Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on WNYC

March 10, 2017

Brian Lehrer: It’s The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone and we begin today with our weekly Ask The Mayor segment. And our main focus on Ask The Mayor today will be the stubbornly persistent problem of homelessness. And on top of it now, neighborhood resistance to housing homeless people – the number of New Yorkers in shelters has hit a record 60,000 even as unemployment sinks below five percent and average wages are rising.

Now last week the Mayor unveiled a plan for 90 neighborhood homeless shelters to be spread throughout the City, so if people face homelessness they can do it near where they were living. But if early indications mean anything, we may be facing 90 hyperlocal neighborhood revolts because no one seems to want to shelter in their backyard. The Mayor got an earful about that at a raucous town hall in Crown Heights last weekend and a town hall in Bedford-Stuyvesant last night. And with that as prolog, Mr. Mayor welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well it is good to be here Brian, but I am sorry to challenge you right at the front of the show – there was no raucousness to any of the meetings that I have been at. They have been, I think, respectful serious conversations and no one is doubting there is a historic homelessness problem we are all trying to deal with and there is no ‘quote, unquote’ revolt. This is something that is being done to address what each neighborhood is going through. People come from neighborhoods and they are in our shelter system and we are trying to revamp the shelter system to have people served in their own neighborhood when God forbid they end up being homeless. So I think a lot of people get that and are trying to work with us productively on that idea.

Lehrer: And listeners, we’ll make it a topic-specific Ask the Mayor today about homelessness. If you are one of the 60,000 New Yorkers currently residing in a shelter, call in and ask the Mayor a question or tell him what you think would help to fix the problem. Or if you are someone who works with homeless people or if you’re otherwise involved in the issue call in and ask the Mayor – 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or use the hashtag #AsktheMayor on Twitter or if you want to comment on the plan for a shelter in your neighborhood you are welcome too, 212-433-WNYC.

By way of more overview, what a difficult problem – we had 12 years of a technocrat mayor who prided himself on fixing things, but he seems to have made the problem worse and now we have you, a progressive mayor focused on inequality, and you could hardly make a dent even in pretty good times. What is the learning curve? What didn’t work by now that maybe you thought would?

Mayor: Well, let me [inaudible] quick frame, picking up on your history. The great lost opportunity was in the last term of Mayor Bloomberg when he cancelled with the State of New York – cancelled the Advantage Program. And I think the Governor – Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg made a huge mistake because it would have actually helped us contain the number of people in shelter and providing subsidies to keep people in their apartments. Once that was cancelled the level of homelessness in New York City went from about 36,000 in shelter to about 50,000 in shelter in the course of just over two years. So that was the moment where we really lost momentum. We came in and we tried to restore what was lost with Advantage. We put in things like rental subsidy programs, anti-eviction legal services. They helped, they didn’t help enough is the blunt truth. Now, right now – just a little correction additionally – we at one point had 60,000-plus people in shelter. I think 60,600 was our high point. We are now down around 60,000 a number that is starting – thank God – to go down. And that is part of our vision, to keep driving that number down. Had we not put those plans in place – those measures to stop the increase – that number could have gotten as high as 70,000 people in shelter, which is astounding but could have happened.

So, an answer to the historical point, I think we are actually turning the tide. An answer to what we learned, I have been blunt about this, Brian; we had to figure out the hard way that the system was actually oriented the wrong way from the beginning. It was a crisis based system built over 35 years of steady increases in homelessness. As you said, at one point Mayor Bloomberg said he would reduce the number of people in shelter by two-thirds. It actually started increasing and then skyrocketed thereafter. So, the vision he put in place didn’t work. The vision we started to put in place the first few years didn’t work in terms of turnaround. It did start to [inaudible] the increase, but it didn’t turn things around. Now we finally see a small turnaround and we want to build on it, but what we did not understand enough was until we it made a borough based and community based system it would not work properly and it wouldn’t allow us to get people back on their feet and out of shelter as quickly as possible. It was also creating tremendous tensions that were unnecessary. And last night when I was at the meeting for the community – for the council district representing parts of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy – you know, there was a debate, but people also understood if the folks they would be serving in their shelters came from their own community that was a very different discussion then folks coming from Queens and the Bronx who had no connection to the community. I think it was much more receptivity to serving their neighbors who had fallen on hard times of they knew that would be the consistent reality.

