David Siffert is a civil rights lawyer, NYU law professor, and progressive policy advocate running for New York State Assembly in District 66, which covers the West Village, Soho, and a tiny sliver of Chelsea south of 16th Street. David is NOT running for Congress. But they are an expert on the New York State Legislature in general, and on the RAISE Act in particular, so there was lots of great NY-12 crossover content in this conversation. We also spoke about David’s candidacy, and their vision for affordable housing in Lower Manhattan and across the city and state. The following transcript is lightly edited for clarity, so there may be some slight discrepancies between the podcast and the transcript.
David Siffert, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
Briefly, could you just introduce yourself? Describe your candidacy for the seat. Why are you running? What is your campaign built around? What are you guys excited about right now?
I’m David Siffert. I’m a civil rights lawyer, NYU law professor, and progressive Democrat running for New York State Assembly in District 66, which is parts of Lower Manhattan, specifically the Village, Soho, and Tribeca. I have spent a lot of time working with the state legislature, the class I teach is specifically about it. I’ve written over 100 bills for the state legislature. I’ve had some bills that I’ve written, passed, and become law, but more often than not, I’ve watched them get carved up or just ignored and have gotten increasingly frustrated. I’ve worked on all sorts of different issues from trying to make housing more affordable, trying to protect immigrants, but I’ve specialized, especially recently, in the intersection of technology and civil rights. I worked at a nonprofit advocacy organization specifically dedicated to those issues. I did both impact litigation and legislative advocacy. So a lot of what I was doing was writing legislation for the state legislature on these issues.
I’m unsurprisingly, increasingly worried about the rise of unregulated artificial intelligence and the way big tech is sort of having their way with all of us. The impacts are pretty broad, from privacy to civil rights to misinformation, environmental harms, education, and eventually catastrophic risk issues as well. And I’ve written bills on a lot of these things. I worked with Alex Bores to pass the RAISE Act, which is right now the nation’s premier AI safety bill. But by and large, there’s a lot of complacency in Albany around this issue and not a lot of expertise on it. After Alex Bores leaves the assembly at the end of the year, we just won’t have an expert in the assembly. And that’s really troubling at a time when the federal government’s obviously not going to come and save us, and we’re at a real inflection point about what our society is going to look like and how technology is going to impact that. And we have an opportunity to shape that, and we are at risk of missing that opportunity. And I have seen how progressive champions are able to make a huge difference, and I want to be one of those people.
You mentioned in there that you don’t think that the federal government is going to come save us with AI regulation. One of the candidates in NY-12 is trying to be the face of the federal government coming in to save us with AI. Is it that you’re not optimistic that Alex Bores is going to win this race? Or do you think even if he does win, that’s not going to spur an amazing federal regulation framework that will save us in your terms?
I would say more the latter. Having someone in the federal government who will be speaking up about it and keeping it on people’s minds, I think, could be important. But we have such a dysfunctional Congress, and especially with the Senate filibuster and the current federal administration. I’m really pessimistic at the moment about doing anything important. We’ve seen how much the AI industry has captured this administration, and has pushed through an executive order and attempted to push through legislation preempting state regulation of AI. And at the very least, until this administration changes, I don’t see much hope. Now I assume what Alex is hoping to do is put himself into a position where when the administration changes, maybe there’s an opening. I think that as long as there’s a Senate filibuster, I’m still pretty pessimistic. But with a friendly administration, something might happen. I don’t think we can wait three years. I think things are moving really, really quickly, and within three years there’s going to be a lot of changes.
You were involved with the RAISE Act as you say. One naive response to that bill might be: “Good news! We passed this landmark bill. We have this very strong AI regulation in New York State. And so the box has been checked and we can focus on other things.” I take it that’s not your perspective on this issue.
