interviews
Labor and the White House
by Dave Weigel
March 31, 2021
This interview with Dave Weigel, national reporter covering politics for the Washington Post, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
DW | The White House's involvement in the Amazon union drive was a big surprise. I mean, we know where it could have originated, the union talked to the White House; they have kind of an open door with Biden that they didn't have with Trump. We know that Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign chairman, and his group, Perfect Union, got involved. So, there was public pressure.
The fact that the White House and the president released that video was a big deal to people. And, he made this decision to get involved very early on in his presidency. It was within his first 50 days. He decided to do what hadn't been done before and give a message in support of the union. It was a very careful message. The new labor secretary, Marty Walsh, when asked specifically about Amazon, responded in more general tones.
But, no matter what happens, if you are in for a penny, you are in for a pound.
A lot of previous presidents, including Barack Obama, said a lot less about these union drives and, in doing so, limited their own exposure. If the drive didn't work, people didn't say that the president supported something that didn't work. The fact that Biden made a statement, early on, when it wasn't clear how this was going to go, is a real political statement of what they thought was important.
frank | How do you think his background plays a role in this?
He's always leaned in really hard and identified with workers in the same way he's tried to identify with different civil rights movements. Joe Biden has always wanted to be seen as the kind of person who is coming from Scranton, who has lived through the sixties, and who wants to jump to the front of the march if there is a struggle happening.
He frames everything in terms of fairness. He's not as natural as other members of the party in talking about this. When Bernie Sanders talks about this, for example, he talks about greed, he names CEOs, he says nobody deserves that much money, he talks about a maximum wage and how there should be no billionaires at all. Biden doesn't go that far. Biden has never gone after Jeff Bezos. He's never gone after individual heads of companies the way that Sanders does. He does this sort of a "Hey man, these guys are under assault, somebody needs to stick up for them."
That is something that he has always wanted to be part of his brand. Even when he was voting for trade deals like NAFTA as a Senator, he was never really comfortable. He had the same ideological mindset as a lot of the Democrats in the eighties and the nineties. He did it because he saw that that was the way things were moving and he voted strategically. But, the stuff that fired him up was when he could side with workers. It is the same thing with the projects he took on under Obama when he was Vice President.
During the Democratic primary, he didn't get the same amount of labor support that Hillary Clinton did, but, Sanders didn't get it either. There wasn't the same sort of a landslide of labor to get in early and say, this is our candidate. Instead, they were demanding more of the candidates.
I would cover presidential primary events with the Teamsters in Cedar Rapids or the Building Trades in DC and you would kind of look to the level of applause as an indicator. The interesting thing is that at those events Sanders would lay out the things he did and what he wanted to pass. Biden would go on at length about non-compete clauses and about wage theft and things like that. It was less, "I have studied all of the papers on this and I've decided this is my policy," and more of "this seems unfair and I'm against this thing."
I think the Democratic Party is increasingly understanding what labor can mean for them strategically.
Republicans have gotten kind of tangled up on labor. They have done better with union households, but they are basically the party of deregulation still. They've never really moved on the labor part of their messaging. That makes it easier for Biden to compete for these workers. When it comes down to it, Republicans want “right-to-work." Josh Hawley, who branded himself as a working-class candidate, for example, supports a national right-to-work.
Biden was very concerned with winning back more union households. Union workers were saying, “Democrats had the presidency for 16 years. What do they do for us?” Biden didn't have all the answers that labor wanted, but he was making a lot of specific promises about how he was going to act. He talked about infrastructure spending and about how he was going to run the NLRB and how he was going to approach employers. It was less than Sanders did, but that's way more than Democrats had done in the past.
I mean, the McCain/Romney era Republicans had no appeal to the sort of voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. Biden only peeled back maybe 10% of them depending on where you're talking about, but it has made life easier for Democrats.
This fight has in large part been framed in the context of continuing a battle for civil rights. Do you see Biden lean into that messaging?
Biden did not really lean to the racial justice aspect or the civil rights legacy aspect of this labor fight. When the congressional delegation here came down a couple of weeks before the vote, they were much more explicit. Someone like Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush is much more comfortable saying that than Biden. That is the thing about Biden. He basically sets boundaries. He says what his position is and backs off and lets the action happen without his constant commentary. It's very different than Trump in that way too. And that's different than the Sanders position. And it's different than what Warren said her position would be as president.
Can you give us context on how or why you started covering this story?
I started covering the Amazon drive because of the president and members of Congress intervening. I mean, labor decided to get involved months before, but the fact that Democrats were getting involved was new. It has been interesting to monitor their investment in this over other Democratic Party causes.
There's a little bit of intervention from the Democrats, but not, I'd say equal to what Amazon is doing. They are not the advertisements on TV. We all know the Democratic party is kind of involved, but it is not the same political project that I've seen in other places.
