NYC NOW - May 1, 2024 : Evening Roundup

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

New York City's Rent Guidelines Board is considering raising rents by up to 6.5 % for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. For more, WNYC’s Janae Pierre talked with housing reporter David Brand. Plus, WNYC’s Mike Hayes reports from New Jersey, many drivers of electric vehicles worry about running out of battery without being able to find somewhere to charge up. And finally, WNYC’s Rosemary Misdary follows gardeners in New York City who are stepping in to save the city’s monarch butterflies.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City's rent guidelines board is considering raising rents by up to 6.5% for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. The nine-member board voted on a range of potential increases at a meeting Tuesday night. Board member Robert Ehrlich represents the interests of landlords who want a higher rent hike. Housing has ever increased costs. and revenues need to meet those costs, especially in stabilized buildings. But the board's tenant rep, Adon Soltran, says the increases are hurting low-income renters.

He's calling for a rollback. Our decision-making in the last few years and this year cannot be characterized as anything other than an attack on poor people, people of color, and working-class folks in favor of maintaining and increasing landlord stability and profit. The board will hold a binding vote on legal rent increases in June. For more, I talked with W. NYC housing reporter David Brand. He starts the conversation telling me how the board comes up with the range in the first

place. So the board considers a series of reports, and they've been doing that over the past couple months. And one set of reports is landlord expenses, how much it costs to operate, rent-stabilized buildings, you know, cost of insurance, cost of water bills, cost of fuel. Another set of reports is financial impact on tenants, so how much tenants are earning, median household income, the cost of rent. We see in these reports that a lot of tenants and rent-stabilized buildings are paying at least 30% of their income on rent or in many occasions paying at least half of their income on rent.

So tenant groups would say, hey, we're struggling here. A lot of tenants are not doing well financially can't afford a rent freeze. The same time, landlord groups are taking this information and saying, we're not fair and so great either. Ultimately, you know, there is an imbalance here. Landlord's own property. Tenants don't. So it's up to the board to determine how to negotiate that. You know, tenants are on a whole not doing so great, and they need to kind of thread the needle there.

Yeah. So tell us about the board. You mentioned that it's made up of nine members. Who are these members making such consequential decisions for New Yorkers? So nine members, all appointed by the mayor right now, I think eight of the members are Adams appointees. Oh, okay. There's two who are representing tenants. There's a lawyer and an organizer.

There are two who are representing landlords. That's a pair of landlord attorneys. And then five, quote unquote, public members who are supposed to be neutral here. And they tend to take their cues from the mayor. So he's not necessarily calling them directly and saying, do this, but tends to appoint people who share the mayor's worldview. Under Adams, the board has twice voted to increase rents by at least 3%. That comes after eight years under Mayor de Blasio,

where there was never a rent increase above 1.5%. and that included three rent freezes, and those are the first rent freezes in history of rent stabilization. So it's different these days. So, David, what happens next? There's going to be a series of public hearings. Right now, there's only one scheduled so far that's going to be May 23rd. And so tenants, also landlords and any other New Yorkers are going to get a chance to weigh in. There's going to be some more that are probably scheduled.

And then coming up in June, we'll get that final vote. That's WMYC Housing Reporter, David Brand. In New Jersey, some drivers of electric vehicles are are anxious about not having access to a charger when it's needed the most. That story and more after the break. New Jersey wants drivers in electric vehicles. The Garden State has about 150,000 EVs already on the road. The state hopes to more than double that by the end of next year.

But many drivers worry about running out of battery without being able to find somewhere to charge up. As WMYC's Mike Hayes reports, drivers say, New Jersey must do more to calm drivers' EV range anxiety. Ken Honnold of Hackettstown recently got his first electric vehicle, a Chevy Bolt. He's enjoying it so much that he brought it out to a meetup in Bridgewater with other EV enthusiasts. I like it. I love it, actually. I think that electric vehicles are the future. He drives it all over. Just last month, he drove it hundreds of miles to upstate New York for the eclipse. And to make sure he has enough charge when he's on the road,

He says he likes to have a plan. And so you find a place to park, the place where you can charge. You charge, you go in, you have your lunch, you have your snack. When you come out, you've got enough juice to make it either to the next charging stop, if it's a long trip, or maybe to make it to your destination. But even a planner, like Ken, says he can run into issues. The problem is that a lot of the chargers don't work. I've never had a horror story.

