Grab your coat and get your hat Leave your worries on the doorstep
Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street
Can't you hear that bit of battle That happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet On the sunny side of the street
I used to walk in the shade With those blues on parade
But now I'm not afraid This rover crossed over
If I never have a stand I'll be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet On the sunny side of the street
It's election season, so remember that the real estate lobby has a vision.
They want to destroy our historic neighborhoods and turn New York into a city of glass towers like Shanghai or Dubai, as these photos show.
To change that, we have to elect politicians who are not beholden to big real estate.
Hi, I'm Lynn Ellsworth, and this is the Human Scale City.
We're going to show you neighborhoods, how they're developing, and what we can do about saving them.
We're also going to talk politics and policy about land use and real estate.
Today, we have two guests who are running for city council.
They're both in their own way, outsider candidates.
We have Aaron Hussein, and we have Christopher Marta.
They're both Manhattan. We will get to Brooklyn and the other boroughs in the next shows.
So let's talk about the two races that are happening in lower Manhattan.
Christopher, tell us a little bit about who you are and what's happening.
My name is Christopher Marta, running for city council district one.
I was born and raised in the Lower East Side.
My parents immigrated from Dominican Republic.
My dad was a bodega owner.
I'm almost a sweatshop worker.
For 27 years from that, I worked in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors,
working for IBM, helping previously incarcerated individuals start their own businesses,
and really being a community activist, whether it's protecting gardens,
helping individuals who are legally detained by ICE,
and also helping individuals with tenants' rights.
And what made me want to run is just seeing the corruption and the lack of transparency that has plagued my district for generations.
District one. What's district one?
District one is Greenwich Village, starting in the most northern part,
going down to Tribeca, Battery Park City, Fidei, South Street, Seaport, Chinatown, Lower East Side, Little Italy, and Soho.
Okay. So you would be my council representative if you went.
Yes.
Erin, what are you running? Tell us about your race.
I am running in council district two, which is basically the north.
It's north of Christopher's, so we share almost all of his northern boundaries, or my southern boundaries.
Okay.
And I grew up in Connecticut, but I've lived in New York City for almost 30 years now.
My father was a general in the U.S. Army, and my mother was a teacher, which sort of, I was raised with two things.
One, a very warm love of children and the educational process, and also the understanding that some people fight and some people are the civilians.
Also, my father was, my father's parents were immigrants from Albania, so he was born nine months after the day that my grandmother arrived at Ellis Island, maybe 10 months.
And so I grew up in an immigrant family with an immigrant mentality, and also my father was Muslim.
And so we saw a fair bit of, you know, not overt racism, but certainly to be Muslim in my town in Connecticut was, it was a novelty, and we were definitely treated as such.
I have worked, I'm a lawyer by training.
I've worked in a very large law firm doing commercial lending and real estate finance, which I stopped doing that about 12 years ago, and since then I've been more focused on my immediate neighborhood.
I am the president of my co-op, which is one of the larger co-ops in the district.
We have 750 inhabitants and a budget of $10 million.
It's like a city in the middle of itself.
And 26 union employees and master plans and aging infrastructure and a constituency that right now is four weeks old to 100 years old.
Right.
Now, the council member who's leaving the post is Rosie Mendens, is that right?
Yes, that is right.
And you're challenging Margaret Chen.
Correct.
Both of these are unusual positions to be in, I feel like, because I know that in your district, Erin, that the staff for Rosie Mendens has often seen Carlina Rivera, correct?
As seen as the sort of anointed next person by some sectors.
And so you have to sort of challenge a bit of the machine going on.
And how is that going?
Tell me about that.
It's an interesting proposition.
And how do you raise money in that context to finance your race?
It's an interesting proposition.
You know, I tell people, you know, I'm not running against an incumbent, but I'm sort of running.
I'm being treated like I'm running against an incumbent.
You know, the thing is, when you have worked so closely with a council member, and particularly as the legislative director for the council member,
I think that you can be judged by the legislation or in this case lack of legislation that came out of that office.