Lehrer: Right. So, on the tension around that issue on where to locate shelters; Crown heights residents complained that they already have 19 shelters – is there number in their City Council district while neighborhoods like Maspeth, which got you to cancel a proposed shelter have zero. On the other hand, the City stats, as cited in the Times today, are that Crown Heights has 2,400 homeless people but current beds for only 1,600. So, how do you balance the desire to give all neighborhoods a share of the burden – if we consider it a burden – but also build shelters where people are, which would mean concentrating them in lower-income neighborhoods.

Mayor: So let me explain the vision – this is a great question. First of all, every community board in New York City – there is 59 community boards – every one of them has folks who are homeless coming from them; every one of them should help shoulder the burden. The Maspeth – that community board includes the neighborhood of Maspeth. We did not cancel that shelter because we thought it was strategically wrong, the landlord refused to cooperate after the protest. We are going to go back in to that community board, find the best possible location, and create a new shelter. We are happy to work with elected officials and community leaders to determine the best location if people want to work productively with us. Either way that community board needs to have shelter capacity. 250 people from that community board are in our shelter system. Is it fair to all other communities that those folks would be elsewhere, no. Staten Island, we have one shelter. I said something inaccurate the other night on NY-1, I want to correct it. I said there were no shelters in Staten Island. There is one for 46 families, but there is about 1,200 more people from Staten Island in the shelter system in other boroughs, which is unbelievable when you think about the fact that if you are from Staten Island and you’re sent to a shelter in Queens or the Bronx it’s an entirely different reality. We want folks from Staten Island who fall on hard times to end up being in shelter [inaudible] Staten island. We’ll work with the elected officials and communities to find the right one. It’s literally going to correlate to the reality of where people are coming from. And at the same time, Brian, crucial to our plan this is something we really worked hard on addressing; we have to get out of crisis mode, which means get out of the hotels which are costly and disruptive to communities; get out of the clusters which are not good enough quality housing. So the whole concept here is to erase the mistakes of the past systematically. And I have said, bluntly, incrementally because it won’t happen overnight. Get out of the things that weren’t working and start to increasingly shrink the shelter system and then the shelters we will have left will be run by the City with higher quality standards, with the NYPD providing security inside and outside of the shelter. And if we do it right we steadily contract the system over years and then a shelter facility – if it is no longer needed – could be converted to things like supportive housing or permanent affordable housing.

Lehrer: Let me ask you one more question before we go to the phones, you mentioned the cluster apartments which you want to phase out. If I have my numbers right about 3,000 private sector apartments that the City rents out for homeless people at about $3,500 a month,  sometimes from landlords who won’t fix code violations – that is about a 15-year-old system. Why isn’t that working better? Because in theory you want to give homeless people apartments, not just cots in an armory or some other shelter building, right?

Mayor: Right and the armory model is not what you’re going to see in the future. That was again a result of a crisis based system. You’re going to see a focus on purpose-built shelters that are done the right way, where people can be treated decently. But what happened with the cluster apartments is unfortunately too many of them were buildings landlords didn’t treat properly – the housing was not good enough quality. We have gotten out of 44 such buildings in the last year or so. We’re going to get out of 40 more this year. It’s just not the right thing for the taxpayer; it’s not the right thing for the homeless individuals to be in a situation like that where the landlords are not cooperating.

