Shaun Donovan's N.Y.C. Mayor Endorsement Interview

Shaun Donovan served as housing secretary and budget director under President Barack Obama and as housing commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

This interview with Mr. Donovan was conducted by the editorial board of The New York Times on April 21.

Read the board’s endorsement for the Democratic mayoral primary here.

Kathleen Kingsbury: Secretary Donovan, good to see you. You are muted.

I’m a bit of a rookie on Google Meet.

Kathleen Kingsbury: Thank you so much for being with us. We only have a limited time together, so if you don’t mind, I’m just going to jump right in. My first question will give you a chance to tell us a little bit more about yourself, which is, why do you want this job? Why would you be better than anyone else in the field of candidates?

Well, thank you all for having me today, and it’s a real pleasure to be with you even in this format. I wish we were meeting at The New York Times. Look, I fundamentally believe that this city is in a moment of reckoning and that this is the most important mayoral election of our lifetimes. Our city can either slide backward or rebound from this crisis and tragedy. And like every disaster, this one has not affected all of us the same.

For many, there’s a palpable sense of excitement that our city is coming back, and I will build on that as mayor. But for millions of others, profound loss remains. Thirty thousand of our neighbors are gone and half a million more are out of work. There are millions of others who are struggling just to pay the rent and to put food on the table, and so many of those people were struggling even before this crisis hit.

We need a mayor who can bind up our wounds and move this city forward, a mayor who understands that once the health pandemic is behind us, the economic and equity pandemics will still be in front of us. And I believe there is only one candidate who has actually seen a crisis like this, led through it and knows how to bring our entire city back. We have to get this decision right. We need a mayor who will not just repair and rebuild this city, but reimagine it as a city that works for everyone.

Now, I became a public servant because I grew up in the city at a different time of crisis. As a child, I saw homelessness exploding on our streets. I saw neighborhoods like the South Bronx and central Brooklyn crumbling, even burning to the ground. And it made me angry and made me ask, how can we allow our neighbors to sleep on our streets, our communities to crumble?

So I went to work. I started volunteering at a homeless shelter. In college, I interned for the National Coalition for the Homeless, and I learned about a remarkable leader in Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn named Bishop Johnny Ray Youngblood, who was building thousands of Nehemiah homes to rebuild his community, to build Black and brown wealth. When I finished school, I came to him and I said, ‘Put me to work,’ and I went to a nonprofit that was working directly with him to rebuild those communities. That began a 30-year career on the front lines of housing and homelessness, of economic and racial justice, a career that’s taught me again and again what it means to lead through crisis.

In fact — I try not to take it personally — a crisis seems to follow me wherever I go in public service. I was housing commissioner for Mayor Bloomberg in this city in the wake of 9/11. I was housing secretary in the midst of the worst housing crisis of our lifetimes, when Sandy hit our shores. President Obama asked me to lead the entire federal recovery effort, and then he asked me to lead the $4 trillion federal budget. Just weeks later, Ebola hit and later Zika, and I ended up side by side in the Situation Room with Dr. Fauci, with all our military leaders, with President Obama and then-Vice President Biden, making sure that emerging global health threats didn’t become pandemics that cost tens of thousands of our neighbors their lives.

So I know what it means to lead through crisis, and I know that those who are the most vulnerable before a crisis are always hurt the worst by it. I was angry, but not surprised, that Black and brown communities have been hurt the worst. And that’s why I’ve put the most vulnerable, and equity, at the forefront of all of my work, whether it’s leading the strategy to dramatically reduce homelessness around this country, making sure by giving real meaning to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that Black and brown people could live wherever they choose, becoming the first cabinet secretary in history to endorse marriage equality. My work on climate change and immigration and so many other issues.

In fact, I believe I’m the real progressive in this race because I’ve made the most progress on issues of inequality. And that’s why I put those issues at the forefront of my campaign with the biggest, boldest ideas to make sure that our neighborhoods don’t determine our futures, by creating 15-minute neighborhoods ——

Mara Gay: In fact, I want to ask you about that, if you give me a chance. You have some of the best ideas in this race: transforming every neighborhood in New York into a 15-minute neighborhood — which, for my colleagues, is actually an idea that came from Hidalgo, from Paris — that every New Yorker would have good health care, school, a coffee shop within a 15-minute walk; an equity bonds plan to give every kid $1,000 when they’re born that would grow; speeding the closure of plants and subsidizing air-conditioners to low-income communities in harm’s way. As mayor, how would you turn these ideas into reality, and can you talk a little bit about your management style?

