By Arturo Ignacio Sanchez
Charles Dickens’ opens the Tale of Two Cities with the memorial phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” This paradoxical catch phrase fits contemporary New York like the proverbial glove. It evokes the aspirational hopes of New Yorkers, the growing sense of widespread economic anxiety, and the daunting challenges that you will confront as the 109th mayor of our great city.
As a Colombian immigrant, resident of Queens County, urban planner/academic and long-standing member of Community Board 3, I share your sense of hope and concern. Listening to your inaugural address, during a frigid New York afternoon, I was moved by your bold commitment to take “dead aim” at the “economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city.”
Nonetheless, my hope and optimism was tempered and constrained by a glaring omission, on your part. You failed to mention that New York is a city of immigrants. The Big Apple has over 8 million inhabitants, of which 55 percent consist of immigrants and their U.S. born children. In the final analysis, this demographic reality brings to the foreground that the city’s long-term economic sustainability will ultimately revolve around the future of our first- and second-generation immigrant majorities. As such, any attempt at addressing the city’s growing economic divide – in a bold and concerted manner – must deal directly with this immigrant reality. To not do so, will take your administration down the road of misguided analysis and poorly crafted public policy initiatives.
The best and worst of times are flip sides of the same coin. On the positive side, immigrant New Yorkers revitalized the city’s neighborhoods, established small family-based businesses and energized local labor markets. On the negative side, working-class immigrants are being displaced by corporate mega-construction projects, speculative luxury housing and ramped gentrification that is devastating small businesses and the affordable housing stock that sustain ethnically diverse neighborhoods. In effect, real estate-driven economic growth policies have engendered a deeply polarized, increasingly segregated and unsustainable city.
Mayor de Blasio, Queens County exemplifies these negative economic trends.
Immigrant Queens is the latest economic frontier for the speculative corporate real estate projects that favors the privileged few at the expense of the many. The borough’s immigrant neighborhoods are clearly in the eye of the economic tsunami that is sweeping through New York and is leaving a gilded and unjust city in its wake. With 47.7 percent of the borough’s residents classified as foreign-born, immigrants are at risk for massive residential and commercial displacement.
As of late, immigrant Queens has struggled with a host of negative issues associated with corporate driven economic growth. The immigrant dense neighborhoods of Northwestern Queens are the latest focal point in economic restructuring and changing land use patterns. The borough’s pro-growth coalition has reinvented Flushing and Willets Point as a strategic node in the Pacific
economy, while Flushing Meadow Corona Park is being restructured and commoditized as a profit center for the tourist industry. And as part of this larger trend, the neighborhood of Corona has been rezoned for large-scale retail growth
along Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard. While Jackson Heights is shifting from a community of diverse immigrant populations to a homogenized bastion of middle-class gentrifiers, and Long Island City’s light industrial-base has been dismantled and re-configured as a high-end residential and corporate compound. This clustered economic growth, stretching from Flushing to Long Island City, has triggered immigrant residential and commercial displacement, vanquished manufacturing jobs and accelerated the economic disparities that characterize and define our borough’s local version of a Tale of Two Cities.
Mayor de Blasio, if your administration is intent on addressing the city’s polarized economy it must grapple seriously with the skewed economic growth trends that are devastating our newest New Yorkers and outer borough neighborhoods. This is clearly a difficult and contentious political process. It requires the crafting of a novel governing coalition that will function as a countervailing force to the entrenched growth coalition that has long dominated the city’s economy. And in doing so, your administration must fully ensure that outer borough’s immigrant ethnic groups are included in a newly configured governing coalition that will champion your political and economic reform agenda. This involves both a short- and long-term process of substantive ethnic political incorporation.
A first step towards mobilizing immigrant ethnic groups would be to fully support INTRO 410, the legislative bill currently before the City Council that enfranchises immigrants with municipal voting rights. While the electoral enfranchisement of
resident immigrants would create new political actors, it would not necessarily lead to a “captured electorate” that would unequivocally support the incoming administration’s emerging agenda. In short, ethnic immigrant incorporation is a
variable process that ultimately reflects a wide and varied spectrum of socio-economic group-based political interests. And, in the final analysis, a successful governing coalition must also include the shared concerns of municipal labor unions, community-based organizations and a wide-spectrum of citywide progressive forces.
Mayor de Blasio, the canalization and mobilization of immigrants and their respective communities, in support of the incoming administration, will require a collaboratively design repertoire of public policies that addresses a constellation of economic and political interests that favorably impact our newest New Yorkers.
This can be accomplished by bringing immigrants to the proverbial table via electoral engagements, making key appointments to significant administrative positions in the city’s bureaucracy, and restructuring the municipality’s current institutional arrangements that have long excluded and marginalized ethnic immigrant voices.
To date, unfortunately, your transition committee has fallen short in populating the incoming administration with qualified and progressive outer-borough ethnic activists that reflect the bottom-up economic and political interests of our newest New Yorkers. As such, as a reform-minded mayor it is imperative that your administration move beyond the rhetoric of social justice and incorporation and establish a truly inclusive urban landscape. To fall short in this regard is to place at risk your bold commitment to unravel the structural foundations of the dual city and to ensure the well-being of all New Yorkers.
Arturo Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is chairperson of the Newest New Yorkers Committee of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught contemporary immigration, entrepreneurship, and urban planning at Barnard College, The City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute.
