“The governor and New York State Legislature should begin a process of discarding all property tax abatements that primarily serve the interests of landlords and developers (not tenants), and end the patchwork of other taxes required to make up the subsequent lost revenue from them.”
Adi Talwar
A May evening view of Manhattan over the East River.
The question now arises whether the J-51 property tax abatement should also expire with that of 421a, which expired on June 15, 2022). The inequity of 421a goes without question, yet the inequity of J-51 is obscure. In this report, this obscurity is lifted sufficiently to allow legislators to comfortably allow J-51 to also expire on June 30, 2022. Touting 421a and J-51 as affordable housing’s only game in town is a flawed idea, as other communities demonstrate.
J-51 taxation abatements began in post-war 1955 so that affordable rental housing may have hot water plumbing; afterward it creeped to abate taxes on all building renovations, valued at 8.33 to 12.5 percent of renovation cost every year for 20 years and up to 34 years of no-increase-in-property-taxes, and (for tenants) stabilized rents while the J-51 abatements are in place.
What’s the problem with that? Some think we all must beat the tax monster with a stick, so let’s shout hooray for those who strike a blow! This misguided view ignores the fact that New York City pays its bills with collected revenue, so a loss (i.e., foregone taxes through these abatements) requires an increase for everyone else.
In 1984, it was estimated New York City lost $2 billion over the life of all J-51 abatements in place at the time and the beneficiaries were primarily landlords and developers in Manhattan’s wealthier neighborhoods; hardly equitable (more recent estimates of costs could not be found, but given 38 years of creep opportunity, the amount is likely to rival the $1.8 billion/year lost with 421a.
Why are New Yorkers allowing this to happen to them? Is it to get permanent affordable housing, rental or otherwise? If its permanency, tax abatements are not the answer, as the abatements all have time limits, and stabilized rents only last for the life of the J-51 abatement periods.
There’s a better way. Consensus among affordable housing advocates is that Community Land Trusts (CLTs) uniquely offer permanency, and do so because tenants avoid taking out mortgages for the trust’s land value; they only finance the building’s value and upon sale, they only sell a share of the building value—a tradeoff to secure permanent affordability. Over the years we’ve seen waves of attempts by landlords and developers to game J-51 to push tenants out of their stabilized units, yet they push these tenants to the foreground in J-51 advocacy while stepping back to hide their wealth-generating schemes.
New York City should revisit the hugely successful tax reform advocated by Lawson Purdy (president of the NYC Department on Taxes and Assessments) and Gov. Al Smith that eliminated the tax on building value, thereby making the property tax a land value tax. The result was a building boom in the 1920s that allowed New Yorkers to weather the approaching Depression of the 1930s.
In tandem with Congressional legislators, we should enact 100 percent federal income tax deductibility on all state and local taxes (including taxes on land value, not limited to $10,000) to diminish the inequity of taxing away labor’s wages.
The governor and New York State Legislature should begin a process of discarding all property tax abatements that primarily serve the interests of landlords and developers (not tenants), and end the patchwork of other taxes required to make up the subsequent lost revenue from them. Go back to Purdy’s simple but effective removal of property taxes from buildings, making NYC once again governed by the equitable system of land value taxation–what economists have judged to be the most equitable tax.
Marty Rowland is a social justice lecturer and progressive advocate of affordable housing
The number of drug overdoses inside Department of Homeless Services shelters reached new heights in the second half of 2021, though staff and clients managed to reverse more than 90 percent of the overdoses.
Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office
Naloxone, a rescue dosage for opioid users who overdose.
A worsening nationwide opioid crisis is taking a heavy toll on New York City’s homeless population, with the number of overdoses inside city shelters reaching new heights in the second half of 2021, records show.
Staff working in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters recorded 632 overdoses in the six months between July 1 and December 31, 2021—the months immediately following the deadliest fiscal year on record for unhoused New Yorkers—according to statistics shared with City Limits in response to a Freedom of Information Law request. That’s up from 364 in the final six months of 2020 and 359 in the last half of 2019.
Overall, there were 1,091 overdoses recorded in DHS shelters in 2021, a 76 percent increase compared to 2019. In November 2021, the most dangerous month for people who use drugs, at least 106 people overdosed in single-adult shelters, the records show.
The rate of overdose has prompted immediate action from DHS and has spurred calls for more effective federal, state and local strategies to keep drug users safe amid a nationwide spike in overdoses and drug-related deaths fueled mainly by Fentanyl-laced opioids.
Julia Savel, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, which oversees DHS, said staff, emergency responders and other shelter residents managed to reverse 93 percent of the overdoses inside shelters using naloxone nasal spray last year.
“New York City’s pioneering and model approach on harm reduction continues to save lives amid a nationwide opioid crisis and overall pandemic-related increase in substance use challenges,” Savel said, adding that the agency is “equipping all of our shelter sites with dedicated supports to protect the health and safety of our clients.”
Staff submit an incident report for a suspected overdose when they encounter a person who is unconscious and is known to use drugs, as well as when they administer naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan.