There are two stories that kind of were happening at the same time; they have merged, but not completely. One is this labor drive, which is smaller than most drives that have succeeded. It is not overwhelming. You don't see labor signs everywhere you go. But, on the other hand, the level of national involvement is kind of new.
Had Biden said nothing, there would have been a story, but it wouldn't involve the White House, it wouldn't involve the Democratic Party, and it might not involve the PRO Act.
And I think that's going to change because of this.
New interview w/ @daveweigel @PaydayReport
— frank news (@FrankNewsUS) April 6, 2021
"The White House's involvement with the Amazon drive was a big surprise ... Previous presidents, Obama comes to mind, said a lot less. The fact that Biden did that early on is a political statement of what they thought was important." pic.twitter.com/MwYlmqE4xQ
That was a big decision Biden made to be a part of this.
Right. And that political story is interesting. The story here is much more independent. A lot of the people who've come in to help canvas are from smaller groups. You have Black Lives Matter and DSA groups from the area, but you don't have the Democratic Party getting involved in a huge way. I think that is something that people will revisit after the vote.
Should the Democratic Party, like most left parties in the world, be very involved with labor? Should they always take the side of labor?
Most social democratic parties are labor parties and they build up from there. Their coalition includes labor unions. In the British Labour Party, for example, labor has a role in electing the leadership. That is not the case here. That's the conversation I think they're going to start having when this votes over. For example, if there are, and the union says there are, hundreds of people around the country calling them saying, "Hey, I have some questions about what I can do at my fulfillment center in my town," that will be a question for Democrats.
And if Amazon wins, do you get spooked? Amazon has been very punchy in their PR. They might say that a bunch of elite Democrats stood with the union and the workers stood with Amazon. That is very comfortable turf for Amazon to be on, and that leaves a big question open for Democrats. If the union succeeds, throw all of that out the window. I think the lesson that everyone would take in that case would be that if it takes less than a three-minute video from the president to get momentum for something like this, then we should keep doing that. As we talk, I don't know the answer to that question. I think that is something that is going to be answered when the votes are in.
interviews
New York City Housing Authority with Polina Bakhteiarov
by Polina Bakhteiarov
May 3, 2018
This interview with Polina Bakhteiarov, the Deputy Director for Real Estate Development at NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority], was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place April 24, 2018, in New York City.
Can you tell us about yourself and how you found yourself at NYCHA?
I was born in Moscow, Russia, came to the States as a child and grew up in Massachusetts. I ended up going to MIT and doing a five year program where I did double undergraduate degrees in Urban Planning, City Planning and Civil Engineering, and then a master's in City Planning.
I came to MIT wanting to do bioengineering, having no idea what that was. My freshman year was the year after Katrina, and I was walking down the hallway at school one evening, and this flier caught my eye. It was a discussion about recovery and resilience in New Orleans post Katrina, hosted by a professor named J. Philip Thompson. I was like, wow! I had been interested in what happened, what was going on in New Orleans at the time and wanted to go down there, but my mother was like, “no, you're not going anywhere”, I was 17. So I went to this forum to see what it was all about.
Phil ended up being my adviser and longtime mentor. He just got elected Deputy Mayor for strategic policy initiatives across the street. So we're looking to partner in a new way at this new stage of the game.
Tell us about NHYCA.
New York City New York City Housing Authority, NYCHA, we call it the acronym, is a huge organization, about 10,000-11,000 employees. We're technically part of the city of New York government, but we're also federal, so we’re in this strange purgatory of being funded by the Feds, but then reliant on City Hall.
NYCHA is the largest residential landlord in North America. We have about 2,000-2,500 buildings, and about 2,500 acres of land that comprises around 320 developments of various sizes. Small developments can be a walk up, then the largest development is Queensbridge, which has 3,000-4,000 units and about 7,000 people who live there. The scale is vast. We also corner about 8 percent of the rental market in NYC. We have a lot of untapped power which is very interesting for me because my I'm starting to get into the area of public asset management, and public finance, and how we can better leverage our public assets to generate additional income. Not just within the NYCHA world, but in government in general.
It's really started to pique my interest, especially because of the federal conversation, for better or worse, around infrastructure. Regardless of the motives, and even the mechanics of that conversation, there is still a legitimate point around the fact that we don't leverage our public assets, bridges, roads, airports convention centers etc.
How you would like to leverage NYCHA's assests?
One of the ways we do it now is through our infill program. We have two programs. We have what we call "100 Percent Affordable Program", and then we have the, "NYCHA Next Generation Action Neighborhoods Program", or the "50/50" program. In both of those programs we identify underutilized or vacant land within our development campuses for a new construction project. On the 100 percent affordable side, we build a building and all the units are up to 165 percent AMI [area median income], so there's different levels of affordability there.
