NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Gillibrand to Head Democrats’ Campaign Arm, Mayor Adams Prepares for State of the City, Stalled Bill Requiring Coops to Explain Rejections and NYC’s Cultural Calendar

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand will chair the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the 2026 cycle. Plus, Mayor Eric Adams is set to deliver his "State of the City" address on Thursday. Also, we take a look at a city council bill that would require co-op boards to explain why they rejected an applicant. And finally, we explore some of the year’s most exciting art shows, at galleries and museums.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WNYC, I'm Jenae Pierre. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will head up the Senate Democrats' recruitment arm in the coming years. In an announcement Monday, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Gillibrand will chair the Democratic senatorial campaign committee for the 2026 cycle. Gillibrand won election to the U.S. House twice and then the Senate twice. She'll be tasked with building campaign infrastructure, recruiting candidates and trying to secure wins for her party. She will succeed Senator Gary Peters of Michigan. New York City Mayor Eric Adams will deliver his state of the city address on Thursday.

WMYC's Tiffany Hanson has more on what to expect. The mayor will deliver his fourth state of the city address at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Adams says he plans to review the last three years and look ahead, focusing on affordable housing and public safety. Adams is up for for re-election this fall and faces at least seven Democratic challengers. At once, the mayor is fighting federal bribery and fraud charges. Adams maintains his innocence. His address also comes amid investigations into top NYPD brass, the mayor's campaign financing operation and activities of other top officials, many of whom have resigned. The event begins at noon and will be live-streamed at NYC.gov.

Council bill requiring co-op boards to give reasons for rejecting applicants has 29 sponsors. So why is it taking so long for the bill to become law? More on that after the break. But why see? Purchasing a home is already a headache. But for New Yorkers who want a piece of that American dream, a co-op board approval process can be an anxiety-inducing endeavor. potential buyers face infamously invasive questioning and a financial review reminiscent of a tax audit. And if they're turned down, they'll probably never know why.

A bill before the City Council is vowing to change that by requiring the co-op boards to explain why they rejected an applicant. It has majority support in the council, but it's been languishing for nearly a year. My colleague Michael Hill talked more about this with WMYC's housing reporter David Brand. Explain how co-ops board work and why there are stringent rules on those who want to live in them. Well, a co-op's unique collective housing arrangement. The building is organized as a corporation and individual residents don't outright buy their place. They purchase shares for what's known as a proprietary lease to live there. It's kind of astounding just how many co-ops there are citywide.

There's more than 450,000 units. That's enough to house every resident of Miami. The owners are known as shareholders and they select. a board of their neighbors to make financial decisions, that prospective buyers and sign off on sales. So these boards can't discriminate against would-be buyers on the basis of race or sexual orientation or other protected characteristics. That's already against the law. But if they do decide to reject someone, they don't have to say why. Opponents of the system say that opens the door for more covert type of discrimination or at the very least some very capricious decision-making.

There's a bill, as we said before the City Council to address this. What would this bill do? This specific legislation would require boards of co-ops with 10 or more units to actually provide a reason why they reject a prospective buyer within five days of the rejection. If they don't, they face fines up to $25,000. This one got introduced in February of last year by the city's public advocate, Jamani Williams, and it has 29 sponsors, but it's just been sitting there without a hearing. Who exactly is for this and against this bill in the council? Well, 29 sponsors is majority support. And the council members I've spoken with say it's basic transparency and a protection against discrimination. The council members I've spoken with who support it, that is.

But a lot of key members aren't on board with this legislation. I went through city property data to find out how many co-op units there are in every council district. I found that five districts account for about a third of those 450,000 units. in the city. Four in Manhattan, one in Queens. None of those council members are sponsoring this bill. So I tried asking them why not, and I couldn't get a straight answer. Keith Powers, who represents Midtown in the east side, Carlina Rivera and Lower Manhattan, both declined to comment. Julie Menon on the Upper East Side and Lynn Schulman from Forest Hills didn't respond to a bunch of calls and messages. Only council member Gail Brewer from the Upper West Side agreed to talk about it. She says she

worries the risk of penalties might prevent qualified people from serving on boards. What do opponents of this bill say about why they're opposing and who are there? Well, co-op board members really don't like this bill. Warren Schreiber is president of a co-op in Bay Terrace, Queens, and he also runs an influential trade group known as the president's co-op and condo counsel. He says the bill would eliminate their discretion to approve applicants. We would no longer be able to have that flexibility because in order to, in order to to avoid claims of discrimination, we would have to be 100% consistent in the way we treated every applicant. He says they'd have to set specific income requirements and automatically reject people

who fall just short. Many co-ops already have pretty strict rules about income and assets and how much you need in the bank. There's another issue. Opponents worry about the risk of fines or lawsuits from the bill. The same thing that Council Member Brewer had mentioned. What's next for this legislation? Well, the key next step is for the bill to have a public hearing. That's where elected officials get to have their say and hear from experts on both sides. Every day, New Yorkers also get a chance to weigh in at these hearings. But in order to have that, the chair of the housing committee, Perina Sanchez, has to ask the council speaker to hold the hearing. Speaker Adrian Adams has to approve that.