So. Mara, all credit due, Mayor Hidalgo also borrowed that from, I think, the mayor of Vancouver originally. Look, just to make a larger point, one of the things about me that’s different from anybody in this race is I’ve worked with mayors across the country and across the globe. If we really want to be the leading, most innovative city in the world, I think we need to look at other places and make sure we’re building on those.

You know, what I would say is, first, don’t take my word for it. Look at my record. I’ve actually been able to make big change. It would start, for me, by ensuring that we create the city’s first-ever chief equity officer, reporting directly to the mayor, who has jurisdiction over every single agency and is really driving equity through everything that the city does. We need a mayor who understands every issue is an issue of equity, and that would be central to creating real accountability on those plans.

I would also just say that I’m a leader who really understands how to make government work across different agencies. One of the fundamental problems we’ve seen these last few years is a lack of collaboration. Just to pick a very specific example, on homelessness: We try to solve homelessness with homelessness programs when, in fact, the way we made progress in the federal government was to bring together every agency that touches the issue, whether it’s substance abuse, criminal justice — everybody needs to be at the table — and we need to create real accountability through data, holding folks accountable and making sure that we’re doing more of what actually works and less of what doesn’t.

Actually, David Brooks wrote a piece about the work we did on HUDStat and homelessness that got to the center of the way I led on those issues. Finally, I think I’m the only candidate that has that broad experience to make these ideas real.

Kathleen Kingsbury: I’m glad you brought up homelessness and housing in general. You were the housing commissioner under Bloomberg at a time when we saw the cost of housing in this city skyrocket, and tens of thousands of people became homeless. Can you talk a little bit about what you think went wrong there and why we saw some of those things happen?

Katie, just to be specific, if you go back and look at what happened during my time leading housing in this city, I think what you’ll see is that homelessness actually went down rather than up. The big increase happened later and accelerated under de Blasio. I would also say that the issue that we saw during my time was the emergence of the mortgage crisis, and actually the challenges around that became more and more prominent. I led the country with the very first response to that, the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, that really did create innovative solutions with housing counseling, with mortgage assistance, with legal assistance.

And so I do believe if you look at my record, you’ll see a real record of creating innovative solutions on housing, and that we did dramatically accelerate the creation of affordable housing in the city.

But I would also say if I had to go back, one of the things that I’m really concerned about is what I said earlier about the lack of coordination. I felt like there was not enough, on homelessness, of ensuring that every part of the city was moving together. We didn’t have a single deputy mayor at that time that oversaw everything that touched housing and homelessness. I’ve committed to doing that. I don’t think we did enough at that point around housing, counseling and legal services. I agree with Mayor de Blasio, his commitment to create a right to counsel. But the truth is it only exists as a small pilot in a few neighborhoods at this point. It needs to be citywide. It was one of the real lessons of the mortgage crisis, that if you can get counseling and assistance to folks, that it makes a huge difference.

And I would completely restructure the city’s rental assistance program with billions of dollars of federal money that’s coming into rental assistance that, frankly, I helped shape. It was based on work I did as HUD secretary with the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program. We need solutions that ensure that you don’t have to end up in housing court and nearly evicted before you get rental assistance in this city. So those are all key lessons, I think, from that period that I would apply.

Mara Gay: Thank you. Mr. Secretary, what is your path to victory, given the fact that polls, which are imperfect, show that you’re not so far gaining ground with voters? So what’s your path to victory, and can you survive without public financing, or are you expecting those funds soon?

So I assume you mean besides getting The New York Times endorsement, what’s my pathway to victory? Is that the question?

Mara Gay: That’s very flattering.