Now, if the landlord wants to sell off the building or have a non-profit take over the building and fix it up and run it properly that is always an option, but we don’t believe in the status quo around either clusters or around hotels. And just one other point to what you said in the opening; you’re right that New York City economically is stronger than it has been in a long time. We need to connect that reality to addressing the problem of homelessness. And one thing I’m very proud to say is we just got the latest federal and State unemployment figures and New York City, right now, today, the figures from January – 4.5 percent unemployment. That is the lowest unemployment rate in New York City since 1976, which is an unbelievable good reality for the City. We have a lower unemployment rate than the State or the nation, which we have not seen in a long, long time either. We’ve got to take that reality and use it as part of the solution. One of the things that will keep people from being homeless is getting jobs in the hands of people who don’t have them and getting higher wage and better benefit jobs to people. That is what our 100,000 jobs plan aims to do; that’s what the training we’re going to have in shelters more and more. People who are in shelter – rather than just being told in the morning leave and comeback at night – are going to get job training right in the shelter to help get them to the jobs that a growing economy is producing. So, I do think your original point is a very valid one. As we have experienced economic strength, it should help us to address homelessness at least in part. But that means getting good jobs in the hands of folks who unfortunately lost their economic footing because they just didn’t have a high enough paying job in a very expensive housing market.

Lehrer: And I think Rose in Harlem might want to elaborate on that very point. Rose, you are on WNYC, hello.

Question: Thanks so much and thanks for your work Brian.

Lehrer: Thank you.

Question: Mr. Mayor, the issue of displacement is directly linked to homelessness and the rate of gentrification. I heard news reports early in the week when some people seemed to discover that the Bronx was subject to gentrification. Something they could have found out if they had looked at [inaudible] for the past five years. But anyway, what are you doing about displacement. In Brooklyn, you’re putting in all these density projects where, you know, these huge ugly aluminum things are going up next to the brownstones forcing out the traditional residents of those neighborhoods. For those of us who are being displaced now, either because there is no protection – no real protection because HPD work doesn’t count. It’s irrelevant in terms of protecting Mitchell Lama people. There is nothing – [inaudible]. We’re all being displaced from Harlem, from Brooklyn. We’ll be homeless next week. What is the long-term plan to protect those people who live there now?

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Okay Rose. You’re asking a very important question and one that people ask me all over the City. I think the affordability crisis and the challenge of displacement is the number one issue in New York City. Now, Rose I commend you because your point about [inaudible] is exactly right. This is not a new thing. The gentrification reality has been growing over 15 or 20 years. My blunt feeling is that in the previous two administrations there was a chance to start addressing it. Both of them took a very laissez-faire approach. Both of them, you know, were free marketeers. And they did very little to control development or put any ground rules on it. We have changed that in very substantial ways.

First of all, because we passed a law with the City Council to require the creation of affordable housing in any new development, any time a developer comes to the City for approval to build something differently they need a specific approval – if they are going to build higher for example then the zoning allows or the neighborhood is being rezoned – we now can require, as a matter of law, the creation of either 25 percent affordable housing or 30 percent affordable housing depending on what level of income families will be reaching who get that affordable housing. So, that’s a guarantee in law that never existed in New York City. You know that a lot of times there were rezonings of neighborhoods, all sorts of promises made about affordability. They were not kept and there was no legal mechanism to enforce it. We have changed that. We’re the only big city in America that has put in such stringent rules. Simply put, if a developer has not agreed to create affordable housing they literally cannot build. And that to me is a game changer on its face. Also, anti-eviction legal services; we started providing widespread free legal services for folks facing eviction. One of the biggest elements of the displacement reality is when someone is forced out by illegal actions by a landlord – overcharging on rent, not providing heat and hot water, harassment – and eviction that is being done illegally. Now, we announced with the City Council weeks ago, anyone who makes up to $50,000 in New York City will be given a lawyer for free if they have to go into housing court and defend against an illegal eviction or any of those other offenses. That is a game changer. With the legal services we provide already evictions are down 24 percent. We believe as we expand legal services availability it’s going to go even farther.

One last point, we talked about last night in Crown Heights there are speculators and folks who are really doing the wrong thing who are trying to convince homeowners to sell and they are doing deed fraud even – [inaudible] homeowners of the right to their own home. The New York City Sheriff is now enforcing and bringing criminal charges against speculators who do this kind of thing. And anyone who is endangered by something like that could call 3-1-1 and get connected to our lawyers and we can provide support and defense. And again, up to criminal prosecution against the wrongdoer. These are all elements of changing the reality and addressing the displacement challenge.

