Letter to New Yorkers from New York City Comptroller Mark Levine

Dear New Yorkers,

Today is the beginning of a new era in New York City — one with enormous opportunities ahead. Five years since the worst of COVID, our city has come roaring back in countless ways, reasserting ourselves as a global cultural and economic powerhouse. We have defied the skeptics yet again.

But amidst the prosperity of this city — with a soaring stock market and gleaming new office towers — far too many New Yorkers are struggling. The cost of housing is now increasingly beyond the reach of even middle class families. Young people are finding it more and more difficult to break into the job market. Our homelessness crisis has reached painful, unprecedented heights, fueled in part by a broken mental health system.

Our city’s budget, now at over $116 billion, is projected to face multi-billion dollar deficits in the years ahead, even before factoring in the significant economic uncertainty we are facing.  Meanwhile, amidst all these challenges, many New Yorkers have lost faith in local government, and are facing a federal government which is more likely to be hostile than helpful. The pressures we face are real and growing.

The Office of the New York City Comptroller will have a pivotal role to play in meeting the challenges of this moment.

The Comptroller is our city’s chief financial officer, our pension fiduciary, and responsible for providing accountability to every agency of City government. The office is critical to the fiscal and economic health of the city at any time. And at moments of great challenges such as this it plays a truly outsized role.

I will make tackling our housing affordability crisis my top priority, in part by investing some of our pension funds — in a prudent way that gets strong returns for retirees — to finance the creation of affordable housing throughout the five boroughs.

I will work to create innovative financing mechanisms to dramatically expand our city’s green infrastructure, so that we win the race to carbon neutrality.

I will fight for a budget which invests in tenant legal services, so that our city at last lives up to the commitments in our first-in-the-nation right to counsel law for those facing eviction. I will push for more funding for in-patient psychiatric services, to help get New Yorkers who are suffering off the street into the care they need and deserve.

And I will use the tools of audit and oversight to ensure that our City government works better — for regular New Yorkers, for small business owners, and for tax-payers. This will in part require pushing City agencies to embrace the technology of the modern era, so that we have a government freed of the worst limitations of bureaucracy. It will require a City government which is nimble enough to move fast during a period of accelerating change, and to capitalize on the promises of new technology while protecting against its perils.

This is not a short to-do list. But I firmly believe we can achieve these things together, and that New York City can be a more affordable, fairer, safer and prosperous city for all. I look forward to working every day, as your new comptroller, to make that a reality.

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