Mayor de Blasio, in State of the City, Focuses on His Housing Plan
Source: NYTimes
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s State of the City Address FEB. 3, 2015
Calling the high price of housing one of the most profound challenges facing New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday urged the construction of hundreds of thousands of new apartments over the next decade in an ambitious plan that he said would result in denser, more economically diverse neighborhoods.
“While the state of our city is strong, we face a profound challenge,” Mr. de Blasio said in his State of the City speech at Baruch College in Manhattan. “If we fail to be a city for everyone, we risk losing what makes New York, New York. We risk losing the very soul of this place.”
“And nothing more clearly expresses the inequality gap — the opportunity gap — than the soaring cost of housing,” he said.
In contrast to other mayors who have often used the annual address to outline a raft of policy proposals, Mr. de Blasio focused most of his speech on the housing plan, which calls for the transformation of whole neighborhoods from Staten Island to Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio also called for ways to make more neighborhoods accessible to public transportation, which in turn would make them more appealing options for development.
He called for the launch of a “citywide ferry service that will knit together existing East River routes with new landings and services to Astoria, the Rockaways, South Brooklyn, Soundview and the Lower East Side,” according to an advance copy of his remarks.
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/nyregion/mayor-bill-de-blasio-state-of-the-city.html?_r=0
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