Definitely not. So when we started off, I talked about sort of the different categories of risks of AI when, you know, went through privacy, civil rights, misinformation, education, environment, yeah, they can go on forever. But this only dealt with one of them, which is the catastrophic risks. It doesn’t deal with most of the concerns at all. Even within the catastrophic risks, it’s sort of a bare minimum. All it requires is these companies to create safety plans and file them with the Attorney General. It doesn’t require, for example, pre-development or even pre-deployment audits. It doesn’t have strong whistleblower protections. The damages are pretty minimal. So there’s a lot of room to grow in terms of AI safety. I actually thought when this bill went through that it was going to be a no-brainer. I was shocked at how much resistance we faced trying to get the governor to sign it. I really thought this was a bare minimum bill that we could all agree on. I didn’t even think the tech companies were going to fight it because I thought it was so milquetoast in terms of filing a safety plan.
So wait, can you elaborate on that? Both, just give us like a bare bones: What does the RAISE Act do? And maybe not that bare bones, get a little bit nerdy, get specific. And then tell us about specifically your involvement in the advocacy journey and fighting to get it across the finish line.
I mean, the core of the RAISE Act is basically don’t, if you’re, it applies only to frontier AI models. These are the big massive companies, the OpenAIs, ChatGPT, the Anthropic Clouds. It says don’t deploy a model that is going to kill a lot of people or cause huge amounts of damage. And file safety plans with the Attorney General to show that you’ve thought about these problems and that your system’s not going to do that. And if you don’t comply with all of this, you know, the AG can come after you and you can be fined.
What’s an example of a safety test?
One risk is what if someone logs on to ChatGPT and says, Help me develop a novel biological weapon that’s going to kill a million people. We really don’t want ChatGPT to give a good answer to that question, right? And so you want OpenAI to have made sure that ChatGPT is not going to answer that question. And there’s a lot of things you could imagine them doing to make sure it doesn’t. And the bill itself doesn’t lay out in detail what steps those are. but they have to file what they did, the safety plan that they have and they put in place with the Attorney General. So the idea is for these companies to take some responsibility for the products they’re putting out.
So why are they objecting to such a common sense policy?
They do not want to slow down. It’s obviously very convenient to believe something that’s very profitable to you, which is that the faster we build these systems, the faster these systems can help people, and the faster people’s lives will be made better.
And so how does that manifest specifically in Albany when you’re fighting over a state law?
It means that Tech NYC will come in and spend millions of dollars trying to hire people and put out ads convincing, for example, the governor not to sign the RAISE Act or trying to stop Alex Boras from getting elected to Congress after he succeeds in passing the RAISE Act. And part of it is money and part of it is expertise, which is I think something people miss, which is, you know, I can go up to Albany and tell people about the privacy risks related to big tech, and then I come back to New York City to do my job, and Tech NYC sends in a fleet of lobbyists with a lot of expertise on how technology works, explaining to the legislature why we don’t need to do anything or why proposals are bad. I don’t, I’m not there, so I can’t respond. And I think part of the reason the RAISE Act was successful is because Alex did have that expertise, and every time they sent a lobbyist down, Alex could counter the narrative and was very successful at it. Unfortunately, we won’t have him after this year.
Couldn’t you hire someone, like a staffer? I mean, normally, either that’s someone who is in someone’s office or that’s another group, right? There are advocacy groups with built-in experts to counter other advocacy groups with built-in experts. Why does it need to be the elected official specifically?
It doesn’t need to be the elected official specifically. If there were as much money in the slow-this-down space as there were in the speed-this-up space, it wouldn’t be so important, because you could have a battle of the expert lobbyists. The fact that there’s so much more money on the side of build-it than don’t-build-it is why this is a problem. And elected officials personally just have a dramatically outsized voice, more so than any staffer or any lobbyist. And a few well-placed elected officials have the ability to take on a lot of money’s worth of lobbyists. But an organization like I worked at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, as a small non-profit organization, we would do half a dozen Albany trips a year and would be emailing legislators every day for meetings. We can’t compete with Tech NYC.
Is there a solution here where, you know, because Alex specifically is getting a ton of money from PACs that are aligned with Anthropic, which I think is at least nominally a little bit more Team Slow-It-Down. You know, now there’s this crypto billionaire who’s very excited about Alex and is giving him money. Do you have hope that in the future, in New York State specifically and in general, that Team Slow It Down will put together the amount of money and the organizational resources to make this a fair fight?
