‘Come Together’

It’s the cliché of the moment, the phrase repeated over and over as news of the pandemic gets worse and worse: “We’re all in this together.”

And yet everything around us – from fights about facemasks to frights about fascism – tells us we’re not.

It’s time to make the phrase real. Here is a simple agenda – a half dozen things the city can do in a New York minute to make “We’re all in this together” a self-evident truth.

1.            Abolish the adversarial system in housing court and make every eviction subject to extended arbitration. Eviction is the capital punishment of the housing world: the one matter from which, if the tenant loses, there is no recovery – one strike and you’re out. This is not how it should be. There were 200,000 evictions pending when COVID-19 shut the courts. Many tens of thousands are surely about to be filed when the courts allow it. Yet think about it: eviction should always be a desperate last resort. Therefore, we need a new system dedicated to the presumption that people need a home. And landlords should agree not only because it is the right thing to do during the pandemic but because, hey, as they say, “We’re all in this together.”

2.            In early March, some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s staffers convened a kitchen cabinet to come up with policies to help the city through the coronavirus era. The report was suppressed, but one of its ideas was revelatory: create permanent affordable housing in vacant tourist hotels. In fact, the city has already moved in this direction. In late July, the Department of Social Service reported that, during the pandemic, it had moved 13,000 homeless people into hotels. The 4-star Omni Times Square now houses all the guys who used to live in the Jerome Avenue Men’s Shelter. The Lucerne, on the Upper West Side, is home to 283 homeless substance abusers who used to bunk in two group shelters in the Lower East. We have proved it’s feasible: we can have a city with no street homeless. Now let’s make it permanent. And if any of the NIMBY crew starts grousing about formerly homeless folk living it up in or next door to fancy digs (some Hell’s Kitchen and Upper West Side residents have already complained that their new neighbors are menacing), let’s remind them to show some patience and forbearance because it happens to be true that, “we’re all in this together.”

3.            In the post-pandemic future, landlords are going to have to do something with all the empty co-working spaces that no one will want to use so long as there’s even a tiny risk of viral contamination. Let’s help them out and convert these vacant co-working spaces and other obsolete open-space offices (newspaper newsrooms, for instance) into permanent affordable housing. This will not only ensure an income stream for landlords, but will guarantee that streets throughout the city will have 24/7 life. And, you know what to say if the developers demur: “Fuggetaboutit. We’re all in this together.”

4.            As people lost their jobs due to COVID-19, volunteer mutual aid groups have sprung up to distribute free groceries to desperate families. Now it’s time to hire these groups to do the door-to-door contact tracing of people who have been potentially been exposed to the virus. The city has been hamstrung at this – with more than ½ the people who tested positive refusing to disclose who they came in contact with. Mutual aid organizations know their communities and are trusted, so they will be able to do a more complete and efficient job of finding at-risk neighbors and convincing them to isolate. Plus, they understand the dangers of over-surveillance, and will not pry into people’s lives. And should anyone in City Hall balk at defunding city agencies and instead funding communities, let’s just tell them: “Come on, I thought we’re all in this together.”

5.            Education is a critical public service and the city is still improvising when it comes to figuring out how to reopen schools. How about bringing all the stakeholders into the classroom. Let’s set up a team – including administrators, teachers, custodians, the various unions, parents, students, plus ventilation professionals and public health experts – to figure out a real plan. Then empower fundraisers to ensure we raise the dollars to do it (recovery bonds? a pied a terre tax? reviving the stock transfer tax?). I mean: didn’t these politicians and administrators get the memo: “we’re all in this together.”

6.            Finally, let’s set up a system of community adjudication for non-violent offenses. As things currently stand, if a person doesn’t deal with a citation for setting foot in a park after dark or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk or walking between subway cars, a warrant will be issued for their arrest – and they will be put in cuffs the next time a cop runs their ID. Retooling this would be a great start toward abolishing the police and breaking the street-to-prison pipeline. And should the thin blue line of cops, prosecutors and judges protest, let’s give ‘em a good Bronx cheer, while shouting our common refrain: “Don’t be an oppressor! We’re all in this together!”

Once upon a time, calling New York home gave a person a sense of ownership, even if the majority of us owned nothing. Now, with these six simple actions, protestors in the five boroughs will finally mean it when they chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” And we will have provided ourselves an opportunity to rediscover the principle that has always made our city great: we really are all in this together.