I think that I actually have an opportunity here because oftentimes when you have gotten yourself into a fix,
you need to have some creative ideas.
You need to have somebody that comes in and says, well, how did we get here?
How did we get to this situation?
I feel instinctively like things are broken, but, you know, why do we do this this way?
Why is this done this way?
Why are these the parameters?
Why can't there be a different set of parameters?
Right.
So I think I actually have a real opportunity in that I have the skills certainly to deal with laws and to deal with legislation and rules and real estate and property issues
and financing and infrastructure issues.
But I also have a fresh take and a fresh look, and I have a real fighting spirit and a real desire to save our neighborhood.
So I want to tell our viewers that the Alliance for a Human-Scale City did a questionnaire for candidates.
Some 18 responded to our questionnaires, 15 questions, and we then gave everybody a score.
Now, what's kind of interesting about this is that nobody who is an incumbent has yet taken our questionnaire, which is full of questions about taking real estate money
or dealing with the land use issues that big real estate has been pushing on the city.
I just want to point out that in our questionnaire, both these candidates were A scored an A on our report cards on it.
Erin was a perfect A. Chris was an A minus.
Probably if I did it again, it would all be A's, string A's.
But I want to pull off some of their comments from when they took our survey.
Erin, one of the comments you made is that the air rights sound very innocuous and that it sounds like it's in the right to build,
but it's really something else, a public element to those space.
Do you want to elaborate on that, what you meant by that?
What I meant by that.
In case you can't see or remember what you said.
I have a sense of what I said.
The thing is with air rights, it's like anything.
You can phrase anything in a way that makes it sound bad or in a way that makes it sound good.
We give my children medicine and if it tastes a certain way and is sweet enough, it tastes less like medicine and they're willing to take it.
There's this concept that entities, it could be a church, it could be any kind of a building that doesn't want to build up to its height restriction or build up to its envelope.
They're saying, well, we actually own this air that's around our building.
I would say if you don't want to use that air, then you actually don't use that air.
If you don't own that air, then actually the fact that the light is going to continue to stream down from the sky and hit the ground,
then actually that light actually belongs to the people that are going to be walking through that light.
I think property rights are often defined as a bundle of rights.
This is a multi-page document and if each page is a particular type of right,
the right to enjoy the sunshine, the right to build, the right to trade on a building site, the right to rent it, multiple parts of property rights.
So if you see air as a bundle, air and sky as a bundle, there's a public element to that.
Part of it belongs to all of us and part of it is totally private.
So we need to regulate it so that the public element is not just squeezed out.
Our group, the human scale group, feels that the public element is just being left out of many parts of legislation.
Before I turn to another question, I wanted to get to Chris.
You also said something interesting.
You said, I don't believe affordable housing and managing the city's budget are at odds with preserving green spaces and other public assets.
You go on to talk about the Elizabeth Street Garden, but why aren't they at odds?
Like the mayor says, we just have to build anywhere and everywhere and taller the better to solve this affordable housing crisis,
which does pit building against all the other public goods.
Yeah, and I think the point I was trying to make is affordable housing versus the quality of life.
I think we shouldn't just build to have, we should build and understand that people need light, air, different resources to enjoy their quality of life.
And I think we just take it pretty bluntly and we don't actually look at the numbers and saying, can it be in the budget or not?
I believe that we have enough space to build.
There's other ways of development that we haven't thought of.
And I think it's pretty much been pro-realistic of taking a building that's 10 stories and trying to increase it to 20 or 30.
I think there's different ways to think about it that haven't been able to be debated yet.
Right. Well, let me ask about another part of this problem.
I feel like, Erin, you had mentioned the issue of legislation.
And I went and looked at different legislation that different council members have proposed this year or last year or the past couple of years.
And much of the legislation for many council members, and not all of them, is often very small bore.
It seems like a minor issue, like that the big issues of the city are not being dealt with or they're being only dealt with by the mayor.
So what is the role of the city council in sort of pushing the mayor to consider different types of legislation that maybe people are afraid to bring it up?
