David Yassky for New York City Comptroller

May 31, 2007

David Yassky: A New Dem in the Big Apple

by David Yassky

This commentary appears in the current issue of BLUEPRINT, Ideas for a New Century - published by The Democratic Leadership Council.

Even New Yorkers have a pragmatic political sense. They want solutions that work.

I am a New York City politician-and a New Democrat.

I know that sounds like a contradiction. Big cities are supposed to be Old Democrat redoubts, dominated by patronage machines and social service bureaucracies. New York City does fit that stereotype in many ways, but many of the city’s younger politicians are eager to apply the lessons of Clintonism to local government. As a member of the New York City Council, my legislative agenda has been largely shaped by the New Democrat movement—and I have found a surprising number of like-minded allies. That’s why New Yorkers are seeing a burst of policy innovation that looks quite different from old-fashioned, tax-to-the-max liberalism.

New Democrats across the country have a great deal at stake in nurturing innovations at the local level, like those in New York. As the Democratic congressional majority develops a national platform, local government offers an indispensable opportunity to see what the New Democrat values of innovation, growth, and efficiency can look like in practice. States and cities can be laboratories of “New Democracy,” as the saying (almost) goes, and New York is a terrific example of that.

Progressive Innovations. First and foremost, a New Democratic local agenda must be progressive, reflecting the core Democratic commitments to equal opportunity, aiding the disadvantaged, and protecting future generations. That is what makes New Democrats Democrats. What makes us New is our determination to pursue these goals in creative ways and to look beyond tax and-spend solutions.

A perfect example is an innovative initiative developed by Council Speaker Christine Quinn and me to alleviate the most salient problem in the city today: the lack of affordable housing. Eye-popping increases in rents and housing prices have forced many working families to leave the city, and have left many more fearing that they will be next.

The traditional response to this problem has been to pump subsidy dollars into government-funded low income housing projects. Indeed, in the last major election cycle, a coalition of advocates demanded that City Council candidates sign a pledge to support a $1 billion increase in the city’s budget for subsidized housing. Almost all candidates signed the pledge, even though they must have known that the city’s fiscal situation made such an increase highly unlikely. And, when the first budget after that election actually cut housing funds, many of those pledge-signing Council members voted for it, despite their campaign promises.

Speaker Quinn and I took a different approach. We saw that the real estate industry was hungry for changes in the zoning law to allow residential development in some of the city’s older, now vacant manufacturing areas. We proposed allowing apartment buildings in some manufacturing zones if one-quarter of the new apartments were made affordable to low-income (or low- to middle income) families.

This proposal created a classic New Democratic dynamic. Some on the left opposed any new development unless it was completely government-subsidized. Some on the right, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wanted to let the developers build without any affordability requirement. But to the broad swath of commonsense progressives, our idea was a home run. In the two years since its enactment, this initiative has worked magnificently. More than 1,000 new affordable apartments are on track for construction, at minimal cost to taxpayers.

Beyond our housing and tax initiatives, the Council has broadened the urban agenda to include issues, such as environmental protection, that have not historically been the purview of local governments. Environmentalism is not typically thought of as a distinctly “New Democrat” issue. But I believe it can be of great value in reaching out to disaffected voters, particularly younger voters, who are progressive in their beliefs but who see the traditional Democratic Party as irrelevant. This kind of outreach is certainly part of the core New Democratic mission.

Cities have terrific environmental opportunities. In 2003, for example, I introduced and the Council passed the first-ever bill requiring part of our taxicab fleet to be gas-electric hybrid vehicles, and last year, we created incentives for the rest of the fleet. When all 13,000 New York City taxis go hybrid, we will have cut greenhouse gas and asthma-related emissions by more than 4,000 tons a year. That’s not enough to offset the damage done by President Bush’s “Clear Skies Initiative,” but it is a material step in the right direction.

Creating Jobs. When I worked in Congress during the Bill Clinton years, I heard the president say more than once that “work is the best social program this country has ever devised.” The policy implications of that insight are obvious. While traditional urban Democrats focus mostly on government programs and on dividing the economic pie, New Democrats come at the problem from the opposite direction. How can we help the economy grow and help people generate their own security through work and earning? In New York, Wall Street has boomed but middle-income jobs have steadily disappeared. Our challenge is to create jobs that don’t require advanced degrees but do pay enough to support a family.