Look, first, I just want to start with saying this is a wide-open race at this point. The majority of New Yorkers are undecided, and I think we see that even those who say they’ve decided, it’s very soft. I think in the best poll that we’ve seen 16 percent were supporting the leading candidate. So first of all, what I would say is that it’s a wide-open race. As we learned in 2013 in New York, in Mayor Bloomberg’s election, in Chicago, that in the last month there can be huge movements in these races. So first, a wide-open race.

Second, in the conversations that I am having with New Yorkers, in the polling that we’ve seen, what we understand is that New Yorkers want two things at this moment. They want change from the political status quo, but they also want experience. And I think I’m the only candidate that really represents both in this sense. Nearly all the leading candidates have either worked for Mayor de Blasio or they’re current elected officials. I don’t think they represent, for the voters, change from the political status quo. But at the same time, the two who are kind of coming from outside the current political system, like me, have never spent a day in government. And 75 percent of New Yorkers say government experience is actually very important to them right now. They don’t believe this is the time for a rookie as mayor.

So what we’re seeing in our polling, in the public polling, is a real demand for experience leading through crisis. I would also say that three out of four voters say that having an Obama-Biden cabinet secretary is a huge positive for them. So we believe that this is really just a moment about name recognition, where you have one candidate who’s universally known and a large group of us that aren’t yet. We also know that by the time folks are voting, we should have three or four of us that are universally known. This will become a race not about name recognition, but about who really brings both the change and the experience that New Yorkers want at this moment.

Mara Gay: Could you answer part of my question which is, are you expecting to receive matching funds?

Absolutely. We have responded to all the requests quickly based on the ——

Mara Gay: Sorry. I just wanted a yes or no.

Jesse Wegman: Can I follow on that question both with regard to your electoral strategy and also the large field that you just mentioned? Can you talk about how the introduction of ranked-choice voting is going to affect both your campaign as well as your campaign strategy?

Kathleen Kingsbury: Can I add to that? Can you also tell us who is No. 2 on your ballot?

Sure. So first, I would just say that we’ve looked at ranked-choice voting closely around the country. I’ve actually talked with London Breed and Libby Schaaf, the mayors of Oakland and San Francisco, about it.

What we see is that it does three things. It increases turnout because your vote matters more when you have five choices. You need to run a more positive, visionary campaign.

[As The Times reports: “In the U.S., ranked-choice voting is most commonly used by cities for local elections. Only Maine uses it at the state level, though Alaska will soon join it after passing a ballot measure last November. In New York City, ranked-choice voting will be used for local primary and special elections; it will not be used in the city’s general election on Nov. 2, or to elect candidates to county, state or federal office.”]

And I believe that both of those things — a broader turnout with a more representative group of New Yorkers and needing to run a more visionary, positive campaign, where we’re seeing lots of attacks growing — I have stayed on focus as the candidate of ideas and putting out a positive vision in a way I think other candidates haven’t. And then third, and maybe most importantly, you have to run citywide. You have to be able to draw more than 50 percent of New Yorkers.

I think my ability to appeal both to those who are concerned about management and leadership, as well as bold, progressive ideas, my appeal to a broad set of groups, whether it be African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans — I think I’m a unique candidate to be able to draw broadly from every neighborhood and every demographic in the city. And I think that is unique among the candidates, in terms of getting to 50 percent.

Jesse Wegman: And can you answer Katie’s question?

Greg Bensinger: As you know, turnout in municipal elections is chronically low historically. So what specifically are you doing to increase turnout outside of your prime voters, especially in underrepresented neighborhoods and communities?

Katie, I’ve said publicly before that I have deep respect for the work Maya Wiley has done on civil rights. We’ve known each other and worked on similar issues over many decades. And I do believe that work is critically important to the city at this time. I believe I have a record, as I said, of making real progress on those issues as well. I’ve said publicly she would be my second choice.

Greg, to your point, I was the first candidate to actually make videos in multiple languages about ranked-choice voting to educate folks. I have deep relationships, as I said in the opening, with leaders like Bishop Johnny Ray Youngblood and a broad group of clergy leaders in the city who I’ve been spending time with and doing education work with them. I believe that we need much more education about this. But I have been trying to do everything that I possibly can, including when I started a food program a year ago called Common Table. We were putting ranked-choice voting information into the bags with food that we would have delivered to people’s homes so that they wouldn’t have to wait for hours in line at a soup kitchen and potentially get Covid. So I’ve been following and trying to do my part in many, many different ways.