In 2021, shelter staff administered naloxone 1,107 times and emergency responders used the spray inside shelters another 137 times, DHS said. Since 2016, staff, residents and emergency workers have administered naloxone about 3,300 times inside shelters.
The agency declined to say how many people who overdosed in shelters died in the second half of 2021 and said the information will be available in the next annual homeless deaths report, which is published around January by DHS and the Health Department and covers the fiscal year that ended six months earlier. The most recent report showed that 237 homeless New Yorkers died from overdoses in the months between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, marking a dramatic rise in fatal drug use and contributing to the deadliest year for unhoused residents since the agencies began compiling their report.
Overall, 640 New Yorkers died while experiencing homelessness in the 2021 fiscal year, the report found. During that period, staff working in DHS shelters submitted 823 overdose-related incident reports.
Overdose statistics reveal the disproportionate impact on New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, who make up less than 1 percent of the city’s population but appear to account for about 10 percent of the overdose death toll.
Across New York City, roughly 2,500 people died from a drug overdose in the 2021 calendar year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control. If the overdose death rate among homeless New Yorkers in the first six months of 2021 continued through the full calendar year, it would mean 1 of every 10 people who died from an overdose was homeless at the time.
Around 16,300 single adults stay in DHS shelters each night, according to daily reports tracked by City Limits. People staying in single adult shelters accounted for the vast majority of overdoses last year, though a rising number of overdoses also occurred in so-called Safe Haven shelters for people coming in from the streets.
Dr. Kelly Doran, an emergency physician who runs the Health x Housing Lab at NYU Langone, said New York City reflects the nationwide rise in overdoses and drug-related deaths among people experiencing homelessness. The Health x Housing Lab focuses on the health benefits of permanent housing and provides evidence-based strategies for improving health, including reducing overdoses, among individuals experiencing homelessness.
Doran urged city, state and federal agencies to make deeper investments in strategies that make it safer for people who use drugs while easing access to opioid replacements and pathways to recovery.
“In the end, the drug supply is unpredictable and unsafe right now, and criminalization doesn’t work,” she said. “We need safer supply and real harm reduction—things like supervised consumption sites.”
Two supervised consumption sites, also known as Opioid Prevention Centers (OPCs) that opened earlier this year have provided people in East Harlem and the South Bronx with a safe setting in which to use drugs while receiving additional medical and recovery treatment.
On Wednesday, Mayor Eric Adams said the city will use $150 million it received as part of a state settlement with opioid manufacturers to open additional OPCs and fund additional harm reduction strategies, including Street Health Outreach and Wellness (SHOW) mobile clinics and syringe exchanges.
DHS officials said they have no plans to introduce OPCs inside shelters where drugs are banned, but said they will use a new grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to establish a Harm Reduction Advisory Council, update policies to make them less punitive and provide Fentanyl test strips to shelter staff.
In an interview with City Limits, DHS Medical Director Dr. Fabienne Laraque said the agency is collaborating with the city Health Department and state agencies to run mobile methadone clinics and increase delivery of methadone, which acts as a non-lethal replacement for opioids.
Laraque urged the federal government to eliminate a requirement forcing physicians to undergo training and obtain a waiver to prescribe buprenorphine, another opioid replacement medication.
"Anybody can prescribe an opioid but not everybody can prescribe buprenorphine," she said.
While comprehensive prevention strategies may lag, city agencies and nonprofits have become adept at responding to an overdose. DHS said it has distributed more than 66,000 naloxone kits in shelters, most of which are run by nonprofit organizations with city contracts. Officials said they have also trained about 14,200 staff members and more than 17,150 shelter residents to administer the life-saving nasal spray. The medication temporarily reverses the effects of an overdose by blocking opioid receptors.
Samuel Irving, a resident of a Bronx shelter, said he recently used naloxone on a man he found unconscious inside the shelter bathroom earlier this month.
“I saw a guy in there almost done,” Irving said. “If I hadn’t hit with the Narcan and called the ambulance, he’d be dead.”
Irving said he received naloxone training while staying at a veterans shelter and carries a kit with him because he frequently encounters people who use heroin and other opioids.
Edwin J. Torres/NYC Mayor’s Office
An overdose prevention kit.
City Limits talked with nonprofit staff members at three shelters in Queens and Manhattan who said workers and residents have encountered people who have overdosed and intervened with naloxone.
“It’s been crazy with this Fentanyl,” said an administrator at a single men’s shelter who was not authorized to speak to the media.
A social service staff member at a women’s shelter said the naloxone training and accessibility seems to be working. “We are all trained regularly and carry Narcan [and] have Narcan kits in various places around the facility in the case of suspected overdose,” the person said.
But staff, residents and city officials interviewed for this story said the key is addressing the root causes of substance use and making it easier for people to access and stick with treatment.
“The stress people feel while being in shelter has caused many to relapse,” said Milton Perez, an activist with VOCAL-NY and former shelter resident who moved into an apartment last year.
He said the best treatment is permanent housing mixed with behavioral and medical support to prevent people who are isolated from fatally overdosing.
Perez also urged shelter staff to inform residents when a person overdoses or dies to protect others.
“People die one day from drugs, nothing is said,” he said. “And the next day someone dies probably from the same package of bad drugs.”