One of our innovative approaches has been to identify sectors of our economy that have strong growth potential—and then use the government to help them along. In New York, one such sector is film and television production. This industry employs more than 100,000 people in well-paid, high-benefits jobs—the sort of jobs that are increasingly hard to find. Thanks to a highly skilled work force and an urban streetscape that many directors find attractive, New York has a competitive advantage in film and TV production. Throughout the 1990s, however, the city lost jobs to lower-cost locales such as Toronto and Dublin, Ireland. In response, I teamed in 2004 with Councilman Eric Gioia (a Clinton White House alumnus) to enact a tax credit for production companies. Some city officials were skeptical of the credit. They commissioned McKinsey & Co. to study its effectiveness. The study found that the credit had created more than 3,000 jobs and had generated more than enough filming to pay for itself in the city’s budget. In 2006, we doubled it.

Another key sector of New York’s economy is specialty manufacturing—high-end clothing, metalworking, furniture. While New York’s industrial sector has declined, along with the rest of the country’s, we still have hundreds of manufacturing firms with more than 100,000 employees. These businesses have the skills and contacts to compete with overseas companies—but many of them have succumbed to the high cost of real estate in New York.

In response, Councilwoman Diana Reyna and I joined forces to establish a program that would create dedicated spaces for manufacturers. The idea for this program came from some innovative nonprofit leaders who were interested in industrial retention, and who realized they could collect enough in rent from manufacturing tenants to cover the cost of renovating and maintaining older buildings. The hurdle was the cost of acquiring the buildings in the first place—the nonprofits simply couldn’t compete with developers looking to convert the buildings into condos. Our program helps with these acquisition costs.

In addition to generating and retaining jobs, we’ve made efforts to assure that people who work hard every day can keep enough of their income for basic living needs. To that end, we adopted a Clinton-era innovation called the Earned Income Tax Credit. Rather than focusing, as many Democrats still do, on traditional spending programs, we added the EITC to the city’s income tax structure. The EITC is a perfect way to boost incomes of the working poor. Our EITC is modeled on the federal program—a refundable tax credit available to wage-earners making less than $38,000 per year. In 2006, this program returned more than $100 million to 740,000 low income families.

Reinventing Local Government. Another part of the New Democratic agenda in New York that flows from the Clinton years has been to make the government itself operate more responsively and efficiently. Clinton called it “reinventing government.”

One of the elements first proposed by Clinton that we’ve implemented in New York is a designated toll-free phone number—311—to handle citizen complaints about everyday matters such as potholes, malfunctioning traffic lights, broken water mains. Though the president introduced the idea in 1996, so far only seven cities have adopted it. New York’s system, by far the largest, handles 40,000 calls per day, and it has had a huge impact on the delivery of city services. Not only does it trigger the right service at the right place, it also tracks the agency responses, creating a new level of accountability in city government.

Bringing a New Democrat approach to governing is not just good policy, it’s also good politics. It addresses the problem that underlies the Democrats’ dilemma—the fact that they have lost the last four mayoral elections in New York, and this in a city with a 4-to-1 Democratic edge in voter registration. Old school Dems strive mightily to avoid the obvious conclusion that the traditional Democratic message is simply not reaching the voters. Or they blame the 1991-1992 recession for electing Rudy Giuliani and attribute Bloomberg’s two wins to his personal wealth.

The truth is that voters, even hardcore progressive New York Democratic voters, want government that works. They are pragmatic, forward thinking, and results-oriented. Yet none of the recent Democratic mayoral candidates articulated the kind of New Dem vision embodied in the policy innovations some of us are trying to push. Intensity of passion, something every Democratic politician has, is a good thing—but it’s not enough. A winning Democratic candidate must also be driven to innovate, press for economic growth, and be pragmatically results-oriented. That’s how progressives can once again take over City Hall in the Big Apple.

About the DLC. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) leads the New Democrat movement, a national network of elected officials and community leaders whose innovative ideas are modernizing progressive politics for the 21st Century.