I asked her office when that might happen. And they just said the bill is going through the legislative process. And we didn't get much more than that. David, I'm wondering, as I listen to you, explain all this, I'm wondering if in your reporting of this, you came across anyone who thought of this crossing the line of the First Amendment? I haven't come across that argument. I mean, this is a different type of housing arrangement than condos and buying a single family house, for example, where you work with a seller. If you have the money, the seller agrees to sell it to you. There's this other layer where this board who's picked by residents gets more of a say in picking their neighbors. And so it's a little different. in that way, but, you know, there's this coalition of fair housing groups who say that could potentially shroud discrimination. That's WMYC's David Brandt, talking with my colleague Michael Hill. New York City's cultural calendar is picking back up after its holiday hiatus, which makes this

a great time to look at some of the year's most exciting art shows at galleries and museums. For some insight, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with WMYC's art and culture reporter, Ryan Kailat. Do we even know what the big gallery museum shows are of the year? Yeah, you know, galleries put this stuff together faster. That market moves a little faster. But museums, you know, they have years-long lead times to get their shows going. They borrow holdings from other museums and there's rights issues and catalogs to get an order. So some of that stuff is known more than a year in advance.

That said, we do have some gallery highlights for the nearer term. Cool. Chief among them, maybe the coolest show this month, a Nick Cave, show, not the musician, the conceptual artist at Jack Shynman Gallery. That opens January 10th. Nick Cave is one of our major living artists today. He's a sculptor, he's a dancer, a professor at several institutions. Listeners might know him from his sound suits. These are these enormous, larger-than-life sort of wearable sculptures that completely obscure the person inside them and they're made of twigs or shag or beads.

Sometimes they look Native American. Sometimes they look African. They look in all different ways. And often they're presented still, but sometimes they're presented in performance with people dancing in these amazing suits. There's actually a mosaic of them in the subway tunnel between Times Square and Bryant Park. His longtime gallerist has been Jack Scheinman. And this new exhibit of new work from Nick Cave will open Scheiman Gallery's gigantic new

space in Tribeca. It's just worth seeing alone. It's this entire block-long Renaissance-style building, 29-foot ceilings in an old bank hall. It's now this gallery space that's gorgeous and worth visiting. Multiple art advisors I spoke to told me that's one of their highlights of the year. Worth checking out. Right on. All right. Let's talk about museums. What are some of the shows we can look forward to this year? Probably the big showstopper lines out the door kind of one. It's not going to be until October, but there's this major Ruth Asawa retrospective at the MoMA. She's the Japanese-American artist, best known for these giant paper foldings and wire sculptures. They're enormous and elaborate geometric.

This show will have plenty of those, but also some 300 works from the rest of her six-decade career, paintings, drawings, archival stuff, ephemera. This will be the first major retrospective of hers in New York that I can remember. And Ruth Asawa's stuff really demands to be seen in person because it's 3D, because it's sculpture, because it's so big. It comes alive in real space the way it really doesn't in photos. All right. Give us one last recommendation. Anything that's, say, not at the major museums like the Met and the Mama?

Yeah, a bunch. One show I'm really looking forward to is going to be at the shed, you know, that newish kind of space in Hudson Yards. Just next month in February. It's a look back at Christo and Jean-Claude. So New Yorkers may remember one of their biggest, most famous projects in New York. It was like maybe 20 years ago or so called the gate, the orange, almost like Japanese Tory gates kind of that wound through Central Park. So that project took like 30 years or something to put together and get approved and just all the city bureaucracy. So they are doing in the shed this enormous digital model that sort of recreates the gates on a big digital model of Central Park.

and moves through time over how the project came together over those 20 or 30 years. And not just that, apparently Christo and Jean-Claude had all these other ideas for big, huge New York City site-specific works that they wanted to do. But it was too difficult for these same reasons. You know, that one took decades. So the shed is going to present all these other what could have been sort of New York City art projects, also digitally recreated or ephemera or archival material. A little nerdy, a little in the weeds, but like for fans of this stuff, I think it's going to be very fun.

That's WNYC's Ryan Kyloth talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.