On the 50/50 side, same concept. Identify a plot of land that’s developable, and when we construct a building, 50 percent of the units are affordable, and 50 percent are market rate. We take the revenue from the deal and reinvest a portion into the development on which the new building has been constructed, and then the other portion goes to the highest need development. The ones in the worst conditions, and in need of investment in systems, grounds etc.
That's like putting our toe in the water. Taking the intrinsic value of our developments and figuring out how to extract that value, and then reinvest it back in.
In order to be truly able to put any type of dent into that huge number, that keeps on rising, we have to get creative.
Is the 50/50 housing model working?
We have not actually constructed the building yet. That was rolled out in 2015 under the Next Gen NYCHA strategic plan, which is a 10 year initiative. The mayor is very aggressive in his housing goals, and he wanted to pilot this new structure, and this new framework.
What were the main points of anger towards the 50/50 idea?
The biggest fear is gentrification. You're bringing folks who can afford a market rate apartment in some of the hottest neighborhoods in New York City (Upper East Side, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Lower East Side). So gentrification is the biggest issue. The fear of rising rents and displacement, although that still bleeds into the new construction side, because residents oftentimes see a new building as an indicator that change is coming and folks are going to be pushed out.
The other issue is the destruction with the construction. The destruction of folks daily lives and how the new building will impact the lay out of the development, the neighborhood, what these new folks coming to live there bring. The cultural implications. There are a lot of considerations we're working through with residents in that process.
We're trying to continue to expand our thinking. One of the areas that we are now exploring preliminarily is selling air rights because it would really, really change the game for us.
How does that work, and how do you go about getting that approved?
A couple of things. One is the federal process. We have to figure out if HUD will allow us to do this, because it is still a transaction. We've been talking with with HUD about how to do that. It seems like everyone is fairly excited about it. Residents like that strategy because there's no construction, it doesn't disturb their daily lives. Politically, I think that it could really be a win for both the legislative and executive branch because again, it's really a cash cow for NYCHA with a very minimal administrative burden.
Do you anticipate backlash with that program, because you would in essence be throwing an issue onto another person? The idea of changing the New York City Landscape, the idea of environmental impact? The buildings you sell to, exceeding what they should be exceeding.
The buyer of the rights would only be able to use them to the extent that the zoning for their parcel, or parcels, allows. They would still have to go through every process on the city and state level with regard to environmental review. Every other type of testing that needs to get done in order for them to pull their permit. They would not be able to bypass any of that.
Okay, got it.
I want to talk about what I do, which is on the preservation side of things.
Sure!
The purpose of our team is to structure public-private partnerships in order to preserve public housing in the long term. The main tool that we use is Rental Assistance Demonstration. It's an Obama administration initiative that began around 2011, and is really a way to open up new avenues of capital, coming into a development that's prohibited within the public housing framework.
What RAD allows us to do is switch the funding for public housing developments from public housing, what we call Section 9, to Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
What that allows us to do, is go to the markets and bring in additional capital for that development, which was previously prohibited from us.
Our program focuses, once we get that financing package, on three pillars. The first one is a very substantial rehabilitation of the development under the federal guidelines. We have to address the 20 year capital needs of that development. We also switched the management to a private property management company which allows for streamlined property management, and also allows residents to revisit the conversation around house rules, which is something that NYCHA used to enforce very strictly back in the day. Over the past couple of decades it's really deteriorated. A lot of residents, in the forms that I've engaged with them, complain that there are no standards for how these communities are supposed to function. The last piece is around social services delivery. With the conversion we also bring in an onsite social services provider to really increase the services that folks are receiving in the development, tailored to the needs of that particular community.
Where does this work fit in under the larger umbrella of “planning”?
The great thing about planning is that it can be defined in so many different ways. For me, I see us focused on the housing aspect of planning. We are definitely very implementation focused. We obviously rely on planning studies and analyses that are done by our colleagues at the Department of City Planning, housing preservation, and development, and even internally have folks that do planning oriented analyses. But we're really focused on the implementation. We're looking at how we choose the developments that go through the Section 8 conversions.
We do look at it from a planning lens. We're looking at neighborhood context. One of the things that I've been looking to to add to that particular planning process, for our preservation pipeline, is that particular piece. When we first started the pipeline planning for RAD, it was really based off of financial feasibility. What we were doing was taking developments that were in some local proximity to each other geographically, and figuring out how to make them work financially. Because we're bundling developments together, we're not doing one at a time in order to get efficiencies. That's a great baseline, but there are other factors that we have to take into account when we do this planning.
There's also the piece around political planning.
What is NYCHA’s ultimate goal?
Our ultimate goal is to dig ourselves out of the $17 billion hole. We've lost our identity as a landlord, because that's really what we are. We house 1 in 14 New Yorkers. We have about 400,000 people in public housing, an additional 200,000-250,000 via the Section 8 program. We really need to get back to that identity, of being a strong landlord.