I wouldn’t run if I didn’t have hope. I’m running specifically because I think we can build a society that works for New Yorkers. If I thought that AI dystopia was inevitable, I wouldn’t be up here talking about it.
I guess I more meant specifically about the organizational mismatch though. Like right now it seems like what you’re saying is that we need a heroic knowledgeable elected official to fight back against all this money.
We need a lot of things. One person can do a lot of good, but I’m not, I’m always skeptical of the hero narrative. You know, Alex Bores did a lot, but he had a whole group of folks with him. You know, he had the sort of team Anthropic and the team slow-it-down money behind him. plus himself, plus a bunch of nonprofits and advocacy organizations like STOP, and collectively, we were able to beat back big tech. It’s gonna be a team effort. So you need some, I believe you need at least one person in the legislature who be the face within the legislature for it. It doesn’t have to be just one, preferably it’ll be more, but that person can’t do it alone. It’s sort of like a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Taking a step back, generally, when you’re working in the state legislature, you mentioned one thing that made Alex effective was that he had specific subject matter expertise on this issue. A big part of his candidacy in this race is that he brags about being voted one of the most effective legislators in the country. He told some reporters earlier this week that he passed many more bills than Micah Lasher did, and that was a sign that he was more effective.
What makes an elected official effective, specifically an Albany state legislator? And both, I guess maybe it’s a two-parter, but both in terms of Alex and Micah and how effective they are, and then also in terms of yourself and how effective you hope to be.
I think the first thing I want to say is that Alex is bragging correctly. He is an extraordinarily effective legislator, given how junior he is. For the RAISE Act, I think his expertise was absolutely necessary. But one thing that’s been impressive about him is his ability to find areas with less resistance and push there and take advantage of opportunities. So he’s done work on court reform. He’s not even a lawyer. but he’s listened to people who are, understands that there’s a need, understands that there isn’t organized opposition in the same way as there is big tech, and managed to get important bills through. And this has been through a bunch of different subject matters that he knows a varying amount about.
And so, again, expertise is useful, but it’s not necessarily necessary to be effective. And I’ll say, Being effective requires a lot of different things. Alex has a lot of these skills, one of which is being able to figure out where the opportunity is. Another is being willing to compromise. Another thing is sort of being a smart negotiator in terms of figuring out how to get what you need with upsetting the fewest number of people, where you can safely give and where you can take. Now they’re just being a really hard worker. Alex is absolutely all of those things. I think Micah is, in some ways, cut from a similar cloth. Smart, serious, hardworking. And actually, given how junior he is, I think he’s also pretty effective. Alex has been, I think, uniquely effective. But I respect both of them in terms of being competent legislators.
Okay, and brag about yourself a little bit. Tell us about why you’re going to be the most effective option of the people who are running.
Yeah, I guess the first thing I want to say is there are often, legislators tend to paint themselves in one of two ways. One is sort of the champion of the values, and one is to get it done. And there are legislators who are such necessary voices for causes that are unpopular among powerful people, and they use those voices extremely effectively, and they’re sometimes punished for it, and they don’t pass as many bills. And I have a lot of respect for that category of legislator that really sticks to their values and can express it in a positive way.
Can you give us an example of someone…
Instead of getting a name, I’ll just say, it is relatively common in the DSA space to have a legislator who’s really vocal and then winds up punished for being vocal.
I think on the flip side, you see a lot of legislators who play the inside game well, are more complimentary to people in power, but then do it in order to pass more bills. I tend to judge those people based on whether they’ve actually succeeded in passing good bills that really help people, it’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re in that category and then not actually get that much important stuff done. That’s the majority of people in that group, but I’ll say Brad Hoylman Siegel is an example of someone who really got a ton done. He was not a flamethrower, but he got a lot of just an enormous amount of really important bills through.
