New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a “racial equity plan” this week in an effort to address what he believes are “patterns of disinvestment, exclusion from homeownership, unequal access to health care and employment and concentrated environmental burdens” experienced by “communities of color.”
According to Mamdani’s office, the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan is the “first time any New York City administration has required major city agencies to examine their work through a racial equity lens and identify and eliminate disparities.” Areas to be assessed include Children, Youth, Older Adults and Families; Economy; Housing and Preservation; Infrastructure and Environment; Health and Wellbeing; Community Safety, Rights and Accountability; and Good Governance and Inclusive Decision-Making.
Mamdani said during a press conference on the matter that the “story of black and brown New Yorkers is one of being forced to stretch that same dollar that little bit further. Every year as wages stagnate, as well as an exodus and exclusion continues to take place.”
“When I say exodus, I refer to the fact that from 2000 to 2020 more than 200,000 black New Yorkers were pushed out of the city because they could not afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America, because rent was too high, child care was too expensive, and groceries cost too much.”
“I ran for mayor on an affordability agenda because we know that we cannot solve this crisis without reckoning with the fact that the neighborhoods hit hardest by rent and the rising nature of it, by childcare costs and the suffocating manner of it, are the same ones that have been hit for years by institutional neglect and racism,” Mamdani added. “In that way, New York City’s affordability crisis and its history of racial inequity are bound together.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said the plan sounds illegal and will be reviewed.
