Lovaglio-Miller proposes a municipal housing program for city workers
Lovaglio-Miller describes members who are homeless or living in cars and calls for a municipal housing program, arguing that what the city deems affordable is out of reach for workers like school lunch helpers and park workers.
One other thing that I would also like to bring that actually isn't in my written testimony is we've also been trying to talk to the administration about municipal housing programs.
One of the things that we find very difficult with our workforce is being able to afford rent.
In the city of New York.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of members that are actually homeless.
And how can we try to get them out of shelters, some of them not even in shelters, living out of their cars, into a stable living environment?
So we've been trying to talk to the city again about a municipal housing program.
You know, they talk about all these developments that come in and are doing residential housing and affordable housing.
My question to them is what is considered affordable.
What they deem affordable is not necessarily affordable to a city employee.
So we look across that.
District Council 37 represents titles from accountants to zookeepers.
We represent some of the highest paid workers, but we also represent some of the lowest paid workers.
We represent school lunch helpers, city park workers that can't afford to live in what they call affordable housing.
So we would love for the city to turn some of their attention and looking at
at creating housing programs for the municipal workforce, especially since there's a residency requirement for the first two years for the majority of the jobs that they take.