Lehrer: I actually wonder if this is your biggest frustration in three-plus years on the job as Mayor. Tell me if it is or where it would rank that in order to deal with the affordable housing crisis you’ve proposed and started to launch this massive development program because if there are more people you need more units, and that people don’t get what you say over and over again, which is that this many units were being built anyway by the private market, but they were going to be less affordable unless you stepped in as the government and created rules that forced them or gave them incentives to build a larger percentage of affordable housing, and you’re pushing it as far as you can push it to get developers to actually play ball while including the maximum number of affordable units that you think you can get them to include, but what people see is gentrification.

Mayor: A very powerful summation there, Brian. I appreciate it. Look, it is frustrating, but it’s not surprising. I have been very honest about the fact that I think there are challenges and problems in the free enterprise system when it comes to addressing people’s needs. This is a fundamental belief of mine. I wish the City of New York right now had more power to address this situation. One of the bigger problems is the semi-colonial dynamic between the City of New York and our state government in Albany which is keeping us – for example – from instituting more stringent rent regulation. That’s one of the – the number one thing we have to – that protects affordability. It’s between 2 and 2.5 million New Yorkers are in rent regulated housing, and obviously we’ve had a rent freeze during my administration the last two years. That is the number one way we are protecting the ability of working people and everyday New Yorkers to stay in their neighborhoods. I wish I had even more power to dictate the shape of development and to require affordability. But your summation is right.

Here’s the simplest way to say it, and it’s very pertinent to Rose’s question. I watched – as a Brooklynite – I watched what happened to Bushwick. I watched what happened in Bed Stuy. There was no rezoning. There was no government involvement. The private market created a huge amount of displacement and a huge amount of pressure, and the government did nothing, and there was no response that allowed the community to get something in that dynamic. There was no affordable housing that was required. There were no ground rules. There was no anti-eviction plan. So the free market just ran rampant, and what I’m saying – to your point – is the City of New York does have substantial power. Not as much as I think we should have, but we have substantial power. We’re now using that power to contain the market dynamics as much as we possibly can and create balance. But to anyone who said ‘oh, you know, we don’t want a rezoning because it’s going to bring development’ I say ‘wake up and smell the coffee.’ Just what Rose said – it’s already happening. In all sorts of areas of the Bronx where there’s been no rezoning, there already is gentrification and pressure on communities. Why not have the government come in and create some ground rules and create some balance and create some guarantees and get something given back to the community in the progress – in the process, excuse me. That’s the vision of our administration.

Lehrer: Hope in the Village. You’re on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hi, Hope.

Question: Hey there. Good snowy morning – Mayor, Brian.

[Laughter]

Mayor: Good snowy morning, Hope.

Question: Thank you. It sounds as though from what you were just saying we need [inaudible] and Jane Jacobs to point out. That’s not why I’m calling, though. I am calling on behalf of a wonderful, smart, drug and dementia free older man who is tired of sleeping on subways. He had tried shelters in the past, and he was robbed. He and I were figuring that if he’s in a place geared for older guys, they would be more chill, and he can finally do what he’s been – if you will – dreaming of for years now, which is to sleep lying down, not sitting up. So I have two questions. One, is the place in Crown Heights to be the only shelter geared for elderly homeless men in New York City?

Lehrer: Can I just tell the audience – by way of background, the Crown Heights shelter, one of them that’s been in the news that’s coming, is specifically for men 62 and older. Right?

