Dear friends,
Yesterday was the second birthday of the wiffij. I want to begin today by thanking you for joining the work of educating and activating ourselves to advance justice. You will never know how many action suggestions come to me from readers, because I seldom thank individuals publicly any more; you are a humble lot, and many of you have asked me to mention you in ways that only you will recognize.
There are always issues that I feel I am neglecting, since we are all suffering from extreme too-muchness. Housing is one of these issues that needs a whole staff.
Luckily, there’s a group called Housing Rights Initiative (HRI). To my astonishment, I recently learned that this group has just four full-time staff members.
HRI has filed
the largest housing discrimination lawsuit by number of defendants in United States history against a whopping 124 real estate companies and brokers for discriminating against low-income families with housing vouchers.
To make this issue human-scale, allow me to introduce you to Jeanette Taylor of Chicago.
Read about Jeanette’s 29-year quest to find housing with a housing voucher.
And now, let’s get back to the giant lawsuit that Housing Rights Initiative recently filed:
HRI investigators posed as prospective renters and conducted a sting operation over many months, in preparation for this suit. The law in most places requires landlords and brokers to accept government housing vouchers.
The investigators made thousands of inquiries seeking to rent homes using a special city voucher for people struggling with evictions and homelessness. But in recorded phone calls, text messages and emails, which were shared with The New York Times, the investigators were repeatedly told that landlords did not rent to such voucher holders.
Support this tremendous initiative to hold landlords and brokers accountable to existing anti-discrimination laws. Donate to HRI.
I have had a few flares of anger at our new mayor in his short tenure. I continue to feel angry about his contradictory policies concerning COVID safety generally and was livid about the stupid decision to lift vaccination requirements for school proms. (I will revisit my smoldering frustration with his positions on policing on a regular basis, but not today.)
And I fear that Adams’s decision to pause progress on public internet is part of the same hard-headed insistence that, no matter what, no one should work from home.
It is one thing to want the city to come back from COVID, healthy and vibrant. I think we all want that. It is quite another to imagine that wishing or insisting will make it so.
A group of NYC employees, City Workers for Justice, are pushing state legislation to expand the New York City Teleworking Act. The law would require each city agency to develop a policy that would allow employees to perform some or all of their duties from home as long as employee performance is undiminished.
The urgency of the problem is illustrated by the abnormally high attrition levels in the city’s workforce. There are acute staffing shortages at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, which is alarming given the city’s pressing housing problems.
[O]ne division in HPD that is charged with approving affordable housing projects ha[s] 24% fewer staff compared to what is allowed under the budget — 341 vs. 448.
A telework plan seems like common sense, given the duration and intensity of the current pandemic and the likelihood of future public health crises.
It’s late in the session AND you can use the tools from City Workers for Justice to join their telework campaign!
And now, back to public internet. In 2020, Chicago launched a $50 million four-year program called Chicago Connected; it now provides free broadband to more than 60,000 students, the largest K-12 internet connectivity program in the country. The program is on track to reach well over 200,000 students by 2024.
Two years into Chicago’s program, the city and its partner organizations have enabled entire families to be integrated into digital life, in large part thanks to on-the-ground community outreach.
This is as it should be. New York City’s Internet Master Plan, which was designed before the pandemic gripped the city, brought affordable internet to tens of thousands of NYCHA residents in an early pilot.
[It] was designed to help more than 1.5 million city residents who do not have any kind of internet access. It also aimed to bring more competition to areas with only one internet provider.
Now, the new Chief Technology Officer for the city, Matthew Fraser, wants to reevaluate before rolling out the next phase of the project — a $157 million effort to build public broadband infrastructure — even though the city has contracts with eleven service providers who are ready to go.
Greta Byrum is the former co-director of the New School’s Digital Equity Lab, which worked on the Internet Master Plan. Byrum said the plan was “years in the making” and included exhaustive research on New Yorkers’ internet habits as well as detailed economic and technical calculations.
“A lot of careful thought and time and effort — and funding, frankly — has gone into the project,” she said. “I don’t know why we would go back to the drawing board before we try and do something designed with equity at its center.”
I have a nagging feeling that this delay has less to do with the plan itself than the Mayor’s desire to get everyone back to the office.
Let the Mayor know that we’re waiting on public broadband and digital justice! This is a 30-second action.
I keep hoping that cryptocurrencies will simply collapse, so that we don’t have to expend more energy to stop the environmental disaster of crypto-mining.
My own state senator, Kevin Parker, has been leading the charge to pass the crypto moratorium, which has passed the Assembly but has not reached the Senate floor for a vote, in spite of having the votes.
“The New York state Senate has abdicated its responsibility to address climate change or attempt to meet the goals of the CLCPA,” Parker [said]. “The lack of courage on the cryptocurrency moratorium is especially disappointing because it’s a resource that’s being exploited by people that care nothing for our state.”
We can’t afford to cave on this.
Call Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins to demand that she bring the cryptomining moratorium to a vote! There’s a script and this call will take ONE MINUTE!
I have introduced my students to the “fierce urgency of now,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful phrase for calling us to action. King noted that “tomorrow is today.” Surely, where the climate is concerned, we can see that. Scientists are telling us that we cannot adapt our way out of the crisis.
Thanks for taking action!
with love,
L