But there’s a whole lot of people that don’t do very much at all and really kind of fall into neither category. There are very few people that manage to do both, and those are the people that I really respect as legislators. One example would be Julius Salvazar in the Senate or Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas in the Assembly. They’re both really good at standing up for what’s right. And they haven’t done it in a way that’s compromised their effectiveness. Both of them have gotten really, really significant progressive legislation through. And so I would like to model myself after people like that. And I think I’m probably, because I’m not in the legislature, I’m known for being a vocal advocate for civil rights, for privacy, and speaking my mind on that stuff. But I think it’s all, I can give an example of my working within the system to get stuff done. I’ll tell the long story and feel free to cut it into a shorter story.
We love long stories.
So we had proposed amendments to the POST Act, which would have required increased disclosure obligations on behalf of NYPD to disclose the surveillance technologies they use. NYPD testified and said, oh, we can’t pass this bill, because if we have to do a new report every time we have a distinct surveillance technology, that means when we upgrade our camera from the 2024 version to the 2026 version, we have to do a whole new notice and comment process. It’ll take us forever. It’ll produce all this paperwork. I’m in court the next day suing NYPD to try to get documents from them. And their lawyer comes up to me and says, “hey, I talked to the deputy commissioner and we’d like to try to work something out in this bill.”
And I proceeded to sit down with NYPD’s policy lawyers over a course of a year, just about, hammering out the details of the language of this bill. And they would go to the higher ups, and I would go to the civil rights organizations, the privacy organizations, the public defender organizations, say, what do we think of this? They would do the same. We’d come back and say, OK, well, we’ve got to tweak this. It took about a year. In fact, we had to go through, we got approval from three different NYPD commissioners because they kept on getting fired or resigning in disgrace. But finally, Jessica Tisch signed off, and NYCLU signed off, and Legal Aid signed off, and Brennan Center signed off, and STOP signed off, and we all came to language and passed the city council, and it was signed by Eric Adams. So, you know, even...
Sorry, can you describe in one sentence what that bill did?
It did a whole lot of things in terms of the disclosure obligations and the record keeping obligations about NYPD with respect to their surveillance technology and the data storage and sharing and stuff. But the premier thing it did is it said, you can’t just have an IUP on cameras and fold in robots and drones and pole cameras and dashboard cameras. And you have to, every time it’s a distinct technology with a different function, you need to have a separate IUP about it.
But I think the upshot of all of it is that even if there’s an organization that you’re suing all the time and you disagree with, if you go in and negotiate in good faith, good things can happen. Now, it doesn’t always happen. It really depends on having a good faith negotiating partner on the other side of the table. And there have been plenty of times when I didn’t feel like I had that. But when you do feel like you have that, then I think you can make important progress and be effective.
what is your agenda moving forward for policing reform? Or if you want to talk more generally about criminal legal reform. We had Eli Northrop on and he was talking a lot about bail and discovery. What is your perspective on those issues in the next legislative session?
Eli and I agree a lot. We’ve been part of a lot of coalitions together and work together on a lot of things. I agree with Eli on bail and discovery issues. He tends to know a little bit more about them than I do because he’s been a public defender and he’s seen them on the ground, whereas I just hang out with public defenders and have studied it. I tend to know a little bit more about the privacy and surveillance components to it. So where my comparative expertise is on things like, how do we feel about law enforcement using fake social media profiles to trick kids into giving up their data? How do we feel about law enforcement trotting out cell site simulators to protests to harvest identities and datas of people’s cell phones that are in the area? How do we feel about facial recognition?
On this podcast, we feel bad about all of those things.
Then we are of like mind. So those are things that I know comparatively more about. I think assuming Eli and I both win, we will be pushing for a lot of each other’s priorities.
Another thing you and Eli Northrup have in common is you both have the endorsement of Our Revolution, the advocacy organization that sprung out of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Separately, Bernie Sanders endorsed a whole list of state legislative candidates across the country Eli Northrup and your colleague Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas made that list. You did not.
