New Comptroller Stringer Analysis: To Protect Vulnerable Communities During COVID-19 Pandemic, City Must Address Immediate Needs and Underlying, Systemic Disparities

(New York, NY) – Today, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer released a new, comprehensive analysis of the deep inequities in housing, health, food security, environmental quality, and access to technology that disproportionately impact the city’s most vulnerable communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, especially people of color, immigrants, seniors, and low-income New Yorkers. The analysis spotlights the adverse conditions prevalent among these communities — and why they must be addressed as part of any strategic approach to mitigate impacts of the virus and assist those who are isolated, overwhelmed, and in dire need.

The Comptroller’s report examines overcrowded and dilapidated housing, single parent and immigrant households living below the poverty line, elderly and disabled New Yorkers living alone, neighborhoods with poor air quality and high asthma rates, and other New Yorkers who are facing severe isolation, deprivation, and risk of exposure to COVID-19. The analysis takes a data-driven approach to examining and mapping some of these populations by Community District in the hopes that they may serve to guide the City’s ongoing efforts to help New Yorkers in need, contain the virus, and to arm communities with information that could help to stem the tide.

“The COVID-19 outbreak has laid bare the deep, systemic inequities that run through our city and has exposed how the right to basic health and safety are too often out of reach for New Yorkers due to class and skin color,” said Comptroller Stringer. “As we grapple with this unprecedented loss of life and livelihood, we must acknowledge that communities of color have long sounded the alarm about the persistent inequities that have plagued New York City. And the data is clear: communities of color, particularly Black and Latinx New Yorkers, immigrants, seniors, and low-income individuals and families are the targets most vulnerable to this virus. Our City’s efforts to combat COVID-19 must center these communities, recognize the disparities, and take them on — from alleviating overcrowded housing, to improving poor air quality, to expanding internet access, to eliminating discriminatory loopholes in our social safety net. We are defined as a society by how we treat our most vulnerable. We have the tools, we have the data, we have the solutions, and right now — not later — is the time to act.”

To protect the city’s most vulnerable communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, Comptroller Stringer called on the City to conduct a multi-faceted strategic approach to protecting these vulnerable New Yorkers, including using vacant hotels and dormitories to house the homeless and alleviate overcrowding; providing PPE to all cleaning and maintenance workers and home health aides; creating a bank of cleaning supplies to all New Yorkers living in unsanitary conditions; drafting a comprehensive educational recovery plan that provides targeted resources to students who have fallen behind; expanding access to regional enrichment centers for children in shelters, temporary housing, and single-parent households; and expanding space on sidewalks and parks and pedestrianizing streets, among other recommendations.

Comptroller Stringer’s report analyzes some of the city’s most vulnerable populations to identify neighborhoods and communities that are suffering amidst quarantine or with an increased likelihood of COVID-19 infection and outlined recommendations to address gaps, barriers, and hardships.

Overcrowded Apartments

For years, New Yorkers have increasingly been living in overcrowded apartments and basements, illegal subdivisions, bunked up three or four to a room, and sleeping on couches. These are living conditions that are rife for COVID-19 to easily spread among multiple members of a household.

From 2008 to 2018, the number of overcrowded housing units—those with more than one person living per room—rose from 245,000 to 288,000. Overcrowded housing is particularly prevalent in neighborhoods with high immigrant populations including Jackson Heights (26 percent of units), Elmhurst and Corona (25 percent), Borough Park (25 percent), Sunset Park (21 percent), Bedford Park (19 percent), Highbridge (19 percent), Bensonhurst (17 percent), and East New York (17 percent), many of them already among the hardest hit neighborhoods in the city when it comes to COVID-19. And while less than 10 percent of White New Yorkers live in an overcrowded housing unit, 15 percent of Black, 24 percent of Asian, and 25 percent of Hispanic New Yorkers do.

Solutions

To address these conditions, Comptroller Stringer proposes that the City:

• Leverage its large stock of vacant hotels and dormitories to house not only the homeless, but also those living in overcrowded apartments who are in danger of infecting their families and roommates. Those who are potentially infected must be given options to better isolate themselves in order to stop the spread of the virus both now and in the coming months, as other countries have successfully implemented.
• Expand sidewalks and parks and close streets. The City can begin by bumping out the sidewalk into the parking lane along commercial corridors, closing streets within large parks and around the circumference of neighborhood parks, and limiting car access on select residential blocks.

Unsanitary and Unsafe Living Quarters

Far too many homes and apartments in New York City are unsanitary and unsafe, with peeling paint, holes in the walls, rodent infestations, leaking faucets, and broken toilets. Fifteen percent of New York rental housing units reported three or more maintenance deficiencies in the most recent United States Census Housing Vacancy Survey, with the highest rates in University Heights (35 percent), Brownsville (34 percent), Bedford Park (32 percent), North Crown Heights (30 percent), Highbridge (27 percent), Bedford Stuyvesant (27 percent),and Hunts Point (25 percent). Furthermore, data shows that 25 percent of Black and 23 percent of Latinx New Yorkers live in such dilapidated conditions, compared to just 9 percent of Asian and White New Yorkers. This makes a prolonged quarantine all the more difficult for these individuals and families — and any infection in a confined space all the more worrisome.

