CM Canasio Q&A: Mangin on meaning of 'fair' in testimony
Canasio asks Mangin to explain his repeated use of 'fair' and 'fairer' in testimony. Mangin describes his career focus on creating fairer processes ensuring all affected people have a voice in land use decisions, and that everyone should share the burden of creating housing.
I'll pass it on to Council Member Canasio.
Hello, good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
I also want to thank you for meeting with me a few weeks ago and having a discussion about many of these issues, and I want to thank my colleagues for asking many of the questions that I had already written out for myself.
But I noticed in your testimony, you mentioned the words,
fair and fairer about five times.
And so I'm trying to figure out if you can talk a little bit about what that looks like for you, what that means to you, and why it's so important to highlight it throughout what you mentioned in your testimony.
Thank you, Council Member.
Yes, as I mentioned, I think a theme throughout my career has been trying to create fairer processes that ensure that anybody who's affected by a land use decision has a voice in that process.
And I think that that has not always been the case in New York City.
As we discussed earlier, I think many of the parts of the city, you know, not least of which, you know,
your district that experienced some of the pressures of the housing shortage, the high housing costs, the displacement and gentrification pressures,
that that's a result of not having had sufficient voice in some of the decisions that led to that in the past.
And so I think that there are a range of things that we've done in recent years to try to improve on that, whether it's trying to do citywide actions that, again, enable those fantastic conversations about housing, about neighborhoods in the context of the full city.
That provide tweaks to land use procedures in order to try to reinforce a somewhat broader perspective over land use decisions that affect a broader population, and so on and so forth.
So it's part and parcel with, I think, the fair housing focus that I've had over the course of my career, and it reflects itself in process improvements, and it reflects itself in, one would hope, outcomes as well.
So speaking specifically to everyone should share the burden of creating the housing.
Yes, that is a much better, pithier way to put it.
Yes.
Okay.