DAILY NEWS, HARRY SIEGEL
I wrote a couple of long months ago about my hope that our city can emerge as a fairer and more resilient one, less dependent on global capital and more responsive to the needs of flesh-and-blood New Yorkers. The city’s main product needs to be its people — not the world’s wealth or its elites. We have tremendous native talent here, too much of it squandered.
One step toward a better tomorrow would be a decades overdue requirement that NYPD officers — very much including the brass — actually live here. That would make some economic difference but also a significant cultural difference over time, changing the nature of how police see the city and who signs up to be police.
Bill de Blasio, who rarely has the courage of his own supposed convictions and whose time in office is happily running out, says that the city’s too expensive for that to work. But here are a few things, many of them also decades overdue, that could help change that:
- A vacancy tax on commercial, office and residential real estate. No more letting global dollars seeking a safe haven squat inside of shelters in a city endlessly short on shelter, diverting development dollars in the process. New York’s markets should be responsive to the people who live here, not the people who speculate on our real estate. We need eyes on the street, not empty storefronts. If it turns out that there’s more office space than demand for it in the new normal, let prices fall or spaces get repurposed, but don’t let them just sit empty.
- A pied a terre tax. If you can afford a multi-million dollar pied a terre in New York City, you can afford to pay this tax. Even before the coronavirus, the number of uninhabited units here had been shooting up.
- A commuter tax. It’s not really a coincidence that the bosses who killed that tax two decades ago — Joe Bruno, Shelly Silver and sponsor Dean Skelos — while competing to win a suburban Senate race were all eventually convicted (though Bruno’s conviction was eventually overturned, and Silver has yet to actually get locked up five years after he was arrested and then twice-convicted) for other acts of corruption.
- Use some of that new tax money to make CUNY free again for New York City residents. The city university system, which was already being starved for funding before the virus, is the road to the middle class for 275,000 students a year. They shouldn’t return to in-person classes straight from driving for Uber, and they should be on campuses with toilets that work, sufficient and supportive administrators, and professors who aren’t eking out a living one course and semester at a time, and liable to be cut off, as many just were, if the economy takes a hit. Free tuition was a victim of the city’s last great financial crisis; restoring it should be a priority in this one.
- Whose streets? Our streets! Dedicated walking and biking streets, paths and bridges. Save a few big streets for cars and buses, and then give people and bikes and outdoor dining priority everywhere else, with a truly enforced 10-mile-per-hour speed limit.