Spanish translators were missing at two Queens polling places that City Limits visited Tuesday morning, while interpreters for other languages said they had interacted with very few voters.
Adi Talwar
Evening on primary day at the polling station located at Mosholu Montefiore Community Center in the Bronx.
Read more government & politics coverage here.
A slow day at the polls Tuesday was nevertheless affected by a familiar problem: a lack of interpreters to assist non-English speakers at some sites.
Spanish translators were missing at two of three Queens polling places that City Limits visited Tuesday morning, while interpreters for other languages said they had interacted with very few voters.
Michael Gilmore, voting site coordinator at P.S. 220 in Forest Hills, said the polling place was short-staffed Tuesday, but voter turn-out was also especially low. Just 44 people had shown up to cast their ballots by 11 a.m.—five hours after polls opened—for an average of one voter about every seven minutes.
“If we get 200 voters today, I’ll be happy,” Gilmore said.
A scheduled Spanish language interpreter did not report to the site, but a poll worker who understood the language was able to help voters, he said.
In addition to the Board of Elections translators at these voting places, there were interpreters hired through the Poll Site Language Assistance Program of the NYC’s Civic Engagement Commission (NYCEC), assigned to locations with large concentrations of non-English speakers. That applies to most of New York City.
The City Planning Commission estimates that about half of New York City residents speak a language other than English at home, while a quarter of all New Yorkers are not proficient in English. Linguistic barriers can be a problem at the polls without sufficient interpretation services.
Language and identity can also inform how voters choose their candidates. Hugo Gaitán, a Spanish-speaking registered Democrat, said he chose candidates based on their last name.
“I voted for all Democrats who had a Latino name,” he said in Spanish, before recalling his favorite former elected official, late-State Sen. José Peralta.
“I have Peralta in glory,” he said of the Queens Democrat who died in 2018. This time around, he said he was voting for Assembly candidate Hiram Monserrate, a former state senator and councilmember who was convicted of a domestic-violence related charge, expelled from the legislature in 2010 and convicted in 2012 of steering council funds into his senate campaign.
“I believe in second chances,” Gaitán said.
The race for governor posed a problem for his system, however. There were no Latinos on the ballot and he said he did not remember who he voted for.
Four other interpreters at the site, two who spoke Chinese and two Hindi, said they had a morning like no other: nearly deserted. The two Chinese interpreters, each with more than a decade of experience, said they had helped seven people.
Less than a mile away at P.S. 175-Lynn Gross Discovery School in Rego Park, the Spanish interpreter was also a no-show. The other three interpreters, two for Chinese and one for Hindi, said they had not seen much action in the morning.
Russian interpreters designated specifically for that voting site as part of the Poll Site Language Assistance Program sat in the back of the room and said they had not engaged with a single person on Tuesday morning. By 10 a.m., just 34 people had cast their ballots at the school.
Blocks away at P.S. 206-Horace Harding School, located across the Long Island Expressway from LeFrak City, just 28 people had voted by 9:30 am. Several minutes would pass between voters, only one of whom had sought assistance from a Spanish interpreter.
Four other interpreters who spoke Hindi, Korean and Chinese sat and waited.
Daniel Parra
A poll site in Queens on Primary Day.
While their skills may have been underused on Tuesday—the first of two primaries planned for New York this summer, thanks to redistricting changes that pushed the contests for State Senate and U.S. Congress to August—a new state law passed earlier this month will provide more language interpreters in future elections.
The John R. Lewis NY Voting Rights Act will, among other things, lower the threshold for which local boards of elections throughout the state are required to provide interpretation services for certain “language minority groups”—American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Native or voters of Spanish heritage—if voters of a given language make up more than 2 percent of a jurisdiction’s voters, or more than 4,000 voters.
That expanded language assistance is required to go into effect within the next three years, according to the text of the legislation, which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law on June 20th.
Soaring food and energy costs have propelled consumer prices upwards
Consumer prices in France have been growing at their highest rate in over three decades, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing data from state statistics agency INSEE.
According to the report, EU-harmonized preliminary inflation in the country increased by 0.8% in June from the month prior, driving annual inflation to 6.5%, its highest level since 1991. The figures marked the second month in a row in which inflation has reached record highs since France began using the EU’s calculation methods in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, the country’s national consumer price index was somewhat lower, but still up at 5.8% year-on-year from 5.2% in May.
INSEE specified that inflation is mostly being driven by increasing energy prices (up 33.1% year-on-year and 5.3% month-on-month) and food prices (up 5.7% year-on-year and 1.4% month-on-month). However, prices in other spheres have somewhat stabilized, the agency says, with services inflation remaining at 3.2% since May, while manufactured goods inflation is down compared to last month, standing at 2.6% against 3.0% in May.
The statistics agency still expects inflation to continue to rise in the third quarter of the current year, however, before gradually declining in the fourth quarter and into 2023.
French President Emmanuel Macron recently vowed to take steps to rein in high inflation, including tax cuts and pension hikes. But analysts say his plans may fail since his party did not win an absolute majority in parliament earlier this month.
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