NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Regulating Artificial Intelligence in New York, What New Records Reveal About Sweeps of Homeless Encampments, and Efforts in New Jersey to Contain Future Storm Damage.

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

The tech industry is pushing back against an effort to regulate artificial intelligence in New York. Plus, New York City workers who conduct sweeps of homeless encampments are supposed to offer to store people’s personal belongings. But new records obtained by WNYC show that rarely happens. Finally, how a multi-millionaire dollar environmental effort in New Jersey is aimed at preventing damage from future storms.

What's next in the effort to regulate artificial intelligence in New York? New York City workers who conduct sweeps of homeless encampments are supposed to offer to store people's personal belongings, but new records obtained by WNMIC show that rarely happens, and how a multi-million dollar environmental effort in New Jersey is aimed at preventing damage from future storms. From WNIC, this is NYC Now. I'm Sean Carlson. The tech industry is pushing back against an effort to regulate artificial intelligence in New York, the Rays Act, which passed the state legislature last week, would require tech

companies to come up with plans that would prevent their AI models from causing harm to people, and it would let the Attorney General fine them millions of dollars for violations. Julie Samuels is president and CEO of Tech, NYC, and Industry Trade Group. She says it's a miskinded effort. We're really incredibly concerned about the message it sends to builders of AI tools, to companies, to entrepreneurs all over the country and all over the world, whether or not New York is, quote-unquote, open for business. The bill supporters say it's focused on keeping New Yorkers safe.

Governor Hokel's office says she's reviewing it. As New Yorkers face a critical shortage of affordable homes, local lawmakers are asking the city's housing authority why it has thousands of apartments sitting vacant. The city council held a hearing on the issue Monday. Nichita data shows more than 175,000 families are on the wait list for units, while almost 6,000 units are empty. On average, it's taken the authority more than a year to fill vacancies.

Advocates say the delays put pressure on the city's already crowded homeless shelters. The hearing comes as the overall vacancy rate for the city's most affordable homes is under 1%. Coming up, city workers who conduct sweeps of homeless encampments are supposed to offer to store people's personal belongings. But new records obtained by W&YC show that rarely happens. Stick around. When city workers clear homeless encampments, they're supposed to offer people a chance to store their belongings. But that rarely happens.

New records obtained by W&MIC showed that despite hundreds of sweeps this year, only 13 storage vouchers were filled out in the first five months. W&MIC's Karen Yi has been following the numbers and the people behind them. So what's supposed to happen is the city in most cases needs to give a seven-day notice that they will clear a homeless encampment. And an encampment can be a tent, a cardboard box, a group of people who gather and sleep in a public place. According to the policy, the Department of Homeless Services is supposed to fill out cleanup vouchers

when a person agrees to store their things with the city for up to 90 days. But according to Karen, the city says it only filled out 13 of those vouchers between January and May of this year. We've heard from homeless people and their advocates who say they've lost their ID cards, photos of their families, their clothing, their phones, and other important personal belongings because it's been thrown in the trash during these sweeps. And now the records we have show how rare it is, really. for people's items to get stored by the city. Some of the stored items included things like driver's licenses,

health insurance cards, coats, a microwave, a laptop, and even medication. I think it shows us the things that people have with them in these encampments. I mean, these are their de facto homes because many people are scared to go into shelter or have had a bad experience there. We know that last year the city counted 4,000 people who were street homeless, and that's the highest number it's been in a few years. David Giffin from the Coalition for the Homeless says, what's lost in these sweeps can be deeply destabilizing.

Maybe it's, you know, photographs of a relative. Maybe it's a birth certificate. You know, maybe it's their paperwork they need for their benefits. The goal of the city is to sweep people out of sight. Six homeless New Yorkers are now suing the city, arguing the sweeps violate people's due process and protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. It did prompt a judge to require the city to give these advanced notices

when they conduct sweeps, which arguably would, help people figure out what to do with their belongings before they happen. Karen reports that the city says people often prefer to hold on to their belongings and that it offers storage even when the owner isn't there as long as the items can be identified. A city hall spokesperson also told me that, you know, the mayor believes that there's no dignity in living in the street and he can't just walk away and do nothing. And they didn't want to say more because of the ongoing lawsuit. But the city's own numbers show that not many people end up in shelter because of sweeps.

Over the course of nine months last year, 3,500 people were swept, but just, 100 were placed into shelter and no one received permanent housing. That's WNYC's Karen Yee. Now to New Jersey, when Hurricane Ida hit the Garden State in September of 2021, flooding from the powerful storm decimated thousands of homes and killed at least 30 people. WNYC's Mike Hayes has more on a multimillion-dollar environmental effort aimed at preventing future storm devastation. If you walk out over the Nevious Street Bridge that crosses the Raritan River in Somerset County, New Jersey, you can look down at peacefully flowing water.

But in the fall of 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped over eight inches of rain in a matter of hours. And these waters raged, flooding towns downriver like Manville and Bound Brook, as news outlets reported at the time. If I was standing here around 5 a.m. after that storm, the water would have covered my head.

Manville, home of 11,000 people, completely flooded. One home exploding. I lost everything. Everything's gone. John Django says the damage was devastating. I remember driving through the two days afterwards, and every home had a pile of saturated debris on their curb. It was hundreds and hundreds of homes. Now, Django's job is to help prevent similar flooding from happening again.

And it's a job you may not have known existed. He's taking a 100-plus acre field next to the Raritan River, land that's been farmland since the 1600s, and he's turning it back into a forest. Imagine this. The river floods now and flows over these empty fields and then floods the towns like Boundbrook and Manville. But what if you had thousands upon thousands of trees and shrubs

not only to slow and decelerate that water, but to absorb the water? Django and his team have been planting maple, oak, and spruce trees here since May. By next spring, they'll have planted 50,000, trees and a couple thousand shrubs. Not to mention three miles of fence to keep the deer from eating up the plants. So if a typical tree as it matures is drinking 10 or 20 or 30 gallons of water a day, imagine what 53,500 trees will do. We planted those 17,700 trees and 1976 shrubs this spring. There's another 15 to 16,000 going in in November, October, and then the remainder

get planted next April and May. The land here is owned by Duke Farms. It was established in the 1890s by American industrialist James Buchanan Duke. In the early 1900s, his daughter, Doris Duke, created a wildlife restoration on the grounds. But farming on these lands dates back to the Dutch settlers four centuries ago.

Manville Mayor Rich Anderco says nearly four years after Hurricane Ida, he still sees banged up and abandoned homes in town. And he says he's grateful for the work to mitigate future damage. Every little bit we can do to help absorb floodwaters and restore our environment is probably the best news we've heard around here in a long time. What's paying for those tens of thousands of trees?

In 2024, pharmaceutical company Wyeth Holdings was found liable for decades of damage to the local groundwater. from an old chemical factory that sat next to the river. $13 million from the settlement is funding the reforestation effort. And while Django is excited about the millions of gallons of floodwater his trees and plants will drink up, he understands the limitations of this one 112-acre project. Have you thought at all about the total acreage we need

to be able to solve the problem? It's got to be thousands upon thousands of acres. Still, he's hopeful. this can be a model for other flood prone areas across the state. That's WNYC's Mike Hayes. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNMIC. I'm Sean Carlson. See you tomorrow.