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      Gerald Migdol Is Charged in Campaign Finance Scheme

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      Gerald Migdol is accused of concealing contributions to a New York City comptroller candidate to get more public-matching funds.A Manhattan real estate developer was charged on Friday with scheming to conceal contributions to a candidate in this year’s New York City comptroller’s race in a bid to get as much public financing for the candidate as possible.The developer, Gerald Migdol, arranged for dozens of donations to be made to the campaign in the names of people who had not authorized the payments, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.One contribution that prosecutors said Mr. Migdol arranged, a $250 money order, was made in the name of a relative who is a minor, prosecutors said.The indictment does not name the candidate Mr. Migdol sought to help. But the details of the case and publicly available information suggest it is Brian A. Benjamin, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for comptroller and is now New York’s lieutenant governor.The indictment does not indicate that the candidate knew of the scheme.Mr. Migdol, 71, was arrested early Friday on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, officials said. He pleaded not guilty in an arraignment on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was released on bond. The wire fraud charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and campaign finance regulations are one way communities seek to ensure everyone plays by the same rules,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.Reached by phone after Mr. Migdol’s arraignment, Joel Cohen, his lawyer, said his client had pleaded not guilty “and that’s appropriate.”“That says what we need to say,” Mr. Cohen added.A man who answered the phone at Mr. Migdol’s family-run real estate company, the Migdol Organization, declined to comment. The company, which is based in Harlem, owns and operates residential properties across New York City.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Benjamin’s comptroller campaign said that “neither Lieutenant Governor Benjamin nor his campaign are being accused of any wrongdoing and they are prepared to fully cooperate with authorities.”The spokesman added that “as soon as the campaign discovered that these contributions were improperly sourced, they donated them to the campaign finance board.”The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul referred all questions to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign. Ms. Hochul chose Mr. Benjamin as her lieutenant governor in August after she succeeded Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Migdol’s family has long supported Democratic candidates, according to the Migdol Organization website, which includes photos of family members with Mr. Benjamin and other politicians.Several Migdol family members, including Gerald Migdol, contributed to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign under their own names, campaign finance records show.The contributions at issue in the case against Mr. Migdol, the indictment says, were meant to allow the candidate’s campaign to qualify for public-matching funds through the city’s campaign finance system, potentially unlocking tens of thousands of dollars in additional money. The scheme ran from November 2019 to January 2021, the indictment says.A few of the contributions mentioned in the indictment were given to the campaign by a person at Mr. Migdol’s direction, prosecutors said. The indictment does not name the person, who is identified only as CC-1. The indictment also cites other unnamed “co-conspirators.”Mr. Migdol, prosecutors said, explained the scheme in a message to the unnamed people in July 2020, describing how the city’s public-financing system could multiply their contributions eightfold.“We get 8xl for money orders of $100,” the message said, according to the indictment. “For Money orders of $250=8×1 for first $100 and the other $150 is not matched. So a MO for $250 is worth $950 for [Candidate-1]. Hopefully our next City Comptroller.”A biography of Mr. Migdol on his company’s website says he has been involved in the real estate business in New York City for more than 40 years, primarily in Harlem and the Bronx.Mr. Migdol told The New York Post in 2006 that he started buying brownstones in Harlem in the early 2000s when they were selling for several hundred thousand dollars, far less than the prices such buildings can fetch today.In October 2019, Mr. Migdol received a community leadership award in Harlem that described him as “a true Harlem legend.” He said in his acceptance speech that Mr. Benjamin had nominated him for the award.“I am grateful to my new friend — our great State Senator Brian Benjamin,” Mr. Migdol said in the speech, which his company posted on its website. “At first glance my nomination would not normally be a popular choice. He then said but for the fact that what you guys do here is worthy of being honored.”Mr. Benjamin, a former state senator from Harlem, placed fourth in the Democratic primary for comptroller, well behind the winner, Brad Lander, a City Council member from Brooklyn.Many of the details in the indictment were first reported in January by the news website The City, including that several people whose names were listed on donations to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign said they had not made the payments.One donation reported by The City was a $250 contribution made in the name of Mr. Migdol’s 2-year-old grandson.Jefferson Siegel contributed reporting. More

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      Where Does Eric Adams Really Live?

