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The pandemic has exposed the seams and fragilities of the city, posing profound dilemmas about how to return to normality
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The municipal Democratic primaries on Tuesday, after a campaign focused on insecurity, will choose the Democrat who will take the reins of the city in 2022
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New York is a city woven with many cities and the pandemic, which has killed more than 33,000 of its 8.4 million inhabitants, has fully exposed its seams. That is why now, when thanks to the advance of vaccination in the state, the city has the Governor Andrew Cuomo’s blessing in order to go back to “life as we knew it”, the questions accumulate: Can? Should? How?Recovery is the goal shared by New Yorkers and the path that is already clearly being traveled, with a visible reactivation of commercial, cultural and leisure life; with the schools reopened after the traumatic stage of remote education (which has also forced many women to abandon their jobs), with the tourism that returns little by little, with bars and restaurants overflowing, especially in those terraces that have become part of an urban landscape where the pedestrian and cyclist has claimed Public spaces.
Recovery is also the axis of municipal budget of nearly $ 100 billion (with 5,000 deficit) signed in April by the Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, to which 22,000 million more federal aid will be added in the next few years. It is also the epicenter of primary elections that are celebrated on Tuesday, of which the Democratic candidate for first mayor which, if taken for granted, it will be chosen in november to give the relief to De Blasio in 2022.
There are among the applicants and among the voters, however, deep differences of approach how it should be Post-pandemic New York. And there is debate about how this city can and should face its future, which, as the journalist from Badajoz Juan Manuel Benítez says in a telephone interview – who has been on the local NY1 Noticias channel for almost two decades and produces, directs and presents the program. Pure Policy-, “Has had a identity crisis in the pandemic, “” is coming out of a periodo de shock and it’s like a patient needing more care than normal for their emotional stability. “
Behind the stage
When the virus forced the city to paralyze and the citizens to confine themselves, it was seen, as Benítez says, “what’s up backstage“from that” fairytale “New York to which the media usually turns,” the brilliant, successful city, a tourist attraction and innovation. “In the foreground were the public hospitals with fewer resources of those that are needed or shortcomings of a mammoth public school system which is also one of the most segregated in the country, with more than half of the schools with more than 90% of black and Latino students and where 70% of the 110,000 homeless students did not have access to Wi-Fi or computers.
The pandemic underscored the chasm that separates the rich who could escape and watch their wealth grow from the workers that have been tested essential but they survive with low wages and in a city with scarce affordable housing, where the moratorium on evictions expires in summer. Fired the unemployment, which is going down but still in the 10,9% and affects 440,000 people, many of them low-income and without education or training to secure a job. Emptied the offices, that vital part of taxes for the public coffers and which for now, according to data from the Partnership for New York City, only 12% of workers have returned.
Also, when the human density faded, social problems gained visibility, with the streets and the subway turned into a refuge for helpless and those afflicted by grave mental health problems.
Security and crime
Since the pandemic began, there has also been, as at the national level, a increase in some violent crimes in the city, with a 68% more firearm shots and a 12% more homicides. The total figures, thanks to the reduction to historical lows of crime during the De Blasio era, are still lower than those experienced in the mandates of Michael Bloomberg and before Rudy Giuliani, but that does not prevent a perception growing insecurity among many citizens, especially those associate this moment with him beginning of what was the violence crisis of the 70s, or who consume the conservative media sensationalizing the alert.
Incidents like a Times Square shooting in which it resulted injured a four year old girl they go around the world and tarnish the potential recovery of tourism, on which New York has seen how much it depends. Assaults in the subway spread the fear of using that artery essential for the city to function (also afflicted by management problems and to which only 2.1 million passengers have returned daily, out of the 5.6 before the pandemic, even with the 3,250 police officers who patrol its stations and wagons). And the unsafety has become the central issue of the campaign electoral, priority for voters according to polls.
The moderate candidates, especially the favorites Eric Adams (former police officer) and Kathryn García, defend that the answer can only come from a reinforcement to the policeman (a body that already has a $ 10 billion budget). And it is anathema to progressive voices, especially at a time when the United States, with the movement for racial justice reactivated with force after the murder of George Floyd, debate on alternatives.
“Normal was not good”
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“There is a rush to get back to normal,” says William, a 66-year-old artist, after issuing his early vote at the Campos Plaza community center, within a public housing complex in Alphabet City. “The problem is that normal was not good,” he adds.
The same idea is expressed in a telephone interview by Monxo López, an activist in the south of the Bronx, one of the neighborhoods that best portrays the deep wounds of inequality from which the city bleeds and, also, one of those that has suffered the most from the human and economic devastation of the coronavirus. “There are two impulses and the Democratic primaries are a reflection of that,” explains the Puerto Rican, doctor in political science: “The one of those who want return to normal as soon as possible and the one of those who want preserve visibility to homeless, race, mental health or police issues that have been exposed in 2020 and, if not advance, at least keep them alive and move the agenda“. New York chooses.
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