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Working hard for seniors and our local community

 

Margaret Chin.
Margaret Chin.

BY MARGARET CHIN  | Over the past year, my staff and I have remained hard at work on key issues affecting our local community. I’m also proud to have passed four pieces of important legislation in 2014, while continuing my efforts to support and empower senior citizens as chairperson of the City Council’s Committee on Aging.

During the first half of last year, I sponsored and passed the legislation expanding paid sick leave — for businesses with five or more employees — that has made such a profoundly positive impact on working families all across our city. The City Council also quickly passed my legislation to provide tens of thousands of more seniors with a rent freeze by expanding the NYC Rent Freeze Program (also known as SCRIE). Later in 2014, the Council passed my legislation to strengthen the penalties against landlords who harass tenants, as well as my landmark legislation to create the first-ever oversight and regulatory enforcement of privately run social adult daycare centers, which serve some of our city’s most vulnerable seniors.

As part of my work as Committee on Aging chairperson, I’m currently urging Mayor de Blasio to create a responsible city budget for fiscal year 2016 — which will have to be approved in just a couple of months — by providing some necessary funding increases for senior services in our city.

In last year’s budget, I was proud to work with the mayor and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to secure more than $20 million in new funding for the city’s Department for the Aging. After years of deep cuts under previous mayoral administrations, this surge of new funding allowed DFTA to maintain and improve senior centers, expand Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) and do more to prevent elder abuse, among many other things.

This year, I was deeply disappointed to find that the mayor did not continue those advances in his FY 2016 preliminary budget, and instead chose not to provide any new funding to DFTA. To me, this just means that I’ll have to work a little harder alongside Speaker Mark-Viverito and my Council colleagues to get the job done.


PROGRESS


We will continue working to make sure the mayor provides the new funding DFTA needs to serve our city’s rapidly growing senior population.

Over the past year, I was also proud to win victories and take new strides on some local issues that I know are of great interest to many Villager readers.

In particular, my staff and I continue to work closely with Community Board 2 and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer to address and push back against the troubling trend of oversized retail in Soho, which can damage the character of this outstanding historic area.

Here’s a key example: In October 2014, working in tandem with C.B. 2 and Borough President Brewer, I successfully pushed a developer to withdraw their application for large-scale retail at 19 E. Houston St., as part of a larger land-use application. The resulting application passed by the Council that month, with my support, will allow the developer to construct their planned commercial building at the site, while also keeping that development within the current context of the Soho Cast-Iron Historic District.

This issue of oversized retail isn’t going away, and I’m going to continue to work to address it more broadly.

Another important issue I’m working on now is the preservation of Soho’s Joint Living-Work Quarters for Artists (J.L.W.Q.A., or more commonly known as artist housing), as well as rent-stabilized housing all around the neighborhood.

Along with C.B. 2 and the borough president, my staff and I have been able to gain information allowing us to fully document and better protect rent-stabilized units that would have otherwise been forgotten. We have also been successful in negotiating for the preservation of current zoning uses where developers had sought to remove artist housing units.

And these are just quick glimpses of the many local issues my staff and I are working on throughout Lower Manhattan. So if you ever have trouble with your landlord, if you’re concerned about retail development in your neighborhood, if you need to access city services, or if you just want to discuss any of my legislation or ideas you have, please give me a call or send me an e-mail, at 212-587-3159 or chin@council.nyc.gov .

Chin is city councilmember, District 1, (Washington Square, Soho, Lower East Side, Tribeca, Two Bridges, Battery Park City)