Mara Gay: Thank you. Mr. Secretary, could you please name one, just one specific action that you would take to improve quality of life for all New Yorkers?

Sorry about that, I think you just bugged out for a second, you said one thing for quality of life ——

Mara Gay: Name one specific action that you would take to improve quality of life for all New Yorkers. Just one. We know that you have a book.

Look, I would go back to the work that I’ve done on my arts and culture policy, and the work that would ensure that we become the most vibrant, alive city, that arts and culture become broadly available to all New Yorkers. Because I fundamentally believe in the modern economy talent decides where to live and companies and capital follow. I think what really separates us from other cities is being a city of arts and culture, of restaurants, of all those things. That needs to be equitable across this city; every neighborhood needs to be alive. I would fill all of our vacant storefronts with performers and artists and pop-up restaurants, our public spaces. All of that, I think, will in this moment be the most important thing to bring this city back, to show the world that New York is New York.

Eleanor Randolph: Given the news of this week, tell us how you would balance public safety with safety from the police. And you know the problems here. You know the problems with guns. You saw stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg. You know what it’s like to deal with the unions. How would you do something differently, given what we’ve started to really see across the country?

Eleanor, such an important question. My strategy — and again, I think I have the most far-reaching progressive strategy on this that’s actually achievable — it really centers on doing three things.

One is true reform of policing in this city, real accountability and transparency training. I would require that police officers live in New York City. Every one of my employees as housing commissioner needed to live in the city. I think until our police reflect our communities, and the leadership of the police reflects our community — I said I would appoint a police commissioner of color in the city — all of those things have to happen, along with the training required to ensure that our police are actually treating folks with respect throughout every community in the city.

Second, I would significantly reduce the role of police. We should not have the police being the front lines in working with our homeless and criminalizing homelessness in the city. I’ve worked across the country to set up systems, alternative 911 systems, like CAHOOTS in Oregon, that fundamentally change that response. I would remove the police from schools in ways that would ensure that we have to treat our children with respect and create a learning environment. It works. By doing that and other steps, I would be able to focus the police much more on guns and violent crime, which are the issues that are rising in this city and that I think all communities, particularly Black and brown communities, are concerned with.

[For years, New York has enjoyed a reputation for being the safest big city in the nation. But in 2020, homicides increased 41 percent and shootings increased 97.4 percent from 2019. Other cities around the country had increases in gun violence that most experts attribute to the trauma and upheaval caused by the pandemic.]

And as part of that, what I would say is we need a mayor who can actually build a national coalition once again against bringing guns into the city. My relationships with Attorney General Garland, with all the senior folks at the Justice Department, with mayors and governors across the country — I would be able to build a coalition that would stop guns coming into our city in a way that we have not had a focus on these last eight years. So I think that is all part of it.

But lastly, I would say we need to reinvest in our communities. We often talk just about policing, but we need a broader conversation about our criminal justice system and putting justice in that system. Today, we spend over $400,000 per prisoner per year at Rikers and we get terrible results.

[A report from the comptroller found that in fiscal year 2020 New York spent an average of $447,337 for each person incarcerated — a 30 percent increase from the pervious year. That increase came despite the fact that jail populations are at historical lows following a series of criminal justice reforms.]

So I would create a pretrial agency. I would fundamentally reinvest. And I have the only plan of any of the candidates to get to $3 billion a year invested in those programs, 20 percent of our criminal justice budget, by the end of my first term.

And I would say I also have the record of engagement in these issues in a way that other candidates don’t, whether it was the housing program I created as housing commissioner where we gave Section 8 vouchers to folks coming out of Rikers; the results of that were so transformational for those folks that it’s now been replicated in 40 cities around the country. In my work as a budget director, where I led the charge to take away excess military equipment from police departments around the city — we were giving them excess military equipment from the U.S. government, I ended that. In my work on the 21st Century Policing Task Force with President Obama in Philadelphia, in New Orleans, in cities where they had worse challenges on violent crime and on the culture of policing, that we were able to make significant progress on. So I am the one candidate in the race who really has a deep record on this of actual results.