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      Throughout the race, there has been a significant degree of confusion surrounding the question of where Eric Adams resides.Given the confusion surrounding his residency, and how he accounts for his real estate on his tax returns, a moderator asked Mr. Adams how the electorate could trust him.Mr. Adams said, as he has in the past, that he takes responsibility for omissions on his tax returns, and then blamed his accountant, who he said was homeless.“He went through real trauma,” Mr. Adams said of his accountant. “And I’m not a hypocrite, I wanted to still give him the support that he needed.”Mr. Adams also insisted, again, that his primary residence is in Brooklyn.Mr. Adams owns a multi-unit townhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn in which he says he keeps an apartment. In one of the more bizarre moments of the mayoral primary, he gave a media tour of that apartment, with reporters observing non-vegan food items apparently belonging to Mr. Adams’s son. (Mr. Adams has been a vegan for years.)But Mr. Adams also co-owns a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., with his partner, and he has said that he moved into Brooklyn Borough Hall for a time after the pandemic arrived. During the primary, Politico New York reported that Mr. Adams used conflicting addresses in public records and that he was still spending nights at Borough Hall.He has had to refile his tax returns in part because of irregularities concerning his residency, the news outlet The City reported. The outlet also reported that the city is seeking to inspect his Brooklyn residence following an allegation of an illegal apartment conversion on the property. His campaign has said he intended to rectify those issues, though the complaint remains active.Mr. Sliwa recently led a journey from Manhattan to Fort Lee “to find out where Eric Adams really lives.” More

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      No, California Isn’t Doomed

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      California has been struggling. It has stumbled through the Covid-19 pandemic and recession, afflicted by wildfires, an epidemic of homelessness and stratospheric housing prices. Last year it experienced its first population decline in records going back to 1900. Its latest mess was a costly and unsuccessful campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.The state’s problems are real. Nevertheless, there are positive signs. The first step toward fixing problems is recognizing them, and on that score, Californians have grown increasingly aware of what’s wrong. California is also blessed with abundant resources that enable it to fix problems that would be daunting for less endowed states.Housing is a good example. Prices are crazy: On Sept. 16, the California Association of Realtors announced that the median sale price in the state in August was $827,940, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Only 23 percent of California households could afford to buy a median-priced home in the second quarter, down from one-third a year earlier, the association announced in August.To make ends meet, many Californians scrimp and save and commute long distances from exurbs; others give up and move to cheaper states. Employers struggle to lure out-of-state recruits. Homeowners can swap one high-priced house for another, but renters can’t buy starter homes because they have no housing equity to use for a down payment. And California’s epidemic of homelessness can be traced in part to a lack of affordable housing.The upside is that almost everyone in California understands that building more housing is essential. More homes are being built in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin combined than in the entire state of California, says Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association.One of Newsom’s first acts after surviving the recall attempt was to sign three bills to increase housing supply. Senate Bill No. 8 extends a 2019 law that accelerates approval of housing projects. Senate Bill No. 9 allows homeowners to build up to three additional housing units on their land. And Senate Bill No. 10 allows environmental review to be sped up for multiunit projects near transit hubs or in urban developments. Those are the latest of dozens of housing bills signed by Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown.The California Environmental Quality Act, signed into law in 1970 by Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor, is valuable on the whole but enables people to use environmental pretexts to resist housing developments in their neighborhoods that they could not as easily oppose otherwise. There’s widespread agreement that this needs to change.Progress, though, is halting. The pace of issuance of permits for housing construction in California is slower now than in 1975, according to data compiled by the state’s Department of Finance and the U.S. Census Bureau. Environmentalists fight efforts to circumscribe the environmental quality act, worrying that legitimate environmental concerns about new projects will be neglected. And local elected officials continue to push back against efforts to increase density, which they perceive as reducing the value of existing homes. In Palo Alto, the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard and Tesla, Mayor Tom DuBois expressed opposition to Senate Bill No. 10, writing that “such legislation echoes more of Russia than of California.”Up against such forces, Dunmoyer, the president of the building industry association, told me that he’s impressed by the “courage” shown by Newsom and the California State Legislature in enacting senate bills 8, 9 and 10. But, he added, “This is a marathon, and we’re still in the first quarter of the marathon race.”Other problems in California should be fixable with effort and good will. As I wrote in my Sept. 8 newsletter, the state’s water shortages could be alleviated by diverting a little water from agriculture to other purposes. Farms account for only 0.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product but more than 80 percent of the water used by people (that is, not counting water that stays in streams, deltas and so on).Homelessness is caused partly by a lack of housing, but also by inadequate treatment of people experiencing mental illness and drug addiction. Many conservatives argue that the state has focused too much on low-income housing as the solution to homelessness. “Focus on treatment first rather than housing first,” says Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at the right-of-center Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. “Otherwise all we’re doing is taking the problem from the street to the hotel room.”Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-of-center California Budget and Policy Center, disagrees with Winegarden, and calls for more spending on Homekey, the state’s program for housing the homeless. Social services should be “wrapped around,” or integrated with, a home, Hoene says. It’s unfortunate, he says, that “people on different sides of strategies pit the potential solutions against each other.”One advantage that California has in dealing with these and other challenges — fixing K-12 education, lowering the tax burden on families and businesses and so on — is that the state’s finances have improved. The state raised taxes and trimmed spending to brace for the Covid-19 recession, but tax revenues came in unexpectedly high because higher-income workers kept working and the financial markets did well, generating taxable capital gains. The $100 billion California Comeback Plan, which Newsom signed in July, is a Christmas tree of Democratic priorities, including stimulus checks for two out of every three Californians, renter assistance, housing for the homeless, tax relief and grants to small businesses, universal pre-K, college savings accounts for low-income students and investments in infrastructure and wildfire resilience.I bounced this optimistic line of thought off Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who is an expert on cities. He was more pessimistic. “The way our economy is structured, there’s an incredible amount of wealth being minted for a small number of people,” he said. “We have the worst overcrowding. The schools are terrible and