NYC Charter Racial Justice Mandates

The Racial Justice Commission (RJC), a city charter revision commission, was formed in 2021 and tasked with examining structural racism within NYC. The RJC examined the City’s Charter to identify structural barriers facing Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and all People of Color in NYC. The commission, based on community input, put forward three proposals aimed at eliminating barriers, rooting out systemic racism, and promoting racial equity:

• Add a statement of values to guide government: A new preamble added to the NYC Charter, aspiring toward a just and equitable city for all. 
• Establish a Racial Equity Office, Plan, & Commission: Establishing the necessary infrastructure within city government to advance racial equity and coordinate the City’s racial equity planning process. 
• Establish a true cost of living measure: A new measure to track the actual cost of meeting essential needs in NYC.

In November 2022, New Yorkers across our city overwhelmingly voted in support of all three measures and the Mayor’s Office of Equity is charged with implementation beginning in 2023. These measures will impact how the City makes decisions across all investments, including infrastructure.

Mayor’s Office of Equity

The City established the Mayor’s Office of Equity (MOE) to deeply root equity in our recovery and build lasting systems for sustainable change. MOE will continue shifting NYC towards an equity-based delivery system, laser-focused on dismantling structural inequities across city government, increasing collaboration and inclusion, and creating equitable outcomes for New Yorkers through historically conscious strategies and reforms.

Utilizing an intersectional lens, MOE brought together six existing city entities, including the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity (TRIE). TRIE was established in 2020 in response to COVID-19 to address racial disparities. In partnership with DOHMH, TRIE developed an equity burden rubric to identify neighborhoods disproportionally affected by the pandemic. Recently, TRIE convened city agency leaders to break silos and launch new initiatives, investing over $300 million to support hardest-hit communities over 20 months. Key investments announced through TRIE include expanded healthcare access in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens through H+H COVID-19 Centers of Excellence.

TRIE, now codified in the NYC City Charter and as a division of the newly created MOE, will continue to develop equity agendas that aim to address some of our City’s starkest disparities concentrated by place, race, gender, and other identities.

Environmental Justice New York City

In 2017, New York City passed Local Laws 60 and 64 to assess environmental equity issues in the City and develop a plan to incorporate environmental justice into the fabric of city decisionmaking. This legislation centers on three main products—a report, an online environmental justice portal, and a plan. This legislatively mandated work, known as Environmental Justice New York City (EJNYC), represents a historic investment from the City of New York to study environmental inequities affecting how and where low-income communities and communities of color live, and to provide all residents the tools to advocate for the best outcomes for their communities.

The culmination of the EJNYC work will be a plan that identifies potential citywide and local initiatives for promoting environmental justice and outlines a set of discrete recommendations for better embedding equity and environmental justice into the City’s decision-making processes. The EJNYC plan will consider changes to agency programs, policies, activities, or processes that will promote environmental justice, including the consideration of capital projects that provide environmental improvements.

DOT Priority Investment Areas

DOT has created a working group focused on equity and inclusion in planning, which developed strategies to improve public engagement, project prioritization and development, safety, and sustainability. Significantly, the working group recommended including equity as a consideration in prioritizing project locations. This led to the development of Priority Investment Areas (PIAs), introduced in the Streets Plan, which provided an overall framework for prioritizing transportation investments across the City.

The PIAs are based on three inputs: demographics, density, and previous levels of NYC DOT investment. Inputs are measured at the neighborhood level using the City’s 195 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas which are approximations of New York City neighborhoods.

• The demographics input captures historically underserved and vulnerable communities based on the percentage of non-white (by race and ethnicity) populations and the percentage of low-income households.
• The density input captures the intensity of activity (population and jobs per square mile).
• The previous investment level input is measured by the level of both in-house and capital projects from the past ten years in each neighborhood.

While transportation projects are implemented throughout the City in all PIA tiers, we are committed to rebalancing investments toward higher-need neighborhoods. Accordingly, DOT planning units have incorporated this framework into their work process as they develop and prioritize projects.

DOT Priority Investment Areas (PIA) map

Source: 2014-2019 American Community Survey, 2018 LEHD, and NYC DOT

Access to Open Space

The Walk to a Park initiative increases access to open-space resources in areas of the City that have comparatively fewer green spaces. The OneNYC plan set a goal of having 85% of New Yorkers living within a walk to a park by 2030. Today, 83.8% of New Yorkers live within walking distance of a park (half a mile or less). NYC Parks is exploring multiple approaches to reach the target, from forming partnerships and coordinating with public and private institutions to improve existing open space to acquiring and developing private property to create new parks.

A complementary targeted strategy is NYC Parks’ Community Parks Initiative (CPI). CPI is a multi-faceted investment in community parks that are in New York City’s densely populated and growing neighborhoods with higher-than- average concentrations of poverty. NYC Parks has committed over $300 million toward the program for work at over 60 locations. In the fall of 2021, NYC Parks secured $425.5 million in baseline funding and expanded the CPI program to incorporate public space equity into the City’s recovery. Since then, NYC Parks announced twenty new sites will be renovated to support areas of the City hardest-hit by COVID-19. These sites are currently in or about to start design.