So you are in the illustrious group of people who are endorsed by our evolution, but not Bernie Sanders himself. The one reason, I mean, that’s just a bizarre thing in general, but Alex Bores also has that distinction. And a lot of people in this district are kind of puzzled through what that means. Is that a credential of how progressive they are, or is that a credential of knowing someone in the right place? Help us understand this.
I wish I could help you understand this. This is my first time running for office. I had helped friends who had run with their questionnaires before, but I’d never been through endorsement processes before. And they are so opaque. And sometimes you have a friend on the inside, and that is helpful for getting the endorsement, but it’s also helpful for figuring out what’s happening on the inside. And if you don’t have a friend on the inside, you just have no clue.
So Our Revolution, I earned that endorsement without a personal inside connection. I have no idea how I got that endorsement. except that I think that I share a lot of values with them and have done a lot of work for causes that they believe in. But in terms of the politics of it, the policy I understand, but the politics I don’t.
Alex and I disagree on policy a lot. You know, we align on AI safety, but I think he’d be the first to say that I’m more progressive than he is on criminal legal reform things, for example. So it’s a good example of being able to work with people you don’t agree with on every issue. I don’t have any reason to think that Alex is more conservative than Micah Lasher, for example. I think both of them have been pretty moderate on sort of the hot button progressive issues in some ways.
Can I push you on that? Is there any bit of daylight that you would want to highlight in terms of left versus right, more progressive? Is there an issue where one of them has been more of an ally to something you’ve worked on?
The only major one is the tech stuff, where Alex has been a real ally on the tech issues. But on the other ones, I’m sure that the two of them could tell you differences, but as someone who’s just an advocate trying to get them to sign onto bills, I think I got each of them to sign onto some bills and not other bills, and I didn’t have a, outside of the AI safety tech regulation stuff, I didn’t, especially when it came to the more criminal legal stuff, I didn’t get a sense that there was a huge amount of daylight.
I mean, I’m not sure they could tell us differences. I’ve heard many reporters try to get them to say differences and they’re pretty buttoned up on it.
Yeah. So I do think I have different politics and policies than both of those people. And in respect to Bernie Sanders, I had no idea who was even going to endorse. So if there was an endorsement process, if there was an application I was supposed to do, I certainly missed the memo on it. I suspect that there wasn’t. So I have no idea how Bernie made his decisions in terms of who he was going to endorse.
I will also say that in my assembly district, this isn’t, this isn’t Southwest Queens, this isn’t Northwest Brooklyn. I think I have values that align with the district, which I always say is more of the like Elizabeth Warren/Brad Lander than it is either the, you know, Joe Biden/Kathy Hochul, or the Bernie Sanders/Zohran Mamdani lane. The way that power is currently distributed in Albany, more often than not, way more often than not, I wind up on the same side as DSA pulling to make things more progressive. whether that be on the budget, on criminal legal reform stuff, or on any other issue. But I do think that there’s a more fundamentally philosophical difference that I have with, for example, Bernie Sanders that may be a reason that he didn’t go with me.
Do you feel like you’re the most progressive candidate in your race though?
I feel that way, though maybe the other candidates would say otherwise. And I will also say, there is a candidate specifically running as the moderate candidate, but of the people considered the leading contenders, I think all of us would probably identify within that, like Elizabeth Warren/Brad Lander lane. So while I feel like I’m the most progressive and I don’t want to cast anyone as a conservative or whatever, I don’t think that would be fair to most of the people running.
Talk to me a little bit about the person that, talk to me a little bit about the person that you’re replacing, Deborah Glick. She’s obviously a legendary person who’s been in this office for decades. Do you see yourself as her logical successor, like the baton is passed and you’re going to pick up where she left off?
I have a lot of respect for Deborah Glick. Not only was she the first openly gay elected government person in New York, She’s been, for 36 years, completely incorruptible. 36 years in office, and there’s no amount of money you could offer that would get her off of her values. And I think that’s one of the most important traits in a government official, the way that I don’t think that power has-- you know, power rots people’s brains in a real way, and I don’t think that’s happened to her in 36 years, which is impressive.
