Casey Berkovitz

@caseyberk.bsky.social

1822 Followers 1112 Following

I talk about housing policy for a living, but I skeet about it for fun. Here for housing, politics, sports, and bad jokes. Go bears.

It’s an indication that the toll to enter Manhattan below 60th Street has not been the albatross the governor’s opponents wished. Hochul on Thursday practically reveled in this development. “To all the naysayers and doomsday tellers who thought this would be the demise of New York City, I’m so proud that, as we’re approaching the one-year anniversary of turning on the cameras, it’s been wildly successful,” she said. Hochul can point to several metrics: Decreased traffic and increased subway ridership top among them. “That’s exactly what we want,” she said. “That’s less accidents, it’s less emissions.” Business, too, is booming in the congestion zone. As our Ry Rivard noted, the New York City Economic Development Corp. found foot traffic inside the central business district was up 4.8 percent compared to only 1 percent for business districts elsewhere in the city.
ABC 7 headline “Some Staten Island residents worried about impacts of City of Yes affordable housing plan”
Op-ed from leaders of New Kings Democrats and Brooklyn Young Democrats headlined "Brooklyn! Vote 'Yes' on the Affordable Housing Proposals
Michael Kinnucan's column "You Can't Have Social Housing Without Building Housing"
RPA's voter guide in support
Michelle de La Uz's op-ed in support
Brad Lander, Kathy Hochul, Mark Levine, and Keith Powers flyering.
Errol Louis's NY Mag column
The Daily News Editorial Board endorsement
Two small children high fiving runners
The lack of affordable housing in the five boroughs is an emergency, like a raging fire, and decisive action is needed immediately. The Council has specialized in stalling and killing development and they must lose that power. The public, not the pols, will have the final say with the trio of ballot proposals. Proposal 2 would move affordable housing plans faster through the approval process instead of the seven months now required. Proposal 3 creates a faster review system for smaller land use projects and Proposal 4 has a new appeals structure, where the Council retains a role, but not sole discretion, to sign off on a rezoning. The Council has been wielding that power irresponsibly, which they politely call “member deference,” but we correctly label it as “local veto” over entire developments with hundreds or even thousands of units. That obstinance has to end and it will when the three amendments are made to the City Charter.
But digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
Chris Murphy tweet: Presser is now on the funding shut off. And the broader attack on democracy and growing constitutional crisis. On my way there now.
Sam Stein tweet: Two parties running at different speeds. Senate Dems are holding a press conference today to condemn the pardoning of J6ers. That was done a week ago. Unclear if there is a presser today to go after the OMB's power play to take over all federal grant money.
Picture of a book with highlighted text: Residents like Edward Kendrick of Wakefield and Beverly Bjorkman of Reading got involved in the anti-ABM effort because they feared the installation would force local officials to change their zoning laws to allow apartments for army employees.
Labor Unions and White Racial Politics Paul Frymer, Jacob M. Grumbach
The guiding principle behind City of Yes is to distribute the responsibility of creating housing more evenly, essentially extending it to every neighborhood in the city. Say you are a homeowner with an underused backyard. Under certain conditions, you can now build or repurpose a structure of up to 800 square feet to rent out long term (Airbnb use is not approved) or generously hand over to your aging parents. The crux of the plan, though, is an emphasis on modest structures of five or six stories rather than 30.
Ms. Robbins, who grew up in Manhattan but now lives in Queens, compared navigating the intersection where she works, at Canal and Lafayette Streets, to a game of Frogger — at least in the old days. “It would stress me out just getting lunch,” she said. Thursday was her first day there post-congestion pricing. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was able to cross safely, and cars weren’t honking. It was like a whole other world.”
Minjee Kim, author of a recent study, tweeting: Hi there! Author here. Thanks so much for taking interest in the article! I want to clarify that we do not make any claim re displacement. It is critical that we clearly distinguish gentrification from displacement when studying the impacts of much-debated policies like upzoning. I'd also like to point out that this study is about neighborhood-level, targeted upzoning and says nothing about broad, mass upzoning. Just wanted to leave these thoughts as I'd hate to see the study being mischaracterized and misused in policy debates.
Q: How did that happen? How did Democrats become the party of trying to sound like the precise vocabulary of whatever the latest campus lingo is? A: I don’t know, except that there is a category of folks on the left and the right who define themselves by their willingness to say unpopular things. And saying an unpopular thing to them, is definitionally courageous. And so even though if you look at most of our great leaders throughout American history, they tried to find the most popular way to say the thing they were working on. Not the most provocative way to say it. And yet, if you define yourself online or in real life as against the establishment, then however I phrase something, is definitionally not good enough.
Rally for city of yes with Local 79, 32BJ, HTC, and city of yes signs