they’re going to get worse.” He added, “Used to be a young, ambitious person went to California. I don’t think that’s happening anymore.”It’s hard to argue with a veteran observer of California like Kotkin, who began writing about Silicon Valley in 1975. On the other hand, the bearishness can be overdone. Matthew A. Winkler, editor in chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, observed earlier this year that people love to declare California “doomed.” It ain’t.The readers writeHow you describe a bill depends upon what you are talking about. If you are concerned about too much fiscal stimulus, then taking note of the tax increases and spending cuts makes sense. If you are concerned with the size of government, taking note of spending cuts makes sense, but it does not make sense to reduce the size of the bill by the amount of the tax increases. Same way with a Republican tax cut. If they cut taxes by $1.5 trillion and fully offset it with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, that is a $1.5 trillion tax cut and that is how it should be described. Only offsetting tax increases should be taken into account.Paul PecorinoTuscaloosa, Ala.The writer is a professor of economics at the University of Alabama.Quote of the day“According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” (2004)Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      California’s Housing Crisis Looms Large for Gavin Newsom

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      Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.The median home price in California has eclipsed $800,000. Tenants in the state are among the most cost-burdened in the country. Each night more than 100,000 residents sleep outside or in their cars. A crisis, a disaster, the religion of sorrow, a disgrace — whatever journalists and politicians call it, people across the state, including all the major candidates for governor in the recall vote this week, agree that the situation is untenable.The question is what, if anything, the governor can do about it. It’s something that Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the past three years talking about. And now that he has won a decisive victory in the recall election, which cost close to $300 million and consumed the state’s and governor’s attention for several months, Mr. Newsom is turning his attention back to problems like housing.In many ways the answer there is different from what it was when he took office in 2019.Right now the focus is Senate Bill 9, which would allow duplexes in neighborhoods throughout the state and is one of the hundreds of unsigned bills that piled up on Mr. Newsom’s desk during the recall campaign. But even if Mr. Newsom signs it, which he is widely expected to do in the coming days, his legacy on housing is likely to be less about laws passed on his watch than his administration’s ability to enforce them. That’s because the executive branch has gained much more power over state housing policy than it had even a few years ago, after years of state frustration with how difficult the local governments make it to build housing in California.Mr. Newsom’s administration has come to embrace the role, taking action like suing cities for not building enough to keep up with population growth and creating a team to ensure that cities approve new housing. The moves are part of a nationwide shift in power — away from city councils and toward statehouses — over the $1 trillion annual residential construction market.“It used to be that housing was run by the local planning departments and California governors didn’t really pay attention,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “That has changed.”Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has tried to get through the pandemic emergency by extending the state’s eviction moratorium even as the federal one lapsed, and pouring money from the state’s budget surplus and various coronavirus relief packages into homeless funding and programs like an effort to turn hotels into supportive housing.But California remains one of the most difficult places in America to build housing, causing a supply-and-demand imbalance. It is the leading edge of a nationwide problem that is pricing middle-income families out of ownership and has one in four rental households paying more than half its pretax income on rent.A polling site in El Centro, Calif., on Tuesday, when a statewide vote kept Gov. Gavin Newsom in office.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPlanners, economists and both political parties have long called for states to use their power to ease the housing shortage by breaking local logjams. They point out that suburban governments have little incentive to fix the problem since they are accountable to homeowners who prefer that prices only go up. That conundrum has vexed would-be housing reformers since at least the 1970s, and emerged during California’s recall campaign in the Republican debates, where candidates talked a lot about adding more housing but shied away from discussions of where that housing would go.These often contradictory comments were a perfect encapsulation of Californians’ mood: They are universally unhappy with the state’s cost of living and the tent cities that have appeared along freeways, in parks and on beaches. But homeowners remain fiercely protective of their power to say what gets built near them. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and a Republican candidate in the recall election, all but ran away from his own pro-density policies in California’s second-largest city by saying, “When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that’s wrong.”Mr. Newsom has tried to walk this same line. In 2018, he campaigned on a “Marshall Plan for housing” that had a goal of delivering 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. He came to regret the figure once he was in the governor’s chair, and it became fodder for his leading recall opponent, the talk show host Larry Elder, who seized on it as an example of broken promises. Mr. Elder did not need sophisticated research to find fault with the number: In a state that permits around 100,000 housing units a year, delivering 3.5 million — 35 years of housing at the current pace — is close to a physical impossibility.Mr. Newsom has been mostly quiet about big zoning legislation ever since. He did not take a position on Senate Bill 50, a contentious measure that would have allowed apartment buildings in neighborhoods across the state. And he was largely quiet about Senate Bill 9 as it passed through both houses of the State Legislature and lingered on his desk.Mr. Newsom, at a rally on Monday in Long Beach, Calif., has emphasized enforcement of existing housing laws.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat he has done instead is enforce existing laws more aggressively than his predecessors did. Two weeks after Mr. Newsom assumed office, California’s attorney general sued Huntington Beach for failing to plan for sufficient new housing. Since then, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sent hundreds of letters telling cities to change or simplify their planning codes to comply with state law.The governor’s most recent budget allocated $4.3 million to staff a “housing accountability unit” made up of planners and lawyers who will monitor local governments’ housing decisions and intervene when they’re not following state law.Zoning defines a neighborhood’s physical character and who might be living next door, so it has captured most of the attention in California’s housing debate. But over the past few years, the Legislature quietly passed a slew of smaller measures that when strung together have radically changed the relationship between state and local government. The new rules change how much housing cities have to plan for, make it harder for them to stop developers from building and ultimately deprive them of funding and local control if they drift too far from state mandates.Because they transfer more oversight of housing from localities to Sacramento, the question of how aggressively those laws are enforced has fallen to the executive branch. It’s one thing for the state to pass laws to desegregate neighborhoods, set aside more land for subsidized housing and require cities to permit backyard cottages. If enforcing them isn’t a priority — which has long been the case with housing laws — they are bound to be ignored.In an interview after the recall vote, Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who works on housing policy, rattled off a series of bill numbers and the esoteric text of planning codes to point out dozens of housing regulations that remain mostly unused. Environmental measures that support increasing density to reduce car trips. Various laws allowing backyard units. A way for developers to sue cities that don’t follow their own zoning rules. These are the types of statutes the new housing accountability unit will try to enforce.“I’m never going to say we’re done passing laws and we can’t do more,” Mr. Elliott said. “But what we really need to do if we want to see units spring up is get several dozen people thinking about this and only this, and empower them to reach out to cities.”Will Mr. Newsom ever get anywhere near 3.5 million new units? No. Even if it were politically possible, it would strain lumber and labor supplies.It took California several decades to get into a housing crisis this bad. Lofty rhetoric and promises for millions of units make do for a campaign slogan, but the reality looks more like a process of slowly digging out. More