Because it's against the mayor's interests or current thing. Erin, how would you...
There's a few tools in the toolbox, and there may be more tools that I just don't know about yet.
But certainly legislation bringing, introducing either a resolution or a bill at the floor of the city council is one way to do it.
You know, you could have a resolution that a particular neighborhood should be rezoned.
You could have a resolution that the buildings department should become more technologically savvy and less difficult to deal with.
These are recommendations, and then what you do is you go around and you get your other city council members to join on board with those recommendations.
So these are advisory recommendations, but they're given a lot of weight, particularly when they are prime sponsored by the council member whose district is being implicated.
So you have that way, and then you also have a coalition building.
You know, you get together with some other council members and you say, you know what, this is actually not something that we could solve with a law.
This is something that has to be done by the mayor appointing someone different or by the mayor putting pressure on someone that he or she has appointed to do things a different way.
Oh, that's a great idea. I like that one.
To do things a different way.
And so then what you do is you get people together and, you know, you get enough council members together and you say, we need reform.
We need the BSA process or we need a different type of person in the buildings department or in the landmarks department.
And then you get together and you say, you know, listen, we are just going to stop your agenda until that happens.
There's a perfect example.
So landmarks or preservation decided that they wanted to change the way that they were going to accept public comment.
And so they changed the timing and the timing just didn't favor lay people, community members giving opinions on changes that were before the committee, the commission.
And so a bunch of council members got together and they put a lot of pressure on that commission and also on the mayor to relax those standards.
Because, you know, you can't have something be released to the public at five o'clock and say that the deadline for public comment is 9 a.m. the next morning.
Well, let me just jump in there because, you know, what about having a, you know, I noticed there was no pushback on the approval of the current chair of the landmarks commission, Manakshi Srinivasan.
You know, she has absolutely no credentials in preservation whatsoever.
She's an architect by training but way, way back and has spent most of her career at the BSA, which as we know just gives real estate a green light to do what they want.
Right.
And how does that make someone qualified to serve on this complicated thing?
It really does not.
And there was no pushback from the city council on that.
Why, you know, if you were on the city council, what would have happened?
I think you have to take it to the city council engaging with their voters and constituents because there are individuals that push their city council members to do something or not.
Usually when the lack of information doesn't travel from city hall to the people, the people don't even know what they're trying to fight or they're fighting the wrong battles.
Right.
For this situation in particular, as individuals, most people don't know that they were appointed.
And so you have to either be a proactive citizen and say, I'm going to look into every little thing that happens or just worry about the situation in my neighborhood.
Right.
We all watched very closely the hearings for the presidential cabinet.
You know, maybe we need to have some sort of system in New York City.
I mean, these jobs are huge jobs.
Yeah, especially the planning commission in particular.
Well, I mean, every sector has their own issue about who should be appointed.
But let me ask about specific issues in your district.
Sure.
District one.
Yeah.
All right.
What are the land use big issues there, big fights happening in there?
Well, we have a lot of what's happening now in future battles.
I think the biggest battle now is within Chinatown, the Lower East Side with something you know a lot about the Chinatown Working Group plan, which was a plan that was created by the community.
I think more than 50 organizations came together, created this plan with Pratt Institute and it's been sitting there.
And it's been sitting there for years and we have seen the development that's been taking place currently because we haven't implemented.
Our current councilwoman has decided to implement it in one small part of the whole proposal, but she didn't put it in the location that's being most threatened right now, which is two bridges.
Right.
And so that's what the community has been fighting.
If elected, that's what I'll be fighting for, trying to implement as quickly as possible because even within the past four years, you have seen the neighborhood change.
Right.
FYI, everybody, the towers under two bridges.
There are three towers, four.
Yeah.
Four towers coming up, these huge glassy things or, you know, luxury residences full of, you know, you have your own swimming pool, you have your own park, you have your own parking lot, you have everything.
You don't even need to use the public realm.
You can just get on the FDR and go to the Hamptons for the weekend.