Mara Gay: Just as a quick follow-up to that, both Bloomberg and de Blasio were absolutely steamrolled by their police commissioners. Why is that and how would you be different?

Brent Staples: Yeah, let me tag onto that. I mean, having sat here and watched the Police Department run the City of New York under both Bloomberg and the progressive Mayor de Blasio, I second that question. Also, you cannot require police officers by fiat to live in New York. You need a law for that. Do you think the Legislature is going to support something like that? Or you need to negotiate it in the contract, and they ain’t giving it to you.

So, Brent, first of all, what I would say is — repeating something President Obama used to say to us all the time — we cannot let a crisis go to waste. I fundamentally believe we have a moment of potential for reform with changes in the State Legislature, with what we have all seen with our eyes these past few years in a way that we had not seen before. I fundamentally believe we need a mayor who can capture that moment of possibility and make it real.

So on your point about the State Legislature, absolutely. But I think with the right leadership — remember, I went to Albany under Shelly Silver and Vito Lopez and was able to get big progressive changes to our tax laws to get more affordable housing done, I was able to get a landmark agreement on supportive housing, getting state and city money — so I have a record of being able to work with the state.

[According to current regulations, newly hired police officers must live in — or move to — one of the city’s five boroughs or Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, Westchester, Putnam or Orange Counties within 30 days of being hired. Last year, 49 percent of uniformed officers lived in the five boroughs. The department’s 19,000 civilian employees are not required to live in the city. For many decades, candidates for mayor have called for requiring police officers to live in the city. State lawmakers have routinely introduced mandates but the legislation has failed to pass.]

What I would say locally is, you know, I think Pat Lynch has exposed himself this past year as a leader who does not deserve the following of his members. I’ve been meeting with leaders of Black and Latino officers associations, and I believe there is an opportunity to go around the P.B.A. and really drive reform with the right choice of police commissioner, and real focus and follow-up from the mayor, as well as partnership with the State Legislature on changes that build on 50-a, which was something we would have said was never possible. Bail reform. Other things to your point, Brent, that before might not have been possible, but are possible now. We can build on those victories.

Kathleen Kingsbury: We only have a few minutes left, and I just feel like if we don’t ask about what your plans are for education, we would be remiss, given the crisis that this city’s schools are in right now. But we’d also love to hear how you actually not only bring schools back, but improve them going forward.

Yeah, so I’m proud to have a 10,000-word education plan that the paper of record called ——

Kathleen Kingsbury: We don’t need 10,000 words, thank you.

Hopefully you’ve all got the 200-page book and have been through every page. As I look at education, we have to fundamentally recognize that making our education system more equitable requires making our neighborhoods and our housing more equitable. And I think my work on fair housing, my focus on that, will be an important piece of making our schools more equitable as well. So that’s one part that I think comes as a prerequisite to change.

Second, I do believe that we need to move forward — whether it’s on getting rid of middle school screens, on ending gifted and talented testing for 4-year-olds, really looking at the way we zone and district schools.

[In 2019, a panel appointed by Mayor de Blasio recommended that the city abolish most selective gifted and talented programs in an effort to desegregate the 1.1 million-student system, by far the largest in the country.]

I think there’s promising work in District 15, Park Slope, with weighted lotteries. There are lots of important steps that have been taken to begin that require really scaling up. We should have done those earlier. We should not have waited as long as we did these last eight years. But there is some encouraging progress.

But we need to build on that, recognizing that we need to build a broader coalition for change in schools. Part of the way I would do that is really ensuring that we’re building on what is working. We have both screened and unscreened high schools that are very successful, that are both academically successful and highly equitable. And those are dual-language schools, they’re arts-based schools, STEM-based schools. We should be creating more of those. We should be growing the ones that we have and both pushing people toward more equity in school, but also pulling people toward more equity, so that we don’t ultimately end up with division that stops progress on this.

[This year only a tiny number of Black and Hispanic students received offers to attend New York City’s elite public high schools. As The Times reported: “Only 9 percent of offers made by elite schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science went to Black and Latino students this year, down from 11 percent last year. Only eight Black students received offers to Stuyvesant out of 749 spots, and only one Black student was accepted into Staten Island Technical High School, out of 281 freshman seats.”]

