After Pre-K Victory, Focus Should Shift To Sandy

Part of being mayor is walking the tightrope between pushing a long-term agenda while also focusing on the urgency of the present. For Mayor Bill de Blasio, that balancing act is exemplified through his public campaign for universal preschool, and his intermittent focus on the protracted Superstorm Sandy recovery effort. 

De Blasio campaigned last year on a proposal to raise taxes on New York City’s high-income earners to pay for a $340 million universal pre-K program, and delivered a partial victory by securing $300 million from the state for preschool—albeit without the tax hike or the additional funds he had requested for an expanded after-school program. 

The mayor wisely took the money the city did receive in stride and wasted no time touting the accomplishment publicly, first at an assembly on affordable housing hosted by the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation in Brooklyn on March 30, and again the day after prior to throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day for the Mets. 

“I can tell you one thing: This really is a historic moment for the children and families of New York City,” de Blasio said. “This is a huge step forward. It’s going to have lasting benefits. It’s going to have a huge multiplier effect. This is an investment. This is the kind of investment that will actually turn around our public schools and make them work for everyone.” 

Meanwhile, as the mayor kicked off his pre-K victory lap at Citi Field, in the City Council chambers a group of homeowners were giving testimony detailing the hoops through which they have had to jump in order to receive help through the city’s Build It Back program—a disaster recovery initiative started by the Bloomberg administration to help homeowners, owners of rental buildings and low-income tenants rebuild and repair their storm-ravaged homes. 

The fact that de Blasio had only just announced his Sandy recovery team two days before the Council oversight hearing on housing recovery in the aftermath of the storm, underscored the perception, unwarranted or not, that his administration is having difficulty grasping some of the fundamentals of governance. 

“I thought there should have been a Sandy czar appointed very early on in the administration, given that the mayor was elected in November,” said the Council’s Minority Leader Vincent Ignizio, who represents the south shore of Staten Island, an area hit hard by Sandy. 

De Blasio has been in office nearly three months, after all, and during that time, over 20,000 applicants to the Build It Back program—which serves homeowners and renters whose homes were damaged or destroyed— continued to be unable to break ground on new homes or receive reimbursement money for repairs from the city. 

To be fair, a large part of that delay could be attributed to the mechanics of the program put in place by the previous administration. Sources familiar with the structure of Build It Back under Bloomberg, who requested anonymity so as not to anger the former mayor, say that an overwhelming level of bureaucracy has plagued the program. These sources suggested that the housing recovery aspect of the program should have been administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development instead of the newly created Housing Recovery Office, which has been run out of City Hall, and requires a complicated coordination between HPD and other agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection. 

Amy Peterson, Mayor de Blasio’s new director of the Housing Recovery Office and the former president of Nontraditional Employment for Women, addressed some of the challenges the agency has encountered to date during her testimony at the oversight hearing, citing specifically the coordination complications and the frustrations the city has had in collecting the proper documentation from Build It Back applicants as two major areas of concern. To Peterson’s credit, she sat through nearly the entire 7-hour hearing and displayed a comfortable familiarity with the program, presenting a host of facts and figures—perhaps allaying any concerns about her lack of experience in emergency management. 

Some of those figures, however, reflected poorly on both the previous and current administrations. And while nobody explicitly accused de Blasio’s team of passing the buck on the failures of the recovery effort, at times emotions ran high during the Council hearing as some members clamored for an increased level of accountability. 

“The problem is, it’s been about 10 months, and Build It Back hasn’t actually built anything back yet,” said Councilman Jumaane Williams during the hearing. “This administration may not have made the mess, but this administration has to clean it up.” 

Of the 22,000 Build It Back applicants, only six have broken ground on new homes. Moreover, only $100,000 of the committed reimbursement money for repairs has been distributed—and that amount had only gone out a week earlier, to three different applicants. Another $700,000 is slated to be allotted soon, but still those are harrowing numbers considering it has been nearly 18 months since Sandy. 

Peterson and city officials maintain they have been largely hamstrung by the funding source for much of the Sandy aid: Community Development Block Grants. The city is required to spend at least 51 percent of its CBDG funds on low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations, households that are at or below 80 percent of the Area Median Income for the New York City region, a metric defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which disburses the federal money. 

“Ensuring [LMI] compliance has … necessitated a time-consuming process to collect and verify income information for all applicants, including homeowners and tenants who live in buildings that have registered [for Build It Back],” Peterson said in her testimony before the Council. 

The city also has to ensure that in the process of disbursing CBDG money it is not duplicating benefits individuals have already received, such as FEMA awards or private insurance payouts. 

Poking a hole in the city’s argument that HUD requirements have been a deterrent to Build It Back, however, is the relative success of the state’s New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program, which by comparison is a model of efficiency in administering storm recovery assistance. 

According to a recent press release, NY Rising has distributed more than $280 million in payments to 6,388 homeowners affected by Sandy, tapping funds from the same CBDG fount as the city while adhering to the same stringent federal compliance requirements. 

There is an argument to be made that getting displaced New Yorkers back on their feet as quickly as possible should have been prioritized over (or at least pursued contemporaneously with) de Blasio’s big picture issues, such as universal pre-K—which, while certainly a worthy cause in its own right, does not carry the same urgency. 

In the press release announcing de Blasio’s Sandy team, the administration touted the progress the city has made in addressing the needs of storm victims, highlighting its reallocating $100 million in federal aid toward housing recovery; increasing the staff of the Housing Recovery Office by 35 percent; accelerating the design process for home repairs and rebuilds; and eliminating such permit and procedural bottlenecks as the requirement to clear outstanding Department of Building permits that prevent scheduled repairs from moving forward. 

All of these steps are admirable, but hardly demonstrate the claim advanced by the release that the mayor has “prioritized the fast and efficient delivery of relief to affected families” from day one, especially given the astonishingly low number of people the city’s rebuilding program has actually helped. By contrast, the mayor’s universal pre-K plan has been promoted to the general public and media with a barrage of white papers, progress reports on the hiring of qualified teachers, public lobbying of the state Legislature and now an extended victory lap. 

If these improvements to Build It Back were undertaken from day one, then why roll them out nearly three months into de Blasio’s tenure in office? At the very least, an earlier announcement would have demonstrated a commitment to Sandy recovery, rather than making the mayor’s efforts to date come across as little more than lip service.