There’s also frustrating parts of that too, which is when I try to get her to sign on progressive bills and I come in with members of the community to sit down and talk with her about progressive bills, if she doesn’t feel like that aligns with her instinctive values or whatever, she will also not get a move for us. which obviously it’s frustrating as an advocate. I view myself as more progressive than she is, and I think that I have a record of that, especially on the criminal legal reform space. Which is not to say that she’s conservative or anything like that, but there’s some concrete areas where she just has not been, she hasn’t signed onto bills, or if she has, she hasn’t been champions on bills. And so I do think I would do things differently. I think that she is someone who works within the system type of person. And there are benefits to that, and I would hope to take advantage of those benefits, but I want to be a progressive champion in a very specific way that I think would be different than how she’s done things.
The one policy area that I want to just briefly dig into that we haven’t touched on yet is housing. This is obviously something that everyone’s obsessed with in your district in particular and all over the city. I’ve heard you talk about this Housing Access Voucher Program. Tell us about that.
Relatively simple. The Housing Access Voucher Program is very similar to the federal Section 8 program. It’s a state program to give vouchers to people who are in roughly the bottom quarter or so of income earners. to cap their rents at 30%, I believe, of their income. Would be a super important way to have comparatively low-income people be able to afford to stay in their homes, especially in New York City as it gets more expensive.
We have funded it at $50 million statewide. Obviously, it’s not even worth talking about, really, at the current amount. Obviously, good that we’ve gotten it off the ground. But we need actually to fund it. And I think there’s a push this year to fund it at $250 million. And I don’t know whether that’s going to be in the budget or not. I have no idea. I think even $500 million or $1 billion would probably be able to meaningfully change the way the city works for lower-income people and the state works for low-income people. So I believe that vouchers have to be a really big part of the solution to the housing crisis.
The standard neoliberal or YIMBY or market-oriented response to a program like that would label it pejoratively as “subsidizing demand.” Democrats are really good at subsidizing demand and giving people money so they can buy something. But as long as supply is restricted, that has both a limited amount of upside and also has an exacerbating effect on the part of the demand that isn’t subsidized as long as supply remains constricted. This is the narrative. If Ezra Klein were in this room, he would say something similar to that.
Do you see a supply-side solution specifically in the 66th district as part of your vision? Are you excited by opportunities to build a lot more market rate or mixed income housing? Or do you want to push back on that neoliberal narrative and say that actually, vouchers are really important and there’s something that Ezra Klein gets wrong about this?
I do want to push back on the neoliberal narrative in a few different ways. There’s some things that are right about it. One thing that’s right is that there’s a limit. You’re not going to fully solve this problem with vouchers. That’s one thing that’s correct. I think that the exacerbating effects are exaggerated. I don’t think that the evidence actually shows that vouchers have very serious exacerbating effects. I agree that supply statewide needs to be part of a solution. There are more people that want to live in New York than there’s housing in New York. And if we don’t do something about that, there’s only so much that we can fight the market.
But I find a lot of the details to be missed. A lot of economic analyses are directional. but they don’t do a good job in engaging with the extent of the impact. So for example, I think building more housing, market rate housing, in neighborhoods where everyday working New Yorkers can afford market housing is really important. The impacts are very tangible and immediate. Some of the classic YIMBY ideas of getting rid of parking requirements, getting rid of single-family zoning near train stations or whatever, I think are no-brainers. The idea that we should have, by and large, building up to six-story buildings in most places seems sort of like a no-brainer to me.
The difference, I will say, is that building market rate housing in Assembly District 66 or some of the nearby areas, 100% of market rate housing is luxury housing. The YIMBY’s data on this is shoddy. The data I’ve seen says something like, building luxury housing reduces rents for working people. And the numbers I’ve seen is a 10% increase in housing yields a 1% reduction in rental prices. So maybe they got the directionality here, but the major effect of building more market rate housing in the Village is you’re making developers rich and you’re making quality of life in the Village worse.