The last thing I would say is we can’t have just 45 percent teachers of color in a system that is 85 percent kids of color. We know that a child of color who has a teacher of color by third grade is much more likely to graduate. And so I have the most comprehensive plan, not just to recruit, but actually to retain teachers of color of anyone in the race.

Alex Kingsbury: I’d like to ask a question. I’m interested in two things. First, briefly, what is the biggest mistake you think the de Blasio administration has made? And then second, what do you think will be the greatest challenge that you face as mayor?

So I would have to say that the greatest mistake, I believe, that de Blasio has made is when his health commissioner Oxiris Barbot came to him last — a year ago and said, ‘This is going to be bad, we have to move quickly.’ And not only did Mayor de Blasio not listen to her, but he took contact tracing and testing away from arguably the best health department in the world and gave it to the Health and Hospitals Corporation.

[The editorial board opposed Mayor de Blasio’s decision, writing a year ago: “Starting a proper contact-tracing program goes far beyond the work of medical personnel. Vital records offices will be involved in analyzing death certificates; legal offices will be involved in enforcing orders for those who are at risk of spreading the virus but refusing to isolate. While the city’s health department has an infrastructure for issuing such orders, Health and Hospitals will have to create new protocols.”]

And we became the hardest-hit city in the world by Covid. And by the way, Oxiris then left within a few weeks and threw the health department into uncertainty at a moment that we needed them more than any time in the city’s history. And for me, fundamentally, having led again and again through crisis, I think the greatest danger for any leader is to surround yourself with people who won’t tell you the truth, particularly in crisis. We saw that in the White House the last four years, but unfortunately, we’ve seen it again and again in City Hall these last eight years. And I understand what leadership means, particularly in moments of crisis. And it demands that you surround yourself with the best possible team that will tell you the truth at every moment and not make political decisions that will cost New Yorkers their lives.

Mara Gay: Thanks. I just wanted to ask you a couple quick rapid-fire questions, so if you could be extremely brief, I’d appreciate it. A little pop quiz. Do you know what percentage of New York City schoolchildren in public school are homeless or living in temporary shelter?

Well, there’s lots of debate about this, Mara, I’ve worked long enough in homelessness. But it’s more than 10 percent by the most typically used measure.

[In the 2019-20 school year, that figure was just under 10 percent, with about 111,600 homeless students attending district and charter schools in New York.]

Mara Gay: Thanks. Do you happen to know what the median sales price for a home is in Brooklyn right now?

In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t for sure. I would guess it is around $100,000.

Mara Gay: It’s $900,000.

Median home? Including apartments?

[Mr. Donovan later emailed to say that his $100,000 answer referred to the assessed value of homes in Brooklyn. “I really don’t think you can buy a house in Brooklyn today for that little,” he wrote.]

Mara Gay: All of it, yeah. What about the median rent in Manhattan?

In the range of $4,000.

Mara Gay: Just under $3,000. In your view, what are some of the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by Covid in New York? Just name a few.

Well, we looked at this when I started my Common Table program and we chose the South Bronx, Corona, Brownsville, East New York and Harlem.

Mara Gay: Great. And where were you during the pandemic? What were you up to?

I was here in Brooklyn. And as I said, in addition to starting my campaign, I raised over a million dollars. I founded a program called Common Table with World Central Kitchen and Rethink Food that delivered hot, fresh restaurant meals directly to people’s doors. We developed an app so they could order them at home or pick them up. I was also working on public housing, working on the census, and was working on helping Puerto Rico rebuild after Maria and the other storms that they’ve seen.

Mara Gay: Thanks so much, that’s it for me.

Kathleen Kingsbury: All right, well, I think our time is up. Thank you so much. We’re trying to be fair to everyone. Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you. And I really appreciate your time. And I look forward to building a constructive relationship with all of you, unlike what we’ve seen too much in this country, in this city, these last few years.

I just want to say thank you in a moment when the press has been on the front lines, both central to our democracy but also literally putting your jobs and your lives in harm’s way, given what we’ve seen in this country these last few years. I deeply appreciate it. So thank you.