Mayor: Correct. Correct. And Hope, no, we have a whole range of shelters. We have some for families, some for individual people, some for folks with mental health challenges, some for veterans – we have all sorts of different approaches we use. Hope, I would like you please to give your information to WNYC after we finish the call because I want to connect you to our Department of Homeless Services outreach teams. They can speak to the gentleman that you know and get him to what we call a safe haven. This is a smaller facility that’s explicitly meant to be a transition from the street to something better, and it is smaller, more intimate, provides immediate services. Many homeless folks who come off the street – by the way, 900 folks who come in – I’m sorry, I said that wrong. Six hundred folks – 600 folks have come in off the street since we started the HOME STAT program. This was a year ago because they got that one on one attention, and they became convinced that they could get something better. We have facilities that can really address this individuals needs and convince him to come in and stay in, so for those 600 people over the last year, they have come off the street and stayed off the street. It’s really important to recognize on the security issue. I understand some homeless folks had a very bad experience in shelter, but that was before the NYPD took over shelter security. This is something we’ve done over the last two years. Now NYPD is supervising security in all shelters directly. Never happened in the 35 year homelessness crisis – the NYPD was never directly involved in ongoing supervision for shelter security. Now they are, and with the neighborhood policing initiative outside the shelter is now being patrolled more consistently by the NYPD as well, so I think your friend would recognize if he gives us a chance to show him something different that’s going on now. That it is a lot safer and a more conducive environment.

Lehrer: Hope, hang on, we will take your and your friend’s contact information off the air. How much – to follow up on that – does your long range planning assume that the elderly will be the future face of homeless to an increasing degree? Obviously the elderly population is increasing as a percentage of the population here in New York as nationally, and as people lose their incomes, you know, people don’t have great pensions. Social security only goes so far if you’ve been a relatively low income person through your lifetime, so is this the future?

Mayor: I would say – in two parts – one, yesterday I was in Brooklyn at the Mirage Diner with a group of seniors who told me – and they were folks who worked their whole lives and now are literally with very low fixed incomes trying to get by, paying in many cases more than 50 percent of their income in rent. And we talked about the mansion tax proposal which is one of the things that will keep people from being homeless who are seniors. It’s a proposal we have before the state legislature for a small tax surcharge on people who buy homes of over $2 million in value. They will pay a little more in the tax on that transaction. That money would allow us to provide subsidized senior housing for 25,000 seniors. They would pay no more than a third of their income in rent. That is the kind of thing – bluntly – that we’re going to have to do. And if we don’t start addressing this reality of a growing senior population needs affordable housing we will rue the day, and the way we do that is by taxing the wealthy in fair ways and devoting those resources to senior housing. So I ask all your listeners, if you believe in this mansion tax idea please let your state legislator know.

The second part of the equation, Brian. Overwhelming in the last years since the Great Recession, the face of homelessness is a family. Overwhelmingly. And a family that is not afflicted by mental health or substance abuse issues. A family that has an economic problem of the cost of housing going up too high and wages being too low or job opportunity being too limited. A lot of our families in shelter have a working member in the family who just isn’t earning enough to be able to afford this market, so I think for the foreseeable future that is our challenge – addressing family homelessness is the number one challenge. It’s part of why our plan emphasizes family and community – getting family members who do have homes to take in their loved ones, and we will subsidize it. We will provide direct financial support to any family who takes in homeless family members. And on the community level we don’t want to see a family with children from a place like Crown Heights sent to Bronx to shelter where the child is disconnected from their school. We want them to be close enough to be able to go their own school while we get them back out of shelter, but I think the central challenge over the next decade or more is going to be families. That’s what we have to focus on first.

Lehrer: Andreas in the Bronx, you’re on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Andreas.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: Mr. Mayor I spoke to you three weeks ago about me being laid off for no reason, and unfortunately nobody has gotten back to me.

Lehrer: Was that on this show?

Question: Yes, my name is Andreas, but it’s short for Andy.

Mayor: And you gave your information – Andreas, you gave your information to WNYC?

Question: Yes, I did.

Mayor: Okay, well, what we’ll do is we’ll let WNYC be our guarantor today. Brian, if you could have a member of your staff after the show get Andreas on the phone on a three-way call with a member of our administration so we can see what we can do on this. I always direct people to follow up. If for some reason they didn’t connect, let’s do it today.