And most of those towers are like that and they're completely out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood.
I think that the zoning process for those is, if anything shows that the zoning code doesn't work for New York City, it's those towers, although maybe I could say that about many other buildings.
There's some buildings in my neighborhood.
District, your district, what's one of the land use issues going on there?
I think that definitely the biggest land use issue is the lack of contextual zoning for a few of our main corridors.
One is University Place, which, you know, is one of the most beautiful quintessential New York thoroughfares avenues.
Streets as well as the chunk of Broadway that's from Union Square to about 8th Street.
There's no contextual zoning, which means that you can build as of right up to what I think is a sickening height.
And there's also the mid-block problems between 4th and 3rd, where it's actually zoned for commercial use,
which means that, so on 11th Street across from Webster Hall, these beautiful buildings that were full of affordable housing are in the process of being raised to be replaced by a hotel.
Because of the commercial designation of that neighborhood, commercial use is actually more profitable.
It's actually favored over residential use.
Now, there may have been a reason 20, 30, 40 years ago for that, but right now we have main thoroughfares.
We have the 4th Avenue, which is a commercial zone, plenty of, you know, restaurants and shopping, and also 3rd Avenue.
And so it would make total sense to rezone those mid-blocks, because they're strictly residential.
We don't need more hotels in the middle of a block on 11th Street.
And another issue I find is that the city has this historical issue or approach to commercial avenues where you zone higher on the buildings that are on the corner along the avenue
and you zone lower mid-block.
Now, that logic seems to be more of a political logic than a logic about a livable city.
It's just, well, we have to give them somewhere to build up, because they just want to build up.
And maybe, you know, we don't care that they're robbing the mid-block people of their light and their access to air.
I'm wondering if could that be changed? Like, could you say, you know, we don't want the commercial streets to be have, maybe have a fixed height limit or something?
Like, just say it's up to 80 feet or 100 feet or whatever it is. Like, that's it. It's a bright line. You can't change it.
I mean, I don't know what that would be in the commercial quarters.
Yeah, I agree that that's a good idea. I think you have to work very closely with each neighborhood to figure out what it should be for that neighborhood.
Exactly. Some neighborhoods welcome more development. And some neighborhoods, like my neighborhood, are very historical, very, you know, old New York.
You know, it wears its heart on its sleeve. Like, you walk down a street and you can tell, you know, the nationality of the immigrants that built these buildings.
And that's very, very important to my neighborhood. But some neighborhoods would like to have, you know, bigger buildings.
Right.
Well, most of your districts, the new sites for development in District 1, District 3, right?
Two.
Two, sorry. They're infill sites. You know, it's either a tear down or where there was a parking lot or there was like a low one story building.
Definitely.
They're not like, you know, it's not a blank slate in either of your neighborhoods.
So, you know, the question is, how do you do infill without destroying the existing character you want to build?
No, I mean, I live in Tribeca. We probably have 10 parking lots. Happy to build on them.
Do they have to be 100 foot towers?
Exactly.
Or can they just fit with the rest of the neighborhood?
And I think that, at least in my situation, that's where proactive zoning comes into place.
You know, if you stand on Bari and Houston, you see the lack of proactive zoning on the east side and the proactive zoning on the west side, where the Special Little Italy District prevents seven-story buildings.
But on the east side, you see two new hotels that are about 40 stories high.
That's right. I sort of wondered how that happened.
Wait, we only have a few minutes left.
So, let's turn to campaign finance reform.
Sure.
So, what kind of reform do we need, Erin?
I would favor a public voucher system.
I would favor requiring everyone to live within a certain amount of money, not allowing any opt-outs.
I would favor having it funded either entirely or mostly by public funds.
I think, in this day and age, I just don't think that we need to spend as much money as we're spending on these campaigns.
A lot of the money that is spent is spent on paper.
Ink and paper, that's rough on our sanitation system.
It's terrible for the environment.
A lot of money is spent on robocalls, which people don't even answer their phones anymore.