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      The California Recall Isn't Just Gavin Newsom Vs. Larry Elder

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      The prospect of Gov. Larry Elder has jolted California’s Democrats out of their apathy. Polling on the recall has swung from a dead heat in early August to an 8.4 margin for Gavin Newsom in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. But I want to make an affirmative argument for continuing the Newsom experiment: Something exciting is taking shape in California. The torrent of policy that Newsom and the Democratic Legislature are passing amounts to nothing less than a Green New Deal for the Golden State.To understand Newsom, both his successes and his failures, you need to see the paradox that defines his career. The knock on him is that he’s all style, no substance — a guy who got where he is by looking like a politician rather than acting like a leader. The truth is just the opposite. Newsom’s style is his problem; his substance is his redemption.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]When Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco, his nickname was “Mayor McHottie,” and he came complete with a tabloid-ready personal life and funding from the unimaginably wealthy Getty family. His worst mistakes as governor — like attending a birthday dinner for a lobbyist friend at the luxe French Laundry, unmasked, during the depths of the pandemic — deepen those suspicions. The “Beauty,” one of his recall opponents, who fancies himself “the Beast,” called him in a $5 million ad blitz.The attacks wound Newsom because what appear to be his strengths are actually his weaknesses. Newsom is handsome in a way that comes off as just a little too coifed, like the actor you’d cast to play a politician in a movie. His personal life and social misjudgments have dogged him for decades. He doesn’t have a knack for memorable sound bites or quick connection. (A sample line from our interview: “It was not without consideration that last year we passed a number of bills to site homeless shelters and supportive housing and Homekey and Roomkey projects with CEQA waivers and as-of-right zoning.”) He’s an eager nerd who presents as a slick jock, and he’s never found a way out of that dissonance.He’s also been governing amid the worst pandemic in modern history. California has outperformed most states in health outcomes and, particularly, in economic outcomes. “We dominate all Western democracies in the last five years in G.D.P.,” Newsom said. “The G.O.P. loves G.D.P.! Twenty-one percent G.D.P. growth in the last five years. Texas was 12 percent. And our taxes are lower for the middle class in California than they are in Texas.” Basically every economic indicator you can look at in California is booming, from household income growth to the $80 billion-plus budget surplus. But it’s still been a grueling 18 months of masks, lockdowns, deaths and discord. There’s been little attention to policymaking in Sacramento.As a result, people don’t realize how much Newsom and the Democratic State Legislature have done. But in the two and a half years since Newsom became governor, they’ve more than doubled the size of California’s earned-income tax credit and Young Child Tax Credit, and added a stimulus just for Californians (though some of the neediest were left out). They expanded paid family leave from six to eight weeks and unpaid leave to 12 weeks. They added 200,000 child care slots and $250 million to retrofit child care centers. They passed legislation giving all public school students two free meals each day, funding summer school and after-school programs for two million children and creating a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds by 2025.Newsom is “three years ahead of Joe Biden in terms of pro-family policy,” Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “Any parents or grandparents who back the recall are voting against their own financial interest, I’d say.”Housing has been harder, in part because you need to do more than just spend money. Ben Metcalf, who led California’s Department of Housing and Community Development for three years under Gov. Jerry Brown and one year under Newsom, recalls that “when Newsom first arrived, I was excited by his vision, but then dismayed by his inability to effectively deliver and get the Legislature to do what he wanted. Brown knew how to wield power. He knew the points of inflection. He had a team of people he could rely on.”You hear unflattering comparisons with Brown often when you ask around about Newsom. Brown was a more disciplined and experienced leader. He chose his priorities carefully, and he did what he promised. The surplus Newsom is spending is a gift bequeathed by Brown, who persuaded California’s voters to sharply raise taxes on the wealthiest residents. But Brown did little to address the state’s housing affordability crisis and neither did the Legislature.Nancy Skinner, a state senator who’s been a leader on housing, told me that “our shortage has been decades in the making.” The mantra, she said, was to just leave it to the cities. “For years, the Legislature just urged city governments to be more responsive. We tried to create some incentives. And only in the last five years did we realize this is a statewide crisis and we can’t just leave it to local governments to get it fixed. It took the Legislature a long time to get to the place of realizing the urging and carrots didn’t do it. We have to do the mandates.”Newsom, to his credit, prioritized housing from the beginning. Early in his term, in 2019, he sued the city of Huntington Beach for allegedly falling short on its housing commitments and threatened to sue dozens more. He made housing the primary focus of his 2020 State of the State speech. But the initial consensus was that he overpromised and underdelivered. There were widespread frustrations that he wasn’t tough enough with the Legislature and his interventions were often ineffective. He remains far behind his goal of building 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.