Dear New Yorkers,
Fall is here, and the kids are back in school, so it’s a good time to look at the numbers.
August saw a weakening labor market nationally, with unemployment edging up. New York City is doing a bit better economically than the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, threats continue to loom. The federal government cut $70 million from NYC’s HeadStart program. Federal Medicaid cuts led Governor Hochul to announce that approximately 450,000 working-class New Yorkers will lose their health insurance under the State’s Essential Plan. And the annual budget being considered by Congress includes very large cuts to housing and education funding.
Our Spotlight takes a look at job, population, and housing growth in NYC neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, the areas seeing the most development tend to be adjacent to Manhattan’s central business districts. In the outer boroughs, neighborhoods with high levels of homeownership have seen considerably less new housing added than more renter-dominated neighborhoods. This November, New Yorkers will have the opportunity to vote on ballot proposals put forward by the Charter Revision Commission, including an “affordable housing fast track” proposal, which would make it easier to build mixed-income housing in the community districts that have produced the least affordable housing in recent years.
A few other things we’ve been up to as the summer ends:
Our most recent audit revealed systemic non-compliance in the Department of Education’s (DOE) English Language Learners (ELLs) services, which denied legally mandated services to thousands of students;
We unveiled a “Life in the Slow Lane” report card for New York City’s 332 bus lines operating across the five boroughs, with 186 of the 332 bus lines getting a D or F grade.
We celebrated recovering $15 million for workers whose employers failed to pay them prevailing wages and benefits since the start of my term in 2022.
I testified before the House Financial Services Committee on protecting shareholder rights and corporate good governance from efforts to undermine the model of shareholder accountability that New Yorkers’ retirement security – and U.S. capital markets – have relied on for decades.
We’ll keep watching the numbers. Doing what we can to make sure more that NYC builds more housing. And investing responsibly.