Lehrer: We’ll do that. And, I am going to ask you the question that he told our screener, which is, what’s happening with Section 8 vouchers? And I am going to tie it into something else in the news, which is, the Trump administration’s proposed public housing budget cuts, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to New York City’s Housing Authority alone and more to Section 8 vouchers in terms of cuts. The Daily News Editorial page today calls him “Slumlord Donald,” but also says you’d have to get more specific in how you’d manage in such a cut. So what do you say about “Slumlord Donald” and about your specific actions?

Mayor: I would say the threat of cuts is very real. We are exceedingly sober about it. You know the first three years of my mayoralty we worried about an economic downturn. Now we have, thank God, a reason to be more content about our local economy. But, we are worried to death about what’s going to come out of Washington, because of the targets right now. Because of –remember why Brian – there will be tax cuts in this plan for the wealthy corporations. There will be increased military spending even though apparently the Pentagon did not request it. All of that will be taken away because there won’t be as much revenue. All of that will come off of domestic programs – that means affordable housing, Section 8, public housing, it means education, it means mass transit – all aimed right at the heart of New York City. Even though, we sent a lot more money to the federal government in our taxes than we get back. So we are going to fight all that and by the way cities all over the country are going to fight including cities in red and purple states. Mayors, business communities, I think are going to join us in a lot of this because they understand we are destabilizing their business environments and to their cities. So this is going to be a real fight. I think if the Trump administration thinks these cuts are going to go down easily, they are really missing something. There’s a lot of members of the House and Senate who happen to be Republicans who are going to be very uneasy about having to own those kind of cuts to their own states and districts. So we’ll fight that.

On the question of how we plan – I am surprised people don’t understand what we are saying strategically. I am not going to enable these cuts by putting dollar figures in a budget that basically sent a signal to Washington that it’s okay to go ahead and cut. I think that’s ludicrous. It’s not okay. We are going to fight every single one of them. And we obviously have been very careful about keeping strong reserves. We have historically high reserves in the city budget. But my vision is not to say okay we surrender. You make cuts and somehow we’ll try and compensate. We don’t have that kind of money. We have to fight the cuts and then if God forbid they actually happen, we will make our best decisions at that point of how to deal with them. But, I am just not going to get into this guessing game of how bad it might get when we have a lot of ability to stop these cuts. That’s where our focus should be.

Lehrer: And so you might, in theory, have to go back in the middle of a budget year and figure out how to compensate if they really go through with it in Washington?   

Mayor: Brian, there is a regular budget modification process that happens every single year in New York City. There is one – we finalized the budget in June. Then in November we do an updated budget to account for anything that might happen in the economy or if there was any act of nature that had an impact on the City’s budget. This is normal. What would be insane to do is to start declaring dollar figures of cuts that we have no idea that are going to happen or not. The right thing to do is to have very strong reserves and to work with Mayors and leaders all over the country to stop the cuts before they happen.

Lehrer: Here is a related question. We happen to have a student group from CUNY visiting the station this morning. And one of them proposed the question to ask you and here it is. With federal funding for food assistance now facing uncertainty under Trump, why the $4.9 million cut in your budget to the City’s Emergency Food Assistance Program that would slash our cities food pantry and soup kitchens by more than 40 percent, asks our student visitor. Is that in your budget?

Mayor: Yes, it’s not accurate and I respect your student visitor, but every time I hear of someone claiming we have a budget cut in our budget, I’d like them to show us where it is because it doesn’t exist. There are times when something shows in the budget initially as a certain level of funding, but then it’s still going to go through the executive budget process, which I will propose in about six weeks and then a process with the City Council. So there are times that we know there is going to be areas that we still have to work through with the City Council. It’s not a cut until the process is over and we say we want to cut something. There is none of these areas where we say we want to take away what is there. We do have to go through a negotiation process, so I can understand why people might see it that way but I think if we look a little more carefully then we’ll notice that things like food programs, which I have been working on for 15 years – this administration has increased and kept steady.

Lehrer: I did before I asked that question look around a little bit to see if there was any documentation of that and City Limits Magazine was reporting that same number, $4.9 million cut in your proposed budget to the Emergency Food Assistance Program. So is that just –?