“I said the 3.5 million houses was a stretch goal,” he protested to me. “I said in trying to achieve it, we’d find what we were capable of!”To be fair, Newsom couldn’t have predicted that the pandemic, which descended on California just weeks after his big housing speech, was coming. Still, in February, I was furious watching California’s political class, including Newsom, fail and fail again to pass major housing legislation. But when the facts change, so must your mind. The Legislature just passed, and Newsom will sign, a series of housing bills that achieve something I never expected to see in California: the end of single-family zoning. S.B.9 allows homeowners to divide their properties into two lots and to build two homes on each of those lots. It won’t solve the housing crisis, but it’s a start.Newsom and other Democrats are also finally appreciating the depth of the anger even liberals feel about homelessness. “People can’t take the tents and open-air drug use,” Newsom said to me. “They can’t. Nor can I. They want the streets cleaned up. They want more housing. They don’t care about task forces or bills. I think that sense of urgency coming out of Covid sharpens our edges. The five- to 10-year plans, no one is interested in that anymore. What’s the five- to 10-month plan?”In Newsom’s case, it’s using the state’s budget surpluses to drive a $12 billion investment over two years in permanent residences and mental health care for the homeless. How well it works remains to be seen, but no other state is investing in housing at anything like this scale or speed.What’s most encouraging to me is a broader change you can sense in the politics of this issue. At every level of power in California, the state’s political actors have realized they need to find ways to build. Inaction is no longer a viable option. Even the politicians who oppose development have to pretend to favor it. There’s no illusion that the tent cities can continue, nor that they can be cleared without offering housing to their residents. Politics isn’t just about policy. It’s also about will, coalitions and a sense of consequences. That’s what feels different in California right now. And Newsom deserves some credit for that.“The reason we began suing cities was to provide air cover,” Newsom told me. “I can’t tell you how many mayors privately thanked me even as they publicly criticized me for those lawsuits. We’re trying to drive a different expectation: We will cover you. You want to scapegoat someone, scapegoat the state. We haven’t had that policy in the past. Localism has been determinative. And that’s part of what’s changing.”This is why I disagree with those, like the economist Tyler Cowen, who argue that a Republican victory in the recall would be a healthy wake-up call for California Democrats, with little downside because Elder would be checked by the Legislature. The political system has already woken up. But the politics of housing are miserable, and there’s much more yet to do. To wreck the governing coalition that is finally making progress would be madness.“If Gavin were recalled, that’d be disastrous for housing policy in this state,” Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, told me. “The Legislature, I believe, could override Larry Elder’s vetoes on key bills. But all of these hard-fought housing bills that we are not passing with a supermajority cannot survive an Elder veto. All that would die.”“I also think that if the recall succeeds, in part due to housing, the overall situation in Sacramento would just be chaotic,” Hanlon added later. “It’ll be a lost year as Democrats and the Legislature work to retake the governor’s office in 2022.”Metcalf, the former head of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has moved from dismayed to impressed by Newsom’s record on housing. “We’re beginning to see Newsom find the levers to pull,” he said. “We’re seeing him figure out how to get the Legislature to do what he wants. We’re just getting there with Newsom, which would make it very painful to lose him now.”Every California politician brags that if California were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. On climate, though, that’s a point of leverage, a way California can try to use its economic might to push the world to decarbonize faster. “There is no peer on California’s climate leadership,” Newsom told me. “We move markets. We move policy globally, not just nationally.”The first part of Newsom’s climate agenda is a series of executive orders setting aggressive decarbonization targets and standards. They include orders mandating that all new passenger cars sold in the state are zero-emission vehicles by 2035, a pledge to conserve 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, and directives to the California Air Resources Board to map out a pathway to carbon neutrality by 2035 and an end to oil extraction by 2045.California has, in the past, used access to its markets to transform the products that are sold globally — our tight fuel economy standards became the de facto national standard, and our subsidies for electric vehicles laid a foundation for that market to boom. Newsom wants to do that again, but for far more than just cars.I am, to be honest, skeptical of far-reaching targets and ever more aggressive decarbonization goals. It’s always easier to promise sweeping change in the future. But you can’t build a different future without planning for it now. What matters is whether these orders really do shape public and private decisions in California over the next decade. If Newsom or a like-minded successor remains governor, they have force. But they are instantly vulnerable if he loses office to Elder or anyone else.The second part of Newsom’s climate agenda is, well, money. The California Comeback Plan that Newsom signed this year put nearly $8 billion toward electric vehicles and climate resilience. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who tracks state climate policies, said that “spending in the billions on climate is basically unheard of at the state level. No other state is doing anything remotely close to this scale.”I could keep going, and Newsom certainly did. He’s got a whole health care agenda meant to integrate physical and mental care called CalAIM that he gets extremely animated talking about (“If you could see me, I’m smiling, I’m so excited by this!”). He also has a plan to let the state bargain for prescription drugs on behalf of not just its public insurance programs but also any private insurers that want to join. He’s trying to convert the Valley State Prison into a rehabilitation center modeled on the Norwegian prisons that progressives admire. He’d love to tell you about his immigration ideas.It’s really a blizzard of plans. Newsom sees what he’s doing as “raising the bar of expectations.” He told me a quote, often attributed to Michelangelo, that he repeats to his staff: “The biggest risk is not that we aim too high and miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it.” He admitted they roll their eyes at this. But it is, for him, a strategy. “We’ve stretched the mind and I don’t think it goes back to its original form.”Perhaps. I’ve spoken to Newsom allies who worry that he’s attempting too much and that it could end with him achieving too little. Every one of these ideas will face serious implementation challenges. Transitional kindergarten, for instance, will require the state to produce 12,000 credentialed pre-K teachers and 20,000 more teacher’s aides in the next four years, according to Fuller. It’s going to require a decade of patient political work on housing to reverse California’s affordability crisis. Newsom’s health care agenda alone would preoccupy a traditional term, but his administration hasn’t done much to communicate its vision. When I asked a leading doctor at the University of California at San Francisco about it, he had no idea what it was.So there are challenges still to come — many of them. But I’d like to see Newsom and the Democratic Legislature get the chance to face them. If they succeed, they will make California the progressive beacon it’s long claimed to be.Additional reporting by Roge Karma.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      California Could Throw Away What It’s Won

