NYC NOW - August 21, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

A New Jersey farm workers’ nonprofit is suing the state, alleging laborers are being denied equal pay protections. Meanwhile, Cape May County’s Middle Thorofare Bridge has reopened unexpectedly, just days after officials announced its indefinite closure. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams will attend the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday but is not scheduled to speak. Plus, a decades-old New Jersey law requiring municipalities to build their “fair share” of affordable housing is spurring new developments. WNYC’s Mike Hayes reports. Finally, WNYC’s Community Partnerships Desk, in collaboration with Street Lab, recently visited Morris Heights in the Bronx to spotlight local stories.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Wednesday, August 21st. Here's the midday news from Lance Lucky. A nonprofit representing farm workers in New Jersey is suing the state. It alleges laborers are being denied the same equal pay protections as other workers. Jessica Cully is the coordinator for the group. She says it's unfair to lowball the workers whose labor puts food on people's tables.

Food is essential. We need food to survive in our communities and in our society and that their work that they do should be valued. Farm workers in New Jersey earn less than $13 an hour. That puts them behind other minimum wage workers in the state who make at least $15.13 an hour. The New Jersey Attorney General's office is declined to comment on the suit. Unexpected good news for Jersey Shore commuters Cape May County's two-mile bridge is open again. Transportation officials in the Garden State reopened the crossing, also known as the Middle Thorough Fair Bridge at 2 a.m. today, just a few days after authority said the bridge connecting Cape May County and Wildwood Crest could be closed indefinitely.

Mayor Adams is expected to be at the Democratic National Convention today. Fellow New York Democrats, Governor Hockel and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke there Monday night. Adams will not be speaking. He says he's late because he has a lot on his plate at home, including talking to reporters. When I leave the city, y'all say, where is he? Why is he going away? Why is he going to, why is he out of here for two days? If I don't leave right away, you ask a question, why didn't you leave right away?

You gotta love New York. The mayor will be at the DNC in time for Vice President Kamala Harris to formally accept the Democratic nomination for president that will be tomorrow. And you can hear NPR's live special coverage of the DNC tonight, starting at 9 on WNYC. 69 degrees, this is WNYC. Stay close. There's more after the break. On WNYC, I'm Michael Hill. New Jersey residents are about to hear a whole lot more about developing affordable housing in the Garden State. That's because of a decades-old requirement that each municipality build its fair share of affordable housing.

Under that mandate, the state is about to kick off a whole new round of affordable housing development. He'll explain what it all means is double Eid M.C's New Jersey housing reporter, Mike Hayes. Mike, let's start here. Would you explain what makes New Jersey unique when it comes to building affordable housing? Sure, Michael, thanks so much for having me. So what makes New Jersey different from other states is what's known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine. It's named after a town called Mount Laurel, which is in South Jersey, about 20 minutes outside Philadelphia. Now, it was the site of a lawsuit in the 1970s that ended with a state mandate handed down

by New Jersey's highest court, the New Jersey Supreme Court, that says every town the state needs to contribute some affordable housing. So going back 40 years, how it's worked is the state has broken up Mount Laurel into rounds, and what they say is you have to build X amount of affordable housing in a certain amount of time, and we're actually about to kick off the fourth round, which will last for 10 years. This is happening as New Jersey is facing an affordable housing crisis. Experts estimate that the state needs more than 200,000 affordable units for its poorest residents and those most cost burdened by rental rates. So what's the plan to close the affordable housing gap then in the

Garden State? Yeah, this is why we're talking about this right now. Actually, what's going to happen is in October, the state is going to start handing out these new affordable housing requirements. They call them obligations to all the towns around the state. And the total goal over the next 10 years could be around 84,000 new affordable housing units. And some towns could be asked to contribute up to like a thousand units. Most towns will be asked to contribute somewhere in the ballpark of 100 units or so. The Mount Laurel Doctrine requiring the cities to build certain levels of affordable housing has been around for, as you said, 40 years. Has it accomplished its goal or at least Come even close, Mike?

So housing advocates will be the first ones to admit that the Mount Laurel mandated affordable housing is not a cure-all for the state's housing woes, but it's helped a lot. In the last 10 years alone, the state has put more than 50,000 affordable housing units into the development pipeline, and more than 21,000 of those have been fully built. Advocates are hoping that they can build on the current pace of what's being built. I'm told it's around 2,800 affordable units per year. That said, this process had been absolutely mired in litigation over the year, particularly with wealthy towns around the state fighting hard to resist putting affordable housing in their communities.

