Opinion | Ray McGuire’s N.Y.C. Mayor Endorsement Interview – The New York Times

Binyamin Appelbaum: Are you prepared to overrule local members of the City Council if they don’t want it in their districts? Are you prepared to rezone large swaths of the city for larger construction? I mean, 350,000 is a big number. It’s fine to talk about a specific project in the Bronx, but you’re talking about a large-scale increase in housing.

The answer is, we do need to have a citywide housing plan, and it needs to be a plan that gets input from the locals who are going to be most impacted by it. And yes, once we develop that plan, which I intend to do immediately, everybody’s got to be on board. So, yes, I’m prepared to rezone. Yes, I’m here to make the investments, identify what the available land is and get moving forward on this. We have to start at some point. We’ve talked about it. We’ve not done … about it.

The answer is we’ve got to build. Otherwise the cost is going to get exorbitant.

[Between 2010 and 2019, New York City added 197,558 housing units. Over the same decade, the city added more than 900,000 jobs. The gap between job growth and housing growth is a key reason housing prices were on the rise before the pandemic — and are likely to climb as the city recovers.]

We’re paying $65 million, in some ways, for people to just … in Elmhurst … the end of last … the shelters are there. People don’t want to live in shelters, which is why we have so much homeless. So we need to get to addressing that, and I have a plan.

You say it is ambitious? Yes, it’s ambitious. We need ambition. That’s exactly what we need in the city. Status quo is what got us there. So I applaud … for being ambitious. It is indeed. We need that in New York City in order for us to be the best and accommodate all New Yorkers, especially the most marginalized. We need to have a vision, which I have. You need to have a track record of having planned and executed on a vision.

Mara Gay: Eleanor, if you don’t mind jumping in about streetscape, now would be a great time.

Eleanor Randolph: So this is sort of a quality-of-life question. There are 8,000 miles of streets in the City of New York. The real question very often is who owns these streets, who controls them? And the question has gotten much more complicated in the last few years, with scooters but also with restaurants now moving into the streets and adding territory to the restaurants. How do you look at that whole streetscape, and what would you do as mayor to change it, or just keep it going the way it’s going?

You know, I love the streetscapes, so I’m glad you mentioned that. I think they’re one of the richest parts of how the city works. And one of the ways … being in this community is coming together from the open areas, which I would encourage us to continue to develop. From the art spaces, which I would encourage us to continue to develop, with the artist-designated zones, which I would be supportive of, to making certain that along the streets where we have bike lanes, that we have protected bike lanes. And also given the number of motorized vehicles that we’re now experiencing, make certain that those bike lanes are safe bike lanes, especially for our elderly and for our children.