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      If you live in California and haven’t yet voted or made plans to vote on the proposed recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, please wake up. This is a situation in which apathy could have awesome consequences: California, which isn’t as liberal a state as you may imagine but is nonetheless considerably more liberal than the nation as a whole, may be about to absent-mindedly acquire a Trumpist governor who could never win a normal election.This would happen at a moment when control of statehouses is especially crucial because it shapes the response to the coronavirus. MAGA governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida aren’t just refusing to impose mask or vaccination requirements themselves; they’re trying to prevent others from taking precautions by issuing executive orders and backing legislation banning the imposition of such requirements by local governments and even private businesses. And that’s the kind of governor California will probably find itself with if the recall succeeds.How is something like this even possible? Because the recall process is crazy. Voters answer two questions: Should Newsom be recalled? And who should replace him? If a majority vote “yes” on recall, whoever is chosen by the largest number of people on the second question becomes governor, even if that person receives far fewer than the number of votes to keep Newsom in office.And the most likely outcome if Newsom is ousted is that Larry Elder, a right-wing talk-radio host who is vehemently opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, will end up in the governor’s office despite receiving only a small fraction of the total vote.What would make this outcome especially galling is that California is in many ways — with the glaring exception of housing, which I’ll get to — a progressive success story.The Golden State took a sharp left turn in 2010, with the election of Jerry Brown as governor. Two years later, Democrats gained a supermajority in the Legislature, giving them the power to enact many progressive priorities. California soon raised taxes on the rich, increased social spending and increased its minimum wage. It also enthusiastically implemented the Affordable Care Act.Conservatives predicted disaster, with some saying that the state was committing economic “suicide.” And California gets a lot of negative coverage in the business press, where one constantly finds assertions that business is moving en masse out of the state to lower-tax, less-regulated states, like Texas.The data, however, say otherwise. Given all the trash-talking of California and trumpeting of Texas’ prospects one reads, it’s a bit startling to look at trends in real G.D.P. and employment between 2010 and the eve of the pandemic and discover that California and Texas had essentially the same growth rates. It’s also startling, given all the talk about people fleeing high taxes, to learn that highly educated, high-income workers — who do indeed pay higher taxes in California than in most other parts of the U.S. — were continuing to migrate into the state.California’s experience, in other words, gives the lie to conservative claims that taxing the rich and spending more on social programs destroys prosperity. And the state didn’t just achieve rapid economic growth; its effective implementation of Obamacare helped it reduce the number of its residents without health insurance much more rapidly than the rest of the country.OK, there are some important shadows on this picture. Even as affluent workers continued to move to California, lower-income workers — who actually pay lower taxes in California than they do in Texas — were moving out. This was surely in large part because of the high price of housing, which has become a huge problem.Despite overall economic success, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate (when you measure it properly), largely because of high housing costs: The median apartment in San Francisco rents for more than twice as much as an apartment in any Texas city. California also has a lot of homelessness, for the same reason.What’s behind California’s housing nightmare? Runaway NIMBYism, which has blocked new housing construction. California’s economic performance matched that of Texas in the 2010s, but it issued far fewer building permits despite having a larger population. California gained three million jobs between 2010 and 2019 but added fewer than 700,000 housing units.NIMBYism, however, happens to be one of the few major issues that cut right across party lines. Conservatives are as likely as liberals to oppose housing construction; some progressives — among them Governor Newsom — are strong advocates of housing expansion. So California’s big policy failure shouldn’t be an issue in this recall election. What’s on the line are its policy successes.If Californians choose to turn their backs on these successes, well, that’s their right. The danger now is that the state won’t choose — that it will stumble into MAGAland via a bizarre recall process and lack of attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden’s First Task at HUD: Rebuilding Trump-Depleted Ranks

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      An exodus of top-level officials during the previous administration has left the Department of Housing and Urban Development short of expertise even as its role expands.WASHINGTON — During the 2020 campaign, President Biden pledged to transform the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a frontline weapon in the fight against racial and economic inequality.But when his transition team took over last fall, it found a department in crisis.The agency’s community planning and development division, the unit responsible for a wide array of federal disaster relief and homelessness programs, had been so weakened by an exodus of career officials that it was faltering under the responsibility of managing tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid, according to members of the team.And it was not just the planning unit. In some divisions, as many as 25 to 30 percent of jobs were unfilled or occupied by interim employees. The losses were concentrated among the ranks of highest-skilled managers and policy experts, many of whom had been overruled, sidelined, exiled and eventually driven away under President Donald J. Trump and his appointees.Roughly 10 percent of the agency’s work force left during Mr. Trump’s first years in office, according to agency estimates. But that came on top of a decade-long decline resulting from attrition, poor recruitment and budget deals cut by the Obama administration with a Republican-led Congress at the time that prevented the agency from replacing departing employees.As a result, the agency’s total head count fell by 20 percent, to 6,837 from 8,576, from 2012 to 2019.Other cabinet departments, like the Education Department and Environmental Protection Agency, face similar problems. But the staffing shortfall at the housing department is a case study in the personnel issues generated in part by Mr. Trump’s conflicts with experienced career government employees who carry out programs and policies. And it is especially worrisome to Biden administration officials because it threatens to undermine their hope of transforming the agency into a central player in the president’s efforts to put more focus on social justice issues.“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Marcia L. Fudge, Mr. Biden’s new housing secretary, told a Senate committee last week during budget hearings. “Until we can start to build up our staff, and build up our capacity, we are at risk of not doing the things we should do.”Ms. Fudge, a former congresswoman from the Cleveland area, was there to urge lawmakers to adopt the agency’s 2021 budget request, which includes money to hire hundreds of managers and skilled technical support staff.The problem comes as the department’s responsibilities are growing along with the scale of the programs it manages.The administration’s relief package, passed in March, included $21.55 billion for emergency rental assistance, $5 billion in emergency housing vouchers, $5 billion for homelessness assistance and $850 million for tribal and rural housing, on top of a similar amount allocated under the Trump administration.Some of the funding is routed through the Treasury Department. Even so, it amounts to the greatest increase in housing and related programs in decades. Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, now the subject of intense negotiations on Capitol Hill, would provide $213 billion more.A Maricopa County constable preparing eviction orders last year in Phoenix. The Biden administration’s coronavirus relief package included funding for emergency rental assistance and homelessness assistance, among others.John Moore/Getty ImagesThe department has long sought to shake off the legacy of scandals. And under Mr. Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants who had managed to hold on during other crises, current and former officials said.One former career official, who departed in early 2020 for a job at a less embattled federal agency, estimated that two-thirds of the most experienced employees he interacted with day to day had left over the previous three years.“It’s more than just the number of valuable staff they have lost, it’s all that expertise that was driven out,” said Lisa Rice, the president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a group in Washington that has pressured the department to bring more antidiscrimination cases.