A little perspective on housing for Mayor Adams

By David K. Brawley, Ed Mason and Patrick O’Connor • December 2, 2022

Every mayor tries to make his own mark on New York — in part by showing how he differs from his immediate predecessor, in part by choosing themes and programs that he can call his own. We have seen this pattern play out since the first term of the first “Mayor Swagger,” Ed Koch. As leaders who have created our own initiatives and developed our own programs, we’ve learned to operate with a combination of thick skin, a sense of humor, and a willingness to confront every mayor when they either ignore the successes of others or make claims that simply don’t reflect reality.

We recall a meeting with then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg when he talked about his role in bringing education reform to the city. He waxed eloquent about his support of scores of quality charter schools, as if those were the first new schools in recent memory. We reminded him that Metro IAF and others had fought for mayoral control of the dismal public school system and the dismantling of 110 Livingston St.’s Board of Education bureaucracy long before he arrived on the scene.


We wrote a piece in the Daily News titled, “Draining the school swamp.” Our educational advisor at the time, Ray Domanico, dubbed districts with chronically failing schools “educational dead zones.” We had also championed the first wave of new, smaller community-based high schools with an earlier chancellor, Joe Fernandez, long before Bloomberg arrived on the scene.


So we reminded the mayor that, while he had indeed played a role in bringing long-delayed educational reforms to New York, he wasn’t the first or the only champion of change.


Flash forward: When Mayor Adams recently announced several new housing plans, including one in Willets Point that called for 2,700 new affordable apartments, he claimed that this was “the biggest 100% affordable housing project in New York City since the 1970s.”

That is technically true, but barely. All Adams had to do was to take a ride to Spring Creek, in East New York, where East Brooklyn Congregations is completing the final phases of 2,665 all-affordable homes and apartments, including ownership housing that enables African-American and Hispanic buyers to begin to build equity — real wealth.


There’s another nit we have to pick. His recent announcements with the Related Companies (which, full disclosure, built the wildly successful retail portion of Spring Creek) and Silverstein Properties give them full — actually fulsome — credit.


We don’t begrudge that. What we begrudge is the tendency to ignore the impact over a 40-year period of grassroots leaders and activists who are not celebrities, who don’t hang out at the best clubs, and who certainly don’t make large campaign contributions to elected officials.

Yet it was those (mostly anonymous) neighborhood leaders who stood in the breach when the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and dissolution and designed a home-building effort that none of the great academics, pundits or developers thought possible at the time.


Their work has been recognized in two recent accounts of New York’s growth, ”New York, New York, New York” by Thomas Dyja and “The New Yorkers” by Sam Roberts. These people and their organizations — East Brooklyn Congregations and South Bronx Churches among them — delivered thousands of new homes on the once-vacant and devastated acres of their communities. And a sister organization, Queens Power, stands poised today to deliver at least 3,000 more on the Creedmoor site in Queens.


To overstate the impact of the establishment’s real estate darlings and ignore the impact of tough, focused, persistent community leaders minimizes or ignores the effective work of everyday New Yorkers. It encourages the corrosive sense that merit doesn’t matter; only insider connections do. It discourages others from designing and implementing innovative strategies that are informed by those closest to the issues and deepest in their communities.

The radical change needed now in our nation is the construction of scores of thousands of new, affordable ownership homes and condos in New York and approximately 4 million new affordable starter homes, a need fully documented by Fannie Mae and others. The injection of critical masses of affordable ownership housing would enable millions of Americans to begin to build equity and bridge the wealth gap. The mayor should join us as we press for a national campaign to address this issue. If he does, he will truly have a horn worth tooting.


Brawley and Mason are co-chairs of East Brooklyn Congregations. O’Connor is co-chair of Queens Power. All are leaders of Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.


Editor’s note: This op-ed originally said the Willets Point plan is smaller than the Spring Creek development, asserting that the latter was producing 3,100 units of housing. That is untrue. Willets is in fact the largest affordable housing development by numbers in the last 40 years.