Solutions

To address these dangerous environments, Comptroller Stringer proposed the City:

• Give New Yorkers quarantined in unsanitary and uninhabitable conditions the option of relocating to hotels and dormitories.
• Work with landlords and building services companies to ensure that all cleaning and maintenance workers have access to PPE equipment.
• Create a bank of cleaning supplies, including sanitizing wipes, and open it up to New Yorkers in need. These supplies could be offered at public schools alongside grab and go meals.

Poverty

New Yorkers living in poverty have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, a staggering 34 percent of Hispanic children, 27 percent of Black children, and 20 percent of Asian children live below the federal poverty line—compared to 16 percent of White children. Neighborhoods in the Bronx, including East Tremont, Morrisania, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, University Heights, Concourse, Highbridge, and Soundview have the highest concentrations of single parent families living below the poverty lines. Many non-citizens and undocumented New Yorkers are also strained by the effects of poverty, as approximately 667,000 non-citizens live in households at or below 200 percent of the poverty line.

Low-income New Yorkers are particularly isolated and disconnected during the COVID-19 quarantine. Among households with less than $20,000 in annual income, 38 percent (or 231,000 households) have neither broadband internet access to the home nor a cellular data plan. This compares to 17 percent of households with earnings between $20,000 and $75,000 and 5 percent for those with income of $75,000 or more.

Solutions

To address these disparities and the strain experienced by single parent homes and undocumented New Yorkers, Comptroller Stringer issued a range of proposals, calling for:

• The Department of Education to track student engagement across all schools and offer additional academic supports, in multiple languages, to students who have not been participating in remote lessons. Additionally, the Department of Education must develop a comprehensive educational recovery plan to measure learning loss and provide schools with specific, targeted supports to address learning gaps that have developed during the time of remote learning.
•  The City to expand access to regional enrichment centers for children living in shelters, temporary housing, overcrowded conditions, and poverty.
• Internet service providers to offer 60-days of free service to all New York City households in need and cell phone carriers should institute a moratorium on cutting off service and data plans if bills are delayed or delinquent.
• Internet service to be upgraded at all homeless shelters immediately so that families can access information and students can do their schoolwork more easily.
• Companies such as Amazon, ShopRite, and Walmart to allow SNAP beneficiaries to skip the cue and waive all delivery fees.
• Cash assistance and unemployment insurance to be extended to anyone holding an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number who is not eligible to obtain a Social Security Number and  for the State and City to work together to fund gaps in the federal safety net. Moreover, to ensure that no one is left behind and to circumvent any federal restrictions, the City should work with private partners to establish an emergency relief fund for all undocumented workers.

Living Alone, Stranded at Home

While quarantine and social isolation will be a challenge for all New Yorkers, it will be most acutely felt by seniors living alone and those with disabilities. One-third of the 1.02 million New Yorkers living alone are over the age of 65 — and it is these residents and those with limited mobility that require assistance with shopping for groceries, accessing medication, and other matters of personal care.

Solutions

Comptroller Stringer outlined the following recommendations to address the needs of New York City’s seniors and those living with disabilities:

• The State and City should work closely with home health aides and agencies to ensure that aides and nurses have access to ample medical grade PPE equipment, and have a unified safety protocol for home health aides in place.
• The City should continue to help organizations that provide food delivery to seniors and the disabled to ramp up capacity and make an effort to proactively reach out to every senior in the five boroughs (via robocalls, emails, texts, door hangers, etc.) to ensure they know how to request home-delivered meals. Senior service providers and community-based organization that serve New Yorkers with limited English proficiency should be utilized to help seniors sign-up for meal delivery.
• The City should be coordinating with senior service providers across the city to cross-check that every senior they serve is successfully receiving home delivered meals and to ensure that all providers are being fully utilized and leveraged in the City’s efforts to ramp up meal delivery and combat social isolation.
• Pharmacies must prioritize delivery requests to homebound and vulnerable households.

Asthma and Air Quality

Black New Yorkers are nearly seven times more likely and Latinx New Yorkers are over three times more likely to visit the emergency room due to asthma-related complications than White New Yorkers. These disparities are observed in neighborhoods across the South Bronx, Uptown Manhattan, Central and Eastern Brooklyn, the North Shore of Staten Island, and Central and Southeast Queens. These are neighborhoods experiencing a higher rate of respiratory difficulties and elevated levels of air pollution and are therefore more susceptible to COVID-19 infection and complications.

Solutions

Comptroller Stringer outlined the below proposals for the City to address chronic respiratory illnesses and dramatically improve air quality:

• Scale back dozens of miles of highway lanes throughout the South Bronx, western Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island as part of a broad review of our highway infrastructure.
• Reallocate street space, including widening sidewalks, pedestrianizing select neighborhoods, expanding the bus and bike lane network, reallocating parking spots for delivery vehicles, creating 5 m.p.h. slow zones in residential neighborhoods so that children and others can play on the street.
• Once deemed safe to riders and transit workers alike, the MTA should dramatically increase subway and bus service frequencies in the early morning, late night, and on weekends to help draw riders back to the system. Subways and bus routes should maintain high frequency service all-day, seven days a week in order to minimize overcrowding and so that all New Yorkers—especially frontline workers and the recently unemployed who primarily live in the outer reaches of the outer boroughs and often travel during the off-peak—can get to work and job interviews quickly and without delays. This should be achieved in tandem with a frequent and strict cleaning regiment throughout the system and the stepping up of protections for all transit workers.

To read Comptroller Stringer’s analysis and proposals to protect New York City’s vulnerable populations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, click here.

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