“It will set back the department for years,” she said. “HUD just doesn’t have the in-house legacy knowledge they used to have.”Mr. Biden’s transition team, made up of Obama-era veterans, deployed several of their most experienced members into interim leadership roles to plug the gap at the planning unit. Ms. Fudge, in turn, has installed experienced officials in other hard-hit divisions, although it has been slow going, as evidenced by the dozens of vacancies still visible on its online organizational chart.The losses are seriously affecting the response to the pandemic, Ms. Fudge told the Senate hearing. They are hindering distribution of emergency aid to low-income tenants and leaving many localities without guidance from experienced HUD employees on how to run new programs funded by the flood of coronavirus assistance cash, she said.In November, the department’s inspector general identified numerous “leadership gaps” at the headquarters, concluding that “employees often do not have the right skill sets, tools or capacity to perform the range of functions” needed to do their jobs.Many of the problems the watchdog identified were chronic, such as an ineffective human resources department. But about two dozen current and former department officials interviewed for this article blamed the chaos and disruption on Mr. Carson, who once admitted the job was more complicated than his previous gig — brain surgery.Mr. Carson, an unsuccessful 2016 Republican presidential candidate, took little interest in the day-to-day operations of the department, and was often informed of key hires by White House officials after the fact, according to people who worked with him. He often ceded control to political appointees, some embedded inside his department, others working from the White House, who pursued their own agendas.Under Ben Carson, the Trump administration’s housing secretary, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“People like to make Carson a scapegoat,” said Armstrong Williams, his spokesman and political adviser. “People moved on from HUD for all kinds of reasons. Blaming him is a cop-out.”Nonetheless, three of the agency’s divisions were especially crippled under his watch. One was the unit responsible for overseeing disbursement of federal block grants to states hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters. Another was the homeless assistance operation. The third was the fair housing division, whose job is to enforce federal laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity and disability.This was the unit Mr. Trump singled out for attack in the 2020 campaign, stoking white grievance by claiming that an initiative to review discriminatory local zoning restrictions was a war on suburbia.The fair housing division, led by a Texas Republican operative named Anna Maria Farías, became an especially toxic workplace, according to three former staff members with knowledge of the situation.Shortly after taking over, Ms. Farías informed her staff that she intended to root out “Obama plants” and froze antidiscrimination investigations involving large residential construction companies, including Toll Brothers and Epcon Communities, and an inquiry into Facebook’s online advertising division, among others.As part of the overall strategy of reducing regulatory action, Ms. Farías sidelined two of the unit’s most experienced managers, Bryan Greene, who had served as interim chief of the division, and Tim Smyth, a young lawyer working on some of the department’s most complex cases involving housing discrimination.Ms. Farías bypassed Mr. Greene, and stopped inviting him to meetings of his own staff. She marginalized Mr. Smyth in similar fashion, according to officials who worked with both men. The pair eventually left after being reassigned to jobs unrelated to major civil rights cases.Ms. Farías did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Carson’s political staff aides, housed on the agency’s 10th floor, were, at times, unaware of these machinations, and not even knowledgeable about basic departmental functions, according to people who worked with them at the time.After Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017, several Carson aides expressed surprise when told the housing department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance for tenants and homeowners whose dwellings were damaged by the storms, according to an aide who was present at a briefing session.For a while, their lack of knowledge worked to the benefit of career officials, who quietly slipped in Obama-era provisions to the aid rules — including a stipulation that rebuilding efforts conformed to green building standards.A flooded neighborhood in Beaumont, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Several aides to Mr. Carson were unaware that the department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times But the White House quickly caught on, further fueling suspicions there about the presence of a so-called deep state hostile to Mr. Trump’s agenda. Mr. Trump, in turn, began seeking opportunities in attacking the agency to make political points, slow-walking $20 billion in relief for Puerto Rico, then stonewalling investigators, according to the department’s inspector general.Frustrated staff members departed for private-sector jobs, taking their expertise with them, most notably Stan Gimont, a 32-year agency veteran with deep knowledge of federal disaster relief programs who was the top career official in the planning division.A long-running ideological fight over how best to deal with the worsening homelessness crisis resulted in other departures, led by the division’s director, Anne Oliva, in 2017. Others fled after religious conservatives began to focus on cultural rather than housing issues, like an edict in 2020 allowing grantees to deny shelter to transgender people.Even units with no policymaking roles were affected by the staffing shortfall.Late last year, the agency’s inspector warned that a 28 percent vacancy rate at the information technology division could compromise the personal information of millions of aid recipients. In her testimony, Ms. Fudge blamed the staffing problems at the unit for slowing the response to a recent virus attack that infected 750 agency computers.Ms. Fudge has expressed frustration at the amount of time she has to spend on recruiting and retaining staff, aides said. And while she had success wooing several high-profile staff though discretionary political hiring, the overall pace of appointments has been sluggish, and career civil servants, like Mr. Greene, have proved difficult to reel back in.Lawmakers in both parties, while expressing confidence in Ms. Fudge, said they were worried the department’s staffing problems might leave it unable to manage all the programs it had been given control over, especially if Mr. Biden’s big infrastructure bill passes.“I’m concerned that HUD lacks the capacity to manage and oversee such an influx of funding, regardless of how well intentioned those proposals may be,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who helped shield the department from deep budget cuts proposed by Mr. Trump and backed by Mr. Carson, said at the recent hearing. More

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      How the Candidates for N.Y.C. Mayor Would Tackle Homelessness

