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Tired Of Feeling Powerless, CEOs Pen Letter To De Blasio About "Quality Of Life Issues"
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Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 11, 2020
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 11, 2020
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On Thursday, more than 100 titans of industry sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio, urging him to take “immediate action” to address a host of problems facing New York City, now in its seventh month of fighting a global pandemic that has killed more than 32,000 New Yorkers.
“Despite New York’s success in containing the coronavirus, unprecedented numbers of New Yorkers are unemployed, facing homelessness, or otherwise at risk,” the letter states. “There is widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues that are contributing to deteriorating conditions in commercial districts and neighborhoods across the five boroughs.”
The Post read the subtext: “NYC CEOs plead with de Blasio to crack down on crime, quality of life issues.”
And de Blasio’s former police commissioner, the living embodiment of Broken Windows policing, weighed in.
Kathryn Wylde, the president and CEO of the influential business group the Partnership for New York City, which organized the letter, ticked off the “quality of life” issues the business leaders were referring to.
“Safety and crime, more aggressive panhandling, graffiti, people not wearing masks, garbage. This is the feedback we're getting from both small businesses and employees of large businesses,” Wylde told Gothamist, denying that the letter was a call for more arrests and summonses for these low-level offenses, which disproportionately affect people of color and don’t necessarily lead to less crime.
“We haven’t solved these issues within the police department. That’s the frustration. I understand how you can interpret it that way,” Wylde said. “How do we get the police department reformed so they’re not pouting and working with the community?”
The pandemic has created a two-year, $30 billion budget crisis at the state level. The MTA has said it needs $12 billion in federal relief to maintain basic levels of service. Mayor de Blasio has insisted that if the city doesn’t get its own relief, 22,000 employees will have to be laid off.
In his own response to the letter, de Blasio gently asked the signatories to lobby Congress for relief.
But Wylde insisted that the letter isn’t about money, and pointed to “how Cuomo tapped Columbia and NYU to give a more elegant solution to the L train repair” as an example of the government and the private sector working together.
“The conversation is one dimensional: Send money, raise taxes, send revenues, government will try and fix it,” she said. “Are there more efficient ways to deal with the garbage problems? Probably. Has anyone reached out to the business community to come in with some logistics expertise? No.”
Wylde also disputed that the people who signed the letter—the heads of Nasdaq, Con Edison, Bank of America, Pfizer, and Macy’s, to name a few—had outsize influence with city government.
“They’re not powerful in New York. Politically powerful with the mayor? Ask any of them how many times the mayor has called them,” she said, adding that “only a handful” had likely made donations to Republicans or the Trump campaign.
“If you take the politics out of it and just look at the letter, it’s kind of the way most people feel,” she explained. “This grew out of the employees saying, ‘We’re not coming back unless we feel comfortable and safe.’”
Douglas Durst, the head of his family's eponymous real estate empire, and a signatory to the letter, told Gothamist in a statement that the pandemic required an "all hands on-deck solution."
“New York City and New Yorkers have innumerable energy, resource and creativity and they must be leveraged to keep our streets safe and clean, lobby the federal government for money, and fight for more progressive real estate and income taxes.”
On Twitter, City Councilmember Brad Lander accused the signatories of "gross hypocrisy," given that a lobbying group featuring the same constituency of powerful New Yorkers recently sprung up to oppose legislation in Albany that would raise taxes on the state's richest residents to pay for services like trash pickup and park cleaning.
"There’s no dearth of influence from private interests, including the corporations represented in this group, on state and city policy. They have not been left out," Julia Salazar, a State Senator from Brooklyn, told Gothamist in a text message. "What we need is for the ultra-wealthy in New York—the billionaires whose profits have increased throughout the past six months while the majority of New Yorkers have struggled financially—to finally pay their fair share of taxes. That is the only way that we are going to generate sufficient revenue to address the systemic social problems and inadequate public services in our state."
Tagged
COVID-19
broken windows
quality of life
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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