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Missed City Limits’ mayoral forum? Watch the full conversation here, where the candidates answered questions on how their administration would improve public housing, and address the challenges faced by homeless families with children.
Early voting kicks off Saturday in the primary election for New York City mayor, where a slate of Democratic candidates are competing to get on the ballot for November’s general election against incumbent Eric Adams, who’s running as an independent.
Primary day is June 24. Earlier this spring, City Limits invited the candidates to share their plans with voters at an in-person forum focused on NYCHA and family homelessness. The event took place at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, in partnership with the National Public Housing Network and the Family Homelessness Coalition.
Couldn’t join us at the time? Fear not. You can watch the full conversation below, and hear directly from the mayoral hopefuls on what they’d do to fund repairs at NYCHA (including where they stand on the involvement of private managers), root out corruption in the housing authority, build more affordable housing, improve the CityFHEPS voucher program and more.
These issues couldn’t be more pertinent: NYCHA is need of an estimated $78 billion in capital repairs over the next 20 years, and more than 120,000 people sleep in the city’s homeless shelter system each month, including tens of thousands of children.
The candidates who took part in the April 7 forum were City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, former State Assemblymember Michael Blake, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (who joined about halfway through the event, around the 40-minute mark), State Sen. Jessica Ramos and former NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and State Sen. Zellnor Myrie declined, citing the need to be in Albany for budget negotiations, which were ongoing at the time. Former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson also did not take part, citing a scheduling conflict. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign did not respond to City Limits’ invitations to the event.
Catch the full video below. We’ve included timestamped bookmarks for each question the candidates answered, if you’d prefer to skip around (summarized questions and where in the video they appear are listed below).
Questions the candidates answered, and timestamps for where they appear in the video above:
01:28 mark: Opening remarks
06:10 mark: What would you identify as the root cause of family homelessness, and what would your administration do to address the problem?
15:55 mark: NYC is experiencing a dire affordable housing shortage. What would you do as mayor to address this?
26:28 mark: How would you reduce the amount of time it takes CityFHEPS voucher holders to move from shelter into housing?
36:33 mark: What would you do to address late payments to the homeless services nonprofits the city contracts with?
40:22 mark: How would your administration root out corruption at NYCHA?
52:45 mark: Where do you stand on PACT (private management) and the Preservation Trust as options to fund NYCHA?
01:02:53 mark: How do you feel about the construction of non-public housing apartments on NYCHA property?
01:07:21 mark: What would you do to enhance homelessness prevention efforts?
01:12:30 mark: What would your administration do to ensure economic opportunities for NYCHA tenants?
01:17:03 mark: How will you as mayor work to prevent families from returning to shelter after they leave?
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