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      In the Democratic primary’s last days, and with New York’s economy starting to regain its footing, a chronic problem gains new urgency.Random slashings on the subways. Groups of men clustered outside Midtown Manhattan hotels serving as homeless shelters. Anti-Asian attacks on the streets.In the closing days of New York’s Democratic primary for mayor, the city’s chronic struggle with homelessness has taken on increasing urgency. As the city moves to reopen for business and tourism, public concern — and the candidates’ attention — has focused on a small number of people who are mentally ill and potentially violent.The issue is complicated. Homeless people are not involved in every unsettling incident, and they also have been targeted in vicious killings and other attacks. Their advocates warn against demonizing a large group of people who are struggling just to survive. Most of the 48,000 people in the main shelter system are families with children, not single men.Before the pandemic hit, the shelter population had increased since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, even as he doubled spending on homeless services to more than $3 billion. The number of families in shelters has dropped sharply since early last year, largely because of an eviction moratorium that has been extended through August. If it expires then, hundreds of thousands of tenants who collectively owe over $1 billion in back rent could lose their homes.Now, a spate of attacks on the streets and in the subway, combined with an increase in gun violence, have fed a perception in many quarters that the city is in danger of sliding into chaos. The candidates seem to be split, seeing the issue through two different lenses: the plight of people with an illness that can last their whole lives, and the safety and quality of life of everyone else.At the final debate on Wednesday, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, left no doubt where he stood.“Yes, mentally ill people have rights,” the Democratic candidate Andrew Yang said at a mayoral debate this week. “But you know who else have rights? We do.” Andrew Seng for The New York Times“Mentally ill homeless men are changing the character of our neighborhoods,” Mr. Yang said. “We need to get them off of our streets and subways and into a better environment.” Later, he added: “Yes, mentally ill people have rights. But you know who else have rights? We do: the people and families of the city. We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety.”Candidates with more progressive agendas took a softer stance. Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, described his plan to build 30,000 units of so-called supportive housing, where people with mental illness would get a range of services. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio, lamented that the Rikers Island jail complex had effectively become the city’s biggest psychiatric facility.Unlike some of Democratic rivals, Maya Wiley does not favor assigning more police officers to the subway system.Jonah Markowitz for The New York TimesThe causes of the apparent increase in the number of homeless people on the streets and in the subway of pandemic-era New York are many.When the lockdown hit last year, the city moved thousands of people from barrackslike group shelters across the city into unused hotels — many of them in densely populated middle-class and wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods — to stop the spread of Covid-19. Many people living under precarious conditions lost their jobs and, thus, their homes. With workers doing their jobs remotely, far fewer people were in the main business districts, leaving those who live on the streets to stand out. Some hospitals used inpatient psychiatric beds for Covid patients. Many libraries and other places where homeless people typically spend their days closed.The city is accelerating its efforts to move homeless people off the Manhattan streets. On Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio said that 8,000 people would be moved from 60 hotels back to group, or congregate, shelters by the end of July. Starting next week, the police will begin sweeps along 125th Street in Harlem to clear it of homeless people and those using drugs, according to a senior city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been publicly announced. A spokeswoman for the mayor said the effort was focused on “helping people with substance abuse issues access harm-reduction resources” and that offer would be on hand to “assist as needed.”The leading Democratic candidates have proposed many plans to address the homelessness problem. Here are some of them. More details can be found in voter guides produced by RxHome and the Family Homelessness Coalition and City Limits.Reduce or end reliance on congregate shelters.Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who calls shelters “a band-aid solution to a long-term problem,” says she would cut the shelter population in half. Shaun Donovan, a former city housing commissioner under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said he would end the use of congregate shelters entirely in his first term. (Mr. Donovan’s tenure was the only time during Mr. Bloomberg administration that homelessness fell). Ms. Wiley cites “real concern” that people who stayed in hotels during the pandemic “will be unwilling to come to shelter if we shift back to congregate settings.”Build more “deeply affordable” housing — a lot more.All of the candidates say they will do this. Mr. Stringer says that Mr. de Blasio, despite highlighting his record on creating affordable housing, “has built more housing for people who make over $150,000 a year than for people who make $40,000 or $30,000.” He says he would require most new residential buildings financed with city subsidies to house people with very low incomes.Expand the use of shelters that offer more privacy and have fewer rules.So-called safe haven and stabilization shelters offer single-occupancy rooms and fewer rules and restrictions as to who qualifies for them than group shelters do. Many of the candidates want to build more of such shelters, including Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, and Mr. Yang, who said, “It’s a sign of the city’s broken politics when the choice is either temporary hotels or overcrowded shelters.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Get more people into psychiatric treatment.Mr. McGuire, Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia all say they would press for wider use of Kendra’s Law, which allows courts to require treatment for people with mentally illness.Add psychiatric beds.Mr. Yang said that the number of psychiatric beds in city hospitals had decreased 14 percent and that he would double the current number, although he did not say how he would pay for it. Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Mr. Yang both favor adding psychiatric “respite beds” for people with mental illness who are not deemed sick enough to be admitted to a hospital but are too sick to return to a shelter or to the streets.Focus more on providing mental health services to people in the streets and less on arresting people.“We cannot continue criminalizing being Black and brown, criminalizing mental illness, criminalizing having substance abuse issues,” Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, said at the debate. “That is not the answer for creating a safe city.” Ms. Garcia supports sending “crisis teams” into the subway that include mental-health professionals “who will make a determination and get people the treatment that they need.” Ms. Wiley says Mr. de Blasio’s approach, which she called overpolicing, “never tried to solve homelessness and merely led to displacement, for example, moving those experiencing homelessness from the subways to the streets.”Close the prison-to-shelter pipeline.Mr. Donovan notes that more than half of the people released from state prisons to New York City go directly to homeless shelters, a cycle he pledged to break by providing housing vouchers to people leaving jail.Increase pressure on shelter operators to find permanent housing for clients.Mr. McGuire says he would shorten shelter stays by holding operators responsible for moving people into permanent housing and by “shifting contracts and investment to the most successful operators.”Build more domestic violence shelters.Mr. Yang has noted that domestic violence is one of the main reasons that families seek shelter and that only 23 percent of domestic-violence victims in shelters are in ones that are designed for them. He says he would build more of those.More police in the subway.Mr. Adams, a former transit police officer, says, “We should have a police officer on every train.” Ms. Garcia wants officers “walking the platforms and riding the actual trains, not just standing around.” Mr. Yang, Mr. McGuire and Mr. Donovan also want more police in the subway. Ms. Morales, Mr. Stringer and Ms. Wiley do not.Help tenants and landlords alike in order to prevent evictions.Mr. Donovan favors a “holistic approach” that would “provide direct rent payments for hard-hit tenants” and “offer stabilizing funds to landlords” who agree not to evict.Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting. More