Reminder: Bootcamp Launch Party April 14! RSVP here!
Plus more life updates
Reminder: RSVP for the NYC June Primary Bootcamp Launch Party 🎉
Ready to level up your political influence—and have fun doing it? Join the NYC June Primary Bootcamp Launch Party to build community, find new conspirators, and lock down an accountabilibuddy to help you reach your Bootcamp goals💪
The launch party isn’t just about having fun—it’s your chance to meet other engaged New Yorkers, swap strategies for getting involved, and kick off your Bootcamp goals with momentum.
Whether you’re a seasoned advocate or just starting your civic engagement journey, you’ll leave with a gameplan for your next steps.
📅 Date: April 14 at 6pm
📍 Venue: Finback in Brooklyn - 545 President St, Brooklyn, NY
💡 What to Expect:
✅ Meet like-minded New Yorkers who care about local politics
✅ Structured activities to connect with people in your neighborhood and those with similar interests/goals
✅ First reveal of some Bootcamp prizes
✅ Leave with a gameplan for your next steps
Also, in case you need a refresher on what this Bootcamp thing is again:
Here’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing this week
Making the Primary Bootcamp Calendar
Throughout the Bootcamp, I’ll be adding events to this lu.ma calendar. Some events will be ones that I’m hosting. I’ll also add events that I’m going to and ones that are well-aligned with Bootcamp goals. Hopefully this calendar is a useful resource to make it easy to rack up Bootcamp points by getting out there, joining advocacy groups, and volunteering!
There’s already three events on the calendar for April! You can subscribe to the calendar here. And let me know of any other events I should add!
Moving
I moved to Brooklyn on Tuesday. This is the apartment complex I now live in (see below). It’s brand new– we were the 6th unit to move in (out of ~600 units). The building is the textbook example of a “luxury apartment complex”—a term that’s often thrown around as a negative, especially in community board meetings and rezoning hearings. When a neighbor calls into one of these meetings and mentions luxury apartments, it’s usually this complaint: “We don’t need more luxury buildings—we should be building only affordable housing.”
How did luxury apartment complexes become controversial? This is what a housing crisis does to us. It makes us feel like we’re all fighting over the same handful of livable, reasonably-priced units in the city. Every housing search in NYC is a rude awakening: anything reasonably-priced often comes with a big compromise. We’ve all been there. But rejecting market-rate housing in favor of building exclusively affordable units won’t get us out of the housing crunch, in fact, it’ll make it worse.
My new “luxury apartment” is significantly cheaper than my last apartment in Manhattan, which was neither new nor luxury. But lots of people want to live in Manhattan. And only some parts of Manhattan are building more housing. For example, Manhattan Community District 5, where I’m serving out the last couple weeks of my term, added only 19 new homes last year. CB5 covers midtown, one of the biggest job centers and transit hubs in the country. And the neighborhood only added 19 units of housing in an entire year🤯. What’s worse, CB5 did better than other parts of Manhattan. Manhattan CB2 (Greenwich Village, SoHo, West Village) actually had net-negative units permitted last year. That can happen when not only is there little housing being built, but also building owners combine units so they can have more space. It’s no wonder I couldn’t find an apartment in the West Village in my price range.
But it doesn’t have to be this way– NYC used to build housing in step with job growth. We used to build housing to accommodate all the people that want to live and work here (see chart below). We can again.
Advocating
On my third day in Brooklyn, I emailed my City Council Member about a rezoning.📣
My City Council Member is Crystal Hudson– she’s great. She voted yes on the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, and under her leadership, her district has been a leader in affordable housing production.
It’s up to Crystal to weigh in on a big rezoning proposal in our district that’s coming up soon. The Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan will provide approximately 4,000 units of new housing, including over affordable 1,000 units. The whole City Council will vote on the rezoning. But usually the City Council votes the way the local member votes– basically everyone else defers to the local member. So they’ll defer to Crystal.
Two days after I moved, I emailed Crystal and her team to express my support for the rezoning.
If you’re tired of complaining about the price of rent and ready to do something about it, here’s your links for action:
Join and donate to Open New York, NYC’s pro-housing advocacy group
Get involved with Open New York’s endorsed candidates and electeds (who are they? See here)
Learn more about and advocate for proposals to bring more housing to Atlantic Avenue, Midtown, and Long Island City
The above actions are worth points in the Bootcamp!
