“The Extell Tower is a 100-percent luxury glass building that reaches close to 87 stories high,” Mr. Marte said. “It’s the main reason why I became a community organizer. We’ve been fighting against displacement and gentrification for decades. I think the Extell Tower is a great symbol of what can go wrong when luxury developers influence land-use policy in our district. It’s something that I ran on 2017. We’ve seen people unite around it, whether you live in Tribeca, or Soho, Noho, Chinatown, Lower East Side. We have seen how much re-zoning or land-use decisions have affected our quality of life, and who gets to live in this community. For me, it’s really personal. I feel like that will always be a reminder of the work we have to do in the Council to represent our community.”
“We live in one of the densest communities,” he continued. “We have a lot of development in our district. I think what we’ve seen is that a lot of that development isn’t affordable to the community that lives here. Under the de Blasio administration since 2014, he has built 8,233 ‘affordable units.’ But when you look at those units and the price, it doesn’t match the median average income of our community. Only nine percent of that 8,000-plus units are actually affordable to the people that live here. When we think about what affordability means, it’s typically not representative of what’s on the ground.”
“I don’t think what we have is affordability crisis,” Mr. Marte added. “I think under mandatory inclusionary housing and under the de Blasio administration, we’ve seen more luxury development, more development that doesn’t suit the neighborhoods or doesn’t suit the crises we’re living in. Whether it’s a homeless crisis or a shelter crisis, we need to really build more deeply affordable housing.”
Asked about the plan to building a giant new prison at the edge of Chinatown, in conjunction with a proposal to close Rikers Island, Mr. Marte reflected, “I think we have to make sure that we close Rikers Island. I also think we don’t need to build this jail, because I don’t believe in building new jails.”
He elaborated, “the Borough-based jail plan was not the right solution to fix the situation, specifically in Chinatown. The City refused to even give us a proper environmental process, when they’re actually developing the site here.”
Mr. Marte argued, “the only reason the population of Rikers Island is so big at this moment is because this last administration failed to appoint judges to have speedier trials. They failed to have an efficient process to make sure that people got the court date. When you think about the average person that’s on Rikers Island right now, they had been there for probably nine months, and some people have been there more than a year.”
He also observed that, “when they built [the current detention facility] 30 years ago, they said that it was a state-of-the-art jail. And 30 years later, it’s falling apart in disrepair. There’s been fire. There’s been malpractice, misconduct. When you build a jail, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to change the whole system. I think what we have to really address is the condition that people are in jails, but then also get in a movement that says we don’t need to build new jails as a way to put people in incarceration.”
Matthew Fenton
