New York's Challenges In Budgeting For Racial Equity

Forbes

2 days ago

In 2022, New York City voters added provisions on racial equity to the city charter. But ... More implementation has been slow and halting and required reports not issued.
In the November 2022 election, New York voters overwhelmingly approved three amendments to the New York City's charter to 'lay the foundation for achieving racial equity.' But the legally required implementation of the amendments is far behind schedule, and despite its progressive reputation, New York is lagging behind other US cities on comprehensive racial equity policies.
New York's charter lays out the city's governing vision, the roles and activities of the Mayor (executive) and City Council (legislative) and establishes standards for city policies. (City courts are mostly governed as part of the state's court system.)
In 2021, almost a year after the murder of George Floyd that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, New York's then-mayor Bill de Blasio appointed a special New York City Racial Justice Commission. The commission was charged with proposing charter amendments to 'root out systemic racism across New York City.'
The commission proposed three ballot initiatives, with voters approving them by 70% or more. Underscoring the desire for racial equity, the amendments included a new preamble to the City Charter. It calls out the historic 'violence and systemic inequity that continue to be experienced by marginalized groups.' The preamble says 'collective values' undergirding racial equity created 'duties, obligations, and authorities' that would 'guide the operation of our city government.'
The amendments went into law almost immediately, with detailed implementation language written and incorporated into the charter in December of 2022. The new legal requirements require the city to 'undertake a process of citywide and agency planning and reporting with a goal of eliminating racial inequity.'
The city's sweeping duties include defining overall city goals and specific strategies, 'throughout the city government's policymaking, operations, and workforce,' including attention to neighborhoods. Performance indicators and revisions to data when necessary also are part of the mandate.
All of this is to be specified in a mayoral-issued racial equity plan, with adequate time and feedback from other elected officials and public before it is finalized. And the plan is meant to be coordinated with the city's budget process, along with review by the newly-established independent Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), also created by the charter amendments.
To date, Mayor Eric Adams' administration has not issued any racial equity plans, preliminary of otherwise. CORE has been carrying out its own mandated duties, including gathering public input on racial equity priorities, but that process was intended to work with and inform the Mayor's racial equity planning.
After missing repeated deadlines for issuing plans to be coordinated with the FY2026 budget process, CORE issued a letter calling on the Mayor to release the preliminary plan 'no later than March 21, 2025.' That call has been echoed by the city's Public Advocate, and the Progressive and the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucuses of the City Council. But as of this writing, there hasn't been a public response, or a racial equity plan, from the Mayor's office.
I work on a joint project of the New School's Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy and the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution. At the Institute, we analyzed the city's public budget documents to look for attention on racial equity by agency, spending, and other measures.
We did a word search for the terms 'race,' 'racial,' 'racial equity,' 'Black,' and 'charter.' We found no systematic attention to racial equity in the hundreds of pages in public budget documents we examined. If the city is linking a racial equity strategy to the budget process, as the charter requires, it is not apparent in the publicly available budget documents.
Measuring and pursuing equity is challenging, but it can be done. There is a wealth of practice on how to look at equity for specific policies, from a number of institutions.
Our joint New School and Brookings project has conducted specific racial equity analyses as a 'proof of concept' on transit subsidies and on wages paid by nonprofits to human service workers, reviewed racial equity efforts around the nation, looked at local land use decisions and racial equity, and documented racial equity analyses and policies from around the country.
The Institute also is developing a pilot framework for assessing equity across a city's budget, with special emphasis on transparency and community input from marginalized communities. Budget equity involves a variety of complex technical issues, but must be driven by a set of values. The Institute's founding director Darrick Hamilton has anchored the work in values and guided our work by saying 'we value what we measure and we measure what we value.'
One of our key findings is that racial equity is not just issuing new policies or spending plans. It must involve political leadership with adequate resources , guidance, and data to city agencies to examine their existing operations along with real community involvement. Existing programs and continuing spending usually are well over 95% of a city's operating budget, so an effective racial equity strategy must focus on existing programs to have a substantial impact.
New York has some promising practices. The Department of City Planning, after urging from community organizations and some elected officials, created an online 'Equitable Development Data Explorer' along with a mapping tool to measure housing displacement risk for specific city neighborhoods. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene candidly states 'our neighborhoods are segregated by race and wealth,' providing community health profiles with over 50 measures by specific neighborhoods.
But compared to some other cities, New York's efforts are piecemeal and uncoordinated. Although several cities (Philadelphia, Washington DC, Portland, Dallas) have strong racial equity analytics and practices, Chicago is perhaps the nation's most comprehensive.
In his 2025 Budget Overview, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson foregrounds 'Equity and Engagement,' clearly stating that 'Budget Equity is the process by which all departments account for the progress they are making to advance racial equity.' The city maintains an online 'Chicago Equity Dashboard' with data on key neighborhood indicators, and an online site showing 'Racial Equity Action Plans' for each city agency.
Although New York voters spoke strongly in favor of racial equity analysis in coordination with the budget and using it to guide agency management and practices, the city has not met its deadlines. Of course, budget processes and comprehensive management of billions of dollars and many different agencies and policies is difficult and hard work. But the experiences of other large cities, especially Chicago, shows progress can be made.
And now all cities must worry about the active hostility to diversity and racial equity coming from the Trump Administration. There will doubtless be many battles around federal funds, mandates, regulations, and court fights around equity in the next few years.
That hostility means cities are now the best hope for progress on racial equity. When the city's Racial Justice Commission was charged in 2021 with drafting the ultimately successful ballot measures for racial equity, Darrick Hamilton (named as a commissioner) said 'This city, and this nation, are faced with an unprecedented opportunity to think big.'
New York's voter-approved mandate calls for 'a city where the worth, talents, and contributions of all people are valued and recognized' by 'closing of gaps in policy, practice, and allocation of city resources through the prioritization of access, opportunities, and resources to those people and communities with the greatest need.' That indeed presents 'an unprecedented opportunity to think big.' The next few years will show if New York is up to the challenge.