NYC NOW - September 5, 2024 : Evening Roundup

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Three top officials in the Adams administration have had their homes raided by FBI agents, according to a source familiar with the matter. Plus, New York's attorney general is offering tips on how to detect fake content generated by artificial intelligence, ahead of the November election. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson discusses housing policy with former federal Housing Secretary, Shaun Donovan.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. Three top officials in the Adams administration have had their homes rated by FBI agents, according to a source familiar with the matter. The three are Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, Philip Banks, first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, and her partner, Schools Chancellor David Banks. The school's chancellor and Wright share a home, and Philip Banks is his brother. The purpose of the raids is unclear.

The FBI has previously searched the homes or confiscated evidence from the mayor and several of his aides in a federal probe into his 2021 campaign. A lawyer for City Hall says they have no indication that the mayor or his staff are the target of any investigation. Ahead of the presidential election in November, New York's Attorney General is offering tips on how to detect fake content generated by artificial intelligence. Attorney General Leticia James says fake or misleading videos, images or audio can be used to impersonate people and spread misinformation. The AG says you can protect yourself by reaching out directly to election boards for information.

You should also avoid relying on chatbots to answer any election-related questions. She says, be especially on the lookout for misinformation about the time, place, and manner of voting. If you see misinformation, you can report it by calling the election protection hotline. line. New York City is among a growing list of U.S. cities experiencing a housing crisis. Now, housing is usually a local issue, but Democrats have recently placed it on the national stage. Coming up, a conversation with someone who has worked on both the state and federal side of housing policy. That's after the break. Like many parts of the country, New York, New York.

New York City is in the midst of a housing crisis, but that's not really news, right? What is news is that at last month's Democratic National Convention, many national Democrats expressed specific policy preferences for how to address an increasingly unaffordable housing market. But housing policy in the U.S. is traditionally treated as a local issue. So what can the federal government do? For more, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with someone who has worked on both the state and federal side of housing policy. Sean Donovan was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the first six years of President Barack Obama's administration.

And before that, he served as housing commissioner under former mayor, Mike Bloomberg. Here's their conversation. Americans tend to think of housing as more of a local issue. It's something that's primarily dictated by local officials, whether it be the mayor, the city council, city planning. So what role do the feds have to play here? Well, Sean, the first thing I would say is it really is a national. national crisis now. Maybe in a way, I've been doing this work for 30 years, and I've never seen the problems this deep, but also this broad. And what I mean by that is, you know, it feels like New York

has always had a housing problem. But right now, we've got a crisis in almost every state in the country, almost every place. So I think it's not surprising that this crisis is translating into national conversation about it and national action. And it's very, very bipartisan in a way that I've never seen before in a long career in housing. And that means that the federal government has to step up. And yes, there are things that are controlled locally. But the federal government is also trying to do more and encourage states and local governments to do more as well with incentives, some carrots, but also some potentially some sticks. We tend to think of these big transformations in American housing policy after World War II.

The Federal Housing Administration took a more active role in financing homeownership leading to the development of the modern American suburb. That's how a lot of people in my family bought houses. The Housing Act of 1949 led to the construction of more public housing. Bold initiatives that were driven primarily by Washington. So when and why did that change? First of all, what you saw was that at different times in our history, the end of the 1900s, for example, we had an enormous crisis in our cities with overcrowding.

Certainly in the middle of the century coming out of the Depression, you had a crisis that was at a scale that we hadn't seen in a long time as well economically. And so I think we're starting to get to the point where the housing crisis is bad enough. We saw the biggest rent increases in our history in terms of recording that data during COVID and the price of homeownership has skyrocketed 50%. Those are really a scale of crisis, I think, that are getting us back to times when the federal government moved in a big way. Former President Obama made some waves in his speech at the DNC when he talked about scrapping outdated zoning laws and regulations that make it harder to build affordable homes. isn't zoning though primarily local issue like how can the feds exert pressure on local governments to revise zoning so it is a local issue but here's the important thing to remember the federal government is an incredibly important source of funding and oversight for almost everything that happens around this country and so i'll give you an example

recently the biden administration put out something called the pro housing grants This is the program for reducing obstacles where Pro comes from. And that's giving funding to local governments that are doing the right thing. And that's an incredibly important part of what the government could do is to encourage it. But what's interesting what you're seeing around the country is that more and more state governments who actually do have the power to tell local governments what they have to do are starting to take action. This year alone, more than 30 governors have talked about housing in their state of the state addresses, and over a dozen states have started to take action to reduce these barriers. So the federal government needs to be part of the action, but we need states and locals to step up as well.

You know, you mentioned rent and how expensive it is, but we're not really hearing a lot about renters, the national dialogue around housing. They are caught up in all of this, too. New York City is a city of renters. So why are we not hearing more about renters in the national discourse about housing? And what can feds do to alleviate their increasingly unaffordable housing burn? Sean, you raise a great point. And especially as a lifelong New Yorker in a city where two-thirds of us are our renters, it's incredibly important that we talk about it here in New York. But look, part of it is it's a campaign here, right? And in a way that, that we tend to talk about middle class when it comes to just about anything. I think the same

thing is happening in housing is that even if you're not a homeowner right now, just about everybody still aspires to become a homeowner at some point in their life. And so I think there is a political aspect to it. I do think we need to be talking more about renters because that's where the most serious housing challenges are. But again, the good news here is we do have tools to make this happened. The low-income housing tax credit is the most successful public-private partnership we've ever had in housing in this country. We know that tools like vouchers and others work. And in New York City, you can't talk about reaching low-income renters without recognizing that we need tens of billions of dollars to fix up our public housing. One in 11 New Yorkers lives in

public housing, and it's been woefully underfunded for decades. This is a moment where we have to take seriously preserving what is really the most important rental housing we have for the lowest income in New York, and that's public housing. One of the policies or we call them a group of policies that Mayor Adams here in New York City has pushed for is this city of yes plan. And a big part of that proposal is revising zoning laws so that in certain areas you can build denser and higher and presumably build more housing for folks. But on the other hand, what you're hearing from existing homeowners is that this is going to change the character of our neighborhoods. It's going to depress the value of our homes. What can government officials do to win over those folks, whether they're in

New York City or maybe in the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey or anywhere else for that matter? Look, we've seen this fight. Governor Hokel put out a housing compact a couple of years ago that pretty famously went down in flames because of resistance. But they kept at it. And this year they came back and they got some important pieces done. And I really want to shout out some brave public officials who are more and more speaking out about the need to step up, to build more densely and to create more options. And whether it's the borough presidents in Manhattan and in Brooklyn, for example, or a range of legislators around the state in New York that are starting to step up, I think we are seeing more and more people do that.

And to your question about how to win the appeal, what I find is that it's one thing to talk about your own house that you own. But when you start to talk to a family about, well, where are your kids going to live? Are they going to be able to stay nearby and your grandchildren? Not to mention companies that can attract workers. Our economy is growing more slowly in this region and in many regions around the country, simply because it's harder and harder to get workers to move for jobs to a place where we just don't have the housing affordability that we need. So there are lots of things like that that I think can build campaigns.

And the truth is we're seeing those campaigns win in more and more states around the country. So I think we just have to keep at it and eat into that resistance and turn more NIMBYs into YIMBYs. That's former Federal Housing Secretary Sean Donovan talking with WMYC's Sean Cowan. 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.