Mayor: Well again I would ask anyone. I would really strongly advise Brian anyone listening who wants to actually understand the budget to look at the budget and not go through a journalistic outlet to understand the budget. The budget’s online. Anyone can look at it. There are times again where we say here is the baseline level that we are going to go with and then there is going to be a whole negotiation with the council to decide priorities amongst the resources we have. We don’t get up and say unless we believe a cut is the right thing to do, we don’t say we actually thing this is a bad program, we are going to cut it. If you look at the reality, year after year, we have consistently supported the emergency food programs and when they needed additional resources we put it in. So when there is a cut is when we declare in the preliminary budget, we think something is a bad idea. We’re not going to fund it. That is a situation that people can then debate. But this is not accurate to say when you look at three years running, when we have consistently funded emergency management food programs, all people have to do [inaudible] is a little sense of history and they’ll see that, that allegation is not accurate.

Lehrer: Last thing, because we are just about out of time, but I am going to give you a chance to tout a piece of good news that I see you have released, which is that the City’s Vision Zero did some new things this winter apparently with good affect. You want to mention it?

Mayor: Well thank you. Yes. It’s good it’s a place for good news in this world. I appreciate it very much Brian. We are very proud of it.

We recognize that there was a particular strategic problem, which was the evening rush hour. And we created what is known as the Dusk and Darkness Campaign to increase the amount of police resources applied to key intersections during those times and sort of the end of the afternoon, early evening when it was getting dark to do a lot more public education to alert people to the dangers. That time period November through March, we saw a 26 percent decline in crashes compared to the previous time frame last year 66 crashes versus 89 the year before during that time frame. So there’s been a lot more police presence. We’ve been given an increasing number of violations for failure to yield. That’s up 70 percent. So to anyone who’s thinking of not yielding to pedestrians in the intersection, we are giving out NYPD violations increasingly the same with speeding violations have gone up 11 percent since last year. We think this is working and a number of fatalities have gone down compared to year to date last year. So, look the Vison Zero as I keep saying it’s still in its infancy. You are going to see a lot more in the coming years, but this new piece of recognizing that there was a challenge in the late afternoon, early evening has really helped us. It’s precision policing – putting people where they’re needed the most where the danger is and a reminder that daylight savings begins 1:00 am on Sunday morning.

Lehrer: That’s right.

Mayor: So again that’s going to change the dynamic again. What that’s going to mean is mornings are going to be darker, so the morning commute is going to be more of a concern and we are going to shift resources towards the morning because more people driving sort of unexpectedly when it’s dark. People have to adjust to it for a certain number of weeks. We’ll make sure there is more police presence out at that time to guard against crashes.

Lehrer: Can I hold you over for one more homelessness question?

Mayor: Sure, sure.

Lehrer: Because I want to get your reaction to Governor Cuomo who seems to live to try to upstage you.

Mayor: Hmm –

Lehrer: Holding his own event in Central Brooklyn yesterday, while you were holding yours, before you held yours and announcing $1.4 billion multi-prong plan to fight poverty in the area. According to the Times, half the money would go to healthcare services and there would be 3,000 new affordable units and a more aggressive parks building program than the City has. I just want to get your reaction to the Governor’s plan.

Mayor: I am not seeing the details. I look forward to it. I welcome new investments in New York City. My concern, I don’t care what a politician does to get attention. That never worries me. What I care about is actual product, actual results of the people of New York City. To date, we have been waiting on the State of New York to give us a clear affordable housing plan since June – they passed a nebulous plan with no facts. We haven’t heard any results. The housing MOU, we haven’t heard any results on the supportive housing plan that was supposed to help us address homelessness.

We’ve heard lots of big talk, very real action, very few numbers, very few guarantees, very few results. We’d like to change that. So here is a plan theoretically to invest a lot of money in Central Brooklyn. I love it if it’s real so, you know, show us the money, show us the beef, whatever phrase you want. You know, if it’s real, I say thank you. We welcome it. But, I need to see some facts to go with it. I need to see a timeline and real dollars moving before I believe a hundred percent.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, thanks a lot. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.