The Roundtable: Keith Wright

Q: What do you think about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing? What can the state Legislature do to help out? 

KW: My thoughts on the plan are Hip, hip, hooray! I love it. Now I finally get a mayor who’s talking my language, someone that I can communicate with. I think it’s fabulous. I want to be helpful. Whatever we can do in the state Legislature to make that happen is something that I certainly want to do. Certainly we have to define what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, because there are a number of different ways you can go about it. We could probably preserve a lot of the affordable housing if we’re able to get an influx of capital money to help our New York City Housing Authority properties, because they’ve been neglected with capital money and in terms of repairs and the infrastructure throughout the city. Now, in terms of where I live, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s we needed to redevelop, but I think we’ve gone condo-crazy. We really need to look at building low- and moderate-income housing, especially in the five boroughs. Neighborhoods are made up of an economic mix. It’s not all rich people or poor people. When I was growing up in Harlem—and I lived in the same old rent-stabilized apartment that I grew up in, which not a lot of people can say—we had an economic mix of people. We had folks that were well off, doctors and lawyers, we had folks that were middle income, police officers or teachers, and we had folks on public assistance. It made for the best childhood and the best neighborhood that anybody could ever, ever want. I loved my upbringing so much I decided to stay. Every neighborhood, whether you live in Westchester or Bedford-Stuyvesant, it’s good to have an economic mix, because we can all learn from each other, and it makes for a better neighborhood.