I've just had to go from a charger that didn't work to a charger that did work. New Jersey has blown past charging infrastructure goals that lawmakers set of having 1,400 publicly available chargers by 2025. The state already has more than 3,300 of them. That includes 1,000 fast chargers that can charge an EV in as little as 20 minutes. Still, a lot of drivers I talked with say not having access to a charger when you need it the most is a big concern. The Murphy administration says they're aware, and New Jersey drivers should expect see new charging infrastructure goals soon. That's something that's top of mind for us because we know how much these policy goalposts

drive near and long-term action for the state. Prethetan Garage is the deputy director of the governor's office of climate action and the green economy. She's working to put drivers' minds at ease about their EV's battery life. The biggest priority for New Jersey when it comes to building out the EV charging network is that we prioritize build-out in highly trafficked areas to address a lot of the range anxiety. Hannah Greenberg of Jersey City is among the EV drivers looking to New Jersey to make charging more accessible. She owns a Tesla and also attended the meet-up for EV drivers in Bridgewater. She says her family has had some close calls with charging.

You do have like 5% left and you're like kind of circling to find where there could actually be a EV charger because they'll direct the navigation directs you. And they'll say, go to charger here. But finding a charger on a map and locating one in the real world are different things. If you don't see it, like you can't tell and sometimes they're really well hidden. So we've had some like panic moments of like,

are we going to be stranded without figuring out how to charge? And it's not just current EV owners who are anxious about the state of charging. Clarissa Fahey from Bondbrook stopped by the EV event. It was happening just outside her office and she was curious about vehicles her family might want to consider. She admits it's mostly her husband who's excited to drive electric. I would go for a gas car if he would let me, but he wants electric.

She says she's unsure if she's ready to deal with the challenges of keeping an EV charged up. My biggest reservation is that the infrastructure is not sound yet. There's not enough electric charges. We live in an apartment. We don't have a house. That means Clarissa's family doesn't have an easy way to install a charger at home, so she'd have to rely even more on chargers on the road. Ken Honnold, with his Chevy Bolt, is looking ahead to what he hopes will be a future free of range anxiety. It's getting better. It has to get better. Funding will be there to make it better, but that takes time.

Later this month, New Jersey officials will convene to start crafting the state's next energy master plan, which will set guidelines for all aspects of New Jersey's ongoing clean energy transition. and officials say that EVs, and in particular EV charging, will be a big discussion topic. That's WMYC's Mike Hayes. Monarch butterflies are a symbol of rebirth. They were once everywhere in New York City, but their numbers have sharply declined. The climate crisis and human development continue to diminish their habitat and food source. But gardeners in New York City are stepping in to save the migrating insect.

WMYC's Rosemary Midsdairy has more. The Monarch Butterfly is an important link in the ecosystem as both a food source and a pollinator, but their populations declined by about 60% last year. To help solve the problem, local gardeners are taking matters into their own hands and planting Monarch's favorite food. This is about 1,500 milkweeds here.

We mostly have common milkweed, escolopeus syriaca. We also have Asclepius tuberosa, butterfly milkweed. that's the orange one. Logan Fisher is a horticulture supervisor and governor's island in New York Harbor. His crew is planting milkweed

on eight sites across the 172 acre green space. The fragrant but toxic plant is deeply tied to the monarch's survival, but it's getting harder to find. The native flower is treated like a weed and cut down. I'm a monarch butterfly, and I'm finding a milkweed. I'm laying my eggs on the milkweed,

and then I'm dying because I just finished my long journey. from Mexico. So my eggs are going to be on that milkweed. They'll grow and grow, and then they'll hatch, and then they'll be tiny little itty-bitty caterpillars, and then they start munching on the milkweed leaves. If there is no milkweed, then there are no monarchs. At Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan, residents are scattering seeds everywhere. We're doing what you might call guerrilla gardening, where we're planting the milkweed wherever we can get it to grow. Keith Desaesare is the co-founder of the Inwood Butterfly Sanctuary, a small community-run garden.

Right over the hill, there's a little plot where we have a dozen milkweed. Over behind the dog run, there's a little strip of land where we have some of the milkweed. Last year, monarch's sightings on the East Coast fell to one of the lowest on record. And it's not just a dearth of milkweed that's the problem. David Grimaldi, an entomologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, says climate change is killing the butterflies. Monarchs don't like to fly beyond, say, 85 degrees Fahrenheit. It limits their migration. They become dried out.

And Grimaldi says there are other threats facing the monarchs, from invasive species of predators and plants to herbicides and pesticides. If this population doesn't recover next year, then it's caused for serious, serious alarm. Because it's rare to have two years in a row where it's this low. In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will make a decision on whether to change the conservation status of monarch butterflies to threaten or endangered. But the agency says that could be unlikely because too many other species on Earth

are in much greater peril. That's WMYC's Rosemary Misdairy. 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.