By David K. Brawley and Joel Mosbacher April 26, 2025
Imagine 52,000 guns. That’s how many guns, once belonging to police officers across the country, were retrieved from crime scenes between 2006 and 2022. How many of those crime scenes were in New York City? And how many of those guns used to belong to the officers of the New York Police Department? We are a minister and a rabbi here in New York, leaders of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, who each have too many stories to tell about how we and our congregants have been personally impacted by gun violence. We have buried congregants, friends, and family members who were killed by gunfire. In many cases, those guns were bought or stolen by shooters who took advantage of the glut of guns in our cities and counties. According to data obtained in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, between 2006 and 2022, more than 52,000 guns formerly belonging to police officers were used to commit crimes against civilians and members of law enforcement. Instead of being melted down or destroyed, the weapons were sold. Of the many maddening aspects of the scourge of the gun violence epidemic in America, this ranks up there with the most maddening. While the issue of gun violence is complicated and while many responses are debatable, this trend is neither. And the next NYPD commissioner and the next mayor should make sure that this infuriating pattern is ended and that the NYPD becomes a leader in this arena. The Reveal podcast released an episode in July 2024 on how tens of thousands of cop guns have ended up in the hands of criminals. Since then, more than a dozen law enforcement agencies across the country, including the New York State Police, have stopped reselling their used firearms or are reviewing their policies. The New York Police Department buys more weapons than any law enforcement agency outside of the federal government. Which means that the department has massive purchasing power when it comes to the companies it does business with.We know that the department has said it doesn’t trade in its service weapons, and that’s a good start. But the department has consistently refused to use the leverage that its purchasing power provides to insist that gun makers act more responsibly. We have met with past commissioners and assistant commissioners. We have described how the NYPD could insist that Glock and other gun makers integrate gun safety technology into all future weapon manufacturing. We have quoted the statistics on how guns acquired by criminals end up creating chaos in our communities. We have cited the studies that describe how guns in households, lacking state-of-the-art gun safety technology, have ended up in the hands of children who often harm themselves or siblings.In an era of ever-modernizing smartphones and other devices, we have argued for the integration of already available high-tech controls into weapons creation. We have reminded them that we have always given the NYPD the credit it deserves for the dramatic reduction in homicides in our city, from a peak of 2,245 in 1990 to 377 last year. Our leaders were instrumental in working with local precincts to drive those dreadful numbers down and keep them down. But now is not the time to stop or lose focus. In recent years, high level NYPD officials have listened, nodded sympathetically, and then done nothing. The candidates for mayor are staking their claims for how they’ll keep New Yorkers safe should they be elected. An easy and impactful move they should commit to is this: insist that the NYPD requires accountability from the companies it purchases weapons from to help ensure that cop guns everywhere are destroyed rather than sold to criminals and that gun safety options are tested and integrated into future NYPD purchases. Our faith traditions teach us not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbors. When our elected officials and those tasked with keeping us safe do nothing while the manufacturers of weapons sell retired service weapons to criminals, they are doing worse than just standing idly by. They are enabling mayhem that is often avoidable.If our next mayor expects us to trust them when they say they’ll do what’s necessary to keep New Yorkers safe, this step is one way to prove it. Brawley, a pastor, and Mosbacher, a rabbi, are leaders in the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation network in New York City.
By MICHAEL GECAN January 21, 2025
In times of political uncertainty, it's essential to stay engaged without succumbing to fear. This article explores strategies for effective organizing, including focusing on local political action, building strategic alliances, and resisting the urge to demonize opponents. It also highlights the growing influence of cryptocurrency in politics and the urgent need for smart, proactive resistance against its potential financial dangers.
By Eliza Shapiro - NYTimes January 16, 2025
Written by By Eliza Shapiro Illustrations by Tim Peacock Jan. 16, 2025 Click to read the article on the NY Times