NYC Parks Walk to a Park map

Source: NYC Parks, 2023

Access to Fresh Produce

The City continues to lead the nation in developing and implementing food policies that center on equity and justice. Food Forward NYC is the City’s first-ever 10-year food policy plan, laying out a comprehensive policy framework to reach a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food system by 2031. The plan emphasizes the importance of equity and choice by enabling a food system where everyone should be able to access the food that they want wherever they may want it.

To enable this choice, the City will conduct outreach, stakeholder engagement, and research to better understand the cold storage infrastructure needs and constraints facing both small-scale food businesses such as bodegas and non-profit food pantries, with a focus on the unique challenges faced by those operating in underserved communities.

The City will also prioritize a range of tools to encourage the retention, development, and expansion of the following types of supply chain investments: co-packing facilities, meat and dairy processing facilities, rentable shared cold storage facilities, and urban production of niche produce. The City will leverage its properties to ensure that key food hubs across the five boroughs, such as Hunts Point, Brooklyn Terminal Market, Sunset Park, and Maspeth have the resources and capacities to support the packing, processing, cold storage, and manufacturing activities required by food businesses.

Pedestrian Mobility and Accessibility

Subways

DOT has partnered with the MTA to deliver on-street accessibility and safety improvements in tandem with subway station accessibility upgrades. For example, DOT contributed additional capital funding to the new Borough Hall station project to include pedestrian safety, streetscape, and transit improvements to Joralemon Street in tandem with the station upgrades, allowing for cost savings at scale. Land use policy is another way the City supports investments in public transit. The Elevate Transit: Zoning for Accessibility (ZFA) is a zoning amendment created by MOPD, DCP, and the MTA to make our transit system more accessible and coordinated with the streets and buildings around it. ZFA expands zoning incentives to encourage developers to allocate space for or to build station elevators.

Streets

One of DOT’s core priorities is maintaining and enhancing pedestrian infrastructure to be free of defects and accessible to all. Pedestrian-Priority Districts is a new DOT planning initiative and a key Vision Zero effort to enhance safety, mobility, and livability in commercial, civic, and residential districts across the City. These new districts will improve the street-level pedestrian experience while supporting the bicycle and transit network and enhancing critical access for emergency response, freight, and waste operations in close alignment with DOT’s curb management plan.

DOT has also committed to creating a program that will construct one hundred raised crosswalks per year. Raised crosswalks slow vehicle speeds, increase pedestrian visibility, and encourage motorists to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. Raised crosswalks also improve accessibility by providing pedestrians with a safe, level crossing through the intersection. DOT has committed $234 million to the initiative, which will target locations where a high number of pedestrians have been killed or seriously injured.

Since 2007, DOT has been installing bus boarding islands and bus bulbs at bus stops located under elevated trains, where columns prevent buses from pulling to the curb, providing ADA- compliant waiting and boarding space for bus riders. Since the start of the program, DOT has completed improvements at over forty locations including both in-house and capital projects. Improvements for over twenty locations are currently in scoping or design as part of funded capital projects.

Waterfront

The City is reconnecting communities divided by highways and restoring access to waterfronts. EDC’s Closing the Loop project will complete the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway by connecting remaining gaps and upgrading key pinch points. When complete, the 32.5-mile greenway loop will connect more than 1,000 acres of green space around the entire island. Closing the Loop will add fifteen acres of open space that integrates the greenway into Inwood, East Harlem, Harlem, and East Midtown — mostly low-income neighborhoods historically cut off from the waterfront. The improvements integrate climate change considerations and include safety enhancements and new recreational amenities for cyclists and joggers.

DOT, NYC Parks, and EDC are undertaking another groundbreaking plan to deliver a critical public space to the Bronx. The seven-mile route will restore waterfront access for Bronxites and connect Van Cortlandt Park to Randall’s Island with public open space and a bike path. On Staten Island, construction of the Tompkinsville Esplanade and Pier will reconnect a valuable waterfront area with its North Shore neighborhoods and transit nodes. This EDC-led project will repair the shoreline, make infrastructure improvements, increase waterfront open space, and build a new pedestrian esplanade.

Schools

Currently, less than 25% of New York City’s public school buildings are considered fully accessible. Through an expanded allocation of $750 million, an increase of $629 million the previous capital plan, SCA will be able to make a third of all school buildings in every school district fully accessible and ensure that 50% of all elementary school buildings around the City are either partially or fully accessible. This includes building ramps and wheelchair lifts, creating accessible bathrooms, widening doors and partitions, and making public assembly spaces compliant with disability access requirements. SCA has also created a dedicated funding stream for District 75 Special Education programs to make sure students with serious disabilities have equitable access to high-quality inclusive education programs.

Libraries

The New York Public Library strives to ensure its buildings are fully accessible in support of its mission to ensure that all New Yorkers have access to its resources and services. This includes improving accessibility in older branches with architectural challenges. NYPL is fully renovating five historic Carnegie branches that lacked adequate elevators or accessible entryways and restrooms. When complete, all five branches will be fully accessible. The branches selected for this program are in neighborhoods of need and in buildings that have historically faced underinvestment.