In State of City speech, de Blasio positions himself as a friend to small business and tenants
Will Bredderman
The first State of the City address since Mayor Bill de Blasio's presidential bid imploded found him whistling a familiar tune, if not quite as loud.
Still, business owners and landlords should take note of some of his plans.
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Gone were the 2019 vows to mandate paid vacation for almost all private sector workers and establish a public 401(k) system—items intended to win interest from lefty Democratic primary voters nationwide. On Thursday, the mayor often sounded dour, pessimistic about the progress his own administration had made after six years in office, acknowledging continued cost-of-living increases, residents leaving and businesses shuttering.
The address's hashtag: #SaveOurCity.
"We are facing challenges, we are facing forces that we have never, ever experienced with this kind of intensity before," he told the crowd at the Museum of Natural History. "How many of you fear that this generation of your family may be the last that can afford to live in New York City?"
The mayor's agenda in the new year is no less populist than the one he trumpeted last January, just more attuned to local concerns. And he chose as his targets are "bad landlords" and "the forces of greed."
Commercial rent is too damn high
The mayor at last bent to the notion of commercial rent control, a proposition he has long labeled unconstitutional. He announced he would establish a "blue ribbon" commission to study the matter and render recommendations by the end of the year.
"I think the time has come to settle this once and for all," de Blasio said. "Because at one point in our history we may need this to save our small businesses."
It's a commonplace in politics that you impanel a commission to study an issue when you want it to go away, andthe mayor maintained that imposing the policy would fall not to City Hall but Albany. But he also outlined another proposal to placate aggrieved retailers and their advocates: a vacancy tax on commercial landlords suspected of keeping storefronts off the market to hold out for high-paying tenants.
"They need to pay if they're going to do that to us," he said.
This will need Albany's approval, and the mayor has never wielded much clout in the capital. It also comes in spite of his own administration's findings that the retail vacancy crisis has only afflicted very high-end and very low-end corridors.
Minding your business
The mayor revisited a theme from his first mayoral run in 2013: easing penalties on businesses caught violating the city's many regulations. How much relief is coming is unclear: de Blasio's office boasted in a press release of having slashed fines by 40% already, and vowed to hit 50% by the time he exits Gracie Mansion in 2022.
"We're going to put $6 million back in the pockets of small businesses," he promised.
He also promised new "navigators" to help enterprising New Yorkers interface with the city bureaucracy.
The Democrat also pledged to invest $500 million in city pension funds in small business—a move that would seem to require the approval of the boards governing the byzantine public employee retirement system. And he vowed to furnish struggling entrepreneurs with low-interest loans and free lawyers to negotiate lease renewals.
The mayor also unveiled a series of ambitious-sounding housing proposals that similarly seem less impressive when examined fully. For example, his release boasted he would push to provide "rent without a security deposit," but the initiative will start by allowing new tenants in 60,000 city-subsidized apartments to instead pay monthly a renter security insurance fee or an upfront amount of less than one month's rent. De Blasio more modestly promised to advocate "local and state legislation to expand these alternative options" to the larger market.
De Blasio endorsed a bill in Albany to instate universal rent control, but that lies beyond his powers as mayor. He also vaguely vowed to expand city support for community land trusts, which control local lots and construct affordable housing on a nonprofit model.
Intriguingly, he announced he would expand a Brooklyn pilot program to bring basement apartments and other informal dwellings up to code. At the citywide level, the administration will offer financial assistance to homeowners who want to lease a cellar, a backyard unit or a room over their garage so long as they keep the rents low.
Further, he vowed to persuade the state Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo to reform the city's much-maligned property tax system.
He's got the power
To address the "even greater crisis" of climate change, de Blasio re-upped a controversial plan for the city to import energy from Canada's state-owned Hydro-Quebec. The city will also help finance and install solar panels on 50,000 one-to-four family homes, which it projects will create 5,000 jobs. The source of these figures is unclear.
"In our time these changes can be made," he said. "And we will save this earth for our children and grandchildren."
The mayor promised too to establish a $57 million wind turbine "hub" at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and an "innovation hub" on Governor's Island to explore other green technologies. He also issued an executive order prohibiting the construction of any new fossil fuel infrastructure, whether expansion of power generating facilities, pipelines or transformer terminals.
Additional executive orders will convert the entire city vehicle fleet to electric engines by 2040, almost two decades after de Blasio is due to leave office, and—in the nearer term—debar the use or purchase of single-use plastic bottles on city property or by city agencies by the close of 2021.
The mayor also vowed that he would "work with the City Council" to ban on oil and gas in large buildings by 2040. It seems, however, that the emissions-cap legislation passed last year has already put the city on course to effectively do that.
Reviews are in
The address drew a mixed response from the city's business community. The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce voiced relief that the mayor had abandoned, however briefly, new labor law obligations.
"The mayor's attention to the needs of small business is both heartening and welcome," said chamber CEO Jessica Walker. "The best part of his speech was what he didn't say; importantly, there was no mention of new mandates or costly regulations like paid vacation which would crush many small businesses."
The restaurant industry, meanwhile, questioned de Blasio's emphasis on battling landlords and lease spikes. The NYC Hospitality Alliance fretted about the lack of details for many of his proposals and his emphasis on spurring Albany to action, and noted that $6 million in reduced fees spread across more than 200,000 businesses citywide amounts to little savings for any one entrepreneur.
The group called for the mayor to go beyond proffering help in navigating the city bureaucracy—and to actually start cutting the regulatory tripwires that snag so many restaurateurs.
"When it comes to a restaurant space, labor costs are a much, much more considerable concern than rent, as a percentage of sales," said Alliance executive director Andrew Rigie. "It's great that the mayor is talking about ways to help small businesses. But we need specific policies, and a lot more of them, and we need them now."
The Real Estate Board of New York declined to engage directly with the mayor's proposed vacancy tax or his apparent warming to commercial rent control. The organization, representing developers and other property interests, maintained that all schemes to assist small business will come to naught without an overhaul of the city's excises on buildings and land—which places much of the burden on the owners of apartment complexes and commercial space.
"We can't ignore the fact that the city continues to inequitably tax retail properties and multifamily rental housing that hurts small businesses and exacerbates our affordability crisis," REBNY President James Whelan said in a statement.
Updated to include comments and details from de Blasio, Walker, Rigie and Whalen.
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