A lot of money is spent on consultants, which are people that help you figure out what your message should be
or figure out what photographs or what face you should show to your constituents.
Oh, maybe that's my new life.
Yeah.
I should become one of those.
It's lucrative.
Listen, I understand how it works.
Politics seems crazy. It seems frightening.
People want to get a piece of the power.
People want to feel like they are getting to know intimately their console member.
So there are all these little clubs, and these little clubs have these endorsement races, and you come in and you speak,
but then the club gives its endorsement, and then I don't know why we don't have public debates.
You know, if we can make time in our schedule to go do six of these, we can certainly make time in our schedule to do three of these.
Public debates could be hugely...
You should have a public debate.
They could be televised.
There's only 51 seats.
A lot of them aren't real races, so you have three televised debates.
You have in my district, you do one down to the lower east side, you do one in Astor Place, the middle of my district,
and you do one up in, you know, Marie Hill.
That's right. It would be easy enough to organize.
What about you, Chris?
What would you say about improving the campaign finance system?
I agree with Aaron, but I think also taking Super PACs out of the equation.
In my race, we definitely saw it in 2013, where my councilwoman got a quarter of a million dollars to support her.
Jobs from New York, revenue, Super PAC.
Chris, tell us your take on how you would try to repair the campaign finance law.
I agree with Aaron on a lot of her points, but I think it's taking Super PAC and special interest out of the equation,
because they sway elections.
Right.
We saw it in 2013 in my district, where the councilwoman received a quarter of a million dollars,
and even though she didn't give the yes on it, she could have objected to the use of it.
So one of the campaign finance issues I've noticed, like your take on it,
is that if you're doing business with the city, you're not supposed to give more than $400 to whoever,
to say the mayor or the public advocate.
And I noticed that if you look at who's giving to the mayor,
there's all these big real estate companies like Rudin or Fisher Brothers,
who have business before the city in the sense of all the rezonings benefit them, particularly the midtown rezoning.
And if there's a loophole, like how can that be?
And I think if there's loopholes, we need to close those.
Anyway, comment on any of this, like doing business with the city.
There seems to be a lot of workarounds.
Like, oh, we're not really doing business with the city because, well, it's a zoning.
I mean, listen, you know, I have kids, I have two kids, and I know how this works, right?
One of them wants, you know, there's a rule, and, you know, one of them wants me to change the rule,
and the other one doesn't want me to change the rule.
And so the one that wants me to change the rule, you know, what's he going to do?
He's going to give me hugs.
He's going to, you know, help me with something.
He's going to be super sweet, you know, and then obviously that's going to benefit him.
So, you know, people are just grown-up children, and it really is the city government.
It's all government's responsibilities to create the boundaries and say,
we're the people that are elected to be the adults in the room, and we're going to set up what the boundaries are
and what the rules are for this playground, and then you're all going to follow them.
And you know what? It's actually better for everyone because it's more predictable.
It creates, you know, a business owner may not like the rules, but they're going to follow the rules.
And if you're not sure what the rules are, you're always going to be pushing the envelope.
It's better if we just have hard and fast rules, and that's why I think if you say,
you know, listen, you just can't take money from PACS.
You can't take money from, you know, these large investments from private individuals,
and then you have to hunt through the campaign finance database to find out who they really work for.
Well, you can't take them if you're taking public money.
If you go off that radar, you can, you know, I think that probably the first agenda
on a new city council for me would be fix the campaign finance law.
I know people go around saying it's so great. New York has such a good one.
It's public matching funds. Yes, yes. Those are good things.
Well, that was just step one.
There are, we can drive trucks through those loopholes, and now we need to, like, tighten up.
And the other thing is that you can opt out of the loopholes.
You know, most of the members of the Progressive Caucus have now said, you know,
either they have not yet registered and the deadline is about four weeks, five weeks away.
Okay. Thank you all for coming, and I hope you can come again and talk some more.
We just got started on some of these issues.
Meanwhile, people of New York, stand up and fight for your neighborhood.
When you fight, out in the open air, in a patch of light.
