’s communities, speaking our languages, including young people, with deep moral credibility across all our communities. Many people are talking about creating such a Corps to help with contact-tracing, quarantine assistance, emergency food, and support for home-bound seniors. Involving the Corps in social distancing compliance could help keep us all on track so we can open the city back up safely, and draw out the kind of social generosity that can propel us through these hard months. I’ll be pushing for this idea as the City develops our budget for the coming fiscal year. I’d love to hear your ideas as well.

in the meantime, let's all keep doing our best. Our office will be getting shipments of masks from the city to distribute (street-grade, not hospital-grade), and we’d be glad to take your suggestions for where to distribute them to people who need them. Send us your suggestions!

Brad

In this email:
City and State Updates
Upcoming Virtual Events

City and State Updates:

Latest impacts: New York City has lost an estimated 19,297 people to COVID-19 in the last few two months. The daily hospitalization rate thankfully continues to fall, down to 601 new hospitalizations yesterday, with 43,676 people hospitalized so far and more than 173,000 confirmed cases.
Subway shutdown: The NYC Subway is shutting down overnight for the first time in its 115 year history to allow for cleaning. Essential workers are being provided buses for commuting between the hours of 1 and 5 am. Over a thousand police officers and a handful of social service providers were at stations to remove 250 homeless people from the trains on the first night of the shutdown Tuesday. Only around half accepted services, as many declined to go into shelters which have been hotspots for infection. More than 50 people staying in congregate shelters have died from the virus, and the city has been slow to move thousands of people into empty hotel rooms despite being warned by health officials in late March that congregate shelters were unsafe.
Get your ballot: A federal judge ordered New York to hold the presidential primary in June, after it was cancelled by the state Board of Elections. The ruling may still be appealed, but either way, there will be important local races on the ballot. You can request your absentee ballot to vote by mail here.
Nursing homes: New York State released new data on the crisis unfolding in nursing homes, revealing that 1,700 more people are presumed to have died from COVID-19, a total of 4,813 people. There has been widespread criticism of a directive with required nursing homes to admit people returning from the hospital, potentially with COVID-19, as well as a lack of protective equipment. The City is sending hundreds of thousands of masks and other supplies to nursing homes this week.
New resource for small businesses: The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce started a loan fund this week to give $30,000 to small businesses who have been hurt by the pandemic but shut out of the federal loan programs. Thanks to everyone who signed on to support changes to the PPP program, we will keep you updated about that and other suggestions. I was glad to see Assembly Member Bobby Carroll introduce new legislation yesterday in the state legislature to require insurance companies to pay out business-interruption claims related to the pandemic, which would be a great help for many businesses.
Zoom is back in school: Thanks to the hard work of Attorney General Letitia James’ team and Chancellor Carranza for listening to parents and teachers, Zoom has worked on privacy issues and will once again be allowed for use in NYC Public Schools' remote learning program! Online learning is really, really hard. Zoom is a good tool for enabling teachers & students to do face-to-face learning, to connect to each other, to laugh and smile and think and learn together.
Compost: I joined a town hall organized by my colleague Councilmember Reynoso earlier this week and a thousand compost activists to talk about saving composting from budget cuts. There is going to have to be shared sacrifice in the coming months, and it looks like for now we will have to suspend the curbside composting program (beloved in much of our community, but which has not yet achieved cost-effective citywide implementation) as a result of the budget crisis. We are working hard to preserve a smaller, community collection program, and to continue pushing towards a mandatory organics collection program, adopted city-wide in a cost-effective way.
Unemployment tip: 90,000 New Yorkers who applied for unemployment benefits did not get their payments last week because they did not certify for their weekly benefits. You must certify that you still meet eligibility requirements every week. More information here.

Upcoming Virtual Events:

Today at 1 PM: Join Elizabeth Warren and me for a conversation with essential workers. Register here or watch live on Facebook.

Join me and NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and essential workers in health care, rideshare, food service, and sanitation for a conversation with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren about local and national efforts to pass an Essential Workers Bill of Rights.

Today at 2 PM: Justice in Action Conversation on Workers Rights. Register here.

This week’s Justice in Action conversation hosted by me and Ruth Messinger, organized by the Marlene Meyerson JCC, will be about workers’ rights during the pandemic. We are excited to be joined by Tatiana Bejar and Rachel Kahan from Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network and Adam Obernauer, Director of the Retail Organizing Project of the RWDSU.

Today at 4 PM: Virtual Forum and Town Hall with D15 Superintendent Anita Skop. Join here.

Superintendent Skop will be hosting a town hall every Thursday afternoon in May for parents to ask questions and troubleshoot issues.

Today at 7 PM: Briefing on COVID-19 Relief Resources for Freelancers. Register here.

Join us for an overview of COVID-19 relief resources available to freelancers, including updated information about applying for unemployment/PUA, rent, and more. Hosted by Councilmember Brad Lander and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, speakers will include attorney Nicole Salk of Legal Services, and Rob Piechota from the Small Business Administration, and Divya Sundaram from Community Voices Heard and the Housing Justice for All Coalition.

Wednesday, May 13 at 8:45 PM: Virtual Community Iftar hosted by Arts and Democracy. Sign up here.

Arts & Democracy and ArtBuilt Mobile Studio's fourth annual Kensington Community iftar will take place next Wednesday evening. The annual iftar is an integral event in Kensington (we had over 300 guests last year!) and brings together neighbors from all walks of life to break fast together during Ramadan. We'll be joined by an array of fantastic poets and writers as well as musical performances from Yacouba Sissoko and Hadi and Mohamad Eldebek of the Brooklyn Nomads.