So it really remains to be seen if things are going to go smoother in the future. Mike, how are towns around the state feeling going into this fourth round? So I've been talking to a ton of local politicians. They're the folks that are going to be running the show when it comes to what each town is going to develop. New Jersey is a strong, heavily home rule state, which means that your local officials, your town mayor, they have a lot of power over zoning and what actually gets built in your town. A lot of local officials I've been talking to, I would say they're cautiously optimistic. They really like, for example, that they're going to get their numbers early.

We mentioned in October. They're going to find out what they have to do over. the next 10 years and that's a full eight months before they're actually expected to start the development process but some of the deadlines are worrisome to these officials uh for example folks have been talking to me about how by the end of January of next year they have to either accept the number of affordable units that the state is assigning to them or come up with a different number now there's an election in november and what that means for these towns is you could have a whole new group of local officials being sworn in literally on January 1.

So they're not going to have a lot of time to get up to speed. WNIC's Mike Hayes covers housing in New Jersey. Mike, thanks for this. Sure, thanks for having me. WNIC's Community Partnerships Desk regularly teams up with the nonprofit street lab to highlight stories from neighborhoods across New York City. We recently set up shop in Mars Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Here's some of what we heard.

My name was Ramon Davis. I'm a single dad, so I have my kid, and he's 14 now. I guess I was just stronger than my spouse, and I had to take a hold of my son because I know how it is. Grow up without a father. You know, we need more father programs and things to help dies. The neighborhood needs a lot more activities for the kids to play. A lot of these kids raised up on a sidewalk, just playing on a sidewalk.

and, you know, it should be a basketball court here, or some seesaws or something. They need activities and hearts and stuff to play in. They need to enjoy their childhood, opposed to being around the violence. You never know. A basketball or football, running might change the whole kid's life. My name is Maline Odessania. I have two grandkids, one is four and one is nine. Both girls, my hope for them and in many other children is a better life,

safe and growing positively instead of being influenced by negative energy. That's all I want for them. Even the teenagers, you know, because truth be known, a lot of them don't make it past 17, 20 years old. You know what I'm saying? They need something to look forward to instead of them out here, shooting and killing each other. It don't make sense to me, you know, because I didn't grow up in that generation. We had fights, said, okay, and then five minutes later, we started. still friends. Now they just go out and shoot somebody and there's no going back once you do that.

That's an end product of that. But I'm hoping and I'm wishing for the blessed for this younger generation here coming up is what I'm praying for, you know, seriously. Because all kids are good. It's what they're influenced by to make some problems. My name is Christali Kaban. I'm currently 30 years old and I have a two-year-old and I'm 38 weeks and two days pregnant. Before I believe that I couldn't have children, so I was like six years maybe trying. When my daughter was born, like literally I didn't believe it. I started working for the school because I thought I wasn't able to have children. So I was like, hey, this is something I want, but like I can't have it.

I'm going to focus on teaching children, having fun with children, you know, like getting to know what would it be like to be a mom at some point. So that was what inspired me really to become a teacher. I was a teacher for five years at sheltering arms, family and children's services. But the center closed down, so I ended up leaving there. And then I got a new job, which is not focused on children as home attendant services now. But it's okay. At some point, I want to get back to it.

I have an associate's right now. So the associates allows you to work in preschools and stuff like that. But I want to probably work with children that are older, maybe like fifth or sixth grade. I think that is because they're like more independent and less drama. My name is Christopher Nicholson. I currently run two daycares in the Bronx. We are called Bright Leaders, one on Grand Avenue and other on university. This is my story of the daycare. I was a bus driver for a school company. It wasn't really my thing, but they gave me a nice promotion to become an operation manager. So I was young. I was making 85K, you know, but I wasn't happy. As an operation manager, I would have to be at the yard 430. in the morning and I wouldn't come home to 7 o'clock at night so I wouldn't have that much time with my

wife and my kids I have two kids in my own one is eight and when it's three my um passion has always been to work with kids and enough was enough pandemic hit we didn't know what we wanted to do you know we were all home and my wife was like I really wanted daycare so we just used our savings and and started and prayed for the best and I don't get it at all the biggest rewards for me doing this and seeing the kids grow, seeing the kids that we have go off to school, come back and see how much they learn when they go off to school

because we, you know, we receive kids from like the six months even before that, so some of them are three, four, five years old now and it's just a blessing, it's rewarding, you know, like you're making an impact in the community. Voices from the Bronx's Morris Heights neighborhood. Thanks for listening.

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