Talk to me more about the second part.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a reason that people are NIMBYs, right? People are NIMBYs because construction is annoying, tall buildings are annoying, people like the character of their neighborhoods, things change when big buildings come in. And can we shape all of our policies based on these things? No, we can’t just say no construction because it’s annoying to the neighbors. But if we’re not actually getting tangible benefits for the city, we’re just making developers rich and annoying people who live somewhere. I don’t see a reason that we should be doing, there’s no benefit to it.
One benefit could be that you’re paying property taxes on those new apartments, and that just helps the city’s tax base.
The amount of additional property taxes is really small, and a lot of it is avoided by various tax schemes. You could change those laws.
This sort of makes me a Yes in Your Backyard person. The way I get around just being yes in your backyard, not in my backyard, is that there’s a huge need for affordable housing in the 66th Assembly District. Building market rate housing in the 66th Assembly District is not going to help the 66th Assembly District or I think the rest of the city.
That would be the other case. Okay, so maybe property tax is marginal, but you can negotiate and convince these developers to...
So this is where I’m going. We have a situation in the Village right now, where by and large, there are two types of people who live here. People who are over 65, who bought in forever ago and owned their units, or people who have some sort of rent regulation, rent stabilization, SCRIE, whatever it is. Or you have people who are 25 to 35, who work in tech or finance or whatever, and then leave as soon as they have a kid. That’s not good for our neighborhood. And it’s a product of the housing market. And I live in Lower Manhattan because I value the diversity of people and culture that Lower Manhattan has historically had, and that is being priced out.
I do not view “don’t change anything” as viable. I view that as something extremely harmful to our neighborhood. And so the question is, how do we allow people to afford to live in a Village. And building more market rate units I don’t think is going to be able to do that. Building more affordable units absolutely will. And those can’t just be “affordable”, they need to be permanently, deeply affordable units, preferably accessible as well.
How do we get that built? There’s a lot of different ways you can get that built. You can do it, Emily Gallagher’s Social Housing Development Authority. Social housing has been super effective in Lower Manhattan, especially in the 60s. We built Westbeth, we built Mitchell-Lamas. We haven’t done that really since the 70s. I think we could do more of that.
But we need more housing than is going to be able to be purchased directly by the state government. And so we are absolutely going to have to work with private developers to build affordable housing. And what that means is that we’re going to have to let them build some luxury units in order to get them to build affordable units. Now, my vision of this has always been, the Village has this extremely valuable commodity: air rights. And every bit of air right is gold to developers. And we have to figure out how much those air rights are worth, and we need to make sure that they pay for those air rights. And the way they pay for those air rights is in affordable housing.
It’s one thing if you’re in the middle of a historic district, there’s a lot of AD 66 that’s not a historic district, where we can build a building that’s taller than six stories. And right now we have a building plan that’s 40 stories in the Village, which is 100% affordable. And I’m in support of it. We’re not going to get all 100% affordable buildings, but we’re going to have to build some taller buildings in some parts of lower Manhattan. We are going to need to get real quantities of deeply affordable housing in those buildings. It’s the only viable way to keep the Village affordable, to the types of diverse people we want in the Village.
So I’m not someone who opposes construction in lower Manhattan. I’m someone who wants developers to pay for the public good that we’re giving them, which is the air rights. And I’m someone who does not believe that giving those air rights away for free is going to result in meaningful trickle-down benefits of rent reductions across the city.
Thank you so much for making the time. Our final question, we really do hope to get Micah and Alex and the rest of the candidates on this podcast. We’re still working on that. When we get them, what’s one question you think we should ask?
I mean, I want you to ask each of them to name two issues they disagree with the other one about. I think that would be really good.
And I guess the other question I would ask is, why are you going to be the one that’s going to be Jack Schlossberg? Because it’s not a ranked choice race, and if you’re worried about Jack Schlossberg being the leading candidate as someone who wants someone with more on the ground experience, and you’re deciding between Micah and Alex, figuring out